Witches walk among us — but they’re not like the fictional ones you grew up with

By Scottie Andrew, CNN

(CNN) — Elwynn Green’s morning routine is relatively unremarkable, at least at the start.

With his wife, Green wakes up his three daughters, makes them breakfast and prepares their lunches. Once they’re shipped off to school, and after he’s had a moment to meditate, he’ll take a walk near his home on Northern Ireland’s rugged Causeway Coast.

While he’s out, he’ll typically talk to the wind.

Green might feel the air swirl around him or the force of a gust pushing dark clouds into the sky, blotting out the blue. He hears the wind speaking, so he may feel compelled to ask it a question. Sometimes, the wind will answer. He has a similar impulse when he overhears trees whispering to each other or the waves crashing.

“For most people in everyday life, that’s a sign of madness,” he said.

But Green is a witch, and communing with the world around him is at the heart of his craft. He asks questions of the wind and trees, ancestors and spirits. Sometimes answers never come. But witchcraft, to Green, isn’t about finding answers to life’s big questions (or death’s, for that matter). It’s about finding beauty within the chaos.

“Sometimes it’s not about knowing,” Green said. “Knowing is overrated.”

The way Green practices witchcraft defies stereotypes of broomstick-wielding, cauldron-toting, pointy-hatted witches. He doesn’t belong to a coven. He’s not Wiccan or pagan, religions that are rooted in witchcraft. He has a few cats, though they’re better suited for snuggling than serving as helpful familiars.

There is no one way to be a witch, he said. Tenets and rituals are unique to all who practice. The traits others might find strange only strengthen one’s witchcraft, Green said.

“We’ve never belonged,” he told CNN of witches. “If we belonged, we wouldn’t be witches. And so my advice to people about that is, usually, get used to not belonging. It’s a good place to set up shop.”

Witches can be born and made

Green is a “hedge witch” who exists in the metaphorical “hedge,” the liminal space between our world and a spiritual realm with which he interacts. His witchcraft is heavily informed by animism, or the belief that everything possesses a spirit. To Green, there’s magic in all things — the air we breathe, the water in the ocean, the animals and plants with which we share our planet.

Witchery runs in Green’s family. He was raised by his two aunts, both witches, who shared their house with spirits and encouraged Green to find his magic. Though both have since died, Green said one of his aunts’ spirits occasionally “pops in” for a chat.

Andrea Samayoa, meanwhile, wasn’t raised a witch. She came to the craft innocently as a child, when she and her friends would make “potions” with leftover condiments from neighborhood parties. Playing pretend-witches, they’d cast “spells” to make it rain and dance under the moon.

“We didn’t know what we were doing at the time,” the Floridian witch said.

The practice became more important to her when Catholicism, the religion in which she was raised, started to feel too restrictive. Samayoa said she resists inflexible rules, which is partly the reason why she doesn’t belong to a coven, either.

Even in her early 30s, Samayoa retains a carefree approach toward witchcraft. Her “eclectic” interpretation, which pulls from several witchcraft traditions, has very few rules, if any. She even published a spellbook called “Lazy Witchcraft for Crazy, Sh*tty Days,” inspired by the way her chronic illness has impacted how she practices her craft.

Witchcraft is surging in popularity

Green and Samayoa are both full-time witches, proficient in the typical rituals and spells of witchcraft — Green performs a banishing ritual every morning to rid his environment of negative influences, and Samayoa makes a curse-removing wash with herbs, citrus, witch hazel and quartz to keep harm at bay.

While they practice witchcraft solo, they’re performing it for an audience. Green and Samayoa are both popular figures on WitchTok, a popular TikTok community whose members share tips for improving their craft with fellow witches of all experience levels.

On TikTok, Green, who also hosts a podcast and a Patreon, performs readings using bones and tarot cards for commenters who ask him heavy questions about their love lives, careers and safety of their families. It’s a weighty task, so Green chooses his words carefully.

Samayoa, meanwhile, often shares no-nonsense rituals in videos peppered with profanity that require little more than an open mind. (She also sells spell kits.) Earlier this month, she taught her followers how to create a simple protection sigil with pen and paper, which she used to protect her Tampa home from Hurricane Milton. It worked, she said: Her house wasn’t harmed in the storm, though a few pieces of her fence were blown out.

WitchTok surged in popularity in 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic inflicted extreme stress and uncertainty upon the world. Even in the months before the pandemic upended life as we knew it, witchcraft was on its way to a comeback, partly as a response to societal unrest in the wake of the 2016 election and the #MeToo movement, The Atlantic reported in 2020.

Pam Grossman, a pagan witch and scholar, told The Atlantic that “the more frustrated people get, they do often turn to witchcraft,” because the typical channels through which they accomplish things have stopped working.

But witches who come to the craft to attain power or control will be disappointed, Green said. Witchcraft is a way of interpreting the world and finding one’s place within it, but there are never easy answers or flawless fixes.

“Control within nature doesn’t work — it’s chaos,” he said. “It teaches us.”

Magic isn’t hard to find, if you keep an open mind

Being a witch doesn’t require belonging to a coven or nailing a complicated spell, both witches told CNN. Witch-centric media like “Hocus Pocus,” “American Horror Story: Coven” and “Agatha All Along” may show fictional sorceresses brewing potions in cauldrons, making soul-sacrificing pacts and harnessing their magic for dark purposes, but none of that is required to be a witch.

One doesn’t even have to understand how magic works to be a witch, Green said: “Just accept that it’s there and use it.”

In fact, both witches said, fictional depictions of witches are almost entirely inaccurate. As long as your intentions are clear and your mind is open, you can become a witch, Samayoa said.

“I feel like everyone has magic within themselves,” she said.

While Samayoa’s book includes spells intended to bring their casters money and abundance, some of the most essential spells she shares are for self-care and healing. It’s not easy to tell when those spells have worked, as there’s very rarely a simple fix for problems so nebulous. But once they’ve worked, a witch will know, she said.

“Since the magic is coming from you and you alone, if you’re not feeling like you love yourself, your magic isn’t going to be as strong as you want it to be,” she said. “Taking care of yourself is better for your witchcraft.”

Both witches said that practicing witchcraft is healing, even if the process remains unfinished.

“Witchcraft is a transformative thing — it changes us,” Green said. “I believe we have to embrace every aspect of ourselves, the hardest parts, we have to love it. That’s our empowerment.”

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