Real-life witch on the misconceptions she faces and what draws her to witchcraft: ‘It’s helped me move through times of great sadness.’
Meet the professional witch and author of "Initiated: Memoir of a Witch" who says she can fly and cast spells, and wants the public to know that witchcraft is no laughing matter.
Video Transcript
AMANDA YATES GARCIA: One of the most frustrating things about being a public which is when people are like that woman thinks she's a witch, ha, ha, ha. They're kind of making fun of something that they really know nothing about, making fun of me for believing in something that they don't really understand. Nobody likes to be mischaracterized like that.
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My mother is a witch. So I grew up practicing Witchcraft with a set of tools. So that means that we use herbs, we pay attention to the rhythms and cycles of the moon and the sun, we work with candles and spells and rituals and invocations. We also tend to work with elemental magic-- so fire, air, Earth, and water.
I do protective rituals. I connect with the Earth and meditate. I go out into the woods and communicate with the spirits up there. It's a daily practice of things that I do that has brought me joy and grounding. But it's really our commitment to Witchcraft that makes it transformative.
Witchcraft is not really a belief system. It's a practice. The idea that, you know, you're going to wave a magic wand and totally transform your life in just one instant it's just completely not true and witches don't think that. It's a constant ongoing practice.
People see Witchcraft in pop culture as something that is fantastical. The witch defies the law of physics-- she might fly through the air, she might transform a person into a frog, she's doing all these things that we know can't be done. Witches don't see themselves that way.
So for instance, there is a tradition of flight of flying through the air even on brooms but it's a trance state. Your body is in your bed or it's in your room but you are leaving your body in a sense like a visualization and like traveling through the sky in the world and maybe like visiting other people. But it's not something that we would say like you're going to see a witch actually floating in the air.
I do cast spells. You carve your intention into a candle. You hold the candle and you focus on what you'd like to manifest in the world.
They dress the candle with oils, with salts, with herbs, and they should all correspond to your intention. So for instance, like if you want to call love into your life, then you might dress the candles with rose oil. And then sit and visualize what you want as if it's already happened and blow your intention into the candle and then light it and let it burn all the way through.
Witchcraft isn't just all love and light. It's very much about dealing with our shadow and confronting the things within us that cause us heartbreak or the ways that we hurt or harm other people. But that's actually what makes it such a happy religion. We're willing to look at the things that most people don't want to see and like wrestle with it and deal with it.
Witchcraft has done everything for me. It's helped to make me a more grounded happy person that's helped me move through times of great sadness and losses. It helps me forge a more intimate connection with nature and with the natural world and with the Earth. What Witchcraft has given me is bottomless.
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