We are the Granddaughters of the Farmers who Composted their Eggshells: Reconsidering the Ancestral Witch in Contemporary Magical Practice
Author’s Note: The content of this blog reflects my personal experiences and perspectives on magic. Witchcraft is a deeply individual practice, and my approach may not align with everyone’s beliefs or traditions. I encourage readers to explore, question, and adapt what resonates with them. Nothing shared here is meant to serve as absolute truth or professional advice. Trust your intuition, do your own research, and walk your own path.
Within contemporary magical and witchcraft communities, the call to honour our ancestors has become increasingly central. As practitioners seek to root themselves in authentic traditions and inherited wisdom, there is a growing emphasis on our lineage—not necessarily in a hierarchical or initiatory sense, but in the form of spiritual inheritance, familial memory, and cultural continuity. In the midst of this collective return to the past, however, a concerning trend has begun to emerge: the posthumous reclassification of ancestors as witches in order to lend validity and authority to one’s modern craft.
This inclination raises important questions about historical accuracy, cultural memory, and the ethics of identification. While there are certainly families in which the word witch has been claimed proudly—particularly since the 1960’s and 1970’s. (Indeed, my own grandmother began referring to herself as a witch in the mid-1960’s and still uses the word to this day.) But the same cannot be said for most of the ancestors from whom any legitimately passed-on magical knowledge or traditions have been inherited. The family member who passed on his teachings to my grandmother, for example, never referred to himself as a witch. He was a charmer, a folk healer who avoided the word witch even when others referred to him as a “white witch” or “water witch”.
Indeed, many of the ancestors invoked in these claims of inherited witchcraft would not have recognised themselves as witches. Some were simply country folk—farmers, herbalists, and neighbours—who lived in tune with the land out of necessity rather than esoteric inclination. They practised what they knew because it kept their animals healthy, their families safe, and their crops growing. Their knowledge was practical, regional, and part of daily life. They told stories, followed signs, and adhered to customs that blended Christian belief with older folkloric sensibilities. Some were deeply religious; and most were cautious about anything that might resemble witchcraft.
To retroactively apply the label witch to these individuals is to risk erasing their identities and the cultural contexts in which they lived. It also implies a form of historical flattening, where distinct practices and roles—such as the cunning person, the charmer, the wise woman, the seer—are all subsumed under a single modern category. This not only distorts the past but also deprives us of the rich complexity of magical and folkloric traditions as they were actually lived and understood.
There is also, in this impulse, an echo of our modern discomfort with claiming magical identity without justification. For some, identifying an ancestor as a witch is a way of shoring up their own sense of legitimacy in the craft. It offers a kind of spiritual pedigree, a means of saying, "I come by this honestly." Yet we must ask ourselves: is it really honesty if it is built on the imagined consent of the dead?
Moreover, we must recognise how often these claims stem from a profound disconnect between the world we live in now and the world even our more recent ancestors inhabited. In our eagerness to read "witchcraft" into every ancestral habit, we forget how recent our conveniences truly are. Calling every person who composted with eggshells or brewed mint to calm a stomach a witch reveals more about our own romanticisation of the past than it does about the reality of life in earlier centuries. These practices were not esoteric—they were ordinary. They were simply how things were done before chemical fertilisers could be bought in a bottle or before one could drive to the nearest pharmacy for an antacid. The fact that we now view these habits as "witchy" says less about the nature of those actions and more about how thoroughly modernity has alienated us from traditional knowledge.
Let me be clear: there is no shame in having learned your garden magic from a farmer. There is no deficit in having a healer, a charm-speaker, or a simply superstitious grandmother in your family tree instead of an alleged witch. Conversely, having an ancestor who was accused of witchcraft—whether or not they actually practised—does not automatically bestow upon you any special magical authority. Witchcraft, as we practise it today, is not something that can be inherited by blood. It is something we shape through study, experience, relationship, and intention. It is an evolving, living path; not a birthright to be proven.
In a time when many of us are seeking to reconnect with the land, with folkways, and with the ancestral dead, let us not fall into the trap of revisionism. Let us honour our forebears for what they were, not what we need them to have been. Acknowledge the herbalist who worked without ever naming her practice. Respect the charmer who feared the label "witch" yet healed with his words. Celebrate the farmer who read the clouds like scripture and planted by the moon, even if he scorned superstition. These people were miracle workers in their own right, though they may never have said so.
To listen to the dead is to allow them the dignity of their own identities. To honour them is to resist the temptation to collapse their lives into our own narratives. The craft is not weakened by this honesty; it is enriched by it. When we tell the truth about where we come from—about the messiness and diversity of our magical inheritances—we come into deeper alignment with spirit, history, and self.
Witchcraft is not legitimised by ancestral permission slips. It is forged in fire, shaped by will, and walked with intention. The ancestors walk beside us, not behind us like medals on a chest. They are witnesses, not credentials. Let us treat them with the reverence they deserve, and allow them to speak for themselves.
