If you’re new to practicing witchcraft or alternative spirituality, modern paganism, neopaganism or whatever path is calling you, you may wonder if you fit into a certain “type” of witch. After all, all the memes talk about types of witches. I’ve seen it all, swamp witches, sea witches, kitchen witches, hearth witches, astral witches, chaos witches and the list goes on. Hell, even this blog is called ‘FloodWitch’. But what “type of witch” you are isn’t really all that important. What’s important is how you conduct yourself and what you do with your inner power. Here’s why.
What type of witch are you?
There are many types of witches, and if you’re here because you are just being introduced to the craft, you may be surprised to learn that “the craft” is actually many different crafts.
What I mean is, there are a lot of spiritual paths that someone can take that might lead them to reclaim the word “witch” or find themselves most at home in the “witch community”. The internet has made it easy to connect with people of various faiths and practices all over the world, and unlike previous generations, we know longer need to rely on the generation just before us to teach us the ways of faith and devotion.
For example, I’m a Sanse Espiritista and the founder of this blog. So, for me, being a FloodWitch is akin to being just that. An espiritista is someone who practices Espiritismo, or a spirit-led Puerto Rican practice. Sanse is a community practice, developed in Puerto Rican diaspora, that syncretizes Espiritismo with Dominican 21 Divisions.
But if you are starting out your journey asking yourself, “What type of witch am I?” you are already starting on the wrong foot.
When I started down my spiritual path, I never intended to fit into a bucket. I found Sanse as organically and naturally as uncovering leaves on my family tree. It’s just a part of me because by the time I discovered what it is I was already doing it. That’s because I had started researching traditional religious practices and spirituality in my family line. And I began trying to incorporate the family spirituality I was raised in, symbolism from Catholicism, into my non-Catholic spiritual practice.
Now, I understand that’s not for everyone. There are a lot of reasons why religious symbolism might be triggering for some witches. But my goal when I started looking into the symbols that were meaningful to my family, starting with my immediate family, was not to find a god to believe in, but to learn what daily folk magic existed inside the regular practices of those closest to me. By starting there and working my way back, I created a meaningful practice that I later learned mirrored an existing Latine traditional religion.
What is a FloodWitch?
Well, besides my catchy brand name, the name of this blog, it’s meaningful to me in that it’s a name that I use to talk about my practice. Being a FloodWitch isn’t about being an espirtista, practicing an LTR or being a practitioner of vodou, or any particular path at all. It’s about connecting with your roots, personalizing your path and amplifying voices of the Caribbean diaspora, people of color and other marginalized groups. This blog comes to you from my perspective, as a practitioner of Latine traditional religion that I found through my own research into myself and by entering into spaces with people who call themselves, “witches”.
Being a floodwitch, is all about self-love, self-care and shadow work paving the way of the long and strenuous journey to connect back to your source. You can’t do that, and keep the fabric of spirit around you clean, while actively harming marginalized communities. In Sanse, we call that “cuadro”. It’s the spiritual fabric that guides us through this life, and exercises in cleaning it are important. I believe that, while everyone’s path is different, your connection with magic must connect you to the big picture in a meaningful way, and one way to do that is through learning what parts of your history have ancestral magic.
Though you don’t have to know your ancestors to be in touch with them. As someone from diaspora, I know too well how difficult it is to find more than a few generations of family. Whether or not I believe I am a hereditary witch doesn’t make me any more or less able to connect with my ancestors in spirit and reach back many generations. I rely on my own power to do that, which is why it’s so important I keep my cuadro clean by doing the work; self-care, shadow work and practicing exercises in self-love and advocacy.
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