Magic from the Margins

Witchcraft is a term with a chilling and contested history – one that has been subject to profound re-visioning in recent decades. Practiced on the margins by the marginalized, witchcraft has simultaneously been excluded from officially sanctioned knowing and placed under the harshest scrutiny by mainstream authorities.

Practitioners of witchcraft have been keepers of the “old ways” – modes of knowing and practice that understood nature as alive, plants and animals as allies, and magic as real. Committed to healing and transformation on both individual and community levels, witches held a form of decentralized, grassroots power that threatened emerging religious, scientific, economic, and political forces that objectified the natural world and the human body. Viciously persecuted during periods of global colonization, witches have gradually re-emerged as touchstones for new ways of being in the world – ways that recognize the underworld as a necessary counterpoint to everyday reality, and value our deep embeddedness within the environment.

Who were the witches when they were the abject, the feared, and disproportionately women? Who are they now when they represent modes of empowering and extending consciousness from the margins?

This conference seeks to give voice to contributions by women and those who have questioned gender-rigid spaces in society, spiritual practices, medicine, and depth psychology.