Witchcraft 101: What is Witchcraft?

[Updated March 14th, 2026]

Traditionally, “witchcraft” referred to magic that was harmful, but witchcraft in the modern sense includes a wide range of magical practices that can be used either harmful or beneficial.

Witchcraft in modern times includes a wide range of practices and beliefs. In many spaces, you will also see people define "types" of witches, but you don't have to (and probably shouldn't) pick one and build your practice around just one "type" of witch. This will be discussed later, though.

Most commonly, witchcraft involves casting spells, doing divination (e.g. runes, tarot cards), dream interpretation/lucid dreaming, and occasionally communicating with spirits. You do not have to do everything to be considered a witch, a vast majority of people are drawn to a few particular practices and tend to stick with those. For example, I primarily do spirit work and divination.

Witches often keep a grimoire (or Book of Shadows, if they're Wiccan), which is a kind of "textbook" of magic/occult information, but grimoires should (in my opinion) come later, after you've learned some things. I'll discuss grimoires on their own at a later date.

Witches may or may not keep an altar (I'd say most do, however) and may or may not also be a pagan or practice a religion alongside witchcraft. How connected their religious practices are to their witchcraft comes down to the individual. Some witches keep them entirely separate (so called "secular" witches, see notes) and others incorporate their religion into their witchcraft directly (e.g. many pagans, Jewitches).

Witchcraft in previous decades was essentially synonymous with Wicca (as was paganism, as discussed in Paganism 101), but this has changed in recent years. Many authors still have a very clear bias towards Wiccan practices and may be entirely unaware of how Wicca-centric their work is, but progress has been made in including a wider variety of practices.

Witchcraft generally does not include ceremonial magic, but a lot of witchcraft (particularly Wiccan) does incorporate ideas from Western occultism and, therefore, ceremonial magic. An example would be circle casting in Wicca and Demonolatry (among others, of course). Some folk magic practitioners also prefer to not be grouped in with witches/witchcraft.

Notes: "Secular" means "without spirituality" and witchcraft is a spiritual practice. This is a massive pet peeve of mine, but I won't harp on about it.