Witchcraft is not safe, and I am tired of pretending that it is. I am tired of seeing well-meaning but misinformed idiots spouting off about love and light and the rule of three. I am tired of pompous, self-satisfied new agers confidently (and wrongly) asserting that all witchcraft should be ethical, pure, and aligned with the sacred.
If your witchcraft is those things, that is fine! We make choices about the tools we use, and it is certainly a good idea to have values, boundaries, and codes of conducts by which we abide when we practice magic. But to state that all witchcraft is “good” or “holy,” or worse, “white” (a lot of unpack, there!) is to fundamentally misunderstand the history and diversity of the practice.
Witchcraft is not safe. It is inherently and innately dangerous. That is the point.
LOVE & LIGHT IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH TRUE CRAFT
Don’t get me twisted: I enjoy love, and also light. When I say “witchcraft is inherently dangerous” I don’t mean “be the biggest asshole you can be!” I do not mean that witchcraft must be utilized to harmful ends in order to be valid or “real.” Witchcraft is neither morally good nor morally evil: it is a neutral force. But like any neutral force (electricity, for example) it can be channeled constructively or destructively.
To pretend that the only valid and true witching path is one of love, light, and healing is simply incorrect. It ignores the rich and complex history of folk beliefs and practices, hidden ways, and occult sciences (which intersect heavily with many witchcraft traditions). It erases cultural context and defines “witchcraft” as only a White European path practiced after 1950. Witchcraft is so much more immense and complex than that. To pretend otherwise is not only ignorant, it’s frankly a little offensive.
The phrase “love and light” has become shorthand for a certain kind of spiritual practitioner or worker. It’s a stereotype, of course, but typically these kinds of people are middle-aged to older white women who have found their way to the craft via crystal healing, yoga retreats, reiki certifications, and Doreen Virtue’s Angel cards. There is nothing wrong with any of these things in isolation (except maybe for Doreen’s angel cards, since she turned out to be a weird evangelical grifter). But people who discover witchcraft in this way tend to lack a full understanding and cultural context for the craft they say they are practicing.
In and of itself, that’s fine. Our spiritual paths are unique and different by design, and we should take our time and enjoy the journey. What is troubling is when these people pop up online positioning themselves as experts and teachers, issuing blanket statements about things they do not fully understand, and insisting that anyone practicing “black magic” or “dark witchcraft” is “not a true witch.”
SPIRITUAL BYPASSING & SATANIC PANIC
Few people espousing these ideas seem aware that what they are actually parroting is a kind of rebranded evangelical Christianity, a worldview that reframes God as “the divine” or “spirit,” but assigns to this force the same rigid moral code, the same “punishment and reward” framework. To Love & Light witches, doing “a bad thing” with your witchcraft will yield divine punishment, while only using your powers “for good” will reap rich reward. Bad things may be curses or hexes, but also any magic intended to manipulate circumstances, other people, or reality.
This runs into a major rhetorical road block, since witchcraft and magic are by definition about using energy, spirits, or unseen forces to change or alter reality in accordance with one’s will.
The infection of witchcraft spaces with love and light spirituality, which is really just rebranded moral puritanism, arises for a couple of reasons. First, with the Neo-Pagan movement in the 60s and 70s, there was a big push to give witchcraft a public makeover and defang a practice that had, for centuries, been maligned and feared. Up until the 2000s it was very common for witches to remain “in the broom closet” in perpetuity: the danger of revealing your spiritual and religious beliefs was simply too high to risk public practice.
With so many people facing very real public persecution, and many community groups advocating for religious freedom and an end to laws against fortune telling and other pagan practices, Pagans and Wiccans had a vested interest in ensuring that witchcraft was seen not as dangerous, but as a peace-loving religion of nature worship. Popular Pagan authors from the 70s through the early 2000s were at pains to reinforce in their books that witchcraft was not dark or dangerous. The terms “black magic” and “white magic” were used liberally to differentiate between “good witches” and “evil occultists”/Satanists.
There’s not enough time or space here to dive into the racialized baggage of the terms “black magic” and “white magic.” Suffice to say that, over time, “black magic” became shorthand for practices or tools that were associated with non-white cultural or racial groups. There’s a lot to unpack here, because it is far from correct to associate animal sacrifice, the use of bones or animal parts, the use of blood, or the use of coercive magic only with ‘non-white cultural groups.’ Plenty of European traditions include all of those things. But “white magic” invariably meant suburban, pedestrian, gentle, nature-based, pure, high-vibe. And all those things were more commonly ascribed to white ladies who ran crystal shops in the local mall than they were the root worker growing hyssop in their garden. This was not a coincidence.
Concerned mostly with the survival of their craft and the right to practice their religion peacefully, few early Pagans were pushing back too hard on the “us/them” mentality of white magic and black magic, right-hand path and left-hand path. A clear line was drawn between witchcraft (“Wiccans are good witches, we obey the Rule of Three and don’t curse people!”) and Satanism. Anything not in the love and light bucket was obviously Satanic and/or racialized, and therefore evil, and therefore not to be trusted.
Self-professed witches inadvertently became their own persecutors, upholding a distorted version of the craft that fed into harmful movements like the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and the prosperity gospel rhetoric of televangelists in the 1990s. Because if you weren’t love and light, then you must be the other one. And the other one was bad, wicked, and must be punished.
MANY PATHS, MANY WAYS
Go to any Botanica or decent witchcraft shop and you’ll see a great selection of items for sale. In between the crystal wands and oils for healing, the many dried herbs in jars offering physical and metaphysical benefits from enhanced psychic vision to financial flow, you’ll also find more curious items: Come to Me candles to summon a lover; Hot Foot powder to get rid of a troublesome acquaintance; reversal oil to return a harmful spell to its sender. You may find coffin nails, blessed railroad spikes, oils and powders for domination and hexing.
Are all the people buying those items, all the people who practice baneful and defensive sorcery, “not doing witchcraft”? What are we calling it, then? “Black magic”? “Satanism”?
For hundreds if not thousands of years people have turned to witchcraft when they are desperate. When material methods have failed them, when they are sick and struggling, heartbroken and destroyed, betrayed and burdened, they have availed themselves of the one tool that exists outside of a moralistic and judgmental theology. Witchcraft—the force, the current, the energy—does not give a fuck what you are using it for. It is just a tool. Build or break: the choice is yours.
Are there schools of thought, initiatory traditions, and specific paths that do include moral frameworks? Most certainly. But even within those paths and traditions it is rarely as simple as “don’t ever do ‘a bad thing’.” The Wiccan Rede is frequently cited by people who have never actually initiated into nor practiced proper Wicca, for example. Besides that, not every witch is Wiccan, and most people who practice witchcraft do not believe in nor abide by the rule of three.
If we want to get technical about it, there are entire books of The Bible that include prayers specifically designed to bring harm and devastation to one’s enemies (shoutout to you, Psalm 109). Things are rarely, if ever, black and white. Spirituality is nuanced by nature.
Your path may include a rigid moral framework and a fierce adherence to benevolent practices only—that’s okay! You may feel witchcraft is best utilized not as a means to grant you greater control, but a way to offer you deeper understanding of self. This is a beautiful and worthy goal, and one I share: my primary reason for practicing witchcraft is because I strongly desire connection, understanding, and knowledge.
But to say witchcraft does not involve control, manipulation, or exertion of will is patently false. To say witchcraft is safe, that it is only love and light, is at best misguided and at worst the kind of grifter discourse I would expect from a TikTok preacher trying to sell me 5D ascension talismans or Nike Airwalk Sneakers charged with 11/11 portal moon water.
Witchcraft is dangerous. Not because it is inherently dark and evil, but because it is a powerful tool that can and does alter reality and change material outcomes.
At their core, all witches are agents of change. If you claim that label, you are claiming agency. You are taking a step toward greater connectivity with the world around you (seen and unseen), but also greater autonomy and responsibility in your own life. This is not a path of yielding your will to some cosmic ledger-keeper, though your path may include work with deities, spirits, or even God.
Witchcraft gives you the tools to change your life. What you do with them is up to you.
If you enjoy my work, I have offerings available on my website. You might like my class on dream magic, or my metamorphosis workbook. I also offer mentorship, monthly magic, and bespoke spellwork. Reach out anytime!
The 'love and light' thing is why I'm also very skeptical of how much the language of manifestation and Law of Attraction has infested witchcraft spaces. All of it treats "the universe" as a giant vending machine, and if you just say the right words and have the right props, you'll get what you want (*side eyes all those 1990s lists of correspondences*). None of it takes relationship-building into account because spirits and deities are treated as more of those props, and not beings with their own shit to do.
I love this! TBH, hearing love and light and the rule of 3 gives me the ick. Those who know understand that witchcraft has been practiced for millennia, long before organized religion took root. I, for one, am glad that people are returning to their literal roots. And they are finally deconstructing. Of course, there is work still to be done. As a Black woman, I am tired of my practices being branded as dark, demonic, and black magic. As you stated succinctly, magick itself is neutral. And there are many practices out there. And speaking of the botanica, when I am in there, I see many "Christians" and people who won't admit the folk practices that they most likely grew up with are really magickal practices. Magick is a duality, so we live in a world of dual nature, so nothing can always be love and light. To me, it feels like spiritual bypassing.