Jemima Kelly: why I joined a witches’ coven
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It is just after 9pm on the first Saturday after Beltane and I am in a marquee five miles outside Coventry, dancing with a teenage goth and a 64-year-old warlock while a blue-haired woman with a half-shaved head belts out the refrain “Casting my spelllll!” from a podium in front of us. This year’s Witches Ball – an annual highlight here at the Festival for Pagans & Witches – is in full swing.
It is an auspicious, though slightly paradoxical, moment to find oneself at such a gathering. While a whole string of regions and states across the world – Scotland, Catalonia, Connecticut and Maryland, among others – have taken steps to exonerate or formally apologise to those accused of, and often executed for, witchcraft several hundred years ago, self-identifying as a witch has never been so popular.
On TikTok, some 9mn #WitchTok posts are available for your scrolling pleasure, where influencers/self-declared witches offer spells, potion recipes, life advice and tips on “deepening your [witch] practice”. And the “witchcore” aesthetic has been taking over not just social media feeds but runways, trendy queer bars and Taylor Swift’s wardrobe. Next year will see Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman reunited for Practical Magic 2, reprising their roles from the ’90s, a decade that turned witches into cultural and aesthetic icons via films like The Craft and series such as Charmed. Another ’90s spinoff, Wednesday, about the supernaturally gifted soft-goth Addams daughter, is the highest-streaming show on Netflix.
Precise figures for the number of people who identify as witches per se are hard to come by, but 0.7 per cent of adult Americans – about 1.8mn people – identify as wiccan, pagan, satanist or otherwise “New Age”, according to Pew’s 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Study. Back in 1990, just 8,000 Americans identified themselves as wiccans in the American Religious Identification Survey, which had swollen to 342,000 by 2008. The numbers from Britain are less eye-popping but still significant: about 74,000 people identified as pagans in the 2021 England and Wales census, up from 57,000 in 2011 and around 40,000 in 2001. Conservative Christians are, as one might expect, highly alarmed by all of this.
So how exactly did the idea of the witch morph from heretical social outcast to symbol of female empowerment? Why does the figure of the witch carry such enduring outrage and appeal? Does the cultural moment witches are having represent a true reclaiming of female ancestral power or is this all a load of faux-feminist nonsense? And if anyone can call themselves a witch, does the word have any meaning any more? I have come along to this festival to see whether or not I can find some answers.
I’ve also come to see how much common ground I might have with the people here. Because I have something of a personal connection to the world of witches: since 2017 I have been a member of the Sisters of the Sanitary Cloth (the name started as a joke but has stuck), and we refer to ourselves as a “coven”. We come from a range of backgrounds – one member is a fashion tech executive brought up in a pagan family in Norfolk; another grew up around the Caribbean and then Hackney and now teaches ceramics to adults with special needs – but we seem to share a desire to make our lives a bit witchier. It started when a friend organised an evening of intention-setting that became more ceremonial and, yes, woo-woo than any of us had imagined: there was chanting, crystals, hand-holding and burning. We all got so much out of it that we organised a weekend away; it was quickly termed the “witches’ weekend away” and the coven was born.
Do I consider myself a real witch? No. Have we invoked the spirit of Manon or hexed Donald Trump? Not yet. But does being in a closed group of women whose express purpose is to provide support, inspiration and good vibes for one another add value, comfort and richness to my life? Yes. And furthermore, taking part in regular rituals and ceremonies – we are a bit haphazard about these, but we gather for the odd full moon or when a member might be having a hard time – adds a dimension to my life that I very much cherish, and that I hadn’t realised I had been missing, maybe since my teenage years attending convent school.
My Catholic upbringing is one shared by the festival’s founder, Julie Aspinall, a slightly intimidating 60-year-old witch, granny and security-dog trainer with poker-straight blonde hair, turquoise eyeliner and silver shimmer smudged under heavily lined brows. She tells me it’s a common background for witches. “You ask any witch here, and 90 per cent of them will have had a Catholic upbringing. Why? Because spirituality was forced on us,” she says in a strong Coventry accent. “But our deity is Mother Earth, so we do rituals to work with her or with gods and goddesses we call in to work with our spells.”
Aspinall started the festival in 2021 but extended it to three days this year to keep up with demand. As well as the ball and dozens of stalls selling witch- and pagan-themed goods, it features a programme of rituals, performances and workshops – sessions include “snakeskin powder in ritual”, “unfreezing trauma with ice dragons” and “witches’ baubles”. Some 3,300 tickets were presold and another few hundred are sold each day on the door at £15 each, with all profits going to charity.
As I wander around, I notice there’s a real sense of inclusivity and diversity here that I don’t think I’ve encountered at a festival before. Not only is there a significant trans contingent as well as a large number of disabled people, there are also just a lot of people whom you might characterise as misfits or oddballs but seem right at home. It strikes me that, along with all the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-feminism and the algorithmically optimised TikTok drivel, being a witch offers many people who struggle to fit in a sense of belonging.
When I shyly tell Marion Gibson, a professor of renaissance and magical literatures at the University of Exeter and author of several books on witchcraft, about my own experience with my “coven” over the phone, she tells me mine is a common experience. “A lot of people, particularly women, though not exclusively, find the witch a useful figure for doing those kinds of ceremonial or ritualistic things,” she says. “And people tend to find witches empowering, because they’re just such an obvious victim of historic injustice and people want to recover their stories and give them something back or celebrate them.”
The idea of the witch acting as a useful archetype for modern women to tap into is one I hear from others too. Alice B Davies, founder of Salon, which creates fully shoppable curated rooms, has recently launched a room – Chambre Bleu – that she describes as “witch-coded”, inspired by her self-identifying witch mother, featuring crystal obelisks, a hand-carved machalite ashtray with a burning smudge stick and a triptyque of naked witchy women above the bed. “In the ’90s, when it was my mum and her hippie mates being witchy, there was a very definite type,” she tells me. “But now it’s across the board. I feel like women are almost rediscovering this other way of figuring shit out and being together.”
Aspinall discovered she was a witch when she was a teenager and realised she could “manifest things” for herself (making boys fancy her was one), though she kept her gift largely private for a long time, afraid of a negative reaction. After coming across a couple of witchcraft pages on Facebook that seemed inauthentic, she decided to set up a coven with a social media presence of its own: the Coven of Gaia, which now has 19 members aged 32 to 70. One of those is my dance partner Mark Ashley, 64, one of three male witches in the coven, an auctioneer who appears on the TV programme Bargain Hunt. I initially made the mistake of calling him a “wizard” (in my defence he is the exact image of what that word conjures up) but he corrects me. “Wizard’s a bit Harry Pottery,” he says. “I’m a witch, which in old English just meant ‘wise person’; it was gender-non-specific.”
Ashley and the other members of the Coven of Gaia have almost 840,000 followers on TikTok, where they post daily spells – usually from the “spell room” in Aspinall’s house nearby, where she lives with three Rottweilers and two German Shepherds. Recent offerings include a video on “How to hex your enemy” (putting an evil spell on them) and “Make someone obsessed with you”.
“Do you really cast bad spells on people?” I ask Aspinall. “Yes, of course I do. I call it justice,” she replies sassily. “Like, if someone kidnapped, raped and killed my sister, I’d not only hex them. I’d hex their whole family under a dark moon. Fuck. That. Shit.”
While we are mid-chat, she gets a call from a woman convinced that another coven in Wales has put a curse on her and so wants to be “cleansed” (Aspinall herself seems less convinced). “If you go to my tent and ask for Paula and tell her that I sent you and you need cleansing, she’ll take you into the woods and do it,” she says down the phone.
“I’ll tell you what will happen,” she says to me once she’s finished the call. “If I tell her we’ll cleanse her and it will go away, it doesn’t matter whether we’ve cleansed her and done magic to make it go away, her mind will believe it’s gone away and it will be sorted. That’s how spells work – if you tell me, ‘I’ve got a really bad leg, can you send me healing’, and I say, ‘Of course I will’, you’ll feel better the next day.”
“Are you saying it’s all in the mind?” I ask.
“I think it’s a bit of both. Me doing magic is the power of my mind, and I’m just tapping into the power of your mind, aren’t I? Even if it’s just making you believe I’ve done something.”
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