Who’s Afraid of Witches?

I've been sitting with the word "witch" since last week—

and I'm still processing it.

I attended a session at my beloved new women’s group Parlay House that was led by the fascinating executive coach, shaman, and witch Tutti Taygerly — a guided experience to meet our spirit animal guides — and what unfolded in the debrief afterward was more alive than anything I'd expected. The word "witch" landed in the room and people's reactions ranged from curious to genuinely unsettled. Someone shared that people they knew who identified as witches had used it as cover for manipulation and control. Others pushed back with "it's just a word." And someone offered a brief but potent history lesson — which I want to hold here for a moment, because the history matters.

Between the 14th and late 18th centuries, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people across Europe were executed for witchcraft. In colonial Salem, more than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft, and 20 were executed. The overwhelming majority of those executed were older, impoverished women, frequently targeted due to their roles in local communities as healers or midwives. In Scotland, a peer-reviewed study found that of the 142 folk-healers and midwives identified in witchcraft accusations between 1563 and 1736, 51% were found guilty and 90% were executed. The partnership between Church, State, and the emerging medical profession reached full bloom in the witch trials — a coordinated dismantling of women's healing authority that took centuries to accomplish and left a wound in collective memory that hasn't fully closed.

So when someone says they're afraid of witches, they may be carrying that history — and the cultural and intentional demonization of powerful women healers.

What I wanted to say in that room, and what I'm finding language for now, is that both things can be true at the same time. Yes, some people who claim mystical gifts use them to manipulate — to manufacture dependence, to profit from someone's fear of the future, to offer certainty where there is none. That is real. It happens. And yes, the history of persecution and erasure is also real, which is exactly why many people who hold healing, intuitive, or mystical gifts have learned to hold them quietly, carefully, and only in trusted company. Secrecy was survival. For generations.

What I wish we'd had time to name is that the antidote to both of those problems is the same two things: consent and do-no-harm.

I am also a witch as I shared in my December essay, and I use tarot cards, spell cards, a dowsing pendulum, palm reading. These are tools of seeing, yes — but I want to be clear about what I believe I'm seeing with them. I am not in the business of predicting your future. Honestly, when I've received readings that feel prescriptive — where someone is telling me what's coming as though my job is simply to receive it — I reject the whole experience. It doesn't feel like clarity. It feels like a form of control.

What I believe these tools can do, at their best, is help a person hear themselves clearly. Cut through the noise of other people's opinions, old stories, and inherited fears, and locate something true that was already there. That's what I'm after. Not prediction. Recognition.

This is also exactly how I coach. I don't tell my clients what to do. I listen for the stories underneath the stories, notice the patterns, ask the questions that help people articulate what they actually want — not what they think they should want, not what would make everyone else comfortable, but what is authentic and alive in them. Then we build from that. My mystical practice and my coaching practice aren't separate things I happen to do. They come from the same place in me.

I do believe some people have genuine gifts of sight. I've sat with enough readers over the years to know when something lands in a way that a good guess can't account for. But even genuine sight is a snapshot, not a verdict. I think about the movie Sliding Doors — two entirely different lives unfolding from the single moment of catching or missing a train. Every choice a person makes the minute they walk away from a reading reshapes what comes next. Those are choices, not predictions, and that distinction is everything to me.

That's the kind of witch I'm working to be. One who makes people feel more themselves, not less. One who asks permission before going anywhere vulnerable. One who holds your uncertainty with care and hands it back to you as something you can work with.

I know the word is scary to many people. That's exactly why I want to claim it with as much clarity and integrity as I can.