Writing as Witchcraft

Writing as Witchcraft
by Theodora Goss

Remember the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth? When Macbeth first meets them on the heath, they greet him with prophesies, telling him that he will be king of Scotland, although he will not bear a kingly lineage. Later in the play, he comes across them again, casting a spell around a cauldron. You probably remember its haunting refrain:

Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and cauldron, bubble.

Their initial prophesy is also a kind of spell: they foretell Macbeth’s future, and he makes it come to pass. He could, at various points in the play, make different choices. But enchanted by his own destiny, he kills the king of Scotland, assumes the throne, and dooms himself.

Is it too far-fetched of me to propose that the witches in the play function as writers? Shakespeare’s most famous writer-figure is also a magic-maker, Prospero of The Tempest. He is a typical representation of the masterful magician: an older man, usually presented as bearded and venerable. At the beginning of the play, he has already defeated the witch Sycorax and imprisoned her son Caliban. The spirit Ariel is his captive servant. This is a vision of the writer as owner and captor, as well as usurper of a magic that did not originally belong to him.

The three witches give us an alternative vision of the writer. They are old women, a collaborative sisterhood, creating both magic and reality through their words. When Macbeth comes across them for the second time, they are stirring their cauldron, putting into it a litany of gruesome but poetic ingredients:

Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing . . .

This scene reminds me of J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of the “cauldron of story,” which he describes in his essay “On Fairy-stories.” According to Tolkien, that cauldron contains all the stories human beings have ever told: myths, legends, folk and fairy tales, even history. Those narratives make a rich soup (like an Irish stew, with carrots, potatoes, cubes of beef, garlic and onions to give it flavor). Imagine a writer dipping her ladle into the cauldron of story and drawing out the ingredients she needs — maybe the history of Tudor England, maybe a fairy tale, floating together in the broth. According to Tolkien, this is how stories get made. Stories are put into the cauldron, where they bubble (toil and trouble). Narrative elements are drawn out to make new stories. Those stories then go back into the cauldron as new ingredients for future story-making.

What I want to argue, through examining these metaphors, is that writing is essentially witchcraft. It does not seem a coincidence that the word “spell” means both an enchantment and how to write a word — f you can spell the right words in the right way, you can cast an enchantment over your reader. Take, for example, the sentence “Once upon a time in the middle of winter, when snowflakes were falling from the sky, a queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of ebony wood.” You probably recognize this description as the beginning of “Snow White.” Reading this, a reader will see the white snowflakes, the dark wood of the window frame. He will wonder, who is the queen? Why is she sewing? What is about to happen?

(In this essay, I chose “she” for the writer and “he” for the reader, but that gendering is arbitrary. Of course, both men and women can be writers and readers, witches and wizards, monarchs of Scotland.)

In her Wizard of Earthsea trilogy, Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes the magical power of words: a wizard’s power is based on knowing the true name of a thing. If he can know its true name, he can control it, transform it. In those books, Le Guin’s wizards are more like Prospero than Shakespeare’s weird sisters — female witches are seen as dangerous, their power illegitimate. However, Le Guin later reevaluated her approach to gender. Her later Earthsea novels show us the danger of a magic that tries to control, and present more collaborative ideas of power. Even in the earlier novels, the best wizards, like her protagonist Ged, learn to maintain the balance of the world — Ged almost dies when he tries to wield his powers out of anger and arrogance.

Tolkien talked about the writer as a subcreator — the creator of a secondary world that has the texture of reality, so that as the reader traverses that world, he experiences it as real, even though part of his mind knows he is sitting in an armchair, drinking a cup of Earl Gray tea. How does the writer become a subcreator? I think it’s a kind of witchcraft. The writer dips her ladle into the cauldron of story and brings out an idea, a character, a plot, a setting — any of the things that bubble in the soup. Then she struggles to put the right words in the right order so she can write, “The princess was all alone in the forest. She looked at the trees around her and did not know what to do. Frightened, she began to run.” The reader will run through the forest with Snow White. To the extent the writer describes that forest — foxes rustling in the undergrowth, branches whipping against the princess as she stumbles through them, a veiled moon floating mysteriously overhead — the reader will see and feel and hear all of it.

So learning to be a writer means learning to cast spells. It means practicing witchcraft, with an emphasis on practicing. The difference between a witch or wizard, and other magical creatures such as fairies, goblins, djinn, and their ilk, is that witchcraft and wizardry are learned. Fairies create enchantment because they are themselves magical — for them, it’s like breathing. But witches and wizards are human beings who must learn how to wield magic.

How to become a writer-witch, or witchy writer, could be the subject of another, longer essay. But think about what witches do: They keep a grimoire (or writing journal). They join a coven (or writing group). They may even go to school to learn their craft. (Ged is initially taught by a witch, then apprenticed to a wizard, then sent to a famous wizarding school — he gets his MFA in wizardry). I have participated in writing groups and workshops, as well as taught in an MFA program. There is no way of learning that is better than any other. The wizard’s way tends to be more formal, institutional. The witch’s way is perhaps more natural — it requires not only reading and writing spells (poems, short stories, novels), but also paying close attention to the world around us. A witch should know the names of the plants in her garden, as well as in the surrounding meadows and forests. She should know myths, legends, folk and fairy tales, and be able to tell them again in different forms. She should be able to see into the hearts of human beings, and also a little into the future. Her understanding should run deep, like a river, and soar high, like a hawk. Out of all these things, she should create worlds we can imaginatively inhabit — she should subcreate, or in other words, make magic.

You too can make magic. Dip your ladle into the cauldron. What does it lift to the surface? Eye of newt? Toe of frog? Those will do to start with. Now turn them into a story — go practice witchcraft.

(The Three Witches from Macbeth by Daniel Gardner)

(This essay was originally published on Fantasy Book Café, November 4, 2025.)