On the floor of a sun-drenched room in a 200-year-old Irish estate, a group of 15 witches gather to commune with the spirits. Everyone has someone they want to talk to – dead ancestors, forest fairies, the witches who came before them – and the room has the same expectant charge as the first day of school. Some of the witches wear long black capes and bandannas. Some wear Columbia fleeces, spaghetti-strap tank tops and Adidas sneakers.
Isabella Ferrari, known as Penny the Witch, guides the women as they make divination maps, sheets of paper covered with “yeses” and “nos” that work like Ouija boards: the witches ask their questions and the spirits guide the crystal pendulums in their hands towards the answer. One of the women, Tara Monte, screeches as her pendulum begins circling uncontrollably. “Isabella, do I stop this? Someone really wants to talk to me.” Later, she will confess she believes it was her archangel Michael letting her know yes, her parents were proud of her. Yes, they still loved her.
It’s the first full day of Green Veil, a sold-out witchcraft retreat Ferrari regularly hosts to teach women from around the world how to conduct their own spellcraft sessions and broader somatic healing work. They make candles together. They confront their ancestral trauma. They form a tight community though the retreat is only two – and – a – half days long.
“We are so used to not trusting ourselves, to second-guessing our intuition, especially women who have been taught to disconnect from their inner wisdom,” Ferrari tells them. In that sense, this divination workshop is less about the spirits than the women themselves – a practice of learning to believe you have the power to summon answers, to regard your own instincts as something sacred.
As a final housekeeping announcement, Ferrari encourages everyone to avoid the underworld and its demons: “Today, stay with the fairies.” It’s an instruction met with completely comprehending gazes.
Later, the process of sharing who they summoned becomes intensely emotional. “I spoke with my boyfriend who killed himself,” Monte says. “I spoke with the brother who was like a father to me,” says a Massachusetts-based hearing specialist. Another woman forgoes her divination map to instead scrawl out a message in an unknown language she says an unnamed spirit delivered to her. As they share their stories, the women weep together. But what they have summoned in reaching for the dead is not only grief. It is also the frustration that lives underneath their loneliness.
Ferrari instructs the women to lean into these feelings, chanting together: “I will learn to use my voice,” and “I am so afraid.”
Perhaps louder than anything else, she has the women practice calling out: “I am so angry. I am so angry. I am so angry.”
For many, it is the first time they have said it out loud in a room that wanted to hear it.
A turn from religion
Ferrari, who is Italian, has filled rooms like this over and over again, across continents. When her Ireland dates in April first sold out, she added more. Those sold out too – for ticket prices ranging from €1,900 to €3,000. With more than 180,000 followers on Instagram, her version of witchcraft is both spiritual and entrepreneurial, providing a sanctuary for expressing the accumulated distrust and fatigue of women who have failed to find belonging in the churches, workplaces and political structures meant to hold them.
Witchcraft retreats like Ferrari’s have proliferated across the US and Europe over the last decade. The practice they’re built around resists easy definition. Equal parts ancient folk magic, herbal remedies and self-soothing rituals, it encompasses everything from the spellcasting done by self-directed pagans to solitary practitioners who scatter protective salts around their homes. If you buy a crystal, that’s witchcraft. If you practice manifestation, that’s witchcraft.
The retreat boom was foreshadowed by an interest in witchcraft that has grown since the counterculture movement in the 1960s, says Helen Berger, a Harvard Divinity School-based sociologist of religion and one of the leading scholars of contemporary paganism. While it’s hard to really identify a single catalyst driving women to witchcraft, Berger sees a pattern: spikes in alternative spirituality tend to coincide with spikes in anti-authoritarianism. In 1968, for example, several feminist groups co-opted occult imagery, adopted the acronym Witch (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell) and marched on Wall Street to hex the New York Stock Exchange and curse the Dow Jones – which did indeed drop 13 points.
Ferrari works almost entirely with women, an increasingly significant number of whom are American; over half of her Ireland cohort came from the US. And they’re from all over the states, not just the neo-hippy communities of the west or the alt-wellness meccas of the east. Ferrari’s witches are twentysomethings and grandmothers, agnostic pagans, Rust belt bartenders and Florida-based interior designers. Many got their spiritual start in strict Christian households and many experienced later-in-life spiritual awakenings.
Over 30% of Americans now identify as spiritual but not religious – a distinction that points not to a rejection of the divine but of the traditional institutions mediating it, according to scholars like Berger. “[That rejection] stems from the structure of religion, the lack of independence and individualization offered within it. Especially because the hierarchy of power is particularly male-dominated,” Berger says. “For witches specifically, many grew up spiritual. But the oppressiveness of those religions they grew up with, particularly the evangelical and the Pentecostal right, also has a direct relationship with the divine.” Witchcraft gives women a way of holding on to that relationship outside the hierarchy.
Former bartender Tara Monte, 55, tried to come to an earlier Ireland retreat – sold out. Then she tried to attend one in Italy – too daunting for a first solo trip abroad. She didn’t even have a valid passport. When Ferrari added new Ireland dates, Monte leapt, getting an expedited passport on 2 April and catching a flight from Philadelphia two weeks later. The stress and expense were worth it.
“There’s this whole disaster that is the world right now that is being run by men,” she says. “[Witches] know how we can support each other without having to deal with that reprehensible behavior.”
Monte grew up in a devout Irish-Italian Catholic family in south Philadelphia – “about as Catholic as it gets” – but experienced a spiritual crisis when she moved to New York in her 20s. “When I was 23, I was raped. That’s when I hit the wall,” she says. “I just thought, I’m a good Catholic girl, how could this happen to me?” Her trauma became a kind of religious solvent, dissolving her belief system with surprising totality. “I was done with God,” she says. The revelation left her isolated and unmoored.
When she eventually joined her first coven in Los Angeles, the unconditional acceptance it offered felt radical. But that community slipped away when she moved again, this time to North Carolina. “You can’t go around the Bible belt and explain why you have a pentagram on your neck,” she says, laughing.
Those were lonely years for Monte. She went through a divorce. A partner, who she describes as the love of her life, killed himself in front of her. Both parents died. She moved back to Philadelphia.
Most recently, her ex-boyfriend has been stalking her, surreptitiously pasting bumper stickers to her car in the night. She feels watched. “I need to know that I have backup,” she says. “We need our coven again.”
For Monte, community among witches is a kind of antidote to spiritual isolation, to the inadequacies of more conventional ways of coping with trauma. It’s also a bulwark against the harmful impulses of men. “We take care of our own,” she says simply. On the Coven WhatsApp group she shares with other retreat members, the witches do indeed ply her with protection spells, recommended oils and crystals, places in her house to prop up her pentagram to keep her safe from that dangerous ex. They believe these rituals will provide some protection, which is enough to restore Monte’s sense of control.
Alyse Benjamin, 42, found herself at a crossroads when she dropped her son off at college. She lost her job last June and though she has settled into new work as an interior designer by day, and an oracle and tea leaf reader by weekend, she feels the lancing uncertainty of a life paused between chapters. “I want to be part of a sisterhood,” she said. She came to Ireland all the way from Florida looking for it.
Another later-in-life convert, Benjamin grew up with a Pentecostal pastor for a grandmother, and practiced non-denominational Christianity through her teenage years and most of her 20s. Her departure from the church began somewhat passively – she was married to a man who wanted to spend Sundays playing volleyball rather than attending services – and then became definitive as she grappled with the oppressiveness of rules-based religion. She prefers to shirk binary thinking and instead embraces a philosophy where nobody is 100% gay or straight, good or bad, Christian or Wiccan.
“The poles of anything don’t really exist, everybody is somewhere in between,” she says. “I was deeply Christian for a long time. I still believe in God … but I really don’t like labels and I really don’t like judgment.”
Benjamin wouldn’t describe herself as angry, necessarily – she’s just done. The list of things she’s done with is long. “I’m not a fan of working 40-plus hours a week and placing value on what we can buy. I’m not a fan of needing to go to a building to find God when I feel it more in nature. I’m not a fan of our sick-care system or our educational system,” she says.
Ferrari has heard so many versions of these stories – women resisting rote categorization, women whose faith was dissolved by grief or violence, women who arrived at the edges of religion and found nothing waiting for them there. In them, she recognized a hunger for a place built with women in mind.
Witchcraft on the rise
Whether you’re a devout Wiccan or someone who wants a hex for an old grudge, there’s an Etsy witch for this, a corner tarot shop for that. Practitioners who want to monetize their craft can attend WitchBiz Academy, while a British university is offering a PhD in magic. Everybody wants to see a Practical Magic reboot and there are about 100 different ways to watch a witch on television. All to say that witchcraft is too popular – and too profitable – to be considered fringe any more. What remains alternative about it isn’t the spellcasting and the crystal work then, but the DIY spiritual framework.
“I like that there’s no dogma to it,” says Ashley Clauré, a self-described psychic medium and practicing witch.
For Clauré, every woman is a witch – and like a witch, every woman knows how it feels to be told she’s crazy.
Clauré hosts at least two witchcraft retreats a year, in Savannah, Georgia and Salem, Massachusetts; prices run anywhere from $2,700 to $5,200 to attend. She says women are searching for something beyond the slumber party Ouija board rituals that loosely inspired her retreats in the first place.
“The patriarchy is not good for anybody, men or women,” Clauré says. “Women have been inherently drawn to [witchcraft spaces] after being demonized or called hysterical or stigmatized. We’re so fucking sick of it that we’re gonna do things our way, whether you call it crazy or not.”
Scholars say this sentiment extends beyond the retreat circuit.
“If you look at the larger social gestalt right now, in which power is being systematically taken away from women and queer people, the traditional witch is the opposite of ‘right’ society,” says Sabina Magliocco, a professor of anthropology and religion at the University of British Columbia and a former Guggenheim fellow. “But if ‘right’ society is depriving women of rights, is excluding women, is saying that it is perfectly fine to sexually abuse women, that there aren’t going to be any consequences, then maybe being the opposite of right society is aligning with the forces of justice.”
Witchcraft, according to Magliocco, is a conduit for righteous anger. It’s partly why there was a notable boom in witchcraft-based resistance movements after the 2016 election of Donald Trump.
There’s a similar sense of rebellion at Ferrari’s retreats.
“People are realizing the pharmaceutical industries, the government, [all of these systems] are not aligning with what they want,” Ferrari says. “They just want to have their own way to heal and fix their problems.”
While not every woman who arrives in the woods would describe herself as politically motivated, at some point between the candle-making and the spellwork, most of them end up naming the systems – political, religious and social – that have failed them.
Psychic wounds
In the afternoon, Ferrari’s witches go forest bathing.
Together, they set off on a two-and-a-half-hour expedition through the woods. They introduce themselves to the trees – literally, placing their hands upon the bark and whispering their names. They circle up and list what they taste, what they hear, what they smell.
“I had the strangest experience where I looked into a tree and I saw a mirror,” Benjamin tells the group. “I saw myself.”
For a few moments, Monte falls asleep beneath the branches of a 150-year-old oak. The women take turns gathering items off the forest floor, passing them around in a circle to inspect: spectral pieces of moss, the looped tails of young ferns, hollowed out branches.
The woods are a mere 30-minute drive from the site where Petronilla de Meath was tortured and burned at the stake in 1324 – the first recorded witch persecution in Ireland. This is what practitioners call a witch wound. It is the collective psychological scar carried by women who have been punished for their power, and it serves as a reminder here that there was a time when women were killed for practicing anything that looked like magic. Which is really to say, there was a time when women were killed for doing anything that a man or a church could not understand.
“And women are never allowed to be angry about that,” says Alessandra Mascarucci, an Italian-born, England-based photographer and self-described pagan documenting the retreat for Ferrari, at a group dinner that night. “People don’t understand how much anger is a part of healing.”
She went on to describe how often female anger in particular is chronically invalidated, reframed as sensitivity, punished as aggression. Without models of what healthy anger looks like, Mascarucci says, repression becomes the default. Repression is a kind of patriarchal convenience that keeps women small, manageable and ultimately adrift.
The permission to feel anger – not to resolve it or redirect it – on the way to a more genuine connection is a goal that appeals to many of the women who come to Ferrari’s retreats. It’s something accommodated by the oppositional fervor of witchcraft, where the witch herself has long symbolized female noncompliance.
Still, not everyone is convinced the retreat format is the right container for something so sacred. Critics like Michael Cardenas, a high priest and head witch of Olde Ways, a magically inclined apothecary brand, have argued that witchcraft’s mainstream moment is just another way of selling radical female empowerment as a “glorified meditation retreat”.
Some witches might be frustrated by the commercialization of their craft. But for Thorn Mooney, a PhD candidate in religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a practicing Wiccan and priestess in her Gardnerian coven, this critique is a bit reductive. “Marketing has always been a part of witchcraft. It’s always been a part of magic,” she says. “We are very suspicious when a religious or spiritual person has money because we think that poverty is innately holy. Seeing my sacred thing sold back to me through Instagram ads is a shame, yeah. But it’s not new.”
The money, Mooney argues, is beside the point. What women like Ferrari’s witches are looking for is much harder to commodify.
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On the last night of the retreat, the witches gather in the moonlight for a closing bonfire. Ferrari has them each write down something they want to release on a scrap of paper. They take turns reading them aloud before tossing them into the flames. Body shame. Guilt over not being a better mother. Anxiety. Depression.
It’s easy to wonder if any sense of transformation they have found will be sustained outside this carefully curated space. By morning, much of what the women have vowed to release will still be waiting for them. “I went there with some big stuff to figure out. Coming back is a shock because that stuff is still just there,” Benjamin admits after she returns home. If there is magic, there is no magic fix.
Braceleting the fire, the women burn the candles they made when they arrived in Ireland. It’s a surprisingly long process and none of the witches are allowed to leave the circle until each candle is finished. At one point, the glass dish of one candle overheats so much it fractures and sends hundreds of tiny shards into the darkness of the courtyard.
The women laugh and gather some of the larger shards of the unfixable dish before they return to their waiting. At the end of the evening, no one walks back to the main house alone.