The Vulgar Witch: Unpacking the Complexities of Witchcraft and Crudeness
The podcast and historical archives often dive into the lives of "vulgar" or folk practitioners who operated outside high-society occultism: Mary Bateman (The Yorkshire Witch)
The Vulgar Witch: Reclaiming the Raw and the Real in Modern Magic The Vulgar Witch
If you want: I can adapt this into a handout, a short lecture (10–15 min), a set of slide headings, or a printable worksheet with passages and prompts.
Most people hear it and flinch. Vulgar means crude. Loud. Unrefined. It’s the opposite of “elevated” or “sacred.” In witchcraft circles especially, we’re sold a very specific aesthetic: the ethereal priestess in flowing linen, her altar minimalist and her herbs dried in perfect bundles. The witch who speaks in soft tones, who never raises her voice, who composts her eggshells in a spotless kitchen and journals by moonlight with a fountain pen. The Vulgar Witch: Unpacking the Complexities of Witchcraft
Many "vulgar" traditions were eventually recorded in historical texts like The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) by Reginald Scot, which sought to debunk these superstitions.
The Vulgar Witch protects her own. She has a temper, and she uses it strategically. Her shadow work isn’t gentle journaling about her inner child; it’s looking her own capacity for cruelty in the eye and saying, “I know you’re there. We’ll use you only when necessary. But I will not pretend you don’t exist.” Irony and satire: Critique of social norms via
To be a vulgar witch is to reject the performative purity of the modern age. It is to remember that magic was born in the mud, not the temple. It is to embrace the cackle—that raucous, ugly, bone-shaking laugh that says: I am mortal. I am animal. I am dangerous.
