My Path As A Witch
written on 08/04/2024
Don't be scared my friend; death is a beginning, not an end
- Nicole Dollanganger, "Don't Be Scared"
When people ask me what kind of witch I am or what my path is like, I generally answer that I am a death witch. It is an easy answer, because it is one that was my whole life in the making and took shadow work, grief, and personal reflection to stand with - and it is always in the making as I continue to walk my path.
People tend to think of "death" as only involving the end of a life, and thus assume that my path is only about working with spirits. While this is certainly apart of it, being a death witch is much more than that to me. Death, in my path, can be applied to the loss or ending of anything important to you. Death of a relationship when you break up with a partner or lose a friend, death of a lifestyle when you move or make a big life change, death of parts of yourself as you grow, make changes, and become a new person over the years. Being a death witch is embracing the role that plays in all of our lives, through cycles and the eventual end of life, as well as through embracing the spirit world.
I have, in many senses, been surrounded by death my whole life. Being indigenous unfortunately means that I have been surrounded by the disappearances, suicides, and losses to terminal illness of relatives since I was a child. However, I also lost much of my childhood to abuse and to cult experiences, and was ironically terrified of death as a child and up through my teenage years. I was taught that if you weren't enough in the eyes of God, you were banished to hell after death, and I spent a lot of time fearing the end of my life.
However, I have also been deeply connected to the spirit world since I was a child. Even growing up in a Christianity-based cult that strongly discouraged all other spiritual experiences as "demonic", I deeply believed in ghosts. I astral traveled before I knew the words, having out of body experiences where I met people I didn't know, and later startled adults by describing their passed relatives to them and things I said they'd told me.
As a teenager first discovering witchcraft and trying to break away from what I'd been taught, I became deeply interested in spirit work. However, I learned through shadow work and through beginning to work with deities and spirit guides that I wasn't ready. First, I had to overcome my pervasive fears of death, and consequently of change and of loss.
So, I began to work. Often alongside working on recovery in therapy, I worked hard on getting to the root of my fears of death, and in the process began to learn so many things. I learned that there is beauty in change, and that the world is always turning and moving forward to create new things and experiences just as others end. I learned not to think constantly with anxiety on my own death, but instead embrace it as a time when I will be ready to move on from this world and experience the next. I learned to be more at peace with myself as a person, accepting growth and learning instead of clinging to parts of myself as stagnant.
I also was able to reconnect with my indigenous nation, and incorporate the things community leaders taught me into this. How important ancestors and acknowledging who came before us is to embracing the future, and how cycles of life and death are present everywhere in nature and an essential part of how it functions.
In doing all this, it did so much for me that I realized this was what I wanted my path to center around.
Nowadays, I have been able to embrace being a death witch and am continuing to incorporate it into my practices. I do, of course, do a lot of spirit work - I have a group of spirits I work with I call my spirit family, who are all passed souls I have welcomed into my home, and also incorporate ancestor work into much of my practice. However, it also is present in all the other things I do. I primarily use plants that were already dead when I found them in spells, as apart of both respecting nature and giving plants that have seen their time a new life. I do a lot of meditation around figuring out what I need to let go of and then change in order to keep being my best self. One of my patrons is Donn, the Irish god of death, and he is present in many of the works I do and in helping me on my journey. I primarily do divination via osteomancy, as bones have a huge connection to my path and help me to honor my ancestors as well.
My path is death centric, and to me that is not necessarily a dark thing. It allows me to appreciate the way the world is continually evolving and changing, the way
I am evolving and changing every day. And, I can finally say I am no longer at a point in my life where I fear death, but instead embrace it is apart of my inherent life.
I'm not scared of death, because death's all over me
- Nicole Dollanganger, "Valley of the Dead"
