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ABSTRACT
What does it mean to live a #witchlife? This article attempts to answer this question by exploring the social media habits and practices of young women who identify as witches. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in Australia, this article presents insights drawn from interviews and participant observation which I conducted. Throughout this article I argue that social media platforms are important spaces where witches create their social identities. A key component of this identity work is the playful and critical ways these young witches contest normative gendered scripts and re-imagine new narratives for themselves . This article identifies and analyses a selection of these scripts and links them to broader patterns in witchcraft communities to 're-weave' dis-empowering narratives, spinning them into new and more elaborate tapestries.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The term ‘witchy’ refers to the discursive trend present in most Australian colloquialisms to create feelings of intimacy, familiarity, and belonging in a witchcraft community. It was frequently used by my participants and captures the sense of belonging these young women create.
2 To protect the identities of those included in this study, names and some details have been changed.
3 The notion of the pagan traditions being stolen and appropriated as Christian traditions is a common discourse in witchcraft and speaks to its origins. Modern witchcraft was inspired by Gerald Gardner (Citation1954) in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s. Gardner was heavily influenced by Margaret Murray (Citation1921), who put forward the theory, which has since been criticised and discredited (Noble Citation2005), of a pre-Christian matriarchal utopia, and that the medieval witch-hunt represented the culmination of Christian persecutions against a Palaeolithic religion.
4 In the context of Clara’s story, ‘juju’ refers to a type of energy—invisible and mutable—which she extracted from her grandmother to her own hands. Shaking her hands dispensed the energy into the atmosphere.
5 ‘Seering’ is Clara’s way of describing her psychic ability. Those with psychic abilities are often referred to as seers; ‘seering’ is a verb for this type of witchy activity: seeing into the future or past.
6 ‘Name anagramming’ refers to the witchy practice of divination, of re-arranging one’s first, middle, and last name to see what other words emerge. For example, my name was anagrammed and words that emerged included ‘Malachite’, a crystal. The young witches sent me a Facebook message after our full moon ritual and explained to me that this meant that I had a special connection with this crystal and should keep it close to me, either in a necklace or in my bag.
7 ‘Tagging ’ on Facebook means commenting on a public post by another Facebook user so they can be notified of its content.
8 In the German tradition, fairy rings were thought to mark the site of witches dancing on Walpurgis Night (Morgan Citation1995, 30).
9 Alex Mar (Citation2015) explains that the horned god refers to Pan, a freewheeling and nature-loving god in the Greek pantheon.
10 In 1973, Gygax and Arneson published the role-playing game “Dungeons & Dragons” (also referred to as “D&D”) which features a medieval fantasy setting (Lancaster Citation1994, 68). “Dungeons & Dragons” is based upon a “paradoxical tension between free exercise of narrative imagination and complex rule-based limitations” (Mizer Citation2014, 1298).
11 Land wights or landvxttir are spirits of the land, popular in Nordic and Germanic pagan mythology.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Emma Quilty
Emma Quilty is a social anthropologist, ethnographer, and a long-standing practising witch. After completing her PhD at the University of Newcastle, Australia, in 2020, she began her position as a Research Fellow in the Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making & Society and the Emerging Technologies Research Lab (funded by the Australian Research Council) at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research is at the crossroads of embodiment, queer theory, and postcolonial studies, with interdisciplinary projects across social sciences and technology disciplines. Current research uses design and visual anthropology as well as digital ethnographic techniques to investigate emerging intelligent technologies, autonomous transport, and trust in everyday life.