When Witches Mourn the Dead: Grieving Rituals of

Contemporary Witchcraft in New England

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Woodlock, Maggie E. 2023. When Witches Mourn the Dead: Grieving Rituals of Contemporary
Witchcraft in New England. Master's thesis, Harvard University Division of Continuing Education.

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 When Witches Mourn the Dead:

Grieving Rituals of Contemporary Witchcraft in New England

Maggie E. Woodlock

Gr

A Thesis in the Field of Anthropology and Archeology

for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies

Harvard University

May 2023
Copyright 2023 Maggie E. Woodlock
 Abstract

This project is underpinned by ethnographic and phenomenological methods used

to analyze the grieving rituals of contemporary witches in New England through the lens

of anthropology, ritual studies, and grief counseling. The results of this study will fill in

the gap in the literature on the anthropology of witchcraft and contemporary American

death rites, which currently lack studies on personal grieving rituals. The scholarly

backdrop of my research traces recent trends in the anthropology of death that reflect a

movement toward noninstitutionalized death-related coping strategies along with

psychotherapeutic literature on bereavement that similarly shows a shift toward private

and individualized rituals of death and grieving while addressing changes in institutional

authorities on mourning and individual responses in the contemporary United States. This

undertaking aims to answer the following critical questions: How does the magic

worldview of contemporary witchcraft inform the way witches create grieving rituals?

How do these rituals enable contemporary witches to process and heal from the critical

experience of loss?
 Frontispiece

Zelda, a practicing witch, lighting candles at the altar before the ritual. Taken by the author, in New

England, 2022.

iv
 Dedication

To Nancy, who taught me to see magic.

And Emma, who helps me keep it alive.

v
 Acknowledgments

I want to thank the Harvard professors whose guidance in research writing led me

to take on this milestone, particularly Dr. Richard Joseph Martin and Dr. Ramyar

Rossoukh. I owe much to the counsel of my thesis director Dr. Stephen A. Mitchell,

whose uplifting conversations kept me on track. I extend my gratitude to my classmates

XingNi Liu, Kenny Legge, and Allison LeLaurin, who shared this experience with me. I

would like to thank the witches who graciously allowed me into a private sphere of their

lives and made this research possible. And finally, this thesis would not have been

possible without the unerring support of my friends and family, who always kept my

spirits up. Yours always.

vi
 Table of Contents

Frontispiece ........................................................................................................................ iv

Dedication............................................................................................................................ v

Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. vi

Author’s Reflexive Narrative ............................................................................................. ix

Chapter I. Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1

Chapter II. Literature Review .............................................................................................. 8

Introduction ............................................................................................................. 8

A Brief History of Neo-pagan Witchcraft ............................................................... 9

Rituals in Witchcraft.............................................................................................. 13

Bereavement Studies ............................................................................................. 19

Anthropology of Death .......................................................................................... 30

Ethnography of Witches ........................................................................................ 35

Concluding Remarks ............................................................................................. 37

Chapter III. Communication with Spirit ........................................................................... 39

With Whom do the Witches Speak? ...................................................................... 39

Forms of Communication ...................................................................................... 42

To Invoke the Dead ............................................................................................... 47

How Spirit Responds ............................................................................................. 52

Threats from the Spirit World ............................................................................... 57

Concluding Thoughts ............................................................................................ 59

vii
Chapter IV. Interaction with Energy ................................................................................. 61

Chapter V. Power through Burning ................................................................................... 68

Chapter VI. The Afterlife .................................................................................................. 73

Chapter VII. Final Discussion .......................................................................................... 83

Appendix 1. Methods ........................................................................................................ 89

Research Design .................................................................................................... 89

Data Collection and Analysis ................................................................................ 92

Limitations and Ethical Considerations................................................................. 95

Appendix 2. Interview Protocol ........................................................................................ 98

Appendix 3. Observational Protocol ............................................................................... 101

Appendix 4. Field Site Photographs, taken by the author in New England, 2022 ......... 102

References ....................................................................................................................... 103

viii
 Author’s Reflexive Narrative

When I heard, the air sucked out of the room. All matter lost form and crumbled

like aged paper. In the beginning, days passed, but there was no time. I lay and watched

the shifting sunlight distort the room into strange shapes, sharp and unreal. A hollowness

severed me from the space, and I floated in the room, in the shapes, unreal.

Then, I sat in a circle of candles and poured love through my cavernous chest.

With all my being, I sent for him to hear me. And I knew that he could. Up the mountain,

off the trail, I held my secret vigils. I watched candles melt in the snow, sending my

messages to the dead. I walked home lighter. I danced barefoot on cold wet grass. I

toasted wine in his honor. I wrote poems and sang for him. In moments of need, I called

upon a hidden world within me, of magic, of spirits and drums, of faint whispers in the

trees.

The world outside me moved on. There, I found no common tongue. Through me,

grief invented a dance. And I knew but little of magic. What would the witches do? How

would they move through grief? How would they mourn the dead?

ix
 Chapter I.

Introduction

A sharp frosty air sweeps across the pond, hitting red hands lighting candles. A

pale winter sun reveals a wisp of smoke curling through the air, hugging the space they

stand in. Incense burns in a copper cauldron. Crystals stand at specific points, encircling

a hand drawn sigil. A tree branch, a feather, and a beer. Pictures of a man smiling ear to

ear, with a baby in his arms and a child in toe, are placed throughout the altar. With eyes

closed, two witches stand facing one another, one thinking of the father they lost, and

both preparing for the undertaking ahead, whatever it may reveal.

Contemporary witches inhabit a world infused with invisible living energy

emanating from the natural world,1 the ancestors, and sometimes from powers beyond.

Their practice is an eclectic noninstitutional form of spirituality, one they navigate

1
Contemporary witches are defined here as “inheritors of Western esoteric magic traditions and nature
religions” (Zwissler 2018, 1), sharing in common with Neo-pagans and Wiccans respect for the divine in
nature, beliefs in otherworldly beings, and sacred rituals aimed at self-transformation, healing, and
celebrations of life (Clifford and Johnson 2019). Scholars of witchcraft use a wide variety of terminology to
describe the interconnected but diffuse spread of Western esoteric spirituality, its followers, and the
corresponding expressions or practices of their beliefs. Research tends to focus on spiritual communities
that either self-define as witches or Neo-pagans, yet as they stem from the same movement, some scholars
use the terms interchangeably (Ezzy 2014; Greenwood 2000; Hutton 1999; Magliocco 2010). In her
landmark text, Tanya Luhrmann (1989) frequently refers to her informants as “magicians” since they
believe their witchcraft to be the practice of magic. Luhrmann (1989) also uses the term to encompass the
many occult divination practices accompanying the practice of witchcraft, including tarot card reading and
clairvoyance. This research uses the term “contemporary witchcraft” to include witches, Neo-pagans, and
diviners while signifying the confluence of beliefs and practices that pre-date them. While Neo-pagan
communities and Wiccan covens have gained pronounced attention during recent decades from
anthropologists, research is lacking on the current iteration of contemporary witchcraft and the rituals they
perform.
through various rituals that are not pre-determined but fluid and malleable to the witch’s

whim.2 Contemporary witches, along with other practitioners from the Western esoteric

spiritual movement lineage, orient their ritual practices around the fundamental cycles of

nature: life, death, and rebirth. Accordingly, death plays a key role symbolically in

witchcraft rituals. Yet the literature on witchcraft lacks the essential human experience of

mourning and the grieving rituals which follow loss.

Typically, appropriate mourning behaviors are prescribed by religious institutions

and spiritual affiliations, they are shaped by specific rules and governed by worldviews or

cosmic orientations. With the erosion of traditional institutions of authority in recent

decades in the US, prescribed cultural codes of conduct for mourning are increasingly left

to the individual to navigate (Souza 2017), a cultural shift addressed by this research.

Studies of grief and mourning behaviors, primarily undertaken by scholars of

psychotherapy, show increasing interest in individual, fluid, and creative personal

grieving rituals, a trend mirrored in contemporary witches’ solitary ritual practices. At the

same time, the prevalence of occult practices and magical thinking connected to

2
Throughout the history of anthropological inquiry, the term ritual has taken on many dimensions.
Anthropologists widely agree on ritual as a sacred cultural product centered on symbolic expression,
separate from behaviors that govern the mundane social sphere. These symbols are tangible forms of ideas,
longings, or beliefs abstracted from lived experience (Geertz 1973). Traditionally, scholars saw rituals as
more static, formalized sets of behaviors that allowed people to address otherworldly powers or mystical
beings (Turner 1970). As the anthropological gaze shifted away from non-Western societies to Western
ones, more fluid definitions arose. More fitting to this research is the definition proposed by Tambiah
(1979), stating, “Ritual is a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication. It is constituted of
patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts, often expressed in multiple media” (119). Notably,
Michael Jackson (2008) adds that rituals are more than a means of communication; they are an existential
imperative, a vital strategy for coping with critical conditions, establishing control in the face of hardships,
and transforming lived experiences of the world. As this research will analyze rituals from a magic
worldview crafted under the emotionally difficult circumstance of loss, rituals take on a flexible form
combining a mystical orientation, symbolic communication, and inherent transformative power.

2
witchcraft,3 often used to cope with uncertainties and to process the hardships of life, has

increased in recent years in popular culture.

In Western witchcraft and Neo-paganism,4 death is experienced symbolically as

part of life; it is seen as a powerful, transformative agent of nature and a metaphor for the

potential to change one’s life (Adler 1979; Bado-Fralick 1998; Luhrmann 1989).

According to scholarship, practitioners do not address death as an ending but always in

conjunction with movement, transformation, creation, and rebirth. While beliefs in

reincarnation and an afterlife are common within the practice of witchcraft, there is no

single, standardized approach to ceremonies regarding funerals and death (White 2016).

What remains unexplored in the literature on witchcraft is an analysis of personal,

individual grieving rituals fashioned to process the experience of death.5 Additionally, as

3
Magic describes a system for comprehending an entire world; it provides “a means for navigating among
the varied forces that comprise and shape material creation and promises its practitioners methods of
controlling or at least affecting those forces” (Bailey 2006, 1). In a review of scholarly literature, Michael
D. Bailey (2006) contends that magical beliefs and attending practices have never disappeared and remain
central to aspects of Western modernity and addresses witchcraft as a form of magical action in this
context. Not all witches or scholars in the field use the term magic, but many do. Scholars of various
backgrounds acknowledge magic as fundamental to human culture. Recent discourses tend to frame magic
around contesting views between science, religion, and modernity, arguing that resurgences of magic come
in opposition to Enlightenment thinking and that the colonization of non-Western societies has impacted
perceptions of magic and witchcraft worldwide (Bailey 2006).
4
Witchcraft sometimes refers to the doctrine of the Wiccan religion but is used throughout this study to
encompass the ritual practices and belief systems integral to the practice of witchcraft in its contemporary
form. Wicca is a form of contemporary Paganism that concentrates on worshipping a Goddess with
corresponding myths and holy holidays held in her honor. Contemporary witches are not direct followers of
Wicca and can be categorized as adhering to a less formalized belief system. They are arguably less
community-oriented than their Wiccan predecessors, making contemporary witches a more ambiguous
group, difficult to recognize and define. Still, contemporary witches share many essential foundational
orientations with previous generations of Wiccan witches and Neo-pagans; Neo-paganism is
interchangeable with contemporary Paganism, which refers to a religious movement concentrating on the
revival and reinvention of pre-Christian European folk traditions and a belief system whose followers
identify with the pagans of ancient times (Magliocco 2010).
5
Across multiple disciplines, grief rituals relate to the death of a loved one, typically conducted after
funerals as part of the mourning process. These rituals are symbolic and performative “vehicles of
transformation and connection”, providing a mechanism to express the intense emotions of grief in order to
heal (Romanoff 1998, 697).

3
coven membership is no longer as common as an individualized, solitary practice of

witchcraft among contemporary witches (Berger and Ezzy 2009), this research is

particularly salient.

Corresponding to rituals practiced by contemporary witches, psychological and

psychotherapeutic research on grieving rituals also highlights aspects of meaning-making

and emotional spontaneity through symbolic play. In the clinical setting, individuals use

ritual objects to confer internal aspects of mourning onto tangible mementos, enabling

them to process the inner landscape of grief externally (Sas and Coman 2016; Romanoff

1998). The use of symbolism of natural elements, common to psychotherapeutic and

anthropological understandings of grief, fits in with the ritual focus in contemporary

witchcraft on motifs of nature and symbolic references to seasonal cycles corresponding

with the life stages of the witch.

Anthropologically, the experience of loss is not an end but a transition, from

living to death, from the lived social relationship to a new ongoing relationship with the

deceased, and with grief itself. A significant loss affects people individually and

reverberates through social networks. A death in a community is often described

anthropologically as a social event processed through ritual, where an initiation from this

life to the afterlife can occur (Kaufman and Morgan 2005). Culturally specific norms and

narratives surround the experience of grief, impacting how various communities respond

to death (Silverman, Baroiller, and Hemer 2021).

Integral to the ritual mourning process is the transformation of the identity of the

bereaved, who must navigate a new relationship with the dead along with a new social

position based on the social shift caused by the death. Forms of memory and forgetting

4
are also culturally sanctioned (Silverman, Baroiller, and Hemer 2021; Kaufman and

Morgan 2005) and play a key role in grieving rituals across disciplines.

Overall, mainstream American society lacks substantial resources to grapple in

meaningful ways with the life crisis of loss. Scholars agree that the culture around death

in the contemporary US does not encourage expressions of grief and tends to minimize it

more generally (Castle and Phillips 2003). In recent years, psychotherapeutic theories on

bereavement have shifted away from the logic that mourners should detach and withdraw

from the person they lost toward an understanding that in order to heal, many people need

to continue to have an ongoing connection with the deceased (Castle and Phillips 2003;

Klass, Silverman, and Nickman 2014; Worden 2018). Contemporary witches contemplate

death and mythologize it; they experience death metaphorically and attempt to overcome

the fear surrounding it. Foundational to their practice is engaging in rituals that honor the

dead and connect witches to lost loved ones. While American society finds discomfort in

acknowledging death (Grimes 2013; Kastenbaum 2015), the subculture of witches has a

repertoire to turn to when the crisis of grief strikes. My research combines the

anthropology of witchcraft, psychotherapeutic bereavement studies, and the anthropology

of death, along with ritual studies and American death rites,6 to analyze the spiritual

orientation of contemporary witchcraft as it applies to grief rituals.

In sum, death plays a central role in the rituals of Western witchcraft, yet there is

a dearth of research specifically on grief. In the US, cultural norms around grieving have

shifted away from public expression as community-based or driven by religious

6
A death rite is a “culture-bound ceremony, ritual, or other religious or customary practice associated with
dying and the dead” (“APA Dictionary of Psychology” n.d.).

5
institutions and onto individuals (Wouters 2002). Consequently, the experience of grief

has become increasingly professionalized and moved into the private arena of

psychotherapy (Grimes 2000). Many effective ritual elements of grief rituals observed

and conducted by therapists resemble those practiced by contemporary witches. While

research on death rites and grieving rituals in the contemporary US is lacking (Grimes

2000; Romanoff 1998), literature from the anthropology of death acts as a bedrock from

which to better understand responses to grief and ritualized forms of processing it. As

death and loss are essential human experiences, deepening our understanding of the ways

rituals are used to process grief can contribute to healing the suffering of the mourning.

This research will contribute to scholarly research in several ways. The current

state of the anthropology of Western witchcraft, psychotherapeutic studies of grief rituals,

and the anthropology of death all point to a transition from community-oriented

mourning processes to informal, adaptive, and individualized practices, which is reflected

in the solitary practices of witchcraft and therefore, requires further analysis. Both

psychotherapeutic bereavement studies and anthropological research acknowledge a

dearth of studies on death rites and rituals in the contemporary US. Additionally, this

study updates the literature to reflect changes in witchcraft from previous generations.

My research aims to analyze the grieving rituals of contemporary witches in New

England to further knowledge on the relationship between death, ritual, and grief while

contributing to a lack of studies on death rites in the contemporary US and grief rituals in

contemporary Western witchcraft. What is at stake in understanding the effectiveness of

grief rituals is the emotional health and well-being of individuals who are mourning (Sas

and Coman 2016). The basis of witchcraft lies in ritual practices and the contemplation of

6
life and death, resisting norms in contemporary US society. Looking at the structure and

effect of grief rituals in this subculture, which relies on rituals more generally, addresses

a need in society at large. More narrowly, it is theorized in bereavement studies that grief

rituals create opportunities for meaning-making, enabling individuals to feel a sense of

control over otherwise uncontrollable events and work through painful feelings (Sas and

Coman 2016). A significant consequence of not addressing this problem, in

psychotherapeutic terms, is a resulting complex grieving experience which can take many

forms, notably by an inability on the part of the mourner to accept the reality of the loss

and a consequential delusional state (Worden 2018). Processing the pain of grief involves

an interplay between society and the mourner and what the mourner sees as acceptable

(Worden 2018). In American society overall, grief is processed privately, and death is

rarely contemplated. Through ritual practices, witches actively reject these norms.

7
 Chapter II.

Literature Review

Introduction

My research engages with literature on rituals in Western witchcraft, bereavement

studies, and the anthropology of death to situate the grieving rituals of contemporary

witches. The goal of this research is to gain knowledge on the relationship between death,

ritual, and grief through witches’ specific sociocultural worldview while addressing a

societal need in the contemporary US regarding mourning. Accordingly, it is critical to

deepen our understanding of the ways rituals can be used to heal the suffering of

mourners from the essential human experience of loss.

This chapter explores the historical and anthropological background of Western

witchcraft, adding validity to subsequent analysis. It acknowledges a decrease in

adherence to institutions of religion in the US and the consequential societal shift of the

mourning process onto psychotherapists. As bereavement studies increasingly show that

personal grieving rituals are a powerful tool in processing grief, this research on the grief

rituals of contemporary witches is salient. Significantly, this chapter synthesizes

anthropological studies of rituals in Western witchcraft and reveals trends in the

anthropology of death that focus on the transformation of the living to the afterlife and

the maintenance of the survivors’ relationship with their lost loved ones. Scholarly works

on rituals in witchcraft, rituals in grief counseling, and death rites cross-culturally frame

the personal grief rituals of contemporary witches in New England within this research.

8
 A Brief History of Neo-pagan Witchcraft

Scholars of Western witchcraft and Neo-paganism largely attribute the origin of

the spiritual and religious movement to Gerald Gardner in the 1940s, who published the

prevalent text Witchcraft Today shortly after England repealed the Witchcraft Act in

1953. He is the founder of Gardnerian Witchcraft, considered the origin of the Wiccan

religion. Gardner claimed to be a member of a coven whose existence pre-dated the

takeover of Christianity in Europe, one that practiced magic in a European Witchcraft

tradition that continued unchanged in secret through the centuries. He asserted his

practice of witchcraft to be a reworking of ancient magical practices suppressed by

Christianity (Hutton 1999). Another prominent force that significantly influenced

Gardner’s work in the history of Western witchcraft was Margaret Murray.

Murray, formally trained as an Egyptologist, served as Chair of Social

Anthropology at the University of London and president of Britain’s Folklore Society

throughout her career. Beginning in 1917, she published widely on the history of Western

witchcraft, releasing her most influential text, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in 1921

(Ramsey 2020). The central thesis of her work, one that captured the public mind then

and still impacts contemporary witches today, is that Western witchcraft originated in the

European pagan fertility cults of the ancient past, surviving in secret alongside

Christianity (Ramsey 2020; Wood 2020). In this way, practitioners of Western witchcraft

see their practices as a revival of those primitive pagan religions.

The idea of pagan survivals or practices that survived from ancient European

civilizations mirrored popular notions at the time of Murray’s publications, including

works by the anthropologist Sir James Frazer who detailed ancient fertility cults in The

9
Golden Bough. Popular evolutionary theory, a teleological outlook that viewed history as

progressing forward as if by a divine influence, also impacted Murray’s work (Ramsey

2020) which she applied to religion.

The existence of a set of collective ritual practices and beliefs revolving around

the natural cycles of vegetation and the changing seasons, postulated as continuing from

an ancient past, Murray named the “Old Religion” (Ramsey 2020). The theory goes

beyond the borders of Britain to the assertion that the Old Religion once spread

throughout western Europe since the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods (Ramsey 2020;

Wood 2020). Murray centered the rituals of these religious cults around “the mythology

of a dying and resurrecting god, a god whose birth and death reflect the seasonal cycle

and the cycle of crops” (Ramsey 2020, 3). Accordingly, pagan survivals took on the form

of folk practices related to the changing seasons as part of a fertility religion dominated

by a horned god and other beings, within which witches were the purveyors of fertility

(Wood 2020). Correspondingly, the ritual worship of a goddess whose annual death and

rebirth symbolize the rebirth of nature as it passes through the yearly seasons is a

common thread linking various sects of Western witchcraft more generally.

A critical aspect of Murray’s work is the view that witches are practitioners of an

ancient and typically harmless fertility cult that the Christian Church suppressed and

persecuted harshly. This theory led to wide criticism of her literature, particularly for her

use of confessions made under torture during the Inquisition and for lacking evidence and

data more generally. At the core of Murray’s work is an assertion of historical continuity

between European witchcraft and ancient religious fertility cults (Ramsey 2020) that

survived Christian persecution and further attempts at suppression. This concept inspired

10
Gardner and continues to influence the identity of contemporary witches and how they

relate their practices to the past.

Other public figures purported similar theories of British mystery religions and

powers hidden in plain sight. Although less publicized, in 1836, occultist Godfrey

Higgins published a two-volume book claiming that ancient megaliths around the world

were built by a forgotten and unknown civilization, founded on an ancient system of

spirituality that worshipped the sun personified as a three-part god, a savior who eternally

dies and returns. Decades later, his theory would be carried forward by Helena Petrovna

Blavatsky, a spiritualist who founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 (Hutton 1999;

Melton 2019) and spread the concept of reincarnation in the US and Europe.

Analyzing the origins of contemporary pagan witchcraft through tracing

discourses in European society that bridge moral values and religion, historian and

practicing pagan Ronald Hutton (1999) addresses several schools of thought that would

impact elements of witchcraft. He draws a connection between a strong popular interest

in the classical ancient Greek and Roman pagan world and its deities in Victorian Britain

to the prevalence of the same classical myths and deities in pagan witchcraft. Similarly,

he argues that an overall societal rejection of authoritarian social structures in favor of

self-discovery through contact with nature, stemming from the Enlightenment and

Romanticism periods, can be seen in the foundations of pagan witchcraft (Hutton 1999).

Addressing a lack of scholarly and historical literature on modern pagan

witchcraft, Hutton (1999) critically investigates the phenomenon as a new religious

movement and the only religion born in Britain rather than a continuation of an

unchanging religion from antiquity. With the help of other authors and practitioners of

11
pagan witchcraft, most notably Doreen Valiente, Wicca spread from Britain to the US in

the early 1960s. In an attempt to separate themselves from Gardnerian Wiccan witchcraft,

the 1990s saw a rise in public claims of ties to the Old Religion of antiquity from

numerous branches of contemporary pagan witchcraft. Referring to the 1990s, Hutton

(1999) notes an increase in identification with hereditary claims or religion through

family lineage, where witches describe their ritual and magic practices in terms of

originating with their forebears. Such claims tended to refer to forebears who upheld the

same belief system as pagan witchcraft, including “popular charms and magical

remedies, fortune-telling, ritual magic, and a mystical identification with an inherent

sanctity in the natural world” (Hutton 1999, 305) but typically did not self-identify as

witches or pagans.

Hutton (1999) defines the worldview of pagan witchcraft using principles outlined

by The Pagan Federation, an organization founded and run by Wiccans. It defines

adherents as following these basic principles: acceptance of the natural world as divine,

rejection of divinely inspired rules of behavior in favor of personal freedom while

maintaining the ethic of not harming others, and a vision of the divine as female and

male. Through his own time spent in the field, Hutton (1999) adds to these basic

definitions of pagan witches. He writes that pagan witchcraft aims to “draw out and

enhance the divinity within human beings” and abolish Western distinctions that separate

magic from religion (Hutton 1999, 391). He additionally argues that the essence of pagan

witchcraft “lies in the creative performance of ritual” and that it is an eclectic, protean

mystery religion (Hutton 1999, 391). Based on extensive research and personal

observations, Hutton (1999) contends that pagan witchcraft fundamentally emphasizes

12
self-realization in the present world and lacks a concept of salvation after death.

Accordingly, contemporary pagans often articulated the afterlife in terms of reincarnation

following a period of rest and renewal in an otherworldly space.

Stemming from the complex origins of the Western pagan witchcraft movement,

the belief that witchcraft is a re-working of ancient magical rituals based on perceived

pre-Christian pagan religions, one that emphasizes the divine within, inspired generations

to turn to witchcraft. Creative and informal by nature, witchcraft splintered over time into

many sects while still sharing a common set of beliefs and spiritual orientations. The

New Age movement of the 1970s and ‘80s, which popularized traditional occult or

divinatory practices and brought them into mainstream America (Melton 1990), further

impacted practitioners of witchcraft (Zwissler 2018). The ritual practices of

contemporary witches reflect the melding of these histories.

Rituals in Witchcraft

Partaking in rituals is a crucial component of the practice of witchcraft. From full

moon gatherings to initiation rites and bonfires at the solstice to honoring the dead,

witches express and celebrate their core belief in the sacredness of life. In these settings,

magic is both a practice and an ideology expressed in symbolic performance. The

structure and workings of ritual magic highlight the cosmic orientation on which they lay

(Eliade 1989). To explore the meaning of ritualistic symbols is to unearth shrouded

dimensions of the witchcraft worldview. Literature concerning the nature of witchcraft

rituals and the ways death figures into them will serve as a basis to extrapolate rituals

related to grief work.

13
 In general, rituals in witchcraft are idiosyncratic, individualized, flexible, and

particular to specific covens or individuals (Clifford and Johnson 2019; Furth 2017;

Zwissler 2018). While witchcraft rituals vary, according to the literature they are

construed as devices or vehicles for healing and transformation. In her seminal text

Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld, Susan Greenwood (2000) asserts that healing

forms the basis of the ideology and practice of magic and witchcraft, while leading

scholar Margot Adler (1979) defines magic as growth. Practitioners heal themselves

interpersonally while perceiving their work as contributing to healing the disjunction

between humans and the natural world or the divine (Magliocco 2010). This two-fold

projection of ritual magic aimed at healing the self and the material world is evident in

much of the literature on witchcraft. In her work with Neo-pagans, Greenwood (2000)

explicates performances of ritual magic as a route to wholeness, arguing that magic offers

practitioners techniques to help heal their bodies and psyche from “the disharmony of

contemporary life” and restore a lost balance (121). As feminist witchcraft serves to heal

women from negative self-worth attributed to the social conditioning of the patriarchy

(Adler 1979; Greenwood 2000), this multifaceted approach to ritual magic additionally

extends to feminist perspectives.

Derived mainly from ethnographic fieldwork in festival settings, scholars have

varied stances on how these rituals work. Large festival gatherings are a common focal

point in anthropological research on witchcraft, where participants perform rituals as part

of a community. Orion (1995) elaborates on the process of ritual action amid a group of

Neo-pagans, describing how participants tap into the external energy of the earth and sky

by laying down on the ground and visualizing releasing energy from their bodies into the

14
body of the earth. An assumed natural capacity of practitioners to draw power up from

the earth and down from the sky to create magic (defined as healing and growth) is

another common thread in the literature on the workings of witchcraft (Adler 1979; Orion

1995). Significantly, witchcraft rituals often begin with drawing a circle, whereby

participants become the center of the cosmos and see themselves as powerful magical

beings. In congruence with scholarly analyses of ritual magic, this research will address

how rituals have changed to fit the solitary practice of contemporary witchcraft.

Scholars note that death is a reoccurring theme in many witchcraft rituals,

acknowledging that an acceptance of life and death plays a key role in the practice of

witchcraft. Generally, death metaphorically symbolizes different aspects of the human

experience. According to the literature, confronting death means confronting fears (Ezzy

2014) and becoming more fully human (Adler 1979), marking initiations into coven

membership (Bado-Fralick 1998) and holy holidays that correspond to life transitions

(Magliocco 2010). Understanding previous analyses of death and ritual magic in Western

witchcraft serves as a critical background in building this study of contemporary

witchcraft.

According to Sarah Pike (2001) in Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary

Pagans and the Search for Community, sacred fire rituals within Neo-pagan festivals act

as a ritual force, allowing participants to step outside of the everyday and journey to their

true inner selves, the place of transformational magic power. Through ritual, practitioners

attempt to enter into deeper and more direct contact with “an invisible world of spirits

and deities, also populated with loved ones who have passed away” (15). Pike’s (2001)

analysis is mainly on sacred spaces, healing, and sexual liberation inherent in the festivals

15
and magic practice. Yet she states that the sacred festival spaces are specifically

fashioned for participants to confront aspects of the human experience, including healing

and the contemplation of death (Pike 2001). Death is addressed as a transformative

dynamic of life’s journey that must be explored. In this way, death is a central component

of the practice and ideology of witchcraft that requires further analysis in the context of

grief and mourning.

Additionally, with a more established set of ritual practices, initiation rites are a

well-studied dimension of ritual magic in witchcraft that involves symbolically

confronting death. In Wicca and similar branches of Western esoteric witchcraft, death is

connected to metaphorical and performative initiation rituals where initiates “die” by

shedding their old lives and are reborn into the coven, becoming full coven members

(Adler 1979; Bado-Fralick 1998). By performing nature’s eternal, cyclical growth, death,

and rebirth aspect, witches are bound with it; they are one with the seasons, the gods, and

the spirits of the earth.

Rituals dramatize the cosmic worldview of witchcraft. They allow participants to

enter “into the drama of life itself… so that growth (which is the true magic) is achieved”

(Adler 1979, 1622). Through the voices of her informants, Luhrmann (1989) writes that

ritual magic is about “plunging into the terror of the abyss, and through this acquiring

strength”, referring to the abyss of “fear, anger, sex, grief, death, the unknown” (92). She

argues that the magic of transformation comes from within and occurs by going into the

unknown of the inner self, experiencing death as a kind of dissolution of the outer self,

then journeying back and being reborn (Luhrmann 1989). Understanding what rituals do

16
for participants is foundational to positioning the research of this work on grieving

rituals, which is largely absent from the literature.

Authors maintain that Neo-pagans and witches believe that the natural world is

alive with energy, the powers of the spirit world, and the ancestors (Luhrmann 1989; Pike

2001). They feel a kinship with the spirits of nature, even mourning the pain and death of

trees and plants (Pike 2001). Furthermore, Greenwood (2000) argues that rituals are a

route to wholeness, healing a fragmented and lost sense of self. These conceptions of a

living spiritual reality and rituals aimed at healing a fractured self allow for the framing

of how witches perceive death and transitions into an afterlife or experience grieving.

This background will enable the researcher to fill in the gap in the existing literature on

witchcraft and grieving rituals.

In some instances, death figures into a ritual when participants engage in role-

playing, performing legends and myths that pertain to goddess worship. Importantly,

Ezzy (2014) conducted fieldwork on a specific group ritual centered around death,

providing evidence of witch’s and Neo-pagan’s orientations to death and the afterlife. At

the ‘Faunalia’ festival,7 participants undergo an enactment of an ‘Underworld rite’ where

they metaphorically face death, forcing them to confront fears of suffering,8 mortality,

and the unknown (Ezzy 2014). Through the ritual, participants gain confidence in facing

matters of loss and the suffering integral to life transitions. While catalyzing changes in

“the way people feel about death, dying and loss”, the ritual is ultimately about renewal

7
‘Faunalia’ is a pseudonym for a large Pagan festival in south-eastern Australia where Ezzy conducted
fieldwork. The festival took place yearly between 2000 and ended in 2009. Ezzy’s research is based on
extensive participant interviews, mainly from the 2005 festival.
8
The Underworld Rite is one of the two major rituals practiced at Faunalia; the other is the Baphomet rite.
Ezzy (2014) argues that the rituals create a safe environment for repressed sexual expression and the
development of healthier relationships with oneself and with the world.

17
and self-transformation; it always ends in a return (Ezzy 2014, 65). In thinking about

death and performing journeys around the afterlife, participants learn about being alive.

My research extends the author’s argument more narrowly to mourning.

It is widely acknowledged that the practice of witchcraft is centered around

celebrations of the earth’s seasons, marking personal life transitions, and honoring nature.

Witchcraft fundamentally links the life course of individual witches with the cycle of

nature: birth, growth, death, and regeneration. Deriving from Wicca, many witches

follow the ‘wheel of the year’ that dictates annual rituals.9 The wheel divides the calendar

by holy holidays corresponding with ritual performances that are fundamental to the

practice of witchcraft and display a sense of witches’ cosmic orientation. The holidays or

sabbats, occurring at solstices, equinoxes, and points in between, are embraced by

practitioners as ancient, sacred celebrations. The turning of the seasons fundamentally

connects the birth and death of the natural world to transitions in practitioners’ life cycle,

as well as connecting them to a perceived ancient pagan heritage (Magliocco 2010).

These seasonal sabbats are marked by various festival and ritual celebrations that

acknowledge the natural transition from youth to old age, to death, and beyond.

According to the literature, the time on the wheel of the year most dedicated to

acknowledging death and celebrating the end of the harvest season is Samhain or

Halloween. As the wheel’s cycle is eternal, the death or end of one season is merely the

beginning of the next phase of life. Witches often celebrate this time with festivities,

9
The wheel of the year is a seasonal calendar with eight sacred sabbats corresponding to seasonal shifts,
solstice and equinox celebrations, and ritual actions. It is central to Wicca and commonly used by
practitioners of other forms of Western witchcraft and Neo-pagans. Regarding the wheel, Nikki Bado-
Fralick (1998) states, “Witches draw many of their insights from the seasonal cycles of nature, which are
celebrated in a calendar of eight sabbats or holy days called the Wheel of the Year… In celebrating the
sabbats, Witches express and experience the never-ending cycle of change, honoring equally times of
planting and harvest, seeing in every ending a new beginning, in every death a rebirth” (6).

18
food, dancing, and ritual bonfires. It is also a time for community mourning and

communal grieving, for honoring and celebrating the dead (Bado-Fralick 1998). They

believe that the veil between the living and the spirit world is thin at Samhain, making it

possible to commune with the dead (Bado-Fralick 1998). Many Wiccans, in particular,

celebrate with a “Feast of the Dead” that ritually opens the “Gates of the Dead”, allowing

contact with those who have died and gone to the “Realm of the Dead awaiting to be

born” (Bado-Fralick 1998, 16). By utilizing previous studies on rituals, the place of death

within them, and within the spiritual orientation of witchcraft, this research is positioned

to further develop processes of grief.

There are some scholarly references to funerary ceremonies yet, pertaining only to

Wiccans. Although Wiccan high priestesses can perform funerals, practices related to the

death of a coven member or loved one are often done in private ceremonies (White

2016). While death is fundamental to the practice and ideology of ritual magic in

witchcraft, it is acknowledged that beyond a belief in reincarnation, witches do not share

one view of death, nor is there a unified ritual regarding death (White 2016). While this

study is not specifically on the Wiccan religion, it is noteworthy to acknowledge these

ceremonies as one of the few occurrences of funerary practices in Western witchcraft.

Bereavement Studies

With the general erosion of people’s trust in the authority of religious institutions

in the 20th century, for some, witchcraft has served to fill in a need for existential matters.

Yet at large, with this shift, psychotherapy became responsible for assistance in

navigating one of life’s most challenging hardships – loss. While there are no scholarly

19
sources pertaining to mourning and grief within the study of Western witchcraft, the field

of psychotherapy has devoted much time to the study of bereavement.

In Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health, a

prevailing guide in the field of psychotherapy, Worden (2108) discusses the many

characteristics considered “normal” responses to grief. The guide emphasizes the

importance of understanding the wide range of behaviors and experiences associated with

loss in order to prevent bereavement counselors from incorrectly pathologizing such

behaviors.

Worden (2018) sorts normal grief behaviors into four categories: feelings,

physical sensations, cognitions, and behaviors, and stresses the central role meaning-

making and meaning reconstruction plays in the mourning process, having been

introduced by psychologist Robert Neimeyer over 20 years ago. Additionally, for many

decades Kübler-Ross's (1973) stages of dying led the way in bereavement counseling,

which broke the mourning process into clearly defined steps, including denial, anger,

bargaining, depression, and acceptance. This theory was widely critiqued for the literal

and rigid way it was followed by counselors, the consequence of which was the

stigmatization and pathologizing of people who strayed from the stages, compounding

their suffering.

Notable scholars of bereavement counseling, including Parkes (1998), Parkes and

Prigerson (2013), Bowlby (1998), and Sanders (1999), shifted toward a phased approach

to describe common emotional and physical responses to loss and how they change over

time as the mourner learns to adapt to grief. The phased approach has been critiqued for

insinuating passivity and inaction on the part of the mourner, which Worden (2018) later

20
counters by compartmentalizing grief into another set of stages. Scholars argue that the

ability of the mourner to accomplish the tasks of grief relies on an interplay between the

individual and the norms of society. Essential to this undertaking is processing the pain of

grief, which requires coping with emotional and physical pain and often results in

unusual behaviors, the expression of which may be considered deviant by societal

standards and, therefore, may hinder the process. For the bereaved to become arrested at

one stage and unable to move into the next has severe consequences, such as delusion and

physical pain (Worden 2018).

Psychotherapists have increasingly engaged with grief rituals through these stages

of mourning. As the newly bereaved are often unable to cope with “the sheer force and

nature of the emotions that follow a loss” (Rubin 1999, 45), ritual serves to counter

feelings of helplessness, giving mourners a way to channel overwhelming feelings and a

place to externalize them (Castle and Phillips 2003; Sas and Coman 2016). Experiencing

a significant loss can shake one’s most foundational understanding of the world.

According to the literature, it can cause people to question their sense of self and the

deeply held beliefs or values that support their worldview. This argument will be

extended further in my research by analyzing the experience of grief through the spiritual,

sociocultural world of contemporary Western witchcraft.

According to the stages, the bereaved must make external, internal, and spiritual

adjustments to life without the deceased. Internally, grief can affect the degree to which a

person feels they have control over what happens to them. Worden (2018) warns that

losing this sense of control can lead to intense regression. Ritual performances assist in

this stage of the process by providing structure and order that can offer a sense of safety

21
and help one to reestablish a sense of control over feelings and events (Castle and Phillips

2003). Externally, the bereaved have the task of weaving new narratives out of the loss to

give new meaning to their pain. In psychotherapy, rituals provide a space for shared

meaning-making (Hecht 2020; Neimeyer 2001), a critical part of the grieving process.

Even Worden’s (2018) stages shifted over time, reflecting changes in

psychotherapeutic conceptions of the bereavement process and corresponding grief

rituals. Influenced by Freud (1917), who theorized that the function of mourning is for

the survivor to sever the relationship with the deceased by detaching connected hopes and

memories, it was widely thought that in order to heal, the mourner must emotionally

withdraw from the relationship they had with the deceased to move forward and start new

relationships with the living. Earlier additions of Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy

purported the need for detachment and withdrawal. Spearheaded by Klass, Silverman,

and Nickman (2014), who dismantled this dominant conception of grief, Worden (2018)

now argues against this model, instead emphasizing the need for memorializing the dead

and finding new ways to remember them, keeping the relationship or bond alive.10

Bereavement scholars now emphasize continuing bonds with the deceased and

dealing with memories of them as pivotal to grief work. Part of maintaining such a bond

entails reminiscing and integrating memories into living relationships and in this way,

continuing to develop the survivor’s relation to their lost loved one (Balk 1999; Castle

and Phillips 2003; Klass, Silverman, and Nickman 2014). Part of this process is

validating the relationship or memorializing the legacy of the deceased. Grief rituals

10
The shift from the idea of the severing of one’s relationship with the dead to maintaining the relationship
is central to Klass, Silverman, and Nickman’s (2014) classic text Continuing Bonds, originally published in
1996, where the scholars reject the prevailing model in bereavement studies that defined holding on to a
relationship with the deceased as a pathological.

22
encourage a transformation of the bereaved’s sense of self and the changed relationship

with their lost loved one (Romanoff 1998). Additionally, Castle and Phillips (2003) argue

that through ritual, symbolic objects become means to validate and facilitate

remembrance.

In an extensive literature review and through interviews with experts in grief

therapy and grief rituals, Sas and Coman (2016) argue that successful grief rituals have

specific therapeutic properties, serve precise functions, and fall into the three categories

of honoring, letting go, and self-transformation. The key therapeutic properties

mentioned are categorized into the structure, sacred symbolism, sociality, and uniqueness

(Sas and Coman 2016). Each property serves particular ritual functions, including a space

to channel feelings, elucidating an emotional shift, establishing a sense of control,

opportunities for making sense, increasing self-esteem, strengthening a sense of life

direction, and creating a stronger body-mind connection (Sas and Coman 2016). The

structure of grief rituals consists of planned sequences of actions in a time-limited

context, and sacred symbolism regards the symbolic objects and actions used. Sacredness

also relates to the altered state of consciousness brought about through the ritual, which

must be unique to the mourner in order to maintain sacredness rather than become

mundane. The therapeutic property of socialities regards the inclusion of others (Doka

2012; Romanoff 1998), although it can be enacted in solitude.

Similarly, other scholars argue that the most critical aspects of death-related

rituals are personal meaningfulness, a sense of sacredness, and using symbolic objects

(Castle and Phillips 2003), while others emphasize forgiveness, reconciliation, giving

thanks, and acknowledging the legacy of the deceased (Wojtkowiak, Lind, and Smid

23
2021). Whichever way they are categorized, scholars agree that a key function of grief

rituals is to foster adaptation to loss by providing a structure to process and express

internal and external facets of the mourning experience (Wojtkowiak, Lind, and Smid

2021). In this way, rituals address essential psychological, social, and cultural dimensions

of grief.

According to the literature, grief forces people to process complicated

relationships with lost loved ones. As relationships take on many forms, so too do the

rituals that enact and reinforce them. The literature states that while honoring rituals

acknowledge the positive emotional relationship with the deceased, using performance to

honor and celebrate that bond, rituals of letting go aid in releasing negative feelings

associated with the experience of loss (Sas and Coman 2016). Rituals of self-

transformation mark a life transition spurred by the loss and involve a self-evaluation,

often combining complex feelings of both current grief to be processed and hopeful

dreams for the future.

A leading figure in theorizing the function of therapeutic grief rituals is Romanoff

(1998), who, rather than separating different types of rituals, argues that all grief work is

about connection, transition, and transformation. The scholar insists that the effectiveness

of grief rituals relies on highlighting the personal experience of the mourner and must be

shifted from the single funerary event common to Western society to include all phases of

the bereavement process. Romanoff (1998) breaks down the dimensions of grief rituals

into intrapsychic – relating to the transformation of self; psychosocial – entailing the

transition of the mourner’s social status; and intrapsychic – the communal or symbolic

continued connection with the deceased. Personal rituals are critical to filling the societal

24
gap in the contemporary US, where funeral ceremonies are often rigid, one-time events

that fail to be meaningful and therefore do not result in true healing (Myerhoff 1990;

Romanoff 1998). Trends show contemporary life continuing to move away from

traditional ritual expression and toward dynamic, idiosyncratic, and individualized ones

(Grimes 2000; Sas and Coman 2016; Wojtkowiak, Lind, and Smid 2021), adding

significance to this research.

All rituals rely on symbolic objects and actions that facilitate the grieving process.

Scholars of grief acknowledge the importance of symbolic ritual objects and actions in

order for healing and transformation to occur in the bereaved. In bereavement studies, the

strength and effectiveness of grief rituals lie both in symbolic expression and interaction.

In the context of loss, rituals provide a means to create an alternate reality that individuals

experience as real or authentic (Wojtkowiak, Lind, and Smid 2021). If the ritual

enactment is experienced as real, then the transformation it elucidates is in turn, real or

authentic (Sas and Coman 2016). In some instances, researchers have noted participants

feeling as though they have become one with or unified with the ritual (Rappaport 1999;

Wojtkowiak, Lind, and Smid 2021), resulting in more profound healing.

It is common and considered clinically normative for mourners to sense the

presence of the deceased (Romanoff 1998), expressing they feel “the deceased is

somehow still in the current area of time and space” (Worden 2018, 28). Accordingly, a

critical element of grief rituals revolves around continuing the bond with the deceased by

actively communicating with them. Communication can contain a spiritual or

metaphysical component, as mourners find ways to send messages beyond the world of

the living. This communication might involve tapping into unseen forces or asking spirit

25
guides, ancestors, or God figures for help on the path to healing (Daniel 2021). It can also

be as grounded as writing personal emotional letters to the deceased during the ritual,

thereby creating a symbolic object. The object is often respectfully touched or ritually

destroyed (Sas and Coman 2016), as a form of symbolical action.

Through symbolically attaching meaning and emotional connection to objects,

they come to represent the lost loved one or the essence of the relationship (Sas and

Coman 2016). Through symbolic action, the lost one is transformed into an inner

representation of the deceased (Romanoff 1998). Ritual objects become symbolic

representations of the memories, emotions, and experiences related to the dead and often

include possessions of the deceased, personal sacred things to the mourner, and objects

from nature (Daniel 2021). Essentially, in giving intangible sacred memories and feelings

physical form, grief can be processed, and healing can occur.

Although influenced or designed in part by therapists, grief rituals are private and

highly personal, often taking place in homes or the wilderness, a setting that is mirrored

in the rituals of contemporary witches. Ritual objects are typically natural elements, acted

upon through the use of water, fire, air, and earth by burning, burying in the ground, or

purifying in water (Daniel 2021). Common examples include placing objects in water,

burning letters, releasing balloons, and lighting candles. Sas and Coman (2016) found

that using ancient elements and being in communion with them allowed participants to

have deeper, more meaningful experiences and foster transformation.

By provoking engagement with the senses and using the human body as a

symbolic object and ritual action, rituals elucidate participants entering into altered states

of consciousness and conveying feelings of presence (Sas and Coman 2016). Embodied

26
states are achieved in the ritual context additionally through body techniques like

breathing, meditation, sitting, walking, dancing, and other forms of movement that

contribute to an altered state of consciousness while allowing for a release of emotional

pain (Daniel 2021; Wojtkowiak, Lind, and Smid 2021). These ritual states enable the

mourner to work through the clinically normative physical sensations of grief that take on

many forms, such as hollowness in the stomach, tightness in the throat or chest,

breathlessness, weakness in the muscles, and a sense of depersonalization, where

mourners express feeling that they are no longer real, and neither is the world around

them (Worden 2018). Additionally, mourners work through alienation of the mind-body

connection during ritual enactment.

In terms of transformation, the spiritual component to mourning is sometimes at

odds with the clinical, medical model of grief counseling that labels the mourner as a

patient with a diagnosis to be treated by a professional. This tension is notable in

descriptions of grief, with some definitions pointing to the feelings and emotional pain

associated with loss (Wojtkowiak, Lind, and Smid 2021), while others emphasize

spiritual change occurring as a direct result of loss as an integral aspect of the grief

experience (Moules 1998) or the need to spiritually readjust to life without the deceased

(Worden 2018).

The spiritual, transformative power of ritual enactment is partly where

contemporary witchcraft and bereavement studies collide. Scholars of bereavement

describe grief in terms that mirror witchcraft rituals as “an initiation into the mystery of

life” (Castle and Phillips 2003, 41) with the potential for personal change and growth.

While mourning involves suffering, it is often viewed as offering an opportunity to

27
transform one’s relationship with death through connection, honor, and celebration.

Rituals can move and shift energies, changing the conditions of energy and infusing

objects or parts of one’s life with new meaning (Daniel 2021). Similarly, more generally,

witchcraft rituals are a space to contemplate the cyclic journey from birth to death and

beyond and aim for healing and growth, often using natural objects to symbolize parts of

the journey. Additionally, seasonal rituals are performed yearly by witches, particularly

Samhain, specifically to honor the dead, commune with them, and celebrate the

connection between life and death.

Corresponding to scholarly studies on witchcraft, the use of ancient stories and

myths is common to therapeutic grief rituals, used to give voice to the painful

experiences of the mourner. Studies show that re-enacting ancient words can deepen

participants’ experiences and help them to identify with the divine (Daniel 2021). Grief

counselors use such stories as archetypes allowing people to identify with parts of the

human journey beyond their own lives without dealing directly with their own pain.

Myths and “ancient fairy stories” help the bereaved to project and process complex

emotions (Sas and Coman 2016), similar to the enactments found in Neo-pagan festivals.

In bereavement studies, references are made to the symbolic power of the spiral; as

participants walk through the spiral, they enact the journey of transformation – a standard

and crucial element to witchcraft rituals.

Additionally, corresponding to common rituals in witchcraft, scholars of grief in

psychotherapy acknowledge the frequent use of herbs framing grief rituals intended to

cleanse and purify the ritual space. In both grief counseling and witchcraft rituals, natural

objects such as crystals, stones, and feathers often adorn the space, having been imbued

28
with energy and made sacred. It is noted that sometimes, unprompted, people engaged in

grief counseling rituals use figurines to cross symbolic thresholds (Sas and Coman 2016),

allowing the objects to represent parts of their inner self, what they have lost, and the

experience of grief. This symbolic process can be found in the literature on Neo-

paganism and witchcraft, yet the connection has not yet been studied, adding significance

to my research.

Renewal, growth, and self-transformation are central to grief counseling rituals

and witchcraft rituals, inviting reflection on the journey of the human experience with all

its pains and joys. In many ways, grief rituals set out to accomplish what many witchcraft

rituals do – allow participants to explore life and its evitable counterpart, death, and

through ritual, become more comfortable and confident in facing grief, connecting with

oneself, one’s existence, and with others.

Bereavement counseling is critiqued for adhering to a narrow and clinical

approach to grief. The current model lacks the multi-cultural and spiritual complexity

experienced by the bereaved, and there is little evidence that grief counseling effectively

treats clinically normative responses to grief (Daniel 2021; Jordan and Neimeyer 2003).

Studies show that the majority of people experiencing grief will not seek counseling, and

those who do come away unsatisfied with the results (Castle and Phillips 2003; Parkes,

Relf, and Couldrick 1996). An adverse outcome across Western societies adhering to the

psychological approach to grief is a pathologizing of the bereavement experience.

Mourners may experience their own responses to grief as strange or problematic if they

do not align with leading theories in the literature on bereavement. Expressions of grief

are culturally sanctioned yet may appear universal, adding pressure to mourners. Cultural

29
sanctions on grief are explored in the anthropological literature, and addressing the larger

social context of bereavement fills in the gap in the psychological perspective lacking

social dimensions of grief.

Anthropology of Death

The field of anthropology at large has a long history of studying how various

cultures respond to death and what those responses can teach us about human

conceptions of life. Earlier research in the anthropology of death tended to focus on

descriptions of culturally diverse and specific mourning traditions, rituals, and processes

regarding the management of the dead. Classic anthropological texts prioritized analyzing

the social functions of rituals and the reorienting of the social relationships in which they

were situated (Durkheim 1915; Hertz 1960). The literature shows that cross-culturally,

death is never seen as a complete end; it fundamentally involves rebirth (Hertz 1960).

Often, death is seen as an exchange involving sacrifice on the part of the living, who are

charged with caring for the dead and must maintain a relationship with the dead (Sanders

and Wiley & Sons 1999), in part through gift-giving (Mauss 1925). These foundational

anthropological positions on the nature of death have not been studied in the context of

contemporary Western witchcraft, a subcultural spiritual community with strong ritual

and symbolic ties to life and death.

Analyzing rituals as rites of passage is central to an anthropological perspective

on death and mourning, originating with Arnold Van Gennep in 1909. Cross-culturally,

rites of passage are ritual ceremonies that mark a change in status or social position

throughout the stages of life’s journey, including childbirth, puberty, marriage, and death,

among others. Rites of passage consist of separation from one’s former social status, a

30
liminal phase that prepares the individual for the new status, and incorporation into the

new phase that involves reintegration back into the social world. Turner (1969) added to

the significance of the liminal phase, describing it as a time during which the individual is

detached from their social group, being neither part of their previous status nor the new

one to come but an in-between and ambiguous passenger.

Hertz (1960) instilled in the field of anthropology the concept that death is a

social event forged through ceremonial processes meant to initiate or rebirth the deceased

into the afterlife (Kaufman and Morgan 2005). In this way, death is universally

understood as a change of form rather than a moment of destruction. Ontologies of the

dead or the transition and identification of the deceased as specific types of beings

(Silverman, Baroiller, and Hemer 2021), are critical to anthropological literature,

determining the orientation of the mourner and prescribing responsibilities in culturally

sanctioned ways of maintaining their relationship with the dead. Transformations of the

living being to another form are culturally driven. The connections between the living

and the dead and the ritual practices that enable and sustain them remain central to the

anthropology of death (Kaufman and Morgan 2005).

Cross-culturally, it is widely believed that the only way to contact or influence the

dead is through ritual (Grimes 2000). Yet, Western and contemporary views of ritual tend

to primarily emphasize their psychological benefits. Rather than psychological

constructions of grief that cast some responses to mourning as normal and others as

pathological, research in anthropology highlights individuals’ ability to adapt and

reconstitute rituals in unique and original ways, allowing for critical emotional expression

(Silverman, Baroiller, and Hemer 2021). Although, this thinking has been adopted in

31
bereavement studies more recently. Dictated by sociocultural norms, grief rituals help

survivors process the individual and collective dimensions of mourning. Anthropological

research additionally demonstrates that one’s worldview shapes grief and, in this way,

shows how grief itself is a learned behavior. With this background, my analysis of the

mourning process through the spiritual worldview of contemporary witchcraft in New

England adds to a lack of studies on grief in the anthropology of death and contemporary

Western witchcraft, a community whose most common ritual practices strengthen the

relationship between the living and the dead.

In the anthropology of death, grief rituals are where the maintenance of the

relationship between the living and the dead occurs. Memory and forgetting play a

significant role in the experience of mourning and the survivor’s relationship with the

deceased (Kaufman and Morgan 2005; Silverman, Baroiller, and Hemer 2021). In

Western societies, lost loved ones are often memorialized in the public, secular, and

single event of the funeral service. In private, memories are solidified by treasuring the

deceased’s possessions, keeping photographs, and reminiscing. Recent trends in the

anthropology of death in the US focus critically on an individual and consumerist

element in death rites and rituals, exemplified by uses of the ashes of the dead, which are

more commonly melded into jewelry, injected into tattoos, scattered in geographic

locations, or buried under public spaces like sports stadiums (Engelke 2019). The

relationship between remembering and forgetting is culturally constructed, as social

norms and discourses dictate what is worth remembering, encouraged to be forgotten

(Silverman, Baroiller, and Hemer 2021), and the manner in which memories are

displayed. In this way, memorial aspects of grief are cultural productions.

32
 The relationships forged and continued between the living and the dead are

informed by the social contexts in which they are embedded (Silverman, Baroiller, and

Hemer 2021). In a review of the anthropological literature on mourning rituals, Souza

(2017) shows that such rituals tend to focus more on reintegration into the social

environment rather than separation from the deceased. Instead of highlighting continuing

bonds or other psychological aspects of grief, Souza (2017) argues that critically, the

bereaved need to readjust to and re-engage with a world that has been altered by the loss

of the deceased, where the relationships that make up the social environment have

changed. While much of the research in anthropology highlights societies that

acknowledge the social rupture that death causes (Souza 2017), a dearth of social norms

and rituals around grieving in contemporary North American society ignores the social

and societal aspects of mourning. Responsibility for repairing the altered social landscape

marked by loss, and the reintegration of the bereaved back into society, are left to the

individuals closest to the deceased. This research is particularly salient as contemporary

witches resist American norms around minimizing death.

With a general decrease in traditional religious rituals that involved entire

communities, public expressions of grief are hampered by Western cultural conceptions

of appropriate mourning. Consequently, rituals for maintaining an ongoing relationship

with the deceased violate these norms (Romanoff 1998) and are more likely to be done

privately. Wouters (2002) argues that with the loss of traditional, society-wide mourning

ceremonies, expressions of grief were soon publically interpreted as signs of weakness

that needed to be controlled. Grieving put one in danger of damaging their reputation or

loss of social status, and consequently, the release of the emotions surrounding loss had

33
to be experienced in more private and personal ways. Death became further

individualized and privatized through American society's ultimate valuing of

individualism (Grimes 2000). Yet American attitudes toward death generally show fear

and discomfort in contemplating or confronting death and tend to be shaped by faith in

professional knowledge regarding death rather than personal knowledge (Grimes 2000).

Studies show that Americans are likely to feel pressure to overcome or work through

grief, and get on with their lives (Hecht 2020), toeing a difficult line between showing

one is honoring the dead while not showing signs of repressing the loss, rather than

acknowledging death as someone “making a profound and mysterious transition”

(Grimes 2000, 243). Scholarly research on death rites and rituals in contemporary North

America is lacking, and as death rites and funerals become more about the suppression of

grief rather than facilitating its expression, this research contributes to spaces of personal,

creative grieving practices in the US.

The current American death system emphasizes memorialization through funeral

services, often leaving the bereaved to process death alone afterward. Professional

funerary businesses tend to focus more on practical advice and consumer information

than ritual and personal experience (Grimes 2000). A recent review of the

anthropological literature on death rites in the contemporary US by Engelke (2019)

reflects a resistance to this culture around death and a movement toward

noninstitutionalized ceremonies and coping strategies related to death, including the

domestication of death rituals (Olson 2018) and the rise of home funerals as a rejection of

the funeral industry (Hagerty 2014). Fitting in with these trends, the results of my

34
research will contribute to further applications of anthropology to the ways that human

beings process death.

Ethnography of Witches

This work aims to analyze the personalized grieving rituals of contemporary

witches as part of the mourning process. The analysis relies on extensive semi-structured

interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, including a field site in the New England region

of the United States, where the craft has a long history and gravitational pull among

witches. The ritual observed was performed by two witches, Zelda and Hazel, who

designed it to invoke the spirit of Hazel’s departed father. Additionally, this study will

analyze popular literature on witchcraft and ritual guidebooks to better understand how

ritual knowledge is gathered and reconstituted for individual purposes and how these

influences shape the practice of contemporary witchcraft and its attendant worldview.

My research utilizes a qualitative, phenomenological research approach. The goal

of applying this approach is to gain an understanding of the participants’ subjective lived

experiences with processing grief through ritual through the lens of contemporary

witchcraft. In order to engage more fully with the subjective lifeworlds of participants,

the data gathered will primarily be narrative and ethnographic. For this undertaking, data

will be collected through interviews, observations, photographs, and popular literature

and analyzed thematically.

Questions regarding the field site were limited to an unstructured interview

following the completion of the grief ritual to ensure the researcher did not interfere with

the scene under observation. One of the two participants agreed to partake in an

additional one-hour interview in the weeks following the ritual to discuss its impact on

35
the witches involved. The researcher did not make observations during initial mourning

periods or at funeral services but at a personal ritual site chosen by the participants. With

the participants' permission, the researcher collected data in the form of photographs from

the field site to add evidential depth to subsequent analyses. As phenomenological

methodology involves a range of three – ten participants before data saturation occurs

(Creswell and Creswell 2017), this research included seven participants involved in

multiple interviews and site observations.

The goal of this study is to gain insight into the relationship between ritual and the

processing of grief among contemporary witches, a subgroup that has a usual focus on

death and ritual compared to mainstream American society. Data drawn from the seven

participants are expected to demonstrate a continuation of the Western magic-oriented

worldview with its adhering ritual practices while expressing the uniqueness of

contemporary reworkings of ritual, confirming a trend toward idiosyncratic,

individualized, and malleable ritual practices that contribute to healing the suffering of

the bereaved.

The process of collecting ethnographic and secondary sources allows for

engagement with the symbolic world of contemporary witches to explore grief. The

critical questions behind this research are as follows: How does the magic worldview of

contemporary witchcraft inform the way witches create grieving rituals? And how do

these rituals enable contemporary witches to process and heal from the critical experience

of loss? Situated amid previous studies, my research will contribute to a deeper

understanding of the relationship between grief and ritualization, informed by magic

orientations within Western modernity and modern witchcraft.

36
 Concluding Remarks

In congruence with literature on rituals in Western witchcraft, bereavement

studies in psychotherapy, and the anthropology of death, my research is positioned to

address a societal need in the contemporary US regarding death rites and mourning and to

gain insight into the relationship between ritual and grief. As the power of authority on

codes of conduct for mourning shifts into the hands of psychotherapists rather than

religious institutions, grief consolers increasingly look to personal rituals as a significant

resource for processing the pain of grief.

Scholars of the anthropology of Western witchcraft typically look at the ways

witches use creative and performative rituals and mythical enactments to heal, grow,

connect, and transform but ignore grief in particular. The literature on Western

bereavement acknowledges the impact of grief on individuals’ ability to function,

debating various types of rituals and their effect on the mourning process. Yet,

psychotherapeutic studies inadvertently pathologize grief while warning against doing so

and tend to ignore the spiritual and cultural complexities of sanctioned ways to grieve.

The social dynamics of the loss of someone significant are addressed in the

anthropology of death. The trends in this literature show on the complex, living social

relationships the bereaved are embedded in and must adapt to after a death in a

community and the ontology of the dead or the transition of the living into a new form of

being. Maintenance of the survivors’ relationship with the dead plays a critical role in the

anthropology of death, as do culturally sanctioned ways of honoring, remembering, and

forgetting the dead. In this context, ritual is typically seen as a rite of passage that

37
involves transitioning from one social status to another through a transitory and

ambiguous liminal phase. While scholars have addressed the function of ritual in

witchcraft and in grief counseling, studies on how Western witches process grief are

absent from the literature.

Concurrently, psychological studies on bereavement show an increase in the

effectiveness of grief rituals in addressing what counselors deem clinically normative

responses to grief. At the same time, anthropology highlights the importance of cultural

constructions, social environment, and the transformation of the living to the afterlife.

Both fields draw attention to the critical role of ritual in maintaining the survivor’s

relationship with the deceased and the malleable nature of personal rituals. Literature on

the anthropology of death lacks studies on contemporary witchcraft, a subcultural

spiritual group based on ritual practices, healing, and transformation. Psychological and

anthropological research on death rites and grief notes an absence of rituals in the

contemporary US that address the social dimensions of loss.

38
 Chapter III.

Communication with Spirit

With Whom do the Witches Speak?

For the witches in this study, communication was essential to the experience of a

successful grief ritual, although the language around with whom the communication took

place varied. All participants described a time when they contacted a deceased loved one

through ritual, an occurrence that mirrors the anthropological literature on ritual as the

primary vehicle through which the living contact and influence the dead cross-

culturally(Grimes 2000). This anthropological assessment of ritual is also in line with

definitions of grief rituals described in bereavement studies. However, for many witches,

communing with ancestors more generally was more foundational to their most common

grieving rituals and daily ritual practices.11

Additionally, some participants included contacting and communicating with

other aspects of the world beyond the mundane, populated with nature spirits, goddesses,

and energies, and the realms in which they lay.12 These conceptions of communication

are embedded with one another so that in some ways, contacting a relative who had

recently passed or an ancient ancestor or a pantheon of goddesses a witch relies on, could

11
For the purposes of this research, the term ancestor can be defined as “a deceased forebear, a member of
one’s lineage, clan, or house who is no longer among the living” (Hill and Hageman 2016, 3), while
acknowledging the term embodies various meanings and forms in different cultural settings.
12
The prevalence of witches using ritual to contact otherworldly beings corresponds with the scholarly
literature on Western witchcraft, exemplified by Pike (2001), who refers to the otherworldly as “an
invisible world of spirits and deities, also populated with loved ones who have passed away”.

39
not be untangled. The following statements exemplify witches communicating with a

specific deceased loved one:

Florence: “I get little heads up from my brother when I’m doing

something particularly stupid, or when I’m supposed to be going to
something that's not particularly safe.”

Francesca: “When we’re feeling like ‘Oh my gosh we really miss my

grandmother’ we’ll go to it [the altar], we’ll talk to it, sometimes even like
‘Hey, like, I'm really nervous about this, ‘Can you bring me guidance?’ or
anything like that.”

Polly: “If I can't find something, and I’m looking around my house, and
it's driving me insane, I will be like ‘Pop-pop I can't find this, can you help
me find it? Show me where it is.’”

Below are some examples of witches contacting ancestors, in more general terms:

Natia: “I always like to reach out to them and routinely just leave
offerings… I used to do that also with just like my general ancestors, just
reaching out to them with grieving rituals.”

Hazel: “Sometimes we'll open the space, a healing space, for folks who
have passed, and we'll say names and maybe we'll get a message or
something from them.”

The comments below illustrate witches contacting nature spirits, goddesses, energies,

other beings, and realms:

Anca: “I consulted with the mother Goddess herself.”

Anca: “I tend to usually call on um, I’ll call on other goddesses as well.
And then, like animal teachers, human teachers.”

Zelda: “And I’ll honor the four directions and say, like basically any
scattered energies that I have like put out to other people.”

Natia: “The big thing that I learned is angels are all about giving, which
can be both good and bad, and devils are all about taking, which can both
be good and bad. So, I was just really trying to reach out to a lot of
different entities trying to learn about them… So, it's like calling out to
something so they can lend power to you.”

For the fieldwork portion of this research, I witnessed two witches call on all

three categories of communing with the spirit world. The ritual, designed by Zelda

40
(they/she) and Hazel (they/them), aimed at contacting the spirit of Hazel’s father, the

ancestors in their family line, and protective otherworldly entities. Zelda is a 33-year-old

witch with deep family roots in New England, and Hazel is a 31-year-old witch; together,

they practice magic with a coven in the greater Boston area. Adding nuance, they call in

“Ancestors, guides, Spirit, the divine feminine, the divine masculine, our higher and

shadow selves, the many names we go by, the many names you go by, that of atoms and

that of the Universe…”, in addition to guardian spirits of the four cardinal directions.

Just as the practice of witchcraft and its fundamental rituals vary by the

individual, the way participants conceptualized communication also differed. Participants

had extensive and divergent explanations for where the spirit world is, the form the dead

take on when they are contacted, and how they are experienced. Regarding how

communication with the non-living works, Florence, a 24-year-old witch, explains, “I

think you can get communication with other people or things on the other side, and there

can be echoes of personalities and echoes of people.” Whereas Hazel explores the

concept that the spirit world is not separate from but coexists with the living world in the

same space. Elucidating, they state,

[The spirit world] “It lives right here, all around us. But we just often, like
we don't see it or access it, and that's fine most of the time, I think… There
are just funny, subtle ways that I think that we can interact with that world,
and all we have to do is like dial into our awareness about it, and just,
learn more about it and be curious.”

Natia, 18 years old, further contemplates on the difference between communicating with

the living and the dead, illustrating the power and magic in communicating with the

spirits of lost loved ones through grief rituals:

“So, I think grief rituals, it's honestly just the feeling like, it feels a lot
more intimate, I feel, than with the person when they're alive. I think
there's always that blockage of like, okay, they have a body, and they have

41
 a mind. And no matter how close you are to that person you're not exactly
going to be ever really in their body around their mind. It sounds like a
little weird, but it's not that intimate connection that you get when
connecting with them to a grief ritual. It almost feels like they are purely
them as their selves. There's no hidden thoughts. There's no hidden
emotions behind a body. There's no like worries that you typically have as
a human, it just purely them. And that's why I think every experience is
just so magical.”

This passage shows Natia’s subjective and intimate experience of communing with the

dead. Along with various aspects of who witches communicate with when they contact

spirits or otherworldly beings and how messages are received, there were also multiple

forms in which that contact occurred.

Forms of Communication

In taking a phenomenological approach to this research, the qualitative interview

and observational data showed multiple forms of communication enacted and

experienced by participants. Through ritual, witches reach out to or try to contact the

world beyond the living through many modes, including leaving offerings, honoring,

talking, meditating, and carving candles – often doing so with multiple modes combined.

Attempts at reaching out to spirits or making contact to commune with them happen

almost exclusively at a witch’s altar.

However, this form of communication differs from more direct attempts at

“invoking” or summoning a spirit and was therefore coded separately. Invoking is

accomplished through divination, including tarot, pendulums, mediums, and sigils.

Invoking, as a communication style, is often directly intent on bringing forth a specific

presence in the hopes that they will interact and respond, rather than more passive forms

42
of honoring or giving offerings to a deceased loved one that does not require or assume a

response.

Honoring the dead is a standard means to communicate with and reach out to the

deceased, both across the anthropological literature and within this study.13 Additionally,

as argued by bereavement scholar Romanoff (1998), establishing and maintaining a sense

of connection is a central function of rituals related to grief work. The witches in this

study healed from grief through the connections they established and experienced in

rituals for honoring the dead.

The belief that one’s deceased relatives are gathered around the living in their

daily lives as protective beings that offer guidance is a common sentiment and one that

comforted bereaved witches. Accordingly, witches feel it is important to acknowledge the

spirits acting on their behalf and send them gratitude to motivate them to continue their

protection. Participants accomplished this through grief rituals, often leaving offerings of

food, drinks, tokens, jewelry, candles, or songs as a sign of thanks. This central tenant to

the spiritual worldview of witchcraft is highlighted in Starhawk's (1997) Pagan Book of

the Living and Dying, where she states, “The dead remain part of the human community.

We can call on them for guidance, inspiration, and support. They become ancestors who

13
Honoring the dead corresponds with ancestor veneration, a concept that has deep roots in the
anthropological literature, having become entrenched in the discipline through research on the social
organization of African and Asian societies during the 1940s and which continues to be studied by
ethnographers through multiple perspectives within the discipline in the 21st century (Hageman 2016).
Ancestor veneration and the honoring practices of witches in this study are similar in that ancestors are
often given offerings for the protection they provide, and their relationships are periodically celebrated
through ritual but, differ in the sense that traditional theories of ancestor vernation typically involve a
fearful need to placate one’s ancestors to avoid disaster, illness, and tragedy (Hageman 2016), something
not expressed by contemporary Western witches, on which Hutton (1999) notes, “pagan witches do not
regard pain and distress as experiences inflicted by deities, or as aspects of a material world which is itself
inherently flawed, corrupt, and filled with grief” (393).

43
guide and protect their line” (104). Taken from the data, the statements below specifically

concern honoring a deceased loved one and acknowledging guardian spirits:

Anca: “I'm honoring your life, and what you mean to me and what you
meant to me, and for me, that's having a permanent place on my altar.”

Anca: [Grief rituals at the altar] “So that's why it's like, I do kind of try
and keep it just to like her birthday, or the day that she passes to do all of
this honoring because it's really, it's really heavy, and it and it hurts a lot.”

Hazel: “I might pour a special drink, like alcoholic or not, I might pour a
small glass for them, and put it on the altar... just like offering of the
abundance that I have, which I always feel like if I have a good meal, I’m
super grateful and want to pass that on as like a sign of respect and um,
and offering to keep being a guide or a protector, or just honoring an
ancestor.”

Francesca: “I’ll say, like a phrase… it'll kinda like help you to establish,
like break the boundary between the mortal world and the spirit world, and
then I’ll kind of just be like, ‘Hi, like probably doing well. I'm thinking of
you, thank you for protecting me and stuff.”

Francesca: [At the opening and closing of the ritual] “Thank you for like
taking care of me, I now want to open the door to kind of communicate
with you.”

These accounts depict the act of a witch reaching out to the dead to communicate, in

order to give thanks and acknowledgment, to remember and celebrate their life, and in the

hopes of keeping them as protective spiritual figures in the life of the living. Another

common way witches communicate with their dead is simply by speaking to them,

usually at an altar decorated for their lost loved ones.

Polly: “I have an ancestor altar in my room. That's my altar, and it's got all
like corresponding things, you know, that remind me of them. I do try to
keep them alive in my day-to-day life as much as I can. I talk to them a
lot.”

Anca: “But another thing I have done in the past is like set up a ritual, and
like sat and just like talk to her like just talk to the altar and was like,
‘Hey, like this is my life now, this is what I’m doing’, but that that tends to
be really hard for me like I don't really get very far, because I just it just
turns into me being like ‘I miss you. I really miss you. I really miss you.’”

44
 Francesca: “I like to have pictures of her around, just to kind of know, like
she's watching over me. I like to even, wearing her jewelry is kind of
something I’ll do just to feel more connected, I feel like with the way we
do it like... There's a lot of attachment and energy that stems from tangible
items, so I'll wear her jewelry, and I kind of feel like energetically
empowered by that.”

The examples above express acts of communication on the part of the witch that do not

necessarily anticipate a response from the spirit world. These modes of communication

aim to reach out to where the spirits of the deceased can hear them, to deliver messages

and pay homage.

Through reaching out to the deceased, grief rituals serve as a critical means to

stay connected with the departed. Accordingly, for participants, a sense of connection

was essential to healing through grief rituals. Often witches use rituals to connect with

the spirit of the departed, either in the form they are in after death or as they were in

memory. In these instances, the connection can occur through communicating, honoring,

and/or celebrating the deceased’s life. Sometimes witches connect with the spirits of their

ancestors, who have either passed away many years ago or as an abstract concept of one’s

ancestors more generally, rather than rituals aimed at contacting a specific past loved one

who often died more recently. Below, witches recount moments of healing through this

connection:

Anca: “I really leaned on it [witchcraft] a lot like while she was kind of
sick and passing like that was when I feel like I was the most spiritually
strong, like I really called on everything to be there for me, and, like I
have to say like it, gave me the sense of peace that, like I can only call
other worldly.”

Zelda: “So even though everything was super heightened and it felt like
negative because of this thing, we didn't want to happen, which was the
cat passing away, it was a way to connect to life and know that, like
everyone passes on, I one day will to is important to honor this person, this
cat and someday someone's going to honor me, and it's just part of a
cycle.”

45
 Natia: I knew that she couldn't keep living the way that she was. It was
just unsatisfying for her, and she was really in pain um, so communicating
with her made me feel like there was a part of her that I grew up with, that
I was reaching out to again. That was healthy, and you know, just her old
self that I was really familiar with. So that really helped me to know that
that still part was a lot. You know. She didn’t die with that version of her
that was in suffering like that wasn't her final form that she stopped with,
and I think even communicating the biggest… It's just like knowing that
they're there, and that they still love you, and they're still watching after
you.”

In these examples, healing through ritual took the form of connecting with the

deceased’s spirit and with otherworldly beings through honoring and emotional

connection. The ritual I observed during fieldwork was explicitly designed to heal the

wounds between the living and the dead – between Hazel and their father. In aiming to

heal the relational trauma between the father and child, the witches also invited in the

father’s ancestors, hoping to heal the generational trauma that negatively impacted the

father in his waking life. Hazel states:

“I invoke you and call you as we strive to heal this line of ancestry. To
clear away the cobwebs to help light shine through. Help us to better
understand the trauma we have been passed on in our family line. Our
relationships with one another are fraught with grief for reasons bigger
than ourselves.”

The ritual is visibly difficult for Hazel, who is there not only to face the complex grief

they have for their father, but also the pain of their ancestors, and try and mend it. During

the ritual, Hazel speaks to their father, stating:

“There are times I thought we would never speak again. But I do not want
a bitter complacency to sit in my heart like a small, yet heavy, stone. So, I
am giving us both this final chance. I wish and I deserve to feel more ease,
and honestly, I’m sure you feel the same.”

This passage speaks to the burden of grief as it is felt through Hazel’s lived experience.

They later add, “Although it was still a hard time for me to go through these emotions

46
with you, I want to make space to forgive this part of our relationship”, revealing the

power of communing with the dead and processing grief through ritual. In the weeks

following the ritual, Zelda had time to process the event more thoroughly and, referring

to Hazel’s father, adds,

“Hazel says he's not a very trustworthy person, but maybe where he is on
the other side he's learned to trust now. That just like gave me chill saying
that, but he's like learned that we were there, in trust with each other, to try
and connect with him. Like, you didn't need to be there with me, but you
wanted to do that because you care about me.”

The two witches hoped to have an impact on the dead through their grief ritual. They

sought to heal the grief of the living and the dead. The passage above exemplifies Zelda’s

belief that, in this way, the ritual worked and positively affected the spirit world.

To Invoke the Dead

Invoking a spirit is classified as a more direct means of summoning or bringing

forth a specific being with whom one will contact, commune, interact, or influence.14 It

typically requires some form of divination, including tarot, pendulums, mediums, and

sigils. Below are moments that either directly referenced or illuded to invoking through

divination.

Natia: “Any kind of thing that can invoke them kind of has their energy
still embedded in them.”

Natia: “And I was just confident, like you know, she's still here. She's still
there. I can feel her…”

Francesca: “There's an altar in my house for my grandmother. It has like

pictures of her, candles, some of her jewelry, and we also have a family

14
Invoke: to call forth by incantation: Conjure; Conjure: to summon by or as if by invocation or
incantation; to summon a devil or spirit by or as if by invocation or incantation (“Invoke, Definition of.”
2023).

47
 medium who my mom and her sisters always talk to like when we feel like
we want to communicate with my grandmother after she passed.”

Anca: “I was calling on all my beings to watch over her and guide her in
her transition.”

In the passage below, Natia describes a ritual to invoke her father’s godmother,

who passed roughly two years prior to the ritual, who lived with Natia and her family and

is very dear to her. To begin, she meditates. She then casts a circle,15 and facing her altar,

she turns, moving clockwise around the circle to invoke the four cardinal directions. The

structure she employs follows typical Wiccan rituals; however, it can be done

idiosyncratically. For example, alongside casting a circle, Natia prefers to call the corners

by stating “I call in the North Tower and I invoke the element of Earth”,16 followed by

adding something related to the element of earth, that feels right to her at the moment.

She repeated the process for south, east, and west with the separate, corresponding

elements of earth, fire, air, and water. Since in this ritual, Natia intends to invoke and

speak with her father’s godmother, she leaves offerings of food and water on the altar,

along with other ritual items like lit candles, pictures of the godmother, and a ritual

dagger used to draw the circle.

Engaged in a meditative state and having opened the ritual by casting the circle,

Natia invokes the spirit of her father’s godmother and attempts to communicate with her

through scrying with a pendulum.17

15
Many Neo-pagan, Wiccan, and contemporary witchcraft rituals begin with “casting a circle” (Adler
1979; Bado-Fralick 2005; Luhrmann 1989), which typically means forming a circle on the ground either
with rocks, candles, salt, or other objects, loosely or tightly together, and calling in the energies of the four
cardinal directions to assist or protect. The style is subjective to the witch performing the ritual.
16
“Calling the corners” is a common phrase in Neo-pagan, Wiccan, and contemporary witchcraft that
refers to invoking the energy or spirits of the cardinal directions to aid in a ritual.
17
Scrying in the traditional sense with a mirror, glass, or clear water: “Scrying is a form of clairvoyance or
cryptesthesia, and as it would usually also involve the interpretation of the meaning of visions, it can be

48
 “It was just kind of like, okay. This is for you. Thank you for all you've
done. Um, just everything else. And then I like to communicate with my
pendulum… it's kind of like hanging downwards, and the way that I use
the pendulum is, I use my palm, and then I kind of swing it over it, and I
tell it like, ‘Okay. First show me what's a yes, first show me what to no.
First, show me what is unsure.’ This is a way of testing whether something
is actually there, sometimes there will be moments where it just starts
swinging like crazy, and moments where there's not swinging at all. So
that is also for like a signifier, of that before I also get into this pendulum,
I make sure to specified like I'm, only inviting good things for my highest
good just again.”

Here, she explains the importance of confirming with whom she is speaking through the

pendulum, giving an example of another instance in which scrying with a pendulum

worked for her.

“I’ll ask, ‘Can you see me right now?’ and just making sure it's the person
that I think I’m talking to. I think that's the first thing I do, because
sometimes it'll just be someone so random. I actually contacted an
ancestor. Um, because my dad had given me, like in Georgia, it's like a
type of sword, and he had gotten it when he was sixteen. So, they gave it
to me when I was sixteen, and I actually contacted the man who had it like
generations ago.”

She continues, speaking to divination through pendulums more generally:

“I begin with probably like, ‘Are you a spirit?’, first trying to figure out
what kind of entity they are, and then they like, say, yes or no like, ‘Are
you an angel? Are you a devil like? What am I talking to?’, and then
asking like, I think one thing is like, ‘Oh, do you stay in this room?’ Like,
‘Are you someone who's here, who's been summoned here?’ That's
important to, though that gives me kind of clues, and then asking if they've
been part of my family. I've already contacted like in three, or maybe
more, just very random things, my family.”

considered to be a form of divination… The idea of a mirror or shining surface revealing

an occult dimension- an alternative world which cannot be seen via sense perception alone but which
requires an intuitive ‘second sight’ to reveal it- leads us to question what is being revealed, how it is
revealed, and why humans have the capacity to see beyond the veil of consensual reality. The silvery, shiny
and translucent surfaces of crystals, mirrors or water remind us of the moon, poetically associated with the
role of mediator between the elemental life on earth and the immaterial life of the spirit. In a receptive state,
it seems possible for the scryer to gain access to this other realm, which reveals itself in shapes, images and
symbols to be deciphered by the conscious mind” (Voss 2016, 600). Scrying with a pendulum, however,
differs structurally in that the medium of divination is through a crystal attached to the end of a chain, held
in one hand, and used to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions. The pendulum swings in a circle either to the left
or right, one meaning ‘yes’ and the other, ‘no’.

49
Moving back to the grief ritual, she explains how after successfully communicating with

the spirit of her father’s godmother through the pendulum, her next step is further

divination through tarot cards, which she uses to analyze and confirm her findings from

the first round of communication through scrying.

“If anything, I ask for them is any kind of advice. If they can see anything.
Um, and also just a time to connect with them so like, yes, if they know,
then I’ll get my tarot cards. I’ll say, ‘Would it be fine if we elaborated like
on who you are, what this is?’, and getting the tarot cards really kind of
confirms it for me. So, I just kind of shuffle or ask about a specific part of
my life and the cards the way that I, I just let the cards follow naturally. So
that's how that happens. And then I just read it. From that I get more
conference confirmation from the pendulum like, ‘Is this, what you mean
by this?’, like, ‘Is this the aspect of my life you’re trying to help me with?’
And they'll say yes or no.”

The ritual came to a close through the act of leaving the offerings of food and water and

making a point to acknowledge them as such, to show gratitude and give thanks. Then

Natia closed the circle, and the ritual was complete.

A powerful example of communication through invoking comes from the

fieldwork portion of this research, where Hazel designed their own sigil meant to bring

forth their father and serve as a tool for communication. The personal, hand-drawn sigil

combined protective runes with Hazel and their father’s initials intertwined. In shape, it

resembled a kind of arch or doorway (Appendix 4). The witches mention the sigil in both

the opening and closing of the ritual, with Hazel stating,

“Within this container of sacred space, I will be charging and activating a

sigil I have crafted for the two of us to boost our connection. I will use this
sigil as a touchpoint for the channel that is being opened for us today.”

“Thank you for being here, thank you for hearing me and establishing this
connection on my terms. I will be in touch again via our sigil.”

They are clear with their intention to purposefully use the sigil as a source of power and a

tool for communicating. Together, the two witches invoked multiple spirits and

50
otherworldly beings into the ritual space, by naming them, speaking to them, and offering

song. Seeking to communicate with their father, Hazel states:

“With this ritual, we call upon [father’s name]. Now that you are not in
this realm you know there is more to existence than the life you lived. It is
my goal to connect with you today, set some ground rules for building our
relationship going forward, and to listen for messages from you.”

With Zelda’s support, they invite in Hazel’s ancestors and guides, stating: “At this time, I

invite benign and supportive presences to join us. I invoke you and call you as we strive

to heal this line of ancestry.” Then, switching between spoken word and song, both

witches invite in the protective guardians of the cardinal directions. They bestow on each

direction a personified set of attributes:

“Guardians of The East: place of Air, the rising sun, winged creatures, the
change of the winds, the ashes blown by a gust, the whispers of our past.
We invoke you and call you. Please join our circle.”

“Guardians of The South: place of Fire, the noonday heat, passion, lust,
love, the rebirth of the phoenix and salamander, a funeral pyre, the last
sweat of the year. We invoke you and call you. Please join our circle.”

“Guardians of The West: place of Water, the setting sun, the swimming
ones, the range of human emotion – the calm before the storm and the
range of the sea, the ebb and flow of the River Styx that knows where our
endings go. We invoke you and call you. Please join our circle.”

“Guardians of The North: place of Earth, the dark of twilight, the snowy
mountain, the hibernation, the longest and last sleep, the roots that tether
us to this world and the next. We invoke you and call you. Please join our
circle.”

After calling in one direction at a time, in unison they sing a single line to each guardian

spirit, their visible breath warming the cold air. Exemplified here, to the Eastern

guardian, they sing: “Grandmother I see you standing in the East, you are sacred, you are

living in me. I pray to you, pray to you, you are sacred, you are living in me.”

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 The witches in this study used multiple tools and modes for communicating with

entities of the spirit world, to contact their deceased loved ones, and heal from grief. The

forms in which they received responses from the dead also differed.

How Spirit Responds

There are multiple types of experiences that witches perceive as attempts by the

deceased to contact them or are seen as confirmation of a response by a spirit beyond the

ritual space. Witches also differed in their perspectives on how communication works

regarding receiving messages. The most commonly perceived responses from a spirit

were signs in the physical world and in dreams or nightmares. On the theme of how one

hears or receives messages from the dead, Zelda discusses the act of speaking with the

deceased as a kind of universal human skill. She explains,

“I've got this gift, and I’m or I, I mean, I feel like everyone has it. It's just
whether or not you're connected to it and feel like you can do it, and then
start to hone it, you know, but because that's interesting to me and because
it feels like it's coming more naturally like, especially as I get older, like
more and more just keeps happening. And I’m like, ‘Oh, I think that I can
hear spirits a little bit now’…”

Contrastingly, Natia had another perspective on how one hears the dead. She remarks,

“I know some may hear like an actual voice, but I don't think that's very
common. It's more common to just immediately, almost like a thought to
come to your brain, which would just not be there. It's just very clear in
your head, something, and specific imagery, and if there's imagery I get, I
would follow up on that.”

Opposed to Zelda, who more often hears the voices of the dead audibly, Natia

communicates with the spirit world through mental images, which she would “follow up”

with by using tarot cards to get more clarity on what the images mean and what deeper

messages they hold. However, in an interview with Zelda following the grief ritual she

52
performed with Hazel, she comments on receiving messages in multiple ways. She

reflects,

“When we actually left the ritual that day, I was on my scooter going back,
and I got this heavy imprint of like his face from that photo of him being
like 20 something years old. And on my right side like feeling a little
pressure, and hearing in my ear like, ‘Thank you.’”

The above passage shows the nuance involved in communicating with the dead through

ritual and the ways they send messages to the living.

To witches, through the sociocultural worldview of Western witchcraft, signs in

the physical world are a more common technique the dead use to contact the living. Signs

are highly personal to the individual who sees them and imbues them with meaning and

significance. Signs in the physical world are typically highly welcomed and considered

positive to experience. On physical signs:

Polly: “I’ve always been more in the physical world than anything, so I
see a lot of physical signs that they're with me. I see a lot of repeating
numbers. I see these birds, butterflies, you know.”

Polly: “I see signs that you know it may just be random instances of the
universe and action that have absolutely no meaning. But I attribute
meaning to them.”

Francesca: [After ritual at altar] “And we often look for signs. After that
happens, this is kind of weird, but like a rubber band, is… usually we'll
see a rubber band like on the floor, because she collected them, or
something or and we'll get that indication that the message was received.”

Francesca: “You could see a sign the next day, or something and like just
to know the message was received, and like she's there, and she's watching
over.”

Florence: “I think sometimes I get little heads up from my brother when

I’m doing something particularly stupid, or when I’m supposed to be
going to something that's not particularly safe. I think a lot of those kinds
of feelings of knowing when something's a bad idea, and knowing, like
knowing I shouldn't walk down the street, I should walk the extra block to
go down this street. I think those do come from like my brother, and from
loved ones who want to keep me safe.”

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 Florence: “I do think the ancestors, my ancestors tend to try to help me.
They point me in the right direction with little signs and things.”

The passages exemplify moments in daily life that catch a witch’s attention and are

interpreted as messages explicitly directed for them from their ancestors or deceased

loved ones acting as protective guardian spirits. Similarly, witches often received direct

messages through dreams.

Dreams were often described as literal visits from the spirit of the deceased.

Experiencing a deceased loved one through dreaming was often considered intentional

and significant, as in the spirit deliberately reaching out to make contact. In this way,

dreams serve as a vehicle meant to deliver important messages to the living.

Conversations had in these dream spaces were sometimes described as feeling more real

than average dreams, adding to feelings of significance. Dreams without conversations

could still be perceived as critical and meaningful visits from the dead.

Dreaming of the deceased is common. Since dreams often feel more

phenomenologically real to the dreamer, they can be impactful experiences held in high

regard. While witches typically regard dreams as positive, the data shows that nightmares

are a negative form of response from the dead, with spirits reaching out to a witch in a

way that feels harmful, frightening, and unwelcome. Again, because experiences that

happen while dreaming are perceived as realistic, the impact can be severe, especially in

the case of persistent nightmares. Concurrently, dreaming of the deceased is considered a

common and normative grief response (Worden 2018), according to the

psychotherapeutic literature on bereavement studies. The following narrative recounts the

relationship between dreaming and communicating with the spirit world in contemporary

Western witchcraft through Francesca’s perspective.

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 Francesca, 20 years old, connects with the healing aspects of witchcraft, seeing it

as “a way to deal with the world and respond to it”. Her experience and worldview as a

witch are closely linked to her family, specifically the women in her family and their

Sicilian roots. She describes her family as loosely Catholic and highly superstitious. The

women center their practices on warding off harmful energies through burning sage,

saying incantations, and using protective charms like the malocchio or evil eye.

Francesca performs her ritual practices in tandem with her female relatives and leans on

them to assist with daily problems that might warrant ritual needs.

Francesca recounts grief rituals performed for her Sicilian grandmother on her

mother’s side of the family. She makes a point to acknowledge this grandmother as the

source of the family’s magic and ritual knowledge, having been passed on through the

generations to her grandmother, who passed it on to her daughters and Francesca. Her

family home has an altar for the grandmother, adorned with candles, crystals, holy water,

and pictures of her. Francesca, her mother, and her aunts go to the altar to speak to their

beloved relative and to celebrate her. Francesca discusses the place of dreaming within

her and her family’s communication with her grandmother:

“A lot of times we use dreams as kind of like a way to communicate, a lot

of times like, especially after, I think about my grandparents a lot. So, this
is why I kind of think it's not just like a psychological thing like ‘Oh, I was
thinking about it, and it happened’ so if I am in that state where I'm
communicating with them a lot of times, when I’m in my sleep, I can have
a conversation with them.”

She elaborates on how dreams of her grandmother or other passed relatives are confirmed

within her family and worldview as a visitation:

“I’ll have a dream about, let's say, my grandmother, then my aunts will be
like ‘Oh, my god me, too!’, so it's like we're all kind of on the same
page… Sometimes it happens like a few days after that kind of [ritual]
communication period, but it definitely comes up, and even… I feel like

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 people who, like my uncle's parents, who passed like I'll even be able to
communicate with them through this and even if I’m not necessarily trying
to connect with them, it's just like very clear conversation. We always like
to discuss that if it comes up in my family.”

In the next quote, she portrays the lived experience of dreams as vehicles of

communication with the dead through her subjective psycho-spiritual worldview:

“And it's usually not like, because I know dreams can be kind of erratic,
sometimes like unexplained, but usually when they come to me in my
dreams, it's very life-like, it's not like, ‘Okay, I'm flying now.’ Like it's, it
feels like a genuine conversation, like we're sitting down somewhere,
whether it be my grandparent's house, or in my kitchen, like you could, it's
feels very real.”

Through dreaming, Francesca had positive and powerful interactions with her

deceased relatives, describing these occurrences as unlike common, non-visitation

dreams. This reality is confirmed for her through shared experiences with her family

members. In the subsequent passage, the experience shifts from dreams to nightmares,

showing what can occur when dreams move from positive visitations to unwelcomed

hauntings and their daunting effects.

Florence is a 24-year-old witch who was brought up Catholic but didn’t connect

with Catholic conceptions of the afterlife and found it “helpful to turn to witchcraft in

grief.” She recounted a painful time in her life when she experienced being haunted by

her mother, who had died years before. She states: “I felt like my mom was kind of

haunting me or something was attached. I kept having nightmares about my mom.” She

then explains the physical and psychological toll the experience had on her:

“I was just so sick, I had terrible nightmares about my mom which I had
never had, and I was so sick, for a week and a half, no fever, just so tired
and worn out and I just felt nauseous all the time. I had gone to the doctor,
I had changed my diet, I had done everything, and it wasn’t helping. So, I
tried the more spiritual approach to see if that would kick whatever
lingering part of my mother had attached itself to me.”

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 Florence believes that turning to witchcraft and engaging in witchcraft rituals

helped her break the haunting or harmful spiritual attachment. She clarifies that she does

continue to experience some negative interactions with the spirits of her parents

occasionally, but less intensely, and uses multiple ritual courses of action to eliminate the

problem. Nightmares are one category of communication with spirits or other entities

perceived as frightening or threatening to witches in a way that powerfully impacted their

lives and resulted in ritual action.

Threats from the Spirit World

A fearful or threatening element arising from interactions between the spirit world

and the living is a common thread that weaves together the lived experience of grief

among the contemporary Western witches in this study. At the outset of the grief ritual I

observed, Hazel spoke to their father, calling out to him, explicitly commenting on the

fear his unwelcomed visits instilled in Hazel:

“For our relationship to survive, it must be built on a foundation of

concordance. Since you passed, our relationship has taken on a new kind
of instability. It has been defined by sporadic, intrusive, and sometimes
unwelcome jabs of communication. It has been overwhelming and, up
until this point, has felt like too much to digest.”

Further, witches have methods to keep threatening possibilities at bay more

generally. A familiar sentiment to Western witches for opening a ritual is using explicit

language to call in the assistance of beings that have good intentions toward the

practitioner, which is often an iteration of bringing in only that which is for one’s

“highest good”. Anca gives an example by stating, “You are calling these entities to hold

for you, safety, protection, and here for the purpose of my higher good”. This comment

shows a dynamic between the practitioner and all the beings whom they may have access

57
to contact and the need for explicit, protective measures. During the ritual performed by

Hazel and Zelda, Hazel firmly states, “At this time, I invite benign and supportive

presences to join us.” Participants made further comments reflecting an air of fear in

contacting and inviting powers and beings into their space. Florence insists:

“You don't know who you are going to get when you say ancestors, loved
ones, relatives. There's no guarantee which you're getting on the other
side, and I really don't want to take those chances.”

Natia further elaborates on the prospect of inviting in a negative experience:

“So, casting a circle is very important, especially when you do something

as close to the spirit realm because you have to be careful of what you're
inviting in. We have a lot of power, as like humans and spiritual beings, to
tell things not to come into our life. But if you do invite something, and
you're not really clear with your intention, you can be bringing anything
in.”

This comment again illustrates the power a witch has simply in the intention they bring to

their ritual, something mentioned by several participants. Natia elaborates on personal

protective measures she takes to keep her distance from potentially unwanted spirits. She

states:

“Especially now around Samhain, and it's the closest like to the spirit
world. I'm very, very careful, like I go to school like all veiled up. It is
kind of the witch's new year, Samhain, and that's when the veil between
the spirit world and like the human world, they say it's the closest.
Because of that, I've just recently realized that whenever there are
moments like that I just get, I’m very sensitive to energy now. So, I get
headaches quite often. So, a very simple thing I do is veiling, which is the
term for like putting anything on your head. So, whether it's like a
headscarf or you know, even a hat, anything that kind of protects my
head.”

The statement above is indicative of the worldview of Western witches, revealing

how the spirit world and the mundane, the ritual experience and the everyday, blend

together. Witches interact with the spirit world through ritual, and in doing so, they live

58
in a reality bound with the beings that make up that other realm and consequently

navigate them in their daily lives.

Concluding Thoughts

Anthropologically, communication with the spirit of a lost loved one through

ritual is a common and widespread cross-cultural phenomenon. The grief rituals

discussed by participants in this study fundamentally function to allow a mourning witch

to communicate with their lost loved ones, ancestors, and accompanying beings from the

spirit world. The opportunity to communicate through ritual allowed witches to heal from

grief. Concurrently, psychotherapeutic bereavement studies note the significance of

healing through ritual by establishing and maintaining this sense of connection.

Participants had varying explanations for where the spirit world resides –

sometimes separate from the physical world, sometimes within it or beyond a veil – and

differing concepts regarding the forms the dead take on when they are contacted, how

they are experienced when contact occurs, and how one receives messages from the dead,

as in audio perceptions or mental images.

Communication with the dead took on two key forms, with witches using ritual as

an attempt to contact the world beyond the living and through ritually invoking or

summoning a spirit. Reaching out to the dead often occurred at a witch’s altar through

multiple modes, usually performed in tandem, including leaving offerings, wearing the

deceased’s belongings, meditating, and speaking. Invoking is accomplished through

forms of divination, including tarot, pendulums, mediums, and sigils.

Honoring the dead was highlighted as a standard and significant mode of reaching

out to contact and commune with deceased loved ones. Additionally, witches honored the

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dead to pay homage to ancestors as guardians and protective spirits. Forms of honoring

the dead often overlapped with other ritual forms of reaching out to the spirit world. For

the witches in this study, communication and honoring the deceased fostered a sense of

healing from grief through ritual.

Communication also involved witches getting a response from the dead. The

witches in this study reported two key means of confirmation of receiving a response

from the spirit world, through signs in the physical world and in dreams or nightmares.

Signs were exclusively experienced as positive personal occurrences that comforted the

mourning witch. Dreams were typically perceived as literal and intentional visits from

deceased loved ones aiming to deliver important messages to the living. Nightmares were

less common and moved into conceptions of hauntings – uninvited and unwelcomed

visitations from the dead that inspired fear and required ritual action.

Sometimes, communicating with the world beyond the living raised fears and

concerns for witches, who perceived the potential for dangerous interactions with the

dead. Witches combatted these threatening elements through various ritual enactments,

including incantations, intentions, physical garments, and ritual structures of opening and

closing the ritual circle in a particular manner.

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 Chapter IV.

Interaction with Energy

“We’re all an embodiment of energy, of power. Everything we do sends a command,

created from our intent, into the collective web we weave, the single reality which

together we all mold. This is how we create Magick – and make Magick work for us.”

(Diaz 2019, 16)

The complexities around the manifold ways witches conceptualize with whom

they intend to communicate during grief rituals and how such communication works,

overlap with the language of energy. Involvement of and interaction with energy played a

consistent role in witches’ grief rituals. Based on participants’ descriptions, energy is

something that could be felt and experienced by witches as part of their ritual practices,

and it took on many forms.

In some rituals, witches felt they had successfully reached a deceased loved one in

reporting feeling that person’s energy in their space, the sensation serving as

confirmation of contact. While some participants used the term “energy” to refer to

feeling their departed loved one, others used the term “spirit” or “presence”. These terms

were coded as interaction with energy. In each case, the energy, spirit, or presence of the

deceased could be felt and experienced as something in the witches’ physical

surroundings. Energy also took on forms beyond that of the deceased, to include

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otherworldly entities, such as nature spirits and beings in invisible realms. Additionally,

energy referred to the emotional pain of grief, which was often released through ritual.

According to interview data, energy is something that can be utilized by witches,

to different ends, or used against them and thwarted through ritual. Accordingly, witches

have their own energy and can manipulate the energy of others (not necessarily human or

living). In some of these instances, energy was also described as consisting of patterns of

emotions left behind by the dead as remnants of their life and used by the dead to cause

harm to the living, such as in a nightmare or haunting. Additionally, witches often

entered into sacred, meditative states at the outset of grief rituals to create energetically

safe spaces from which to connect and release emotional pain. The passages below entail

witches feeling the presence and energy of the spirits of their departed relatives in

physical objects and in the physical spaces around them.

Francesca: “There's a lot of attachment and energy that stems from

tangible items, so I'll wear her jewelry, and I kind of feel like energetically
empowered by that.”

Francesca: “I just like to believe she's still here, energetically, somehow

like it's not just like once you’re in the grave, that's it. There's energy kind
of lingers and it surrounds you.”

Natia: “Any kind of thing that can invoke them kind of has their energy
still embedded in them.”

Below, regarding a narrative of her mother haunting her, Florence remarks on her

mother’s negative and unwelcome presence as possibly emanating from other entities or

causes instead of her mother’s spirit. She reasons the haunting could either be from her

mother, the universe, or the leftover energy cycles between her and her mother.

“My mom was very controlling and even in death, the concept of me
moving on with my life, either she didn’t like it, or the universe didn’t like
it, or the energy cycles because we’ve been doing it for 20 years.”

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The statements below regard witches’ ability to detect and manipulate energy from others

or other beings. The passages also allude to the need to protect oneself or thwart harmful

incoming energy, and measures that can be undertaken to stay unaffected.

Natia: [At the altar] “Anointing a candle, which is basically taking

different spices and oils, whatever kind of energy you're trying to
manifest, kind of the energy that you try to get and you basically just rub it
on the candle.”

Florence: “I’ve always naturally good at protection and warding, what

isn’t allowed in or needs to get out, it works, it has always been
sufficient.”

Hazel: “Usually the things that come through are benign or loving, or, like
you know, interesting, not like annoying or hard to hear, or triggering or
whatever.”

Natia: “I’m very sensitive to energy now. So, I get headaches quite often.
So, a very simple thing I do is veiling, which is the term for like putting
anything on your head. So, whether it's like a headscarf or you know, even
a hat, anything that kind of protects my head… It's just kind of like it feels
like kind of protective, like the energy there are just not directly affecting
me.”

In addition to taking protective measures, the ritual space one creates in order to

perform a ritual requires some form of working with energy and accordingly, it was often

considered pivotal to create an energetically safe space at the outset of a grief ritual.

Attempting to enter into a meditative state or sacred mindset when beginning a ritual was

a common occurrence in participant interviews; corresponding with the literature on

bereavement studies where the power of altered states of consciousness is a reoccurring

theme. According to the literature, entering into altered states of consciousness in grief

rituals can allow for feelings of presence (Sas and Coman 2016) and allow for a release

of emotional pain (Daniel 2021; Wojtkowiak, Lind, and Smid 2021). For the witches in

this study, a sacred mindset allowed for more powerful or successful rituals, as working

magic is sometimes described in terms of requiring concentration and emotional clarity.

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A meditative sacred mindset also served to create a sense of safety. This state of mind

was often described in terms of physical sensations that accompany the shift from the

mundane into the sacred. The statements below refer to meditation and indicate aspects of

power, safety, and need.

Francesca: “It's definitely nice to know that energetically, somehow, like

you can create this atmosphere where you feel more safe. You feel more
connected. Like if I were to just do it now, I wouldn't really feel anything
like it would just kind of be like me talking out loud, but it feels like when
you're doing these rituals, and when you're kind of involving artifacts and
involving memorabilia, it makes it more tangible.”

Hazel: “I've created a container that feels like sacred space, and it feels
like powerful to be able to do that… It's a container, that feels comforting,
and I have control, and it's almost like, it's meditative.”

Francesca: [Meditating before the ritual] “You're trying to get to that

higher level of thinking and processing where you can really be receptive
of everything around you.”

Anca: “I start with grounding meditations… I do a grounding meditation

which is like an earth, a rooting, where I picture my like legs as roots
going down into the earth. Then I like to come up and picture myself as a
tree like reaching into the sky, and I feel like that really connects me with
the above and the below.”

Zelda: [On why grounding meditations are important] “We're connected to

the earth through uh our root chakra through our feet. We are putting
energy like from our body down into the earth all the time, and we're
collecting energy from around us in the air all the time.”

Below, sacred meditation is described in terms of physical sensations, accompanied by

feelings of presence and energetic connection, giving comfort to the mourner.

Natia: [After meditation] “I think just having that there is so warm. And
having that practice there, it’s so warm that you almost detach yourself
from this reality in the moment. And I was just confident, like you know,
she's still here. She's still there. I can feel her. And um, you know, I think
that's all I really need to know. That she wasn't completely gone.”

Natia: “Also, just when you grieve, it's just so heavy on you that it's
almost hard... I don't think whenever I had someone close to me pass away
it was an immediate thought. It was almost just like immediate reaction or

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 emotion... it's just so intense. So, I think when you take a moment to just
meditate after it happens... it was almost a sense of like, something greater
is around you. You feel something there, and there is the weirdest thing
that usually happens whenever you're trying to be with a spirit or invoke a
spirit, or just like being long into meditation. It's a feeling that's so
indescribable. It's like you feel something there.”

Francesca: “It's sort of like something that you feel kind of feel like almost
like an enlightened like, it's kind of a weird sensation like your body kind
of feels fuzzy, but you could tell when you're in that state. It's not just like
I'm lying there, and I feel like I’m going to sleep, like you kind of feel
something go throughout you.”

Francesca: “You'll feel, you could feel it in a certain part of your body,
too, like sometimes I’ll feel like my arms, something like that, and then
usually again, like you could see a sign the next day, or something and like
just to know the message was received, and like she's there, and she's
watching over.”

As energy is in some cases related to emotion, it can also refer to the powerful

emotions of grief felt by a mourning witch. This too can be used, harnessed, and released

through ritual. Witches’ grief rituals served as a mechanism to allow for emotional

release and “letting go”, corresponding with Sas and Coman's (2016) categorization of

the therapeutic properties of grief rituals. It also aligns with the argument that grief rituals

give mourners a way to channel overwhelming feelings and a place to externalize them

(Castle and Phillips 2003). Several participants acknowledged the need for release in

their grief rituals. Notably, in the examples below, the mourners reference letting go or

releasing painful emotions tied to grief, processing grief, and releasing complex feelings

tied to their relationship with the deceased as part of the mourning process.

Florence: “I think they've [grief rituals] helped me personally in the

concept of letting go, whether that's letting go of my cat that was a big part
of my life or letting go of the trauma and the ghosts from my parents.”

Zelda: “There's always some sort of release that I do in those spells, too...
something that's like symbolic something with like a deep, deep intention
that lets you say like this is a release moment, like I have thought about all
of that.”

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 Zelda: “How can I kind of alchemize this like hurt into something else, to
be able to release it?”

Hazel: “In a way, there's a healthy kind of like letting go of that by

grieving it, like not having it be so attached or controlling.”

In an interview with Zelda following the ritual she performed with Hazel, I asked

her to explain a moment towards the end of the ritual where she began moving her arms

through the air around the altar in great sweeping motions as if to push something

towards the pond beside the ritual space. She explained how in that instance, it felt

necessary to push away the negative grief energy they had been working with and

working through, in an attempt to heal from it. Referring to this energy, Zelda elaborates,

“So this was whatever stuff had been working against them for so long,
and making them feel these moments of grief, and upset feelings, and all
of the things that had happened in their past life with traumas and
whatever it was all this, it just needed to be sucked away and thrown
somewhere else, so it could be alchemized by the rest of the elements, and
not have that like shadow on them anymore.”

Above, Zelda frames energy as stemming from individual grief, generational trauma, and

the painful relationship between Hazel and their father when he was alive, describing the

intense emotions of grief as a “shadow”.

In greater detail, the two passages below concern a group grief ritual and burial

for a beloved family cat. The group made an altar for the cat and a “death nest” for the

burial that included pictures of her, flowers and toys the cat used to play with, and the

bed that she had as a kitten which symbolized the beginning of her life. Each participant

wrote down their ritual intentions, lessons from the cat’s life, and expressions of love and

grief, put them in a vial and sealed it, and put the vials on the altar. Zelda elucidates,

“We all said this thing, our intention about what she's taught us. We all
released the energy of us being like upset about the fact that she was
passing on, and then turning the rest of it into a celebration of like this
only hurts so much because we have been able to have you around and

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 learn how much we love you. So, this feeling is knowing that, like we
won't actively be able to love you daily as we wish, but we're gonna bottle
this moment, and this good feeling about celebrating you, even in grief.”

“There are other ways for people to get energy out. One of those is
definitely through sound whaling, crying completely losing yourself to
that grief, and that's what that space was for, and that was how she used it.
And they cried out every tear that they had about it in that space to the
point that it was contagious.”

The passage above remarks on the need to release emotional energy stemming from grief

and elaborates on modes for doing so.

For the witches in this study, energy took on many forms, most notably as the

energy of the deceased before they died, their presence, and patterns of emotions left

behind from their life. Witches detailed their abilities to detect and manipulate energy

while expressing a need to protect themselves from and thwart harmful energies. A

significant protective measure included creating an energetically safe ritual space.

Participants also detailed processing and releasing powerful emotions of grief through

ritual. Additionally, energy was discussed in terms of what happens to a person’s living

energy when they die, however, it was coded as corresponding to the afterlife and will be

explained in detail in that section.

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 Chapter V.

Power through Burning

Within the various grief rituals discussed by practitioners, each participated in

some act of burning. Burning, or what burning was meant to induce, was coded in several

ways. Multiple participants mentioned intention as the source of one’s power, magic, or

witchcraft abilities. Intention is often noted in popular literature on witchcraft, an active

source of ritual inspiration for contemporary Western witches. In her popular text,

Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within, Juliet Diaz (2019) refers to intention as the source

of a witch’s ability to create magic, and Arin Murphy-Hiscock (2017), author of popular

witchcraft literature, writes that magic is “the use of natural energy with conscious intent

and awareness” (34). Through ritual and intention, witches feel they can bring things into

their lives and ward off or banish influences they do not want. Often this requires the act

of burning, where powers of intention work through burning a candle or herb.

Intentions and burning often served as means to release powerful emotions,

particularly related to grief. Additionally, rather than burning solely activating a witch’s

powers of intention, burning could also activate the power of symbols or sigils and in

doing so, bring things into being. Often in rituals designed to contact specific ancestors or

departed loved ones, candles were integral to communicating with and honoring the

spirits invoked. Burning candles also assisted in getting witches into the meditative state

deemed necessary for rituals to be successful. The two statements below indicate how

burning candles activated a witch’s intentions, helping to bring them into being:

Anca: “I have um spell candles, little candles and I orient the color based
on what I want it to be so like purple if I'm really trying to like connect

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 with the divine, or like green, if I’m doing like a money ritual, and I’m
trying to get a job or something.”

Polly: “So, there's an intention with each candle, and, like I said, intention
is everything.”

In discussing a grief ritual she led for another witch, below Zelda details how writing

down intentions and burning them allows for a powerful release of emotions into the

earth so the mourner no longer has to carry the grief.

“The pieces of paper that they've written things on um, put those in like a
little copper cauldron and light them on fire, and then, once they're on fire
you're trying to think of like, ‘Okay, let the flames totally take this over,
burn it away from me. This no longer is just mine to carry like, it's part of
the ether it's released into the universe’, and then from there, taking those
ashes, putting them into water, and then you return that ashy water to the
earth as well. Typically, what happens is like the intention setting, some
sort of processing, writing down, or thinking about it and... taking those
and burning them are usually the ways that I all have people alchemize the
grief in the in the ritual.”

Florence also describes a grief ritual she performed where intentions, burning, and release

played a key role. In this instance, she did a ritual to mourn the loss of her beloved cat

and to make sure the cat’s transition would go smoothly.

“I took him out to the woods, made a grave, cut a chunk of his fur to put in
a candle at home with herbs and burned it all to kind of acknowledge that
it was okay, because he had been there with all my parents shittiness and
helped me get through, so I was worried that he might not move on and I
didn’t want him to get stuck... I think the cat really loved me and would
have worried about me, and I was worried he was going to get stuck… So,
I was like, ‘You know this chunk of fur is the last thing. I have the last
thing really, like tying you here, and I am going to burn it and let it go
back to wherever it's supposed to be.’”

Burning the cat’s fur activated Florence’s intention to release his spirit from worldly

emotional connections to her, ensuring a peaceful afterlife. Burning the fur also acted as a

catalyst for Florence’s emotional release, allowing her to honor what the cat had done for

her in his life and how much he meant to her.

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 In the following example, Florence engages in smudging her home or ritually

burning herbs to cleanse unwanted energy in response to feeling as though her parents are

haunting her. Through burning and with the intent to stop the unwelcome and hostile

interactions from the spirits of her parents, Florence was able to counteract the

nightmares. The act of smudging the space disrupted the spirit’s ability to contact the

living.

“That was really helpful for me, I found that because of my parents being
crappy people they have a tendency to pop back up, so I’ll start having
nightmares about my parents or my cats will start meowing at the corners
weirdly, then I’ll smudge the house.”

Some participants noted using sigils and symbols in grief rituals that were imbued

with intentions and activated through burning. Florence describes moving into a new

apartment and finding it full of negative energy or hostile spirits. She could thwart the

haunting and banish the unwelcome presence by smudging with specific herbs. She hand-

carved black candles with runes, protective symbols, and the words “get out” written in

the wax and let the candles burn out. Natia also noted the addition of symbols when

burning to increase the activation of intention, advising, “You can also carve something

into the candle. Um, that can be a sigil or symbol for anything that has meaning to you,

and then burning that.”

Similarly, Florence recounts another instance in which she ritually used two lit

candles connected through a shared wick. One candle and flame represented her, and the

other, her mother’s spirit. She let the candles burn through until the burning wick caused

the two to separate, symbolically severing the relationship represented by the candles.

The psychological theory that ritual objects can symbolically represent the lost loved one

or the essence of the relationship (Sas and Coman 2016) and through ritual action,

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transform into an internal representation of the deceased (Romanoff 1998), is reflected in

the ritual performed by Florence.

All rituals that pertained specifically to honoring an ancestor or deceased loved

one involved burning a particular candle, marking it as a significant means to honor the

dead. Speaking of her departed grandfather, Polly explains,

“He wanted white pillar candles, and he wanted them lit on Saturday
night, and he wanted an Irish cross. So that's kind of, you know, special,
Saturday night. That's when they would go to church. I realized later.”

On the theme of burning and honoring ancestors, she continues,

“I’ll make an ancestor candle… right now I have an ancestor candle that
I've been burning, you know, next to a picture of them.”

“I buy these every year. It's to honor your ancestors. It's a pillar candle, so
like I have a dearly departed oil, and then I’ll burn this for a little bit every
day all through October and I do that every year as kind of just a way of
honoring my loved ones that aren't here anymore, because you know, it's
been a while, but it's still. I still miss them desperately.”

Burning a candle to honor the dead served to memorialize the departed, keeping

them present in memory and give comfort to the grieving. Burning candles also supported

activating the meditative, scared mindset needed for witches to bridge the physical and

spirit worlds. Recounting a ritual to call in the spirit of her grandmother, Natia describes

how ritually burning a candle helped her focus and move into the meditative mindset

while increasing her connection to the realm of spirit. She states,

“And then placing the items on the altar, placing her picture, having that
there and then a candle. I think the candle again, like I said, it just feels
like more of a connection with the immaterial realm, so lighting that and
just really focusing in on the candle.”

Similarly, Anca explains setting the scene for a ritual to begin:

“Really like, it's very much about the mood, I get the mood going like I, I
dim the lights. I have my little fairy lights, I have my candles going, like it

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 starts to feel very ethereal in my room, and I do, I start with grounding
meditations. I like to light incense.”

A witch’s powers of intention work in part through burning candles or herbs.

Ritual burning can bring a desired effect into being within a witch’s life, help to release

the emotions of grief or banish uninvited energies. Burning candles carved with symbols

indicating the desired outcome further enhanced the power of intentions through burning.

Significantly, witches burned candles to pay homage to deceased loved ones through

honoring, acknowledging, and remembering. Candles were also a significant factor in

bringing a witch into a sacred mindset prior to beginning a ritual.

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 Chapter VI.

The Afterlife

“Death is not an extinction, a final end. It is a transformation, a dissolution of one form

so that new forms can be created.” (Starhawk 1997, 72)

Corresponding with major themes in the anthropology of death that highlight a

cross-cultural interpretation of death as a transformative, ontological changing of form

(Silverman, Baroiller, and Hemer 2021) and rebirth from the world of the living to the

afterlife (Hertz 1960; Kaufman and Morgan 2005), witches’ narratives around grief

rituals displayed multifaceted conceptions of existence after death. Witches’ personal and

subjective visions of the afterlife are deeply intertwined with their grief rituals. This

emerged in two key themes. In the psycho-spiritual worldview of contemporary Western

witchcraft, witches navigate the dead interfering with the living, a reoccurring theme that

spurred discussion on the afterlife. Where spirits come from when invoked or contacted

through ritual and dialog regarding the passage from life to death and what occurs beyond

also highlighted conceptions of an afterlife. Witches’ personal narratives around the

spirit’s journey after death and the fundamental beliefs that underpin their individual

worldviews in Western witchcraft impacted how they grieved and when the dead could or

could not be experienced. Additionally, perspectives on death and existence after death

played a crucial role in witches’ personal witchcraft styles and its basic tenants.

A sense of the afterlife is reflected in the ways the dead interfere with the living,

both with the ability of a witch to invite in the spirit of the deceased and contact them and

through negative interactions with spirits, as in unwelcome visitations. As previously

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addressed, Florence expressed fears of unwanted interactions with beings from the spirit

world and navigating multiple experiences with hauntings. Below are statements made by

Florence regarding negative feelings related to contacting the deceased and harmful

interactions with the dead.

“What's dead should stay dead.”

“My mom was very controlling and even in death.”

“Part of my mother had attached itself to me.”

Similarly, below, Hazel conveys experiencing negative interactions with the spirit of their

deceased father, which were later countered through ritual.

“Usually, the things that come through are benign or loving, or, like you
know, interesting, not like annoying or hard to hear, or triggering or
whatever.”

“I've never really have had to like draw that kind of boundary with anyone
except my dad.”

“I like, had this experience where I started to experience my dad, like, I

don't know how to say it, but visiting me... It was unwelcome visitations,
too.”

Then, speaking of the spirit world more broadly, Hazel muses,

“It’s kind of like… I remember when I started learning about plants, and I
started learning about things like nettle or dandelion, or chicory, or you
know, whatever that I was like okay, I know these grow locally, but I don't
know where I would find them. Then suddenly I would see them
everywhere because I knew that they existed.”

In this account, Hazel imagines an existence after death that co-exists with the

physical world. Accordingly, the living can interact with spirits through practice and

attention. Calling in or invoking a spirit, or having any experience with the spirit world,

welcomed or unwelcomed, negative or positive, implies that spirits come forth from

somewhere and have a certain capacity to interfere with the living. Witches had various

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conceptions of when a spirit could or could not be contacted and where they came from

when called in through ritual. The statements below refer to what happens after death,

with attention to notions of where spirits are when contacted through ritual.

Polly: “I look at it, as that's where their physical bodies are [at the
graveyard]. But their spirits are still with me… I don't really feel the need
to go visit where their physical body's rest, and like, it also helps that I
happen to live in their house. So, I tend to think that they like to reside in
these walls.”

Hazel: [Spirit world] “It lives right here all around us. But we just often
like, we don't see it or access it, and that's like fine most of the time, I
think.”

Referring to a successful ritual in which Natia felt the presence of her father’s

godmother through invoking, she stated, “I think that's all I really need to know. That she

wasn't completely gone.” Other comments addressed what happens after death, noting

when the dead could or could not be experienced. In the following passage, Anca, a 29-

year-old witch with Romanian family roots, references a transition ritual she performed

for her mother, who died of cancer, with Anca by her side.

“It just still feels like, I don't know if she's still transitioning, or what. But
it doesn't feel like it's, ready yet, like I feel… And that was kind of also the
guidance that I was given by my higher self and stuff. It's like she's not
ready yet, you know.”

With difficulty, Anca expressed being unable to contact the spirit of her departed

mother, who she reasons is not yet ready for contact, as not enough time has passed, and

the pain of grief is still too intense. Below, she recounts how she could feel the sensation

of her mother’s spirit as it left the physical world, accompanied by protective

otherworldly spiritual beings called forth by Anca to aid in her mother’s departure.

“After she did take her last breath I went outside, and I saw these hawks
like circling us, and, like the hawk, is also an animal that I work with a lot,
and it almost looked like they were like taking her spirit up, up, like they
were going up, up, up, up, and I like felt her in the wind.”

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 Sometimes the ability to contact a departed loved one depended on where in the

after-death journey the spirit currently resided. This ability varied to each witch’s

subjective perspective on the afterlife. Anca, for example, tells a moving narrative of

where her mother’s spirit went after she departed. Upon reflecting, she added that more

than one story could be true and that she sticks with what resonates for her and to what

her spirit reacts, which this tale did. Anca on the afterlife:

“So, this concept that I really enjoyed was like was that your spirit goes to
this place called Summerland where the goddess is there and it's a really
beautiful like springy kind of a place where it's nature,18 undisturbed
nature, and waterfalls, and birds and everything. That's how I picture it,
and your spirit goes there for, like the goddess to mend and care for you,
and… just take care of you while because, like I mean at least for my
mom, it's like, yeah her spirit was still sick like when she passed away and
the idea is she, the idea is like she, the goddess, takes care of you and
holds a space for you there, and mends you and your spirit, until you are
kind of ready to come back into the world as a child, as a baby. And so,
like this Summerland place, and I also like the idea of Summerland,
because it's not hierarchical. It's not a heaven. It's not a hell. It's just this
beautiful place where the goddess reigns, and she watches over the spirits
that have transitioned out of the human form, and it's like, I believe that
their spirit, it's still your spirit, and you're over there, and you're being
mended and you're being cared for, and it's like a really compassionate,
safe space to just like decompress from the experience of human life and
like traumas and all of that, and then like, that takes longer for some
people, maybe less for others, whatever how much time that takes. And
then, the time comes when you're ready to come and basically be
reincarnated through another form.”

Accordingly, she reasons that her mother cannot yet communicate with her

because of where she is in her healing afterlife journey. To Anca, she is with the goddess,

surrounded by love and undisturbed beauty, decompressing from human life and healing

18
Summerland is described in detail in Starhawk’s (1997) Pagan Book of Living and Dying, and
corresponds with a repeated, underlying Pagan perspective on the afterlife that she explains succinctly as,
“the dead become the unborn, who return again to life after an interval of rest, healing, and renewal” (98),
reflected here in witches’ narratives of the afterlife.

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the trauma of the body and spirit. Consequently, only when she has properly healed will

she be able to return to earth to commune with her daughter.

While Anca creatively imagined an afterlife that supports her worldview and

worship of the goddess, using borrowed notions from witchcraft and Neo-paganism,

Francesca’s vision of the afterlife is partly dictated by her family’s medium and reveals

sentiments of Catholicism tied with superstition, just as she describes her family’s

spiritual orientation. At the same time, her narrative details how she is able to contact the

spirit of her grandmother but, not of her grandfather. She explains,

“I kind of feel like when we talk to the medium, she says there's kind of
like, some people go, there's kind of like a waiting room and you, that's
when they could have most communication with you. And then they could
also go to the higher place. I'm not a hundred percent sure, like what there
is. But I definitely believe that if you pass, that's not it. And before then I
hadn't had a lot of experience with grief, like this was a very direct, it had
a very direct effect on me. Um, yeah, I just like to believe she's still here,
energetically, somehow like it's not just once you’re in the grave, that's it.
Their energy kind of lingers and it surrounds you… the medium I talked to
and my family talks to, she kind of explained it to us, um, where my
grandma is, she is kind of like omnipresent. She's everywhere, and she's
kind of in this higher place, and she can go back down to like more mortal
regions and go up. My grandfather, though, her husband, he was kind of,
she's explained… kind of being like, it's almost purgatory… like he's fully,
not um resolved, like he still has business, having connections to the
mortal world where he's a little bit kind of… he hasn't achieved that full
enlightenment yet, so I definitely think there are stages to it.”

She later explained that part of the reason her grandfather is in this liminal space

where she cannot reach him is that he died a “chaotic death” that left him unresolved,

having been possibly drunk and fallen down the stairs to his death, only to be found days

later. In part, this narrative corresponds with Anca’s inability to reach her mother, in the

sense that her mother’s spirit may be in an early stage of the afterlife journey and

therefore “still transitioning”, as Anca concludes.

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 Additionally, witches’ family heritage and nationality impacted their perspective

on the afterlife and morphed with their spiritual worldview in witchcraft. In some cases,

this reflected Catholic sentiments fused with contemporary Western witchcraft, like

Francesca’s Sicilian roots. The passage below is also exemplary, where Natia, an 18-

year-old witch with strong family connections to her home country of Georgia, expresses

a combination of beliefs that influenced her experience of grief and her beliefs on when

the spirits of her lost loved ones could and could not be successfully contacted.

“After they passed away. It's kind of like, okay, well, first it's like rejection
and denial and everything, and I think the biggest part is that you can't
fully comprehend. I mean, I can't fully comprehend that they're gone.
That's something that takes me a while, and I think that's maybe because I
don't think they're truly gone, and there's still a sense of them, especially
the Georgian belief is that the first I think forty-four days, or something
around then, is when the ghost is still, or the soul is still on earth and with
you, and I definitely think that there's some truth in it, because for the first
forty days that's when I feel most strongly like they’re there. They're
actively there. It's a feeling that I have.”

On the subject of the afterlife, the two key themes emerged – a foundational belief

in reincarnation and the theory of energy conservation, which were mirrored by two well-

read texts in popular literature on the topic. So notable is the lack of literature on Western

witchcraft and death and mourning that several authors of popular literature acknowledge

it on the subject, who are commonly witches or Neo-pagans as well. To these ends come

two books aiming to address the lack of resources available to mourning witches. A

longtime author and spokesperson for the Neo-pagan movement, Starhawk is often

referenced in scholarly works on witchcraft and Neo-paganism. In 1997 she published

Pagan Book of the Living and Dying, a book of resources for Neo-pagans on all things

related to experiencing the loss of a loved one, from ritually preparing for death to

funerary rites and the basic tenants underpinning the Neo-pagan worldview. More

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recently, Mortellus (2021), a British Traditional Wiccan, Third Degree Gardnerian High

Priestex, and mortician, released Do I have to wear black?: Rituals customs and funeral

etiquette for modern Pagans, a text oriented around pagan funerary rites. According to

these texts, reincarnation and energy conservation can be conceptualized separately but

can also overlap, as energy conservation refers to the concept where upon death, all

energy on earth must be turned into a new form or be reinstated into something else,

which some witches read as reincarnation in different terms.

Rather than conceptualizing the afterlife through narratives of a physical journey

with earthly images of natural landscapes or waiting rooms, multiple participants

described the journey beyond human life in terms of energy cycles. Corresponding with

these witches, Mortellus (2021) defines reincarnation in terms of energy and explains the

basic principle of energy conservation as, “energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only

altered to take another form” (2). This concept is echoed by Zelda when she states,

“energy is never created, it is never destroyed, it's just all around us. It can be transmuted

into other kinds of energy. It can flow in different ways.” Similarly, Florence explains,

“I do think nothing is ever really gone. Energy is not ever destroyed. It's
not ever created. Matter is not ever destroyed. It's not ever created. That's
a fact. I do, I really like the concept that when we die the energy that
makes us alive is what's recycled. The portions of what makes individual
people individual stay with that life. It doesn't carry on.”

“Logically everything gets recycled, but I don’t think personalities

necessarily get recycled. I think there can be impressions. I think you can
get communication with other people or things on the other side, and there
can be echoes of personalities and echoes of people. I think that's where
ghosts come from, where you don't necessarily have to be seeing the
energy of what made that person alive. I do think you're seeing an echo or
a reflection of what that person did when they were alive.”

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The logic of energy conservation helps Florence rationalize the complex feelings she has

around her mother, with whom she had a difficult relationship in life and who’s haunting

Florence thwarted through ritual on several occasions. She continues,

“I’ve always had trouble with the fact that I don’t miss my mom because
she was terrible but I miss the concept of a mom that was good, the things
that make people good or bad don’t stick around, we know energy is
recycled matter, there’s no new energy being made, but the energy that
made my mom a terrible person isn’t going to be stuck as a bad person the
next time around.”

In this way, Florence can be haunted and provoked by her mother’s spirit and the

negative energy cycles she and her mother cemented in life that persisted beyond the

physical world. Yet, she can be comforted by knowing death is not the end for her

mother. The pain will subside, and the next cycle will begin anew.

Participants also discussed how death and existence after death figure into their

overall belief systems and ritual practices. While Florence describes the afterlife in terms

of energy, she details the place of death and beyond into the spirit world within her

spiritual practice and worldview in quite another sense. She explains,

“So personally? Trees and crows are big for me. There's a lot of legends
about crows and ravens being able to take the spirits of the dead to or from
where they're going, the spirits of the newly born to where or from where
they're going, and messages back and forth across the veil. So, I think
inherently, since I've always been drawn to crows and ravens, and they do
have a special place in my practice, I think inherently, that connection
between here and the other side kind of plays a part in it unintentionally.”

Notably, myths and legends play a critical part in her practice of witchcraft, and

she approaches them earnestly. She asserts, “they didn't come from nowhere, so I think

then, at least at some point in history, all these myths, these legends, whatever, were

real.” Yet, when asked about the afterlife, the narrative that comes to mind is more

mainstream and described as recycling energy rather than the abstract, otherworldly raven

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carrying her mother’s spirit across the veil. Accordingly, witches can hold multiple and

sometimes conflicting perspectives that support different elements of their ritual practices

and spiritual worldview. In times of grief and unrest, they call upon the narratives that

most aid their healing.

Witches’ beliefs about existence after death were revealed subtly through the dead

interfering with the living. Such revelations occurred through ritual invoking or calling in

a spirit and more casual contact in witches’ daily lives. Sometimes these interactions

were welcomed and celebrated, while they were alarming and unwanted at other times.

Generally, when contact with the spirit world is made, it calls into question where that

world resides or where the spirit traveled from to arrive in the presence of the witch,

leading to postulations on the afterlife. When contact with a spirit is desired yet

unsuccessful, notions arise regarding the relationship between the afterlife journey and

rules around when an interaction between the living and the dead could or could not

occur. In some instances, a witch’s family heritage and corresponding religious

orientations impacted their conception of the afterlife and whether a deceased relative

could or could not be invoked depending on their place in the afterlife journey and where

their spirit resides.

Two additional themes emerged regarding how witches view the spirit’s journey

after death, corresponding with popular literature from authors and witchcraft

practitioners. One key theme is reincarnation, a fundamental component of witches’

spiritual worldview. The other is the theory of energy conservation. For some, these

themes overlapped, while other witches conjured up images of other worlds to explain the

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journey through the afterlife. In more abstract terms, death and the afterlife also play a

role in witches’ ritual practices and underpin aspects of their overall belief systems.

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 Chapter VII.

Final Discussion

This anthropological project investigated the phenomenon of contemporary

Western witches fashioning rituals to process the complex and ongoing experience of

grief, one that witches tend to repeatedly through ritual enactments. The conclusions

gained through my research centered on witches’ subjective and intimate dealings with

the dead, which are critical to understanding the relationship between death, grief, and

ritual. Having taken on the responsibility for managing their grief, each participant served

as an authority on their own experience of processing loss through ritual.

This undertaking aimed to further knowledge on ritual responses to grief and

healing through ritual from the perspective of contemporary witches whose reality is

upheld by ritual practices and an acknowledgment of death as a universal part of the

human experience. As Western society has shifted toward individualized, private, and

often isolating experiences of bereavement, it was hoped that the knowledge created by

this work would lift up the voices of those who mourn, and through the subculture of

witches – with their sacred worldview, who creatively foster personal methods to combat

the deeply human, ongoing emotional storm of grief – gain a deeper understanding of it.

Contrary to contemporary US society that fears and rejects confronting death

more generally, witches regularly contemplate death through symbol, myth, and ritual.

They find solace in the existential cycle of death and rebirth and celebrate the human

experience, including beyond the physical world. Through cultivating their own personal,

creative, and idiosyncratic rituals, contemporary witches resist American norms around

minimizing death and grieving. Instead of turning to professional knowledge, as is

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common in the US, they express faith in their personal skills and spiritual knowledge to

face the complex and ongoing endeavor of mourning.

Rather than stifle or repress grief, the witches in this study relied on their unique

styles of witchcraft and ritual practices to process grief in ways that best suited their

needs and facilitated the expression of grief. In various ways, they used rituals to release

emotions, connect with the dead, and heal. The grief rituals studied in this research

varied, yet each represents a noninstitutionalized coping strategy related to death and

healing from loss.

Accordingly, my research addresses gaps in the scholarly literature in several

ways. This study fills in the gap in the literature on Western witchcraft that lacks studies

on grief while updating the literature to reflect generational changes in witchcraft. It

confronts psychotherapeutic bereavement studies as a field that increasingly governs

mourning in the US and contributes to knowledge in the anthropology of death regarding

the relationship between ritual and grief and how human beings process death.

The results of this project support leading theories in psychotherapeutic

bereavement studies that promote continuing to have an ongoing connection with the

deceased as a critical dimension to healing (Castle and Phillips 2003; Klass, Silverman,

and Nickman 2014; Worden 2018). Witches’ rituals correspond with multiple

categorizations of grief rituals conceptualized by bereavement scholars, notably in rituals

that highlight honoring, letting go, giving thanks, and maintaining connection. In some

instances, the typical grief rituals described in bereavement studies that aim to

memorialize the dead mirror that of contemporary Western witches. However, the

witches in this study grieved through various rituals, unlike those in the clinical setting.

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Witches invoked the dead through sigil and song and banished the dead through spell-

work. These witches, whose narratives detail pain and loss, peace and magic, met with

otherworldly beings; they sat beside a goddess while holding a dying parent’s hand,

called in ancestors to heal generational trauma, they built altars and toasted drinks with

the dead. Through this work, they leave a mark on the scholarship of grief.

The anthropological argument that grief is a learned behavior and a cultural

production shaped by one’s worldview is supported by the findings of my research.

While the scope of this project did not allow for an analysis of the effect of grief on wider

social environments, it did show how grief rituals can help the bereaved process the

individual and collective dimensions of mourning. Corresponding with the

anthropological literature on death rites, the witches in this study exemplified individuals’

ability to adapt and reconstitute rituals in unique, creative, and original ways. The

theories most closely aligned with these conclusions are the conceptualization of death as

an ontological rebirth and the need for the living to take responsibility for maintaining

relationships with the dead and protective ancestor spirits.

Several critical themes emerged from the data gained through extensive

interviews and fieldwork. The researcher developed four main themes: Communication

with Spirit, Interaction with Energy, Power through Burning, and The Afterlife.

Communication with the spirit world was a complex central feature of witches’ grieving

rituals. Communication involved who or what witches contacted, forms of

communication, forms of responses, and a threatening or fearful element at play. For the

category of who witches can commune with through ritual, the researcher winnowed the

data into distinctions between what forms the dead become. Witches referred to

85
contacting deceased loved ones, ancestors more generally, and the spirit world, which

numerous otherworldly entities can populate. Significantly, the ritual observed in this

study's fieldwork portion encompassed all three communication categories. Additionally,

who witches contact required an analysis of how communication works.

Analyzing the theme of communication resulted in two distinct forms of

communication – reaching out or invoking. Reaching out typically involved one-sided

communication within the ritual space, usually at a witch’s altar, and promoted healing

through connection. This form of communication highlights honoring the dead and one’s

ancestors that have shifted into protective guardians. Invoking involves two-way

communication within the ritual space and typically requires divination through tarot,

pendulums, mediums, and sigils.

Witches report receiving a response from the spirit world, most notably in seeing

signs in the physical world in their daily lives, speaking to the dead through dreams or

nightmares, and hearing voices audibly or receiving messages by way of mental images.

A repeated theme within communication with the spirit world was also feeling a

threatening or fearful element arising from interactions with the dead. This aspect of

witches’ interactions with the dead is at odds with the typical grief rituals described in

bereavement studies. Witches proactively combatted threats through ritualized protective

measures and by invoking supportive beings. They navigated such occurrences through

ritual intervention.

The second major theme is witches interacting with energy through ritual. The

researcher broke down energy into several categories, including the presence or spirit of

the deceased and otherworldly entities. Witches described having their own energy and

86
an ability to manipulate the energy of other beings for protection, healing, and

banishment. Energy sometimes referred to the emotional pain of grief, and witches could

release or let go of that pain through grief rituals. Energy as emotion also refers to

patterns of energy leftover from a deceased person’s life, remaining in the physical

world. Another conceptualization of energy arose from witches fostering energetically

safe and sacred ritual spaces.

The next central theme from the data is power through burning. Within their

rituals, witches burned materials to activate the power of their intentions, which is their

ability to do magic. Through burning, witches increase their ability to bring things into

being and ward off or banish negative influences. Burning also activated sigils or

symbols for added power and supported activating the meditative, scared mindset critical

to ritual witchcraft. Additionally, burning was essential to rituals designed to honor the

dead and connect with the spirit world.

The final major theme resulting from this research is the afterlife. Two key

themes emerged from this analysis – witches confronted existence after death through

instances of the dead interfering with the living and contemplated where spirits come

from when invoked or contacted through ritual (sometimes explained as stages of the

afterlife or other places/planes of existence). Personal narratives were analyzed, revealing

various perspectives on what happens after death. In some cases, the religious orientation

of a witch's family influenced their views, however removed the individual witch may be

from a particular religious institution. Witches’ conceptions of journeying from the

physical world to the afterlife upheld core elements of their fundamental spiritual

worldviews and dictated when they could or could not contact a spirit. The researcher

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incorporated two texts from popular literature authored by practicing Neo-pagans and

Wiccans to support participants' conceptions of the afterlife. These texts crystallized the

stark lack of scholarly literature on death and mourning in Western witchcraft and upheld

two themes emerging from the data – reincarnation and energy conservation.

Future research on this subject would benefit from more time spent in the field.

Expanding the scope of this project to include ongoing interactions with participants over

time would allow for richer engagement with the ongoing experience of grief.

Additionally, having an opportunity to investigate witches’ subjective experiences more

fully both before and after performing grief rituals would strengthen future research. The

witches in this study did not distinguish between the grief of losing a loved one, and more

routine ritual means for honoring ancestors. Attempting to make such distinctions from

the outset would align more closely with the grief rituals explored in psychotherapeutic

grief studies and could therefore be insightful to the field.

A hum of gentle voices singing. The sway of trees, hovered, listening. The dance

of smoke twirling in the stillness. The altar buzzing, ancient tools and shadows shifting,

letting the invisible world in. Birds are circling, bodies humming, hearts lifting. A

warmth is pouring. There is a knock, a space opening. Can you hear them? The ones you

love are waiting. There is no ending.

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 Appendix 1.

Methods

Research Design

Filling in the gap in the scholarly literature on death in Western witchcraft, rituals

in bereavement studies, and death rites in the United States, the researcher sought to

address the following questions: How does the magic worldview of contemporary

witchcraft inform the way witches create grieving rituals? And how do these rituals

enable contemporary witches to process and heal from the critical experience of loss? To

answer these questions required implementing a qualitative research design, using

phenomenological and ethnographic methods that included interviews, an observational

protocol, researcher photography, and popular literature on Western witchcraft. The

researcher carried out this study only after gaining IRB approval through Harvard

University and completing CITI training for conducting research on human subjects. The

IRB approved all study protocols and recruitment strategies prior to data collection.

The goal of applying a phenomenological, methodological research design was to

describe the meaning of human experience by studying individuals’ lived experiences

(Neubauer, Witkop, and Varpio 2019) within the specific sociocultural world of

contemporary witchcraft. The phenomenological approach was critical to assessing the

subjective experience of bereavement through the spiritual worldview of participants.

This qualitative research design used ethnography to describe the use of rituals in the

context of loss and grief among contemporary witches in New England. Interviews and

observations were used to collect data from participants with the primary goal of

revealing processes of healing from loss through ritual. Accordingly, the researcher drew

89
predominately on collecting primary sources in the form of ethnographies that engaged

with the intersubjective lifeworlds of participants and the structures that underpin or

inform experiential and ritualized responses to grief. The narrative data were transcribed,

coded, and categorized into four main themes – Communication with Spirit, Interaction

with Energy, Power through Burning, and The Afterlife – with several subthemes related

to the research questions.

The multiple data sources collected for this study were open-ended and emergent

in design, with themes emerging from the data rather than through predetermined scales

or instruments. The steps for data collection included setting a perimeter for the study

through sampling and recruitment; collecting information through semi-structured

interviews, an observational protocol, researcher photography at field sites, and by

examining popular literature on contemporary witchcraft; as well as instituting a protocol

for recording data.

Sound phenomenological studies rely on a range of three – ten participants to

ensure validity before data saturation occurs (Creswell and Creswell 2017). This research

aimed to include eight – ten participants and officially involved seven people in multiple

interviews and site observations. Seven participants were interviewed, two of which

additionally partook in observational data collection. The literature on previous

generations of Western witchcraft shows a prevalence of large-scale ritual gatherings, a

significant shift from the common solitary practices of contemporary witches, addressed

through the study design. Contemporary witches tend to perform rituals in their homes or

alone in the wilderness or other private outdoor spaces. Accordingly, the fieldwork for

this research took place in a secluded outdoor space, exclusively with two participants

90
and the researcher at the site. Fieldwork took place at a secluded public park in the

Boston area.

The sampling used by the researcher was nonrandom, purposive sampling.

Participation was restricted to those who fit the inclusion criteria of this study and the

participant’s willingness to partake in the study. Criteria excluded minors and considered

contemporary practitioners to be between the age of 18 to 40 years old. The researcher

did not include individuals who self-report as members of religious institutions and those

who identify as cis men in this study as they are not considered representative of the

population under study. Significantly, the participants were selected because they

reported practicing witchcraft and experiencing the process of loss and grief combatted

through ritual. All participants included in this sample currently reside in the New

England region of the United States or have at some time lived there.

The researcher recruited participants through multiple online sources, including

virtual meetups that unite practitioners across New England, psychic institutes, and

witch/pagan communities. Meetups were narrowed down or filtered using the terms

witchcraft, paganism, occult, goddess, druid, earth-based spirituality, and psychic. In

addition, some of these groups congregate virtually in social media communities where

they share information and promote online courses related to witchcraft, from which the

researcher was able to interact with and attempt to recruit practitioners. The researcher

shared recruitment materials in these online spaces and around the city of Salem, MA, a

popular destination for contemporary witches in the region. Recruitment posters were

also displayed across several college campuses in Boston, MA.

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 Data Collection and Analysis

Study procedures included collecting open-ended data through semi-structured

interviews with seven participants, researcher photography, observation of ritual sites,

and an examination of popular literature on witchcraft. Initial interviews were conducted

with the participants individually using the interview protocol (Appendix 2). Interviews

were semi-structured in order to elicit the views of participants and attain a deeper

understanding of the phenomena of grief rituals through participants’ perspectives. All

seven participants participated in a single, virtual, roughly one-hour interview, totaling

seven hours of interviews. All interviews were audio recorded and digitally transcribed,

in addition to researcher notes, for thematic analysis and coded into themes.

The researcher used an observational protocol to collect ethnographic data. The

observations were collected under natural, non-manipulated settings using an observation

protocol (Appendix 3). Participants were initially asked to consent to a one-hour

interview with the option to partake in an observational follow-up at ritual sites for those

willing. All participants were given the opportunity to do the observational piece, but it

was not anticipated that all would, and a total of two participated in a single observation.

The researcher then asked those participating in observations to complete a one-hour

follow-up interview, with one of two completing one interview, for a total of one

additional hour of interviews. Field site questions were unstructured and occurred at the

conclusion of rituals to ensure the researcher did not interfere with rituals, adding analytic

validity to this research. Observations were conducted at a single site for roughly two

hours.

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 The purpose of the observational protocol was to describe the ritual practices

engaged by participants related to grief. The researcher relied on thick description and

participant observation at a ritual site chosen by participants. These ethnographic tools

entailed accompanying participants to the site and overtly but unobtrusively observing

ritual behavior, taking photographs of the ritual, and asking follow-up questions

afterward. The level of researcher participation at the site was based on relevance and

comfortability of participants. Any photographs displaying identifying features of

participants were included only after gaining written consent. All participants were given

pseudonyms to protect their privacy.

Observations were recorded through descriptive notes of the physical setting,

account of dialog and activates; reflexive notes on the researcher’s personal thoughts; and

inclusion of the date, time, place, and demographic information, including age and gender

orientation. Observations included general descriptions of the physical setting, a list of

memorial or altar objects, behavior, actions, movements, and words of participants. The

researcher noted keywords during participant observation and used them to develop

themes. The researcher additionally developed a chronology of what occurred at each site

and took photos, when possible, of the setting, altar, objects, and ritual behaviors.

Reflexivity on the part of the researcher was critical in clarifying possible bias,

ensuring subsequent interpretations were valid and not shaped by personal experience.

Reflexive notes included the researcher’s demographic information and previous

experience with the sociocultural community under study. To ensure the validity of this

study, these notes were used throughout all components of data collection and analysis.

The researcher engaged in thick description during participant observations and included

93
any negative, incongruent, or discrepant information that would contradict research

themes. Additionally, the researcher collected data by photographing field sites and

studing popular literature on Western witchcraft commonly used by contemporary

witches.

In addition to primary data collection, the researcher incorporated an analysis of

popular literature to help determine the structures that inform or influence various aspects

of grieving rituals among contemporary witches. Themes included ritual sequence, form,

objects, symbols, location, and conceptions of death and the afterlife. The multiple

sources of qualitative data, in the form of interviews, observations, photographs, and

popular witchcraft guidebooks, were all examined thematically, including a focus on

healing, self, identity, growth, loss, ancestors, relationship maintenance, journey, and

rebirth, in addition to patterns that emerged gradually through data collection.

The collected data were mainly narrative and transcribed and categorized in terms

of research questions and emergent themes. Corresponding with phenomenological

analyses, a coding method was used to organize interview data into a limited number of

themes and concepts around the research questions. The process involved forming initial

codes by reading the text, describing personal experiences, describing the essence of the

phenomenon or underlying structure, developing significant statements, and grouping

statements into meaning units (Creswell and Poth 2016). The researcher used this process

to develop the essence, or the experience of the phenomenon, and presented it in

narration through discussion. Quotations were selected from the interviews that

highlighted the major themes and issues. Data from observations were compared with the

independent interviews to see if they were verified.

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 The phenomenological approach allowed the researcher to examine participants’

individual experiences and use them to gain insight into what is essentially a universal

experience, that of grief. Data analysis included reflection on the essential themes that

emerged from the study to establish what might constitute the nature of the lived

experience of grief (Creswell, J. Poth, 1998) from the ritualized spiritual orientation of

contemporary witches. This approach considers the ways in which sociocultural

conditions and the subjective experiences of individuals shape the norms, values, and

assumptions that underpin their worldview. Participants' subjective experiences took

precedence in data analysis, informing and contributing to new understandings of

bereavement.

The researcher collected limited demographic information due to time constraints

so as to build rapport quickly before getting into the complex and emotionally

challenging subject of grief. All seven participants self-identified using the term “witch”;

however, several did not use it publicly. Two participants were active members of a

coven at the time of data collection, and one additional witch reported previous

experience with covens and communal practices around goddess worship. At the same

time, all seven participants considered themselves to be solitary witches, showing how

overlap is possible. The ages of participants ranged from 18 to 33. The researcher

included participant pronouns. Several witches identified as queer or genderqueer,

aligning with scholarly representations of the population under study.

Limitations and Ethical Considerations

The study design posed potential limitations at various stages of this research.

Data collection relied heavily on ethnographic interviews whereby information may be

95
given in a designated place outside of the natural field setting, which can constrain what

is said and what is withheld by participants. During both the interview and observational

stages of data collection, the presence of the researcher had the potential to bias

informant responses, which was countered through the use of thick description.

Gaining the trust of participants prior to conducting interviews had the potential to

be a limiting factor. The ability of the researcher to build rapport with participants, gain

their trust, and maintain it during fieldwork was vital to conducting this research, leaving

opportunities for limits to the continuity of data collection. Another potential limitation of

the research for this project was bridging the tendency in witchcraft toward secrecy.

While participants were given pseudonyms, it is not uncommon for practitioners to guard

aspects of their personal ritual practices against being shared. The desire to protect

private practices could correspondingly have been magnified, given that grief rituals may

be particularly emotionally charged.

Recruitment processes posed a potential limit to this research, as the study

methods imposed a limit to the geographic extent of the research to the New England

area exclusively. While circumscribing the area under study served to strengthen the

validity of this research, it also shrunk the recruiting pool. Additionally, as ethnography

relies on prolonged time spent in the field to add validity to research conclusions

regarding cultural patterns of belief and behavior, my research was unavoidably limited

by time constraints on fieldwork.

Terminology was a further possible limitation to this research, as practitioners

have some aversion to identifying with the term “witch”. The researcher attempted to be

clear from the outset that for this research, witchcraft is defined as a spiritual orientation,

96
a magic worldview, and an accompanying set of beliefs and ritual practices that

encompasses people who self-identify using various personal terms instead of being

limited to self-identified witches.

As this research focuses on grief, there was potential for emotionally or

psychologically charged sensitive content. To minimize risks to participants, the chosen

field sites were memorial, not immediately following the death of someone significant.

Additionally, participants may not be public in their affiliation with witchcraft and

therefore want privacy. Consequently, all participants were given pseudonyms, and their

data was made anonymous or de-identified to ensure privacy.

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 Appendix 2.

Interview Protocol

Header: Time, date, location, name of interviewer and interviewee, (file name, length of
interview)

Introduction: Introduce self, discuss purpose of the study, prompt to collect signed copy
of informed consent form (or send), talk about general structure of interview (number of
questions, how long it will take), ask if they have any questions, define terms if needed.

• Hi, there! Before we begin, I am just going to send you the consent form to sign,
here in the chat. At the bottom, please fill in your name and today’s date.
• Today’s interview will be no more than 60 minutes. I will be recording just the
audio of our interview today to use as notes but just so you know, this will remain
private and confidential, and the recording will be erased at the end of this study.
• Before we begin, I recognize we are dealing with a difficult topic, and it is my
hope that through research like this we can help contribute to better understanding
ritual and healing from grief.
• I would like to say thank you for letting me into this private sphere of your life,
and if at any time you feel uncomfortable or need a break, please let me know.
Please let me know as well if you have questions or need any clarification.

*Press record* -Before we begin, could you please state your name, age, and
preferred pronouns? Great, thank you.

Opening question:
Thank you for speaking with me today, how is your day going so far?

I’d like to start by hearing a little bit about your spiritual journey:
• What led you to your practice
• When did you feel the calling

How do you describe yourself in terms of your practices and beliefs?

Could you describe your belief system or form of witchcraft?

Could you elaborate on your connection or link with different traditions or lineages?
(spirit/magic?)

How does your practice show up in your daily life?

• What other rituals do you do?

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Have you been involved in using ritual in the context of grief before?
• Could you describe for me how/or a time when you used ritual in this context?

Probes - “Tell me more”, “Could you explain your response”, “What does ‘not much’ mean?”

Did elements of your ritual come up as you went along, or did you plan it in advance?

What was the experience of the ritual like?

• Were you or are you typically by yourself or with others?

Were you (a witch/ a part of this spiritual reality) before this or was this part of the
process?
• Is this part of what lead you to your spiritual practice?
• Has this changed your practice or spiritual worldview? Has experiencing loss
changed your spiritual life at all?

Where do your rituals take place? (Ex: place the deceased knows, nature)

How are ritual sites chosen?

• How frequently do you visit memorial sites?

Is some form of communication with the deceased part of the ritual experience (spirit
world/ancestors)?
• If so, how is it experienced?

Could you discuss an experience you’ve had with communicating with a passed loved
one?

• How do you experience ancestors/spirit world?

• How does this change over time? (Length of time since passing)
• How are spirit/divine/lost ones experienced in your daily life?

What are your thoughts about what happens after we die? (What comes to mind for you)

Has experiencing loss taught you more about how rituals work?
• About yourself? About the afterlife? About healing?

If needed:
• How do other rituals inform grieving rituals?
• How do popular texts inform rituals?
• How do motifs/symbols of nature figure into grieving rituals? (What purpose do
these serve in your rituals)
• Do myths play into ritual healing for you? – If so, how?
• How do rituals help you process grief?
• How do you feel like rituals help you heal?

99
Follow up question:

• Is there any further information that you would like to share that we have not
covered? Anything specific to grief that you want to add? (I just want to make
sure you know your voice is valued and central to this research)

Closing instructions:

• Thank you for time. If needed for clarity, would you participate in a follow up
interview? Do you have any interest in contributing to the observational part of
this study?

If they ask about results, offer to send abstract of the final study.

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 Appendix 3.

Observational Protocol

Overt observation (subjects know they are being observed)

Participant observation

Chart header:

• Date, time, site name/place, name of participant, name of observer

• Descriptive notes and reflexive notes

Descriptive:

• What observer sees, hears, touches, smells

• General descriptions
o Description of physical setting
o Use rich detail to describe conversations, behavior, and activity observed
o List memorial objects, altar objects, behavior, movements, words, actions
of participant
• Note key words that come to mind during participant observation to develop
themes
• Develop chronology of what happens
• Take photos of the setting, altar, objects, ritual behavior, participant

Reflexive:

• Concerns, hunches, personal thoughts, problems, impressions, ideas

• Note the observer’s impact on the situation
o May include notes on methods, ethical issues, and limitations
• Preliminary list of themes – phrased as two- to four-word labels

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 Appendix 4.

Field Site Photographs, taken by the author in New England, 2022

The Sigil. Used by Hazel as a touchpoint to The Cauldron. Highlights the use of burning within rituals to
communicate with their father’s spirit. contact and invoke the dead.

The ritual space. All four elements of nature are The sky portal. Connects the altar to the sky and air element,
represented. while bridging the world of the living and the dead.

102
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