Witches & Witch Hunts

I learned about so many different aspects of magic and witchcraft this year, from histories of magic to historic witch hunts and all the way through modern practices and beliefs. As the semester comes to a close, this final post shares the top 5 things that stuck out to me throughout our class (a tough choice to make). 1. The banality of modern magic – I grew up in a conservative town where a person certainly couldn’t express an interest in practicing witchcraft or any related occult belief without serious judgment. Even last summer I worried about reading Harry Potter in front of my family because I know some of them consider the series and its “glorification of witchcraft and wizardry” an affront to Christianity (though my efforts didn’t matter much in the end, because my Women and Gender Studies major got me called out all the same). More recently I saw a Facebook post about Satanists working against our Christian community. Always fascinated by stories of witches, I never much agre...