“This is one of the things that keeps me up at night,” says Deborah Hanekamp, a.k.a. Mama Medicine, a healer and shaman based in New York City, when we talk about the widespread but surface-level interest in witchcraft, making it performance rather than a practice. “There’s a lot of witching today in our social media culture where people get stuck wanting to present the image of a healer or a witch, or [thinking] that holding a crystal makes them spiritual and they want everybody to know it,” Hanekamp says.
Neither she, Luna, or Yates Garcia are against social media being the portal that brings fledgling witches into the fold, as they all believe that more witchcraft is good for the world. “It makes us more oriented towards the land, our relationships, communities, our own inner world, and imagination. Therefore, however people come to it is good, in my opinion,” says Yates Garcia.
Hanekamp says witchcraft is decidedly not about the tools or the outward appearance: “It’s about us becoming more kind, compassionate people. If we’re not understanding that the healing work we do on ourselves is about how we show up in the world, then what are we really doing it for? It can become that self-care crosses the line to selfishness.”
It’s a selfishness that Luna is familiar with. Even as psychedelics continue to become lucrative, with microdosing at peak popularity, there’s no reverence to the communities they originated from or sacredness of these practices, she notes. “The ‘wellness’ market is insidious in exploitation of not only tradition, but also of resources, like the overharvesting of white sage,” she says.
That’s enough to make any witch mad, because if there’s one thing they all consider sacred, it’s the natural world. Berger, who has been researching witches for close to four decades, says, “I have not met a witch yet who doesn’t include some form of spiritual connection to nature, as the magic itself is connected to nature, divinities and non-mundane (or occult) sources of power.”
While the mechanics of witchcraft are being squeezed into 30-second TikTok videos, budding witches will have to go questing to discover the true heart of the practice. “It’s really important to take to heart the essence of witchcraft which is not commodifiable; things like community, our relationships with the land, one another and the elements. You can’t really be a witch without fighting for the health and vitality of the natural world, or for the oppressed, and standing up for those who are more vulnerable. Those are the basic tenets of what it means to be a witch,” says Yates Garcia.