🧙♀️Module 1: The Witch, Named | Modern Witchcraft Course
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🧙♀️Module 1: The Witch, Named
The word witch does its work long before anyone asks what a witch actually does. It arrives already carrying the meanings other people have placed on it, stacked up over centuries. Fairy tale villain. Temptress. Hag at the edge of the village. Woman tied to a stake. Halloween costume. Aesthetic. Joke. Threat.
Anyone drawn to this word is picking up something with history in it. The word has been used against people who healed, people who lived alone, people who knew too much, people who simply looked wrong to their neighbors at the wrong moment. Buried inside it is the memory of those who claimed it, and the memory of those who never claimed it but were named it anyway. It carries grief. It carries inheritance. It also carries the long quiet of folk practitioners who knew exactly what they were doing and called themselves anything but.
So this course begins where the craft itself begins: with the name. Not with candles or spells or moon phases, but with the word, what it means, where it came from, who gets to use it, and what it takes to say it out loud. By the end of this module, the word will be defined properly, the biggest misconceptions will be cleared away, and there will be two real skills in hand: how witches choose a craft name, and how witches decide how open to be about the path. Nobody needs to resolve the whole weight of the word before beginning. The craft only asks that the word be met honestly first.
What a Witch Is
Stripped of all the costume and rumor, the definition is simple. A witch is a person who practices witchcraft. That is the one definition that holds across every tradition, and it is worth noticing what it does not say. It says nothing about gender, religion, culture, age, or appearance. The popular image of the witch as a young woman with a certain look is a recent narrowing of a much older and much wider category. Witches have always come in every kind of person there is.
What makes someone a witch is the practicing. A witch works magic deliberately, on purpose, as a craft that is learned and refined, not by accident and not as a costume. Some people claim the identity first and grow into the practice. Some practice for years before the word ever feels right. Both doors lead into the same house.
And what is magic? For now, one plain working definition will do: magic is the deliberate use of focused intention, symbol, and action to create change, in the self, in a situation, or in the world. Intention simply means a clearly chosen aim, what the working is for. That short definition raises a hundred fair questions, and Module 4 exists to answer them. It is devoted entirely to how magic actually works, so those questions can wait a few modules without any harm.
Where the Word Comes From
The word witch is old English in the truest sense. It comes from Old English, the language spoken in England over a thousand years ago, where it appeared in two forms: wicca (pronounced roughly “witch-ah”), meaning a man who practices magic, and wicce (pronounced roughly “witch-eh”), meaning a woman who does. Both grew from the verb wiccian, to practice witchcraft. Witchcraft itself comes straight from wiccecraeft: the craft of the wicce. So the oldest bones of the word already say something important. The witch is defined by a craft, a skilled practice, the way a weaver is defined by weaving.
In the earliest records, these words kept close company with divination, which means seeking hidden knowledge, reading signs, telling what cannot be seen by ordinary means. The oldest witches on record were consulted, not just feared. People went to them for answers.
Many modern witches will say the word originally meant “wise one”, and it is a beloved piece of craft lore. Honesty requires a gentler claim: scholars have never settled where wicca and wicce came from before Old English, and the wise one origin is a lovely possibility rather than a proven fact. The true root of the word is uncertain, which suits the witch rather well. She has always kept a few things hidden.
One more thing hides in that etymology. The old masculine noun wicca was borrowed in the twentieth century as the name of a modern religion: Wicca. The religion is young even though its name is ancient, and the difference between Wicca and witchcraft matters enough to get its own section below, and its own fuller story in Module 3.
What Is Witchcraft
Witchcraft is the practice of working magic: the directed application of will, intention, symbol, and energy toward change. Will means the focused decision to act. Symbol means an object or gesture that stands for something larger, the way a candle flame can stand for hope or a knot can stand for a promise held tight. Energy, as witches use the word, means the felt sense of vitality and influence that practitioners work with; whether that is understood as literal, psychological, or somewhere in between varies witch to witch, and Module 4 takes that question seriously rather than waving at it.
Craft is the operative word, and it deserves a moment. Like blacksmithing, weaving, or medicine before it moved into hospitals, witchcraft is learned over years, refined through doing, and carried as much in the hands as in any book. No single textbook contains it. No exam confers it. There is only the practice of it, attentively, across enough time that the practicing changes the practitioner.
The craft works through many mediums: candle, herb, stone, word, breath, knot, bath, flame, and salt, among others. It moves through many timings and lives inside many traditions. What unites all of it is the deliberate working of will and symbol toward change. Every one of those mediums gets taught properly later in this course; they are named here only so the shape of the territory is visible from the start.
The Words Witches Use
Every craft has its vocabulary, and nothing makes a beginner feel more locked out than words everyone else seems to already know. These are the terms that come up constantly in witchcraft books, shops, and communities. Each is defined here once, plainly, so the rest of this course, and the rest of the witch’s reading life, sits on solid ground.
The Craft. Witches’ own shorthand for witchcraft itself, usually spoken with a capital C in the voice. “She has practiced the Craft for thirty years.”
Practitioner. A neutral, useful word for anyone who practices magic, whether or not they use the word witch.
Wicca and Wiccan. Wicca is one specific modern religion within the wider world of witchcraft, with its own beliefs, holidays, and structure. A Wiccan is a follower of that religion. Every Wiccan practices a form of witchcraft, but most modern witches are not Wiccan. The two words are not interchangeable, though the world outside constantly mixes them up.
Pagan and paganism. A broad umbrella for spiritual paths rooted in nature, the seasons, and often the old gods of pre-Christian cultures. Many witches consider themselves pagan. Plenty do not, including witches who are Christian, Jewish, or belong to no religion at all.
Magick with a k. Some witches add a k, a spelling popularized by early twentieth century occultists, to separate real practice from stage-show card tricks. It is purely a spelling choice. Magic and magick mean the same thing in this course, which uses the ordinary spelling.
Occult. A word that simply means hidden. It refers to the whole family of hidden or esoteric knowledge, from astrology to ceremonial magic. It sounds far more sinister than it is.
Coven and solitary. A coven is a small group of witches who practice together. A solitary witch practices alone. Most modern witches are solitary, by choice as often as by circumstance. Module 2 walks through the many shapes a practice can take.
Mundane. Witches’ everyday word for ordinary, non-magical life: the mundane world, a mundane job, mundane responsibilities. It is descriptive, not insulting. Even the most devoted witch pays mundane bills.
What It Is Not
Misconceptions need clearing before the real work begins, because they cloud the view. These are the big ones.
Witchcraft is not Satanism. This conflation is a centuries-old slander, born during the witch trials and kept alive by rumor ever since. The devil is a Christian theological concept, and most witchcraft operates outside a specifically Christian framework altogether. Most witches do not believe in Satan as a literal being, let alone worship him. The traditions are simply separate.
Witchcraft is not inherently anti-Christian. Many witches are Christian, were raised Christian, or move comfortably between Christian devotion and craft practice. Some left churches with wounds and say so. Many carry no quarrel at all. Diversity of belief is the norm, not the exception.
Wicca and witchcraft are not synonyms. This one earns repeating because the world gets it wrong daily. Wicca is one tradition inside a much larger category. A witch may be Wiccan or may not be, and most are not.
Witchcraft is not mostly cursing. The curse-flinging villain comes from fairy tales and persecution records, not from actual practice. Across history and today, most witches focus on healing, protection, blessing, guidance, grief work, and relationship with the cycles of life. Harmful magic does exist within the tradition; witches call it baneful magic, meaning magic worked with the intention to harm, bind, or punish. It is not denied and not pretended away, but for most practitioners it occupies a small corner of a much larger practice. The ethics of all this get a full module of their own, Module 13.
Witchcraft is not fantasy. It is a living tradition with real practitioners, real methods, and experiences its practitioners find meaningful enough to build decades of life around. Whether science can measure those experiences is a separate and open question, and witches themselves disagree about it cheerfully.
And witchcraft is not new. The current revival is recent; the behaviors it draws on are ancient. Folk magic, meaning the everyday practical magic of ordinary people, predates writing itself. Candles, herbs, water, salt, stones, knots, and spoken intention appear in the oldest traces of human ritual life anywhere on earth. Modern witchcraft as an organized movement is young. Witchcraft as human behavior is as old as humanity.
Claiming the Name
The word witch can be claimed as an identity, used as a plain description of practice, or serve as both, and none of these is more real than the others.
Plenty of people practice witchcraft without ever touching the word. This remains common in folk traditions where the label still stings. The Pennsylvania Dutch Braucher, a traditional folk healer of that community, performs healing charms and rejects the word witch outright. The Italian grandmother who knows the rituals against the malocchio, the evil eye, considers herself simply Catholic. The Southern healer who works roots, practicing the African American folk magic tradition often called rootwork or hoodoo, may avoid the label because of what it costs in her community. Their practices sit within the broad category of witchcraft whether or not they ever use the name, and their refusal of the name deserves respect, not correction.
The reverse is also true and also fine. A person can claim the identity while the practice is still forming, the one who buys the candles and the cards, reads everything, openly says the word, and is still finding a regular rhythm. That is not fraud. That is a beginning. The identity itself can do real work, steadying a person while the practice grows underneath it.
For many, the fullest expression eventually becomes both: working magic consistently, claiming the name, and building a craft to live inside. Some arrive through practice first and grow into the identity. Some claim the identity first and grow into the practice. There is no required order, and no one is standing at the door checking.
The Reclamation
For much of recorded European history, and throughout regions touched by European colonization, witch was a word used against people. To be named a witch could mean being branded criminal, heretic, or deviant, and could mean death. Thousands died in the witch trials. Long after the formal persecutions ended, the accusation kept doing damage through exclusion, family rupture, and public disgrace.
The modern reclamation, taking the weapon-word back and wearing it by choice, is recent. The witchcraft revival of the mid-twentieth century brought the word into the open; feminism and later identity movements carried it further; every generation since has continued the work. Module 3 tells that whole story properly. What matters here is that the work is unfinished. In some countries witchcraft remains criminalized. In some families and communities, the word still costs real relationships, real safety, real peace.
Which brings the course to its first genuinely practical question, one nearly every witch faces and almost no beginner book teaches: how open to be.
The Broom Closet
Witches have a phrase for keeping the practice private: being in the broom closet. It is a playful borrowing from “in the closet”, and it means practicing quietly, without announcing the path to family, coworkers, or the world. Hear this clearly, because the craft community itself says it with one voice: the broom closet is a boundary, not a failure. A witch practicing in total privacy is exactly as much a witch as one with a public altar and a pentacle necklace. Privacy is a valid, honorable choice, whether it lasts a season or a lifetime, and nobody is owed a disclosure.
Openness is not one big dramatic announcement anyway. It is a series of small decisions, person by person, room by room, and it can be partial: open with friends, private with grandparents, silent at work. Witches commonly weigh questions like these before opening any particular door:
Who actually needs to know? Sharing is a gift, not a duty, and most people in a witch’s life never need an announcement.
What would it cost if this particular person took it badly? Housing, employment, custody, and family peace are real stakes, and a witch who depends on someone for any of these is wise to move slowly.
Can the waters be tested first? A mention of crystals, tarot, or an interest in folklore usually reveals how someone will react to the bigger word.
Is the wish to share the practice, or just to stop hiding? These are different needs, and sometimes a trusted friend or an online circle of witches meets the second one safely.
Is it safe where this witch lives? In some places and households the honest answer is no, and staying quiet is not cowardice there. It is the same good sense witches have used for centuries.
A witch might spend years known to her online circle as Rowan while her coworkers know only Denise, and both names are honestly hers. Which leads directly to one of the craft’s oldest and most delightful customs.
Many Words, Many Traditions
The word witch is English, and its history and baggage are English too. Every culture has its own words, its own practitioners, and its own traditions, and none of them are interchangeable.
Strega in Italian. Bruja in Spanish. Hexe in German. The cunning folk of early modern England, village practitioners people hired for healing and finding lost things. The rootworkers and conjure doctors of African American tradition. The mambos and houngans, the priestesses and priests of Vodou. The babalawos, the diviner-priests of the Yoruba tradition of West Africa and its diaspora. Each carries its own practices, its own ethics, its own requirements, and its own relationship to the culture that sustains it.
Here a pair of terms every modern witch needs on day one, because they come up constantly and are rarely defined. An open tradition is one whose practices are available to anyone willing to learn them respectfully. A closed tradition is one that requires something specific to enter: birth into the community, formal initiation, or membership granted from inside. Vodou and the Yoruba priesthoods are initiatory, and many practitioners of hoodoo consider it closed to those outside the culture that made it. The general working principle witches follow is simple and serves well: admire freely, adopt carefully. When drawn to a practice from another culture, the respectful path is to learn from members of that tradition and follow their lead about what is shared and what is not.
Throughout this course, witch is used as a broad English-language category for practitioners of magic. It is a doorway word, not a universal label that overwrites the names, histories, and identities of other traditions. Anyone walking this path is participating in one tradition among many, and the others deserve respect, attribution, and sometimes distance.
Who Can Be a Witch?
Anyone. Gender does not exclude. Neither does race, age, religion, sexual orientation, disability, class, or geography. There are teenage witches just finding the path and elders sixty years into it. There are Catholic witches, Jewish witches, Muslim witches, Buddhist witches, atheist witches, and agnostic witches, and every one of those combinations is being lived right now by real people.
The image of the witch as young, thin, pale, feminine, and perfectly photographed is a product of marketing, not history. Actual witchcraft has always included every age, every body, every class, and every shade of skin. A witch is made by practice and relationship, not by demographics. The only thing that excludes a person from witchcraft is choosing not to practice it.
One honest warning belongs beside the welcome. Modern witchcraft is not one unified tradition with one rulebook. It is a family of traditions that frequently disagree with each other, about gods, about ethics, about technique, about everything. A beginner who assumes every book and every witch teaches the same thing will spend years confused. The field is plural, contested, and very much alive, and Module 2 maps it so the disagreements make sense instead of causing whiplash.
The Craft Name
Now for the first full teaching of the course, and it belongs in this module for an obvious reason: a module about the witch being named should end with the witch doing some naming of her own.
A craft name, also called a magical name, a witch name, or in group settings a coven name, is a chosen name a witch uses within her practice. It might be spoken in ritual, used among other witches, signed in a magical journal, or worn online. It is one of the craft’s most widespread customs, found in traditions that agree on almost nothing else.
Why Witches Take One
It marks a threshold. Taking a new name is one of humanity’s oldest ways of saying something has changed. The name announces, at least to the witch herself: the person who carries this is walking a path.
It separates craft from mundane life. Stepping into the craft name helps shift the mind out of errands and email and into ritual focus. Many witches describe it as a key that turns.
It protects privacy. In online witch spaces especially, a craft name lets a practitioner participate fully, ask beginner questions, share workings, while the mundane name stays safely out of it. For a witch in the broom closet, this is a practical shield, not just a poetic one.
It can be aspirational. Witches often choose names carrying qualities they want to grow into, which quietly turns the name itself into a long, slow working.
In some traditions it comes with initiation. Certain covens give or require a new name when a member formally joins. That name may stay inside the coven and never be spoken elsewhere.
And why do some witches never take one? Because it is entirely optional. Some feel their given name is already true. Many folk practitioners across history never used a separate name at all. A craft name is an available tool, not an entry requirement, and a witch can practice for fifty years without one and lack nothing.
Where Craft Names Come From
Witches commonly draw names from the natural and mythic world: plants and trees, such as Rowan, Sage, Briar, Willow, or Hazel, many of which carry old protective and magical associations; animals, especially ones a witch feels kinship with; the sky, moon, stars, and weather; landscape, such as rivers, moors, stones, and forests; ancestors and old family names; figures from myth and folklore; or meaningful words from a witch’s own heritage language. Some witches use a single name, and some build two-part names by joining a nature word with something personal. Some enjoy choosing by numerology, a system that assigns meanings to numbers and matches them to the letters of a name, though that is a garnish on the process rather than the meal.
Finding One: A Gentle Five-Step Way
There is no single required method, and some witches simply wake up knowing. For everyone else, here is one unhurried approach many witches use, spread over a few weeks. Nothing about it needs to be rushed, and the name page in this module’s practice below is where it begins.
Collect without judging. For a few weeks, keep a running list of candidate names. Gather them from walks, books, family history, myths, dreams, anywhere. No editing yet; a long messy list is a good sign.
Narrow by meaning. Set the list down and ask what each name actually carries. The strongest craft names are chosen for their qualities, not just their sound. A witch wanting steadiness might keep Oak and cross out something that merely sounded pretty.
Apply the aging test. Picture introducing this name at a gathering ten years from now, or signing it at seventy. Names chosen only because they sound impressive today tend to wince later. The ones that survive this test are the keepers.
Speak each finalist aloud. A name lives in the mouth, not on paper. Say it alone in a quiet room, more than once, and notice which one settles into the body and which ones stay costume.
Sleep on the winner three nights. Many witches use this old and sensible test: hold the chosen name for three nights, saying it once before sleep. If it still fits on the third morning, most witches consider the matter happily settled.
Using and Keeping It
Craft names are used at different depths. Some witches wear theirs publicly, as an online handle and among witch friends. Some keep theirs entirely secret, spoken only in private ritual, on the old principle that a name kept hidden keeps its power concentrated. Plenty do both, carrying a public craft name and a private one beneath it. Every arrangement is common and every one is legitimate.
No ceremony is required to make a craft name real; using it makes it real. Witches who want to mark it formally often fold the name into a dedication, a ceremony of formally committing to the path, and that belongs to the far end of this course, in Module 14, where it will be taught in full. And a name is not a tattoo. Witches change craft names as they grow, and a name that fit the first year of practice can be honorably retired in the tenth. The craft keeps what serves and releases what does not, names included.
A First Witch Practice: Meeting the Word
Every module in this course ends with something to actually do, and this one asks for no tools, no supplies, and no experience. Ten quiet minutes, a pen, and any notebook will serve; the craft’s formal journals are taught later in the course, and an ordinary spiral notebook works perfect magic in the meantime. This practice has three small parts, and it can be done tonight.
Part One: The Inventory
In the notebook, sit with these questions and answer honestly. First person, plain words, no performance. This is the witch meeting the word before taking it on, and there are no wrong answers anywhere on the page.
What did the word witch mean in the house where I grew up?
Where did I first meet a witch: a story, a film, a costume, a person, a warning?
What happens in my body when I say the word now? Excitement, fear, recognition, some braid of all three?
What drew me to this path, honestly?
What do I hope the word witch will mean in my life a year from now?
Part Two: Saying the Word
Then, alone and unhurried, the word gets said out loud. Not thought. Spoken. There is old craft wisdom in this: a thing spoken aloud is different from a thing merely thought, which is half of why witches speak their workings rather than think them. Many beginners find the word catches in the throat the first time, and that catch is worth noticing, because it is the whole history of the word being felt in real time. Witches at this threshold often use simple lines like these, until their own words arrive:
“I am learning the craft.”
“I am a student of witchcraft, and I am allowed to begin.”
“Witch. I am finding out what this word means in my own mouth.”
“I am a witch, still becoming one.”
Nothing is supposed to happen. Noticing what does happen, ease, resistance, a small thrill, nothing at all, is the entire practice, and every one of those responses is information a witch can use.
Part Three: The Name Page
Last, a fresh page in the notebook gets a single title: Names. Any craft-name candidates that surface over the coming weeks land here, gathered without judgment, exactly as step one of the five-step method describes. There is no deadline and no obligation to ever choose one. The page simply stays open, the way good doors do.
Where This Door Opens
This course offers tools, frameworks, and foundational skills, and what any practitioner builds with them is entirely her own. Everyone arrives carrying their own path, their own inheritance, their own questions, and their own reasons for standing at this particular door. No single tradition is prescribed here. What is offered is a foundation from which many traditions can be understood and a practice can honestly begin.
The craft, taken seriously, is a lifelong practice. It gives little to those who approach it only as an aesthetic, though it turns no one away at the threshold. For those who stay, the relationship deepens across decades: the hands learn, the instincts sharpen, and what begins as study becomes participation. A life gets built inside the craft. That is what this door opens onto.
The word has now been met: defined, traced to its roots, cleared of its worst rumors, and spoken aloud. What comes next is the question every newly named witch asks within the first week: what kind of witch? Module 2 walks the many paths of the witch, the green witches and kitchen witches and hedge witches and all the rest, so the path that fits can be recognized when it appears.
Disclaimer: Everything IFS Academy is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the IFS Institute. While we strive for accuracy, errors can occur, and users are encouraged to cross-reference critical information. The courses in the Witchcraft & Folk Magic Series explore witchcraft, folk magic, and related spiritual and cultural practices for educational and personal-interest purposes only. Nothing in them guarantees any particular result, and no ritual, spell, correspondence, or practice is offered as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, legal, or financial advice. Practices that involve fire, candles, herbs, plants, or other physical materials carry real risks such as burns, allergic reaction, or toxicity, and any practice is undertaken at your own discretion and risk. They do not constitute therapy, mental health treatment, clinical training, or crisis support, and they should not be used as a substitute for professional mental health care.
Crisis Support: 🚨 If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, feel unsafe, feel at risk of harming yourself or someone else, or feel too overwhelmed to safely use self-directed practices, please pause this material and reach out for immediate support. Contact a licensed mental health professional, call or text 988 in the U.S. or Canada, or use your local emergency or crisis resources.
A few calls I made you should sign off on:
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