Defining Witchcraft

This digital Black Book is a personal record of my own magical practice, experiences, and beliefs. Everything shared here reflects my path and perspective alone. I use the term witch as a personal identifier and speak about witchcraft as it relates specifically to my life and work. This grimoire is not intended to serve as a teaching tool or general resource for others. If you are looking for educational materials, references, or shared resources, please refer to my Public Black Book.

No part of this Black Book may be used, shared, quoted, copied, or reproduced in any form without the express written consent of the author. Thank you for respecting the personal and protected nature of this space.

---

Witchcraft is a lived thing. It is not simply practiced. It is not merely done. A witch’s craft is her life; where the uncanny is woven through at every level, transmuting all things into sorcery. The witch is a person who lives at the edge of things. She dwells at the edge of the forest, at the edge of the village, at the edge of society, at the edge of the spirit world. To be a witch is to learn the language of spirit. To be a witch is to reach out and touch the realm of the unseen, and to be touched by it in return. To be a witch is to be chosen by the hares and the magpies. To be a witch is to become Uncanny. To be a witch is to walk into the woods.

Witchcraft cannot be reduced only to the performance of rites and spells. It is not simply an identity, though identity may be entangled within it. Witchcraft is a philosophical, academic, and spiritual orientation toward the world. It is a disciplined and rigorous craft rooted in observation, repetition, and relationship. It is both a way of life and a living practice—a coming together of breath, of spirit, of cunning, and of craft.

Witchcraft is a worldview. The witch holds that the world is enchanted, that spirit permeates matter, and that all things are interconnected by unseen threads. The witch’s cosmology is animistic: stones speak, rivers remember, trees bear witness. Spirit does not reside in some far-off heaven, but in the soil, the bone, the breath.

The witch builds her spirit-filled life on a foundation of reciprocity and respect. Power is not something to dominate but to work with. Spirits, too, are not tools but coconspirators, co-weavers of the witch’s web. The witch is a participant in a complex tapestry of spirits, ancestors, land, and self, and her philosophy is one of responsibility to these relationships and of sovereignty to herself. The witch does not rely solely on empirical knowledge, though she values observation and experience. She honors intuitive knowing, embodied wisdom, and the messages carried by smoke and linnet birds.

The craft of the witch is a life-long discipline. To walk through the Wildwood is to be a student of the world, of spirit, and of the self. It requires study, practice, and patience. It demands that one pay attention.

Witches learn the properties of herbs, the cycles of the moon, the omens in the flight of birds. They create formulas and symbol sets, practice ritual forms, and record their observations in books and bones. A witch reads the weather, reads the woods, reads between the lines of history and folklore.

Witchcraft is not something that can be confined to a place of power or altar. It seeps into the corners of the kitchen, into the folds of laundry, into the way a witch speaks to her plants or sweeps her floor. Witchcraft becomes a mode of living. To live as a witch is to see the sacred in the mundane. The garden becomes a place of communion. The hearth becomes a place of power. Cooking becomes spellwork. Cleaning becomes cleansing. The home becomes an extension of the body and the altar.

This way of life is seasonal, cyclical, and responsive. The witch marks the solstices and equinoxes, the dark moons and full moons, the festivals of fire and harvest. She knows that time is not linear but spiraling, and she aligns herself with the rhythms of the earth.

To be a witch is to do. To breathe as a witch, to walk as a witch, to speak with two tongues. The witch’s practice is made real through ritual, through spellcraft, through spiritwork. It is found in trance states and dream journeys, in conversations with ancestors, in charms hung over doorways. It is lived in the body—in the hand that stirs clockwise, in the foot that steps into the circle, in the mouth that speaks the words.

It is also found in the quiet, liminal spaces. In the listening. In the moments between. In the act of walking into the woods and listening to what the trees have to say. The witch lives in compact with the unseen. She does not merely summon spirits—she builds relationships with them. She does not simply cast spells—she crafts them with intention, rooted in understanding and context. Her magic is not separate from her life; it is interwoven. The witch is changed by her magic as much as she changes the world with it. She is remade again and again through her work, her devotion, her becoming.