🕯️ To Be a Witch in the USA Right Now: A Survival Grimoire of Resistance, Rest & Sacred Rage

To be a witch in the United States in 2025 is to live in-between. In-between worlds. In-between movements. In-between safety and danger, silence and scream.

And if you’re LGBTQ+, a witch of color, disabled, neurodivergent—or any combination of these—then you already know: Witchcraft isn’t just aesthetics or herbs or cute moon water rituals. It’s survival. It’s spellwork in a burning house. It’s calling the ancestors to hold the line while you rest, rebuild, or rage.

This is your practical spellbook, political mirror, and sacred survival guide for being a witch in a world that wants you to disappear.

🏛️ The Spirits Haunting This Land: What We’re Up Against

Let’s not flinch.

• Christian nationalism is rising. Religious fundamentalism is creeping into law, health care, education—especially targeting queer, trans, and BIPOC communities.
  

• Transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny aren’t whispered—they’re being legislated.
  

• White supremacy is rebranding itself in spiritual circles, misusing runes and pagan symbols in the name of hate.
  

• Books are being banned. Histories erased. Queer and Black youth criminalized for existing.
  

• And grief is thick. Climate collapse. War. Silence. Censorship. Disconnection.
  

And yet—Here we are. Lighting candles. Calling in our dead. Choosing to love, connect, and rise.

✨ What It Means to Be a Witch Now

Witchcraft today is not neutral. It never was.

To be a witch now is to:

• Reclaim the body you were told was wrong

• Refuse to disappear quietly

• Tend to your sacred self while everything screams for urgency

• See through illusion and enchant the truth
  

Magic has always belonged to the margins. Midwives. Queers. Seers. Outcasts. Healers. Refugees. Artists. Rebels.

Your magic is not a trend. It is a tradition of resistance.

🧙🏽‍♀️ Especially If You’re Queer, Trans, or a Witch of Color…

You are not a newcomer to this story. You are the survivor of a thousand untold ones.

• Black witches carried spells in their bones across the Middle Passage and whispered freedom into moonlight.
  

• Two-Spirit and trans mystics were honored in Indigenous communities long before colonizers imposed shame.
  

• Jewish witches read psalms backwards and coded spells into Torah margins to survive exile.
  

• Disabled witches were once seers and spirit-bearers, only later branded as broken by eugenic ideals.
  

• Queer witches have cloaked magic in art, theater, drag, and desire for centuries.
  

Your breath is a spell. Your joy is a ward. Your rage is holy.

🧿 This Is Not the First Time

We are not the first.We are not alone.Our lineage is built on the bones of the ones who made it through.

• During the Salem Witch Trials, enslaved Black woman Tituba was the first to be accused. Her survival strategy? She leaned into what the Puritans feared—confessing to witchcraft to protect herself, spinning tales the court wanted to hear, subtly claiming power in a system stacked against her.
  

• Mother Shipton, a disabled woman in 16th century England, used prophecy to shield herself in a world where women like her were often cast out. They called her a hag, but she outlived her accusers and died peacefully, having built a life rooted in folk magic and fearless voice.
  

• The Zapatista women of Chiapas have woven indigenous spiritual practice with armed resistance and feminist organizing. Their rebellion is not just against capitalism—it’s for life, land, and ancestral memory. That, too, is witchcraft.
  

• In the Harlem Renaissance, Black women like Zora Neale Hurston preserved hoodoo, storytelling, and southern rootwork under the guise of folklore research—reclaiming stolen traditions, surviving erasure by writing it down.
  

• Trans witches of the 1980s and 90s, like those in the Radical Faerie movement, created queer sanctuaries in forests and cities alike—building sacred spaces from the ashes of systemic violence and the AIDS crisis.
  

History shows us: the craft survives. The witches survive. And every time they try to bury us, We sprout teeth.

🔥 The Spell Is This:

We speak truth, even when our voices shake. We cry in ritual circles, then cackle over coffee. We hex the patriarchy and still leave offerings for the land. We organize, we rest, we love, we rise. We remember.

To be a witch right now is to cast spells of protection around your friends. To set wards at the protest line. To charge your voice with sigils. To make love a rebellion. To be a sanctuary with legs.

🌈 Let Your Magic Be Loud

So light your candles, yes. But also… Write your senators. Feed your neighbors. Vote when you can .And hex what harms, with both spell and action.

Because to be a witch in the United States in 2025 is to carry centuries of sacred rebellion in your bones.

Not everyone will understand you. That’s okay. You weren’t made for their comfort.

You were made for the storm.

🔥 A Practical Spellbook for Daily Survival (and Sacred Thriving)

🪶 DAILY PRACTICES FOR MARGINALIZED WITCHES

1. Ground Like It’s a Shield Visualize roots or ancestors forming a circle. Say: “I am held. I am real. I am not alone.”

2. Make Protective Sigils Use lotion, eyeliner, breath on a mirror. Your body is sacred technology.

3. Create a "Joy Altar" Build it from what makes you smile: trinkets, candy, playlists, selfies, queer icons, ancestral photos.

4. Rest Without Apology Say: “Even when I do nothing, I am still worthy.” Claim stillness as an act of war against burnout culture.

5. Use Music as Magic Music is spellcraft. Try:

• Joy Oladokun – “Breathe Again”

• Janelle Monáe – “Make Me Feel”

• Mx. Mack – “Queer Magic”

• Florence + the Machine – “Shake It Out”
  

📚 EDUCATION + ACTION FOR ALLIES

1. Read These:

• Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

• Decolonizing Witchcraft – Aurora Levins Morales

• Hoodoo for Everyone – Tawanna Hannar

• Queering Your Craft – Cassandra Snow

• Black Queer Hoe – Britteney Black Rose Kapri
  

2. Learn How to Sit With Discomfort Don’t spiritualize it away. Don’t skip to “love and light.” Stay in the messy.

3. Redistribute Resources Support queer/BIPOC/disabled creators and witches financially and vocally.

4. Protect Each Other Call in harmful behavior. Share safety plans. Build altars for those who can’t show their faces.

📜 History Lessons from the Margins: How Our Ancestors Survived

Your magic is not new. It is the continuation of a bloodline of resistance. Here’s how witches, mystics, and sacred rebels made it through:

🖤 Enslaved Black Healers (USA, 1600s–1800s)

Even under the horror of chattel slavery, Black women and men preserved African healing traditions—disguising rootwork, herbal knowledge, and ancestor veneration as Christianity. Their work became the roots of Hoodoo, conjure, and Southern Black folk medicine. Survival strategy: Sacred camouflage, coded rituals, spiritual resilience.

🌿 Jewish Mystics in the Diaspora

Throughout history, Jewish women practiced folk magic alongside rabbinical law—writing healing spells in Aramaic, tucking amulets under pillows, using psalms as protective chants. During the Holocaust, these traditions became tools for psychological and spiritual endurance. Survival strategy: Textual spells, communal hiding, encoded prayer.

🌈 Queer Witches During the AIDS Crisis (1980s–90s)

While the government failed, queer witches and healers showed up. They anointed their dead with sacred oils. They created healing circles, zines, herbal care kits, and underground spiritual spaces. Survival strategy: Mutual care, grief rituals, underground sanctuaries.

🪶 Indigenous Resistance Rituals (ongoing)

Despite centuries of cultural genocide, Indigenous spiritual leaders have continued secret ceremonies, oral tradition, and land-based wisdom. Today, many communities are reclaiming language and ritual—and resisting environmental destruction with sacred activism. Survival strategy: Rematriation, ceremony, community guardianship.

🤝 How to Build a Coven of Care (In Real Life)

• 🌕 Host monthly moon calls—no pressure, just presence

• 📬 Start a witchy penpal group for those without safe in-person spaces

• 🛍️ Create a barter altar: trade herbs, zines, spell jars, books

• 📱 Make a signal group for local protection + resource sharing

• 🫂 Use the magic words: "What do you need?" and "How can I hold space?"
  

🌱 A Blessing for the Witch Who Feels Unsafe

For the witch who watches the news and wonders if they’ll come for you next— You are not wrong to be afraid. But you are also not alone. May your voice be louder than their shame. May your circle be stronger than their walls. May your altar burn brighter than their fear. May your joy be the spell they cannot break. You were never meant to survive quietly. You were meant to rise.

🌒 You Are the Witch They Tried to Burn

But they didn’t win. You’re still here. We are still here.

Messy altars. Bare feet. Rage in our bellies. We are the children of the ones who buried their spells under floorboards. We are the queer flame, the ancestral echo, the spell that slipped past the guards.

We are the ones we were waiting for. And the ones who will not go quietly.

💌 Next Steps for Witchy Survival and Solidarity

• 📥 Subscribe to our newsletter for spells, stories, and sacred resources

• 🌐 Join the Weird Sisters Circle—a free digital coven of weird, wild witches

• 🛍️ Support BIPOC, queer, and disabled creators in your community

• 🕯️ Speak your truth. Cast your spell. Protect each other.
  

The coven is calling. Come sit with us. Let’s light the way—together.