I’ll Keep Calling Myself a Witch, Thanks

I’ve been doing it for 35 years, so why stop now?

In the last edition, we explored gender bias in AI recommendations about career transitions. This week, I’m jumping into the deep end of the pool with notes on cultural appropriation, intellectual property, and how to keep your knowledge communities high-integrity spaces. Next week, we’re going to talk about my favorite “chosen ancestor,” Matilda Joslyn Gage, in great detail. Want more about the intersection of witchcraft and intellectual property? I suggest you subscribe.

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A prominent voice in entrepreneurial and anti-racist circles recently said (with her whole chest) that white women need to stop using the terms “witch,” “shaman,” and “priestess.”¹ The logic went like this: white women lack legitimate lineage, accountability, and initiation. We’re claiming identities without a proper relationship to tradition or community. Our ancestors participated enthusiastically in colonization—as missionary wives, boarding school matrons, and plantation mistresses—and now we’re appropriating the spiritual practices our ancestors helped destroy. The most spiritually powerful white people, the argument concluded, don’t use these contested terms at all and center anti-racist work in everything they do.

Her argument contains important truths. White women were and remain complicit in colonial violence. Anti-racism and decolonial analysis should be woven throughout spiritual practice, not tacked on as an afterthought. Many white women do claim spiritual authority with zero accountability or integrity. The capitalization of the craft annoys me, too.

But here’s what her argument got catastrophically wrong: demanding that European women abandon the word “witch”—an Old English term describing people who were hunted, tortured, and killed for practicing forms of knowledge that threatened patriarchal and capitalist power—isn’t protecting Indigenous and African traditions from appropriation.

It’s demanding that women remain bound to the very colonial structures that destroyed their traditions first.

Morgan le Fay (1864) by Frederick Sandys

A Quick & Dirty Outline:

Before you have a knee-jerk reaction, understand the bones of argument.

• “Witch” derives from Old English wicce (female) and wicca (male), from Germanic linguistic roots

• The European witch hunts (roughly 1450-1750) killed an estimated 40,000-100,000 people, approximately 75-80% women

• Silvia Federici‘s scholarship reveals witch hunts as primitive accumulation: the violent enclosure of women’s knowledge, bodies, and reproductive capacity to serve emerging capitalism

• European women had lineages, teachers, and initiatory traditions. They were cunning folk, wise women, midwives, herbalists. But these lineages were systematically destroyed through state and church violence

• The same colonial, capitalist logic that destroyed Indigenous and African spiritual practices was tested on European women first

• Magical traditions are forms of intellectual property, and intellectual property functions as networked knowledge

• Identity-based prohibitions in knowledge networks may create perverse incentives: high-integrity practitioners self-select out, leaving more room for actual appropriators

• Reclaiming destroyed European traditions is the path out of colonialist and patriarchal structures for many white women

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The Word Itself

Let’s start with basic linguistics. “Witch” comes from Old English wicce (the feminine form) and wicca (the masculine form). The etymology points to Germanic roots, possibly related to words for “wise” or “to bend” or “to know.” This is a European word describing European practices.

When someone tells a woman of European descent she cannot use a Germanic word to describe spiritual practice, we’ve left the realm of anti-appropriation and entered something else entirely.

This isn’t like a white person calling themselves a shaman—a term from the Tungusic languages of Siberia that anthropologists flattened into a generic catch-all. This isn’t like claiming to be a priestess of a closed initiatory tradition to which you have no legitimate connection. This is a woman using her own ancestral language to describe practices her own ancestors were killed for. Yes, that happened to us, too.

What the Witch Hunts Actually Were

Have you read Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation? Ideally, you’d, stop here and go read it. At least order it, or its digestible baby sister, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women. I’ll wait.

Federici demonstrates that the European witch hunts weren’t simply misogyny or superstition. They were a systematic campaign of terror that served the emergence of capitalism. The witch hunts accomplished several things simultaneously:

First, they destroyed women’s control over reproduction. Midwives and wise women knew how to prevent pregnancy, induce abortion, and ease childbirth. This knowledge gave women autonomy over their bodies and their labor. Capitalism needed women’s reproductive labor disciplined and controlled—women were for producing workers, not controlling whether or when to produce them. When men accused midwives of witchcraft, tortured, and killed them, they destroyed the knowledge networks these women held.

Second, they enclosed the commons of women’s knowledge. Herbalism, healing, veterinary medicine, weather prediction, agricultural knowledge—these were part of the ancestral “commons”—i.e., shared knowledge passed through women’s personal, familial, and community networks. This knowledge existed outside church authority and market exchange, so it had to be destroyed or delegitimized. What couldn’t be stolen and repackaged as “medicine” or “science” was marked as “superstition” or “devil worship.”

Third, they disciplined women’s bodies and labor for the new economy. Some women were killed for witchcraft; others were imprisoned by the ideology of women’s inherent weakness, irrationality, and unsuitability for public life. Women were confined to unpaid reproductive labor in the home. The witch hunts terrorized women into compliance.

Fourth, they established the template. The same logic, the same mechanisms, the same justifications used to destroy European women’s power would be exported globally. Explorers, conquerors, army generals, settlers, missionaries, and administrators didn’t invent colonial violence in global territories—they applied what had already been perfected in Europe.²

Sound familiar? Federici is describing primitive accumulation: the violent dispossession required before capitalism can function. The enclosure of the commons. The destruction of subsistence economies. The disciplining of bodies and knowledge for exploitation.

The witch hunts were to European women what colonization was to Indigenous peoples: genocidal violence in the service of capital accumulation.

What Was Destroyed

This is the part that breaks my heart and makes me furious in equal measure.

European women DID have lineages. We DID have teachers, initiations, accountability structures, and community traditions. We had cunning folk and wise women. We had healers and midwives. We had women who held the knowledge of plants, seasons, bodies, birth, and death. We had mystery traditions, initiatory rites, and sacred practices that were passed from teacher to student over generations.

All of this was destroyed. Deliberately and systematically, under state-sponsored violence upheld by church authority.

Before Federici, Matilda Joslyn Gage, the 19th-century suffragist and scholar (and yes, L. Frank Baum’s mother-in-law), documented this historical trajectory in Woman, Church and State. She argued that the witch hunts represented the Christian church’s deliberate destruction of women’s spiritual and temporal power. Gage understood that you cannot separate women’s political oppression from the violent destruction of women’s spiritual authority.

When someone says white women lack traceable lineages, initiation rites, and connections to unbroken traditions, they’re not wrong. But they’re describing the result of colonial violence, not a reason to abandon reclamation efforts.

It’s like telling a residential school survivor’s descendant they can’t speak their language because the residential schools destroyed fluency. [EDIT: Or maybe it’s not like that at all. See comments.] The absence of intact transmission is the result of trauma, not evidence that the linguistic tradition never belonged to them.

The Networked Knowledge Problem

Here’s where my background in intellectual property becomes relevant.

Magic—witchcraft, spiritual practice, whatever you want to call it—is a set of knowledge traditions. These traditions can be understood as a form of intellectual property: knowledge that belongs to specific communities, is transmitted through specific relationships, and is protected by accountability structures.

In healthy knowledge networks, individuals with the most integrity self-regulate their tendencies to appropriate. They’re the first to ask, “Do I have permission to teach this? Am I the right person? Am I maintaining the right relationship?” They hold themselves accountable to tradition, community, and their teachers.

Which brings us to the perverse incentive created by identity-based blanket prohibitions: when you make a sweeping statement like “white women shouldn’t call themselves witches,” who actually stops calling herself a witch?

The person with integrity.

The person who thinks carefully about appropriation.

The person who would never claim authority she hasn’t earned.

Those people understand “maybe I shouldn’t use this term” and immediately self-select out.

Meanwhile, the people with zero integrity—the ones who absolutely would appropriate without care, who do claim unearned authority, who have no accountability—those people don’t give a single fuck what anyone says? Yeah, they keep right on going.

You’ve just created more space for the actual appropriators.

This is how knowledge networks degrade. You lose the nodes with the highest integrity first. Then the network becomes increasingly populated by people who ignore boundaries, claim everything, and respect nothing.

But What About Accountability?

The person making this argument said something I actually agree with completely: the most spiritually powerful white people they know don’t argue with people of color who tell uncomfortable truths about whiteness, and they center anti-racist and decolonial work.

Yes. Absolutely yes.

But notice what’s happening here: we’re conflating the spiritual practice itself with the practitioner’s politics. Those are related but not identical concerns.

A white woman can call herself a witch and center anti-racist work. She can reclaim her ancestors’ destroyed traditions and do rigorous decolonial analysis. She can practice witchcraft and be accountable when people of color point out her complicity in white supremacy.

In fact, I’d argue that reclaiming European witchcraft traditions requires this work. You cannot honestly practice witchcraft—which capitalism and colonialism tried to destroy—while ignoring the ongoing violence imposed by late-stage capitalism and the legacies of colonialism. You cannot claim a connection to women who were killed by the church-state alliance while supporting Christian nationalism. You cannot honor the wise women and midwives whose knowledge was enclosed or destroyed while remaining silent about the ongoing enclosure and destruction of Indigenous land and knowledge.

For many white women, witchcraft is the door out of patriarchal cultures. But that exit reclamation has to be undertaken with full consciousness of how the violence that destroyed European women’s traditions was then weaponized globally.

The Actual Appropriation to Worry About

Here’s where I agree with the thinker who prompted this rebuttal:

Calling yourself a shaman when you’re not initiated into a Siberian tradition might be a problem. Using Native American ceremonial practices you learned from a weekend workshop is tacky and rude. Claiming to be a priestess of a closed tradition when you read one book is gross. You didn’t “download” that; you’re not a laptop. You learned it from someone (whom you must cite), had a gnostic encounter (which you should be brave enough to own), or you made it up (and that’s not OK). Don’t lift practices wholesale from traditions you don’t actually know well. Don’t work in public, sell your practices, or teach others until you’re truly competent.

Those are real problems. Those practices represent actual theft from living traditions.

But using the word “witch”? That’s not appropriation. That’s reclamation. That’s refusing to let the Inquisition have the final word.

So What Now?

If you’re a white woman who practices witchcraft, here’s what integrity looks like:

Learn the actual history. Put down the cute spell books. Read Federici. Read Gage. Read Margot Adler, Katherine Howe, and Ronald Hutton. Read Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy. Read everything! Understand what was destroyed and why. Understand how historical violence connects to ongoing violence.

Find teachers if you can. Yes, the lineages were broken. But some threads survived. Some people kept practicing and teaching. Some knowledge was kept alive in fragmented forms. Some is better than none. Seek teachers out. Pay them for their knowledge. Honor the transmission.

Build accountability structures. Practice doesn’t happen in isolation. Find community. Hold each other to standards. Call each other in when someone crosses lines.

Center anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist practices. You can’t practice witchcraft—which capitalism tried to destroy—while remaining neutral about capitalism. You can’t honor women killed by colonial Christian violence while ignoring contemporary Christian violence.

Don’t claim more than you’ve earned. There’s a vast difference between “I practice witchcraft” and “I am a high priestess of an ancient tradition.” I believe that if you practice witchcraft, you can—and should—use the perilous word “witch.” Part of doing the thing is taking responsibility for doing the thing! But be honest about what you know, who taught you, and what you don’t know.

When people of color tell you uncomfortable truths about whiteness, listen. Don’t argue. Don’t center your feelings. Get comfortable with feeling extremely uncomfortable.

And for the love of the gods, stop appropriating from living traditions. If it’s not from your ancestral practice, if you weren’t properly initiated, if you don’t have explicit permission—don’t use it willy-nilly. Take the steps to become a true initiate (which will require patience, diligence, and financial investment, like any education) or find a different book/plant/guide/name/rite that’s open to you. There are millions of options.

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The word “witch” belongs to European women, not because we’re entitled to whatever we want, but because our ancestors bled for it. They were tortured for it. They died for it.

I refuse to let patriarchy win by abandoning the word my ancestors lost to violence.

But I also refuse to practice witchcraft without understanding how the violence that destroyed European women’s power became the template for global colonial violence. The two refusals are inseparable.

That’s what integrity looks like for me. Not abandoning my own destroyed traditions, but reclaiming them with full consciousness of how systems of control spread, how violence compounds, how capitalism and colonialism and patriarchy work in concert to enclose all commons and destroy all knowledge that threatens power.³

The missionary wives who participated in colonization? They weren’t practicing witchcraft. They were practicing colonial Christianity—the same force that killed the witches.

We get to choose which ancestors to embrace and which to shun.

I choose the witches.

1. Nope, not sharing her name. When a teacher tells me she doesn’t want me in her space, I get out. No need to engage further. This isn’t about her, per se—we are discussing the ideas she put forward, not her specific expression of those ideas.

2. Of course, they came up with extra horrors.

3. Why yes, this IS the foundation of my approach to copyright, fair use, and AI. So glad you caught that. ;)