Weavers, Wanderers and Wizards
Exploring Witch Types
Last weekend, a woman at a festival asked me, “So—what kind of witch are you?” She meant it kindly, the way people do when they’re trying to find common ground. Still, the question always makes me pause. There’s no official governing body handing out witch cards. What we call ourselves says more about where our magic lives than about hierarchy or belonging.
When people ask, what they really mean is, What’s your focus? How do you connect?
Maybe your magic lives in the garden, or the kitchen, or the rhythm of the moon. Maybe it flows through your playlists and your code, your hikes and your heartbreaks. The labels—green, hedge, cosmic, cottage—aren’t cages. They’re conversation starters.
You might be one. Or several. Or none at all.
Your practice is yours to define.
Solitary Witches
I was in the garden early this morning, pruning back the sage before it chokes out the lavender. The wind was soft, the chickens murmuring in the coop, and I thought of the many years I’ve spent working alone. Not lonely, though loneliness visits. Simply alone—my altar under the walnut tree, my voice the only one in the circle. This is the life of the Solitary Witch.
A solitary witch (some say lone witch, but I prefer solitary—it suggests choice, not exclusion) practices without a coven or group. They learn through books, intuition, direct experience, and the quiet conversations between self and the unseen. Their rituals may be elaborate or may be as simple as lighting a candle while the kettle boils. There’s no one to impress. No one to perform for. The work becomes honest.
Solitaries are common these days, especially with so many resources available online and in print. Some choose the path because groups are scarce where they live. Some because their spiritual tempo is slower or quicker than a coven’s natural rhythm. Others because they simply prefer their own company. I understand that well.
There are challenges. A solitary must be their own teacher, priest, witness, and critic. It’s easy to drift into ungrounded fantasy if you don’t keep your feet in the dirt (sometimes literally; I recommend gardening for that). The work deepens when balance is kept: study, practice, reflection.
If you are solitary, remember:
You are not doing it “less” just because you are alone.
Your practice is valid even without lineage or group ritual.
Seek community if you want it, but don’t force yourself into ill-fitting circles.
Walk in wisdom, wild and free.
You are not alone, even when there’s no one else in the room.
Traditional / Coven Witches
I was fitting a handrail last month, cold morning, metal biting my fingers, and a kid in my apprentice group asks me, “So what’s a real witch? Like, the old-school kind?” And I tell him: some folks work in groups. Some folks work alone. Neither is more “real,” but coven witches? They’ve got their own rhythm.
Traditional witches—like Gardnerian or Alexandrian Wicca—work in covens. Structured. Consistent. Initiatory. You don’t just show up and get a title. You earn it. Step by step. Like starting in the shop sweeping floors before you touch the forge. Same idea. Respect for craft.
Most of these covens have shared rites, specific ways of calling the gods, set feast days, known chants. Oaths too. And these people take those oaths seriously. You don’t go blabbing what’s said inside circle any more than I’d hand out someone’s custom blade design just because I thought it looked cool.
There’s lineage there—teacher to student, back through time. Not ancient forever-and-ever unbroken, but steady enough to matter. It’s like learning from a master smith who learned from their master. You get shaped by the hands before you.
Coven work can be powerful. Group ritual hits different. Voices together, breath together, feet on the earth. You feel the gods standing close sometimes. Warm like forge heat on your face.
But it’s not for everyone. Some folks thrive in groups. Some bristle. Some don’t want the structure or the personalities or the hierarchy. That’s fine.
Kitchen Witch
Why does everyone think they have to pick a witch “type” on day one? I see this a lot. Folks ask me, “Am I allowed to call myself a kitchen witch?” while they’re literally stirring soup with intention. If the shoe fits, honey, it freaking fits.
A Kitchen Witch works in the everyday, the repetitive, the already-happening. The chopping, stirring, wiping, brewing. Magic’s already in your hands because you’re already touching the world. If I’m simmering broth, I’m stirring in patience. If I’m making coffee at 6am while the kids argue about cereal, I’ll hum a protection chant under my breath. Every chore is a ritual. The work is already there; the magic is in how you frame it.
Now, within that umbrella, people sometimes split into Hearth Witches or Cottage Witches. Honestly? They’re almost the same, just different flavors.
A Hearth Witch focuses on the home as sacred. They care about the emotional temperature of the house, not just whether it smells like rosemary and bread. They do a lot of protection work. Boundary magic. Keeping everyone inside safe and supported. Think charm bags above doorways, sweeping with intention, whispering blessings over laundry.
A Cottage Witch is basically the same idea but often with a bit more nature-involved—gardening, herbs on windowsills, preserving jam, maybe chickens if you can manage them. Still home-centered, still practical, just with more mud under the fingernails.
Here’s the piece most folks miss: you don’t declare your type. You notice it. You look at where your hands already go when no one’s watching.
If your magic keeps slipping into the kitchen?
You’re a kitchen witch. You don’t need permission.
Green or Earth Witch
I was crouched beside the bay tree behind the little coffee shop in Portland the first time I realized how much of my practice lived in the soil. I’d stopped to photograph the morning light hitting its leaves, but my hands wandered to the ground—pressing into damp mulch, feeling the cool give of living earth. A scrub jay chattered above me, like it had opinions about my posture. I remember thinking: This is the altar. This is the work.
So when people ask what a Green or Earth witch is, I tend to ask back: How do you touch the land? Because it’s not about owning acres or living near pristine wilderness. It’s about relationship. Attention. The slow accumulation of noticing: the first nettles pushing up in spring, the smell of rain before it arrives, which plants volunteer in the cracks of your sidewalk.
Green witches lean into the physical world—herbs, soil, compost, seed. They learn the names of local plants (including the “weeds”), and the stories those plants carry. They practice reciprocity: harvesting mindfully, leaving offerings that aren’t plastic or glitter, planting native species for pollinators. Their spells often look like garden beds, tincture jars, teas, smoke bundles made from herbs they grew themselves because they know where they came from and who they were gathered with.
Eco-magic isn’t separate from activism. It’s part of refusing the idea that nature is resource instead of relationship. Sometimes the spell is planting milkweed. Sometimes it’s calling your city council. Sometimes it’s choosing not to harvest that one plant because the bees need it more.
Eclectic Witches
I was grinding down a weld seam the other day—sparks jumping like fireflies—and my neighbor’s teenager asks me, “Is it okay to mix practices?” And I shrug and say, “Everyone’s doing it already. Just do it with respect.”
Eclectic witches build their craft like I build tools. Piece by piece. What fits stays. What doesn’t gets tossed. No need to follow one tradition start to finish. You listen to your gut more than some book’s table of correspondences. You try a spell, see if it works. Adjust. Hammer. Quench. Hammer again.
But. And I mean this solid. Know where your materials come from.
Hoodoo and Rootwork? Those come from African Diaspora traditions. They’re living, cultural, ancestral systems—not ingredients for your spell smoothie. Don’t just lift from them because it “feels witchy.” Learning is fine. Respecting lineage is mandatory.
Within eclectic practice you get types:
Pop-Culture Witches
Seen it all. Someone doing banishing with a Marvel rune set. A kid using anime chants because it helps them focus. I don’t care if it looks silly. If it works, it works. Magic follows belief and will, not aesthetic approval.
Chaos Witches
These folks are a different breed. They’ll roll dice to pick spell timing. They’ll call on fictional gods as archetypes. They run on results, not tradition. Wild, but when they’re disciplined about it? Effective. Like swinging a hammer you forged yourself—awkward at first, but damn it fits your hand once you learn it.
Eclectic witches are experimenters. Tinkerers. Garage-builders of magic.
Just don’t get sloppy.
Don’t disrespect closed traditions.
And don’t pretend something’s yours if it’s not.
Digital Witch
I want to talk about Digital Witches, because this is basically where my practice lives most days. When I first started, I thought “real witches” were always in forests gathering herbs at dawn. And while that sounds gorgeous, I work retail and most of my spellwork happens in my bedroom under purple LED strip lights with my phone in one hand. So if you’re a baby witch who feels more online than outdoors, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just practicing in the era we live in.
A digital witch is someone who uses technology as part of their craft. For me, that looks like tarot apps when I don’t have my deck on me, mood boards on Pinterest to clarify intention, and emoji sigils when I don’t have the energy to carve candles. (I once did a protection sigil using 🧿✨📱 and it actually felt meaningful because I was focusing my intention into something I use constantly — my phone.)
Online covens and group chats have also been huge. I don’t have local witch friends, but I do have three witches I met on Discord who remind me to ground and drink water. That counts as community. Virtual altars are also a thing — I keep a folder of photos and symbols that feel sacred to me, and I look at it when I need to reconnect. It’s not less real just because it’s pixels.
I’m still figuring out how to balance digital and offline practice, but the internet honestly made witchcraft accessible for me. If that’s you too, you’re valid.
Stay witchy 🌙🪄
Hedge Witches
Last night, I sat at the edge of the field where the tall grasses meet the woods. The light had gone violet, and the first stars were quietly pricking open. That in-between place, neither day nor night, neither cultivated garden nor wild wood—this is where the Hedge Witch feels most at home.
Hedge Witches are boundary-walkers. The “hedge” refers to the border between the everyday world and the Otherworld, the seen and unseen. Hedge witches work with trance, journeying, dreamwork, spirit contact, ancestor communion, and the subtle art of moving consciousness across thresholds. This isn’t about theatrics. It’s about awareness, patience, and respect.
A hedge witch may keep an herb garden not for show, but because certain plants are doorways. Mugwort for dreams. Yarrow for protection. Elder for the ancestors. These are old relationships, tended carefully. My own elder tree by the gate gets a whispered greeting every time I pass. Respect is the first lesson here.
Hedge-riding, the act of shifting awareness across the “hedge,” requires practice. It often begins with breathwork or guided journeying. Some use drumming, some stillness, some the quiet crackle of a fire. You must learn the difference between imagination and vision. It comes with time. At first, the mind chatters. Later, a doorway opens without effort.
If this path calls to you:
Move slowly; don’t force contact.
Keep strong grounding habits—touch earth, cook meals, tend your body.
Record dreams; they are teachers.
Seek elders or mentors if possible, but remain discerning. Not everyone who speaks of spirits speaks truthfully.
Hedge witchcraft isn’t glamorous. It is subtle, deep, sometimes lonely, sometimes filled with wonder so quiet it hardly has a name.
Bide your time. Listen well.
The worlds are closer than you think.
Other Paths
There are as many kinds of witches as there are ecosystems. Some thrive by water. Some by firelight. Some in the glow of a laptop at midnight. Here’s how a few describe themselves—not as fixed identities, but as ways of orienting in the world.
If you’re reading this and thinking, None of these fit perfectly, good. That’s the point. The path is meant to fit you.
I’ve met sea witches who swear the tide can answer questions if you’re willing to get your feet wet and listen. Salt, storm-wind, tidal pull—this is magic that reshapes you the way waves reshape shoreline.
Their timing feels deliberate, lunar—casting when planets lean just so, when Mercury exhales. The sky isn’t backdrop to them; it’s conversation.
I’ve watched crystal witches arrange stones like constellations across a table, each one a note in a chord only they can hear. The work is subtle, like tuning a room so it hums true.
Some witches fall in love with one element and spend years learning its moods—earth’s patience, fire’s hunger, air’s restlessness, water’s memory. Others braid them together, weather workers calling calm or gust with a whisper.
They find the wild in places humans forget to look: moss on brick, pigeons nesting under overpasses, the echo of a train as spell-drum. Their altars bloom on windowsills and fire escapes, magic threaded through concrete.
Their work is all edges and intention—carefully drawn circles, invoked names spoken like keys turning in locks. Watching them is like watching architecture being built in the invisible.
This is the magic that smells like bread rising and herbs drying by a window. It’s old family stories, graveyard visits, charms knotted from memory rather than books.
They walk straight into the parts of themselves most of us avoid, lantern in hand. Mirror scrying, grief tending, healing by naming—this is compost magic turning pain into soil.
For them, magic doesn’t require gods—only presence, focus, and the quiet electricity of intention meeting action. Their rituals read almost like experiments, but the results are no less holy.
Cultural Respect
I talk to a lot of folks who come into my workshops saying, “I’m trying to figure out what kind of witch I am.” And I understand that longing. We all want to belong to something real. But sometimes the modern lists—kitchen witch, green witch, lunar witch, chaos witch—can make it seem like traditions are outfits you pick from a rack. The truth is, many of the practices people group together under “witchcraft” come from very different lineages, histories, and lived experiences. Naming that isn’t meant to limit anyone; it’s meant to protect what’s sacred.
For example, Hoodoo and rootwork are African American folk magic traditions that grew through resilience, land-based herbal knowledge, and ancestral connection under conditions of enslavement and survival. They’re not “a type of witchcraft.” They’re their own cultural traditions with their own languages, spirits, and histories. Just like many Indigenous ceremonies, or Jewish mysticism, or Mexican brujería—these traditions come from real communities. Some pieces are open to learn, and some are closed, held by families, initiations, and elders. When we collapse them all under one word, something precious gets erased.
So when you’re exploring modern witchcraft: notice what calls you, but also ask why. Are you drawn to moon phases because the cycles feel grounding? Are you drawn to herbs because tending plants brings you peace? These are open ways to begin—burning rosemary for cleansing, brewing tea with intention, keeping a dream journal.
And if you find yourself drawn to a tradition with deep cultural roots, pause and ask: Is this open? Who teaches this? How can I approach with respect?
Respect the source, always. And remember: one path, not the only.
You Don’t Have to Pick One
You can be a kitchen witch who reads tarot under the stars.
A green witch who practices alone in the city.
An eclectic hedge witch with cosmic leanings and a fondness for tech magic.
Or you can just call yourself a witch and leave it at that.
These names aren’t borders; they’re signposts. They help you describe where you are on the map—but you’re still free to wander. Magic, like nature, resists confinement. Choose what serves your growth and release what doesn’t.