Are Witches to Blame? Then and Now

Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, witches were portrayed as convenient vessels for collective fear. Anything difficult to explain—failed harvests, illness, social unrest, moral anxiety—was attributed to them. Conceptions of witches were not reflections of supernatural reality but manifestations of society’s unresolved tensions and contradictions. Blame was displaced onto individuals who stood at the margins, allowing institutions and power structures to remain unquestioned.

Take it from Shakespeare's famous play: Macbeth. It begins with a wicked scene of three witches boiling a cauldron, warning Macbeth of his treacherous fate. Macbeth, knowing this, does everything in his power to prevent the prophecy of his death. However, are all of the actions leading up to this eventual fate the cause of the witches? Or was it the actions of Macbeth? If Macbeth had ignored the prophecy, without giving it power to unveil, would the eventual fate still come forth? If you are a witch and have been practicing with divination such as tarot, bones, runes, and pendulums, you would probably resort to the idea that fate is not sealed, but this example brings forth many aspects of blame into consideration. It reflects the reasoning behind why people, even now, are against us. Certain truths, perhaps, are better left hidden, and witchcraft, or the practice of bending natural forces, can invite danger and chaos. Even orthodox religions, such as Christianity, teach that humans are incapable of comprehending God's divinity, and must devote a life to learning it, as if it were a new language.

In the present moment, witches are no longer at the center of society’s moral panic. Instead, they often exist on the sidelines, observing rather than absorbing humanity’s egregiousness. The question, then, is not simply what has changed—but why.

One critical shift lies in visibility. Contemporary society increasingly directs its criticism toward institutions themselves: governments that fail, constitutions that age, laws that restrict freedom, economic systems that strain under inequality, and media that manufactures outrage. These structures are no longer opaque. Power has become legible. As systems decentralize and their failures become visible, blame moves upward rather than outward.

When witches were persecuted, they did not disappear. They survived, adapted, and re-emerged—no longer as accusations imposed by others, but as identities chosen intentionally. This survival produced a worldview grounded in symbolic thinking, cyclical time, and intuition rather than institutional validation. The modern witch refuses dominant narratives not through opposition alone, but through disengagement from systems that demand legitimacy on their own terms.

In this sense, the modern witch is not powerless. Scapegoats require vulnerability and voicelessness; witches today possess neither. As agents of their own lives, they are difficult to collapse into symbols of blame.

This does not mean society has abandoned scapegoating altogether. Rather, blame has shifted toward other targets—migrants, “elites” or “degenerates,” ideological enemies, globalization, and abstraction itself. The process remains, but it has been demystified, diffused, and politicized. Fear no longer wears a mystical mask; it speaks the language of policy, economics, and identity.

Because witches understand this history—because they know what it means to be shaped into an object of irrational moral fear—they often serve as allies rather than participants in these cycles. Their position is one of observation, support, and quiet intervention. They stand apart, not out of apathy, but out of recognition.

Witchcraft operates outside the modern obsession with control, legitimacy, and narrative dominance. It does not require humanity to be pure, systems to be flawless, or history to move in a straight line. It accepts contradiction, decay, and renewal as inherent to human life.

As a witch myself, I do not claim superiority—only distance.

Our world exists outside the noise: beyond political debates over authority, beyond contests of legitimacy, beyond the struggle to define reality through power. From that vantage point, clarity emerges—not because the world is fixed, but because its patterns are familiar.

And familiarity, in unstable times, becomes its own form of insight.