Do You Know Where Your Practices Came From?

I have a question.

Who taught the person teaching you?

Seriously.

We live in a time when somebody can open TikTok, watch a sixty-second video about tarot cards, scroll into another about crystals, stumble across chakras, hear somebody talking about smudging, manifestation, covens, spirit animals, and suddenly find themselves three hours deep in something called WitchTok.

And somewhere along the way, somebody will probably use the word ancient.

Ancient practice.

Ancient wisdom.

Ancient ritual.

But how often do we stop and ask what that actually means?

Ancient where?

Ancient when?

Practiced by whom?

And how did it get from them to the person currently explaining it to you through your phone?

So I went digging.

And, as usually happens when I go digging, I ended up much farther down the rabbit hole than I intended.

What I discovered wasn’t one history.

It was a whole bunch of histories that eventually got tangled together.

When we hear the word witch today, we might picture crystals, tarot cards, candles, herbs, black clothes, a coven, maybe a pointy hat if Halloween is involved.

But go back several centuries and witch was usually not an identity someone proudly selected from a drop-down menu.

It was an accusation.

During the major European witch persecutions, roughly between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of people were prosecuted, and historians generally estimate that roughly 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed. Women made up the majority of those accused, although men were accused too, and the percentages varied depending on where you were.

And contrary to a story that became popular much later, historians have not found evidence that all these people belonged to one secret underground Pagan religion that had survived intact from ancient times.

In many cases, accusations began much closer to everyday life.

Someone became sick.

An animal died.

A crop failed.

A neighbor had an argument with another neighbor and something terrible happened afterward.

People could interpret those events as harmful magic.

Then religious authorities and demonologists added their own ideas about Satan, demonic pacts, witches’ Sabbaths, and organized conspiracies.

Even the historical image of “the witch” was being built from different sources.

And here’s a perfect example of how easily popular history gets distorted:

People were not burned at the stake during the Salem witch trials.

Nineteen people were hanged. Giles Corey was pressed to death after refusing to enter a plea. Others died in jail.

Yet ask people how the Salem witches died and somebody will inevitably say they were burned.

Repeat something enough times and eventually everybody “knows” it.

That’s going to become important.

So how did witch become something people call themselves?

That took time.

During the nineteenth century, writers began reimagining the witch. Instead of only portraying her as something evil and dangerous, some writers began portraying the persecuted witch as an outsider, rebel, victim of oppression, or symbol of resistance.

Women’s-rights activist Matilda Joslyn Gage connected witch persecutions with the historical oppression of women in her 1893 book Woman, Church and State.

But here’s where things get interesting.

Even people trying to reclaim the witch sometimes repeated bad history.

Enormous estimates of how many people died in the witch hunts circulated for years. Stories developed portraying the accused as members of an underground female-centered religion or as persecuted healers and midwives.

Modern historians have challenged many of those claims.

That’s why everybody gets fact-checked around here.

Even people whose larger argument we might sympathize with.

In the twentieth century, Gerald Gardner became one of the most important figures in what would become Wicca.

Gardner claimed that in 1939 he had been initiated into a witch coven in England’s New Forest.

That’s the claim.

Whether the group Gardner described existed exactly as he later portrayed it remains debated. What historians have not established is Gardner’s much larger claim: that it represented the survival of an ancient pre-Christian witch religion handed down intact through the centuries.

Modern scholarship instead generally understands Wicca as a twentieth-century new religious movement that combined and reworked older materials from ceremonial magic, folklore, Pagan ideas, occult traditions, ritual practices, and other sources.

And that distinction matters.

Something can contain ancient ingredients without the finished recipe being ancient.

That sentence kept coming back to me during this research.

Because I found it everywhere.

Take tarot.

The earliest documented tarot cards appeared in fifteenth-century northern Italy and were used for trick-taking games.

They weren’t originally little cardboard messages from the universe about whether Brad was going to text you back.

That came later.

The occult interpretation of tarot developed particularly in eighteenth-century France, when writers began connecting the cards with hidden wisdom, ancient Egypt, divination, and esoteric traditions.

Some of those historical claims about tarot’s supposedly ancient Egyptian origins aren’t supported by the evidence.

The cards are genuinely old.

The familiar occult system surrounding them is younger.

Those are two different statements.

Crystals are different.

Humans really have attributed religious, protective, medicinal, and magical properties to stones for thousands of years.

We have physical evidence.

Ancient Egyptian amulets survive today made from materials such as carnelian, lapis lazuli, amethyst, turquoise, and other stones. Egyptians associated particular materials, colors, shapes, inscriptions, and rituals with protective and regenerative powers.

So if someone tells you humans have attached spiritual significance to stones for thousands of years?

Checkmark.

That part holds up.

But that doesn’t automatically mean every chart circulating online telling you exactly which crystal controls which modern concept was handed down unchanged from ancient Egypt.

Then chakras sent me down another rabbit hole.

Chakra concepts genuinely have old roots in South Asian religious and yogic traditions.

That’s documented.

But the familiar Western chart showing seven chakras running through the body in rainbow order—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—is not simply an ancient Indian chart preserved unchanged for thousands of years.

Those ideas went through substantial reinterpretation after entering Western occult and esoteric movements.

Theosophical writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped reshape Western understandings of chakras. Later writers connected them with psychology, nerve centers, endocrine glands, colors, gemstones, and other systems.

The familiar Western rainbow version developed much later than the underlying South Asian traditions.

Ancient roots?

Yes.

Modern presentation exactly as we know it?

Not necessarily.

By this point, the pattern was pretty hard to miss.

When traditions travel, things change.

Take sage.

Burning aromatic plants in religious ceremonies isn’t unique to one culture.

But specific Indigenous smudging traditions belong to specific Indigenous peoples, with their own plants, meanings, prayers, protocols, and histories.

There isn’t one universal “Native American religion.”

There are hundreds of Indigenous nations with their own cultures and traditions.

And that history matters even more when you remember that Indigenous religious practices were actively suppressed in the United States. In 1883, the federal Code of Indian Offenses targeted certain Native ceremonies. It wasn’t until 1978 that Congress enacted the American Indian Religious Freedom Act declaring federal policy protecting traditional Indigenous religious exercise.

Now fast-forward to modern consumer culture.

Suddenly you can buy a “smudging kit.”

The ceremony has been separated from the community.

The history disappears.

The theology disappears.

The object remains.

And somebody sells it.

In 2018, Sephora planned to sell a “Starter Witch Kit” containing tarot cards, rose quartz, and white sage. After criticism involving commercialization and cultural appropriation, the product was canceled.

That controversy wasn’t really about one box.

It raised a much bigger question:

What happens when somebody else’s religious or cultural practice becomes somebody else’s product?

That question gets even more complicated when completely different traditions start being grouped together.

Haitian Vodou is not Louisiana Voodoo.

Louisiana Voodoo is not Hoodoo.

Hoodoo is not Wicca.

Wicca is not generic witchcraft.

And none of those automatically become the same thing because somebody puts them together in a TikTok video.

Haitian Vodou is an African-diasporic religion with deep African roots that developed in Haiti.

Louisiana Voodoo developed through its own history in Louisiana and New Orleans.

Hoodoo, also called conjure or rootwork, developed among African Americans in the United States, drawing heavily from West and Central African traditions while also interacting with Christianity and other influences.

Even the stereotypical “voodoo doll” has a much messier history than popular culture suggests. Human-shaped magical figures and poppets appear in traditions outside Vodou, including European folk magic.

The horror-movie version flattened a lot of different histories into one spooky package.

Sound familiar?

Meanwhile, the witch herself was changing again.

While religious witchcraft was developing, the witch was also becoming a political symbol.

In 1968, radical feminists in New York formed a group called W.I.T.C.H.—Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell.

Yes.

That was really the name.

And honestly, 1968 had commitment to the bit.

They used witch imagery deliberately as political theater and famously staged a “hex” on Wall Street.

The word that had once been used to accuse and persecute women was now being deliberately reclaimed by women as a symbol of rebellion.

At the same time, Wicca and other Pagan movements were spreading in the United States and interacting with feminism, environmentalism, counterculture, and alternative spirituality.

Then popular culture joined the party.

Bewitched.

The Craft.

Practical Magic.

Sabrina.

Charmed.

Eventually American Horror Story: Coven.

The witch increasingly became young, stylish, independent, powerful, rebellious, feminine, and sometimes heroic.

And eventually she got a TikTok account.

That’s where histories that began in completely different places can suddenly appear on the same screen.

Tarot.

Crystals.

Chakras.

Sage.

Manifestation.

Wicca.

Paganism.

Hoodoo.

Voodoo.

Indigenous imagery.

Astrology.

Feminism.

New Age spirituality.

Pop culture.

And social media adds something history never had before:

The algorithm.

Researchers studying WitchTok have even documented something called algorithmic divination—people interpreting videos appearing on their personalized feeds as potentially spiritually significant or specifically meant for them.

Think about that for a second.

The recommendation system learns what you watch.

It shows you more of it.

And somebody may interpret the next video as the universe sending them a message.

Technology and spirituality have collided in a way our ancestors couldn’t possibly have imagined.

And there’s money involved too.

Tarot readings.

Etsy shops.

Subscriptions.

Courses.

Crystals.

Kits.

Candles.

Products.

Content.

A spiritual identity can also become a consumer identity.

And after following all of these histories, I kept coming back to the question I started with.

Not:

“Are you allowed to believe this?”

Not:

“Is your religion wrong?”