Book summary “Witch”: summary

Introduction

Reclaiming the historic title of the witch allows women to reconnect with their bodies, cycles, and innate power.

You often feel disconnected from your body, your intuition, and the natural rhythms of the world because patriarchal systems demand constant productivity and linear living. Lisa Lister shows you in Witch that being a witch requires no dogmatic rules, costumes, or special ancestry. You discover a path of personal authority rooted in nature, self-trust, and radical self-care.

The book guides you through history, the impact of generational trauma, and the process of healing the witch wound. You learn to live cyclically, cast intentional spells, and practice everyday magic.

• What does it mean to reclaim the word witch today?
• How do you heal from the historical persecution of intuitive women?
• In what ways can you align your life with nature and your own cyclic rhythms?

1. The Modern Witch and Witch Work

For centuries, the patriarchy pushed fierce feminine powers into the dark and taught women to fear them. Reclaiming the title of witch allows you to reconnect with your intuition, question out-of-date hierarchical structures, and access your innate creative and manifesting potential.

Reclaiming the word witch allows women to dismantle patriarchal conditioning and access their innate creative power.

Lisa Lister met with Dana Gillespie and Holly Grigg-Spall at Cafe Gratitude in Venice Beach, discussing how women doing public women's work still face public trolling and threats, leading them to declare that the burned witches are back and reclaiming their power.

What Is a Witch

A modern witch is an unapologetic woman who trusts her inner authority, communes directly with nature and spirit, and navigates her environment using her own personal magic. Being a witch is not about wearing specific costumes or following dogmatic rules. You recognize yourself as a force of nature, a creatrix, an oracle, a healer, and a sorceress who uses her powers to heal yourself and the world.

Lineage and Fear

Generational trauma and the very real history of persecution have caused many women, including traditional lineage practitioners, to hide their gifts in fear and secrecy. The author shares her background as a hereditary gypsy witch with Irish Traveller and Roma roots, noting how her female relatives suppressed their seer-like visions and healing practices out of deep-seated fear of persecution.

Lisa Lister's Roma nanna wore all her wealth as gold jewelry and warned her never to trust outsiders, while her mother suffered from chronic fear and hid her dream diaries filled with symbols and prophetic insights.

Witch Work

Witch work is the deliberate practice of making it safe to be a powerful woman again by refusing to shrink, hide, or play submissive roles to appease patriarchal expectations. Many women suppress their inner scream through numbing behaviors or by adopting disconnected, aggressive masculine traits. Lisa Lister lived from the neck up like a man, which contributed to physical health issues like PCOS and endometriosis, while her mother dimmed her light and played a submissive, fearful role.

True power requires expanding into fullness, embracing emotional range, and letting the wild feminine lead.

You must perform specific inner actions to restore this balance:

• Recognize and acknowledge the unexpressed part of yourself in your body and being rather than pushing down the internal scream.
• Bring all aspects of your emotional and physical experience forward, including both rage and laughter, beauty and strength.
• Be willing to feel everything fully, including joy, pain, fear, anger, and distress.
• Be willing to disappoint people in order to be your true self.
• Breathe deeply right down into your womb space.

2. Traditions and Waking Up

Witchcraft encompasses a vast array of traditions, ranging from ancient hereditary practices and folk magic to structured Neo-Pagan religions. You can explore many different paths.

Witchcraft encompasses diverse paths rooted in nature, while waking up requires daily practices of truth-telling and boundary setting.

The author outlines numerous paths including:

• Alexandrian Witch
• Appalachian Granny Tradition Witch
• Asatru
• Bruja
• Curandera
• Dianic Witch
• Eclectic Witch
• Gardnerian Witch
• Green/Eco Witch
• Gypsy or Romani Shuvihani
• Hedge Witch
• Hereditary Witch
• Hoodoo Witch
• Kitchen Witch
• Shamana
• Stregheria
• Thelema Witch
• Traditional Witch
• Wicca

Doreen Valiente authored the Charge of the Goddess and helped lift the legal ban on witchcraft in the UK on 29 July 1951, which had been in place for over two centuries. The author compares Doreen Valiente's massive influence on the spread of modern witchcraft to Beyoncé.

Practices for Waking the Witch

Being a witch is not defined by tools, titles, or spells, but by your alignment with your inner power, cyclic nature, and the Earth. Reconnecting with internal magical power requires specific daily practices.

You can wake your internal power through simple habits:

• Get still – ideally in nature
• Tell the truth
• Step beyond fear
• Be kind (but take no shit)
• Notice what’s around you
• Experiment
• Expand your awareness
• Know that you know

After turning her back on her Gypsy lineage to pursue a fast-paced media career, the author suffered from severe endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome. Physical pain forced her to reconnect with her roots and womb space.

Initiation and Lineage

Sara La Kali serves as a powerful patron saint and dark mother figure for Gypsies, associated with healing, cleansing past karma, and protection. She is honored annually on 25 May with a sea immersion festival in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

You can perform a petition to Sara La Kali using specific items:

• A red candle
• Rose absolute oil
• Anoint a red candle with rose oil, and light it
• For three nights when the moon is full, repeat the specified petition three times
• Say out loud, write, or whisper your prayers to Sara La Kali asking for guidance

Sara La Kali has 13 pearls resting in her crown recalling the lunar cycle. Her festival falls on 25 May.

Seeking to reclaim her power without a high priestess, the author performed a self-initiation in 2008. She immersed herself naked in the dark 7-foot plunge well inside the White Spring in Glastonbury under the guidance of her friend John.

3. History and the Witch Wound

The witch hunts were a systematic gendercide that created generational trauma, which modern women must heal through somatic awareness.

Before the nineteenth century, women were rarely allowed to write. History was shaped by victors with specific agendas. Patriarchy replaced community and spiritual connection with a capitalist work machine. This system infantilized both men and women through fear.

Historically, a wise woman was a witch who had completed her bleeding years. She gathered ancestral knowledge. Hags were women who displayed independence and wilfulness. Patriarchal societies deliberately reframed these empowering qualities.

The Witch Hunts

In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII gave the Church authority to find and kill witches without fair trials. This eliminated threats to emerging male doctors and religious control. Heinrich Kramer wrote the Malleus Maleficarum in 1486 as a guide for catching witches. Silvia Federici documented the massive scale of torture and femicide in her book Caliban and the Witch. Historians cited 13 million women killed on nooses, torture racks, and flames.

The Witch Wound and Voice

Cellular and ancestral trauma from historical silencing creates deep physical fear around speaking out. Past-life trauma and ancestral memory manifest as physical vocal blocks in modern women. The author experienced a four-year period of childhood muteness. She repeatedly lost her voice before public speaking engagements due to past-life regression memories.

You must face the witch wound using specific somatic steps:

• Acknowledge the witch wound as a real thing that impacts your life and body.
• Notice how that wound is affecting your life right now, including hidden truths or fears.
• Take a few deep-down-into-the-womb breaths and notice where you feel these fears physically.
• Lay your hand over this place, send it big love, and breathe into any sensations without judging or fixing.
• Repeat the mantra: "I am safe. It is safe for me to be in my body."
• Ask for courage, faith, trust, and support from other SHE-led women.
• Remember that we are never alone and draw fuel from the women who came before us.
• Ask the divine mother, goddess, SHE, All That Is to help you ignite the flames and walk with you.

Archetypes

The author maps five powerful facets of the witch onto the points of a pentagram. These represent different aspects of female spiritual authority that were historically revered.

You can explore these archetypes:

• Explore the Force of Nature: SHE who cannot be controlled.
• Explore the Creatrix: SHE who dreams, manifests and makes magic.
• Explore the Oracle: SHE who trusts her intuition and sees all things.
• Explore the Healer: SHE who heals herself and heals the world.
• Explore the Sorceress: SHE who is charmed, dangerous and not afraid of the dark.

4. Cyclic Living and the Wheel of the Year

Aligning with the Celtic Wheel of the Year and womb-moon phases allows women to resist linear patriarchal demands and access natural power.

Patriarchy forces a straight-line agenda favoring men, pushing women to ignore natural ebbs and flows through synthetic hormones and unnatural routines. Acknowledging that our bodies mirror Mumma Nature makes women a force of nature that cannot be controlled.

The Sabbats

Witches use the Celtic Wheel of the Year, featuring eight Sabbats divided into Solar Festivals and Fire Festivals, to sync with seasonal energies. The Wheel of the Year marks agricultural and astronomical events through Solar Festivals and ancient Celtic Fire Festivals which mark seasonal gateways and high energy points.

Lisa Lister notes she uses the Celtic Calendar because living in the UK plugs her directly into the motherboard.

Learn myths, legends, beliefs, and festivals of the land you currently live in to tune into natural energies.

Samhain marks the descent of winter and the New Year in the Celtic calendar, serving as a time when the veil between the living and dead is thinnest. Celebrated from sundown on October 31 to November 1, Samhain focuses on introspection, honoring ancestors, bringing closure to grief, and seeking divination guidance for the upcoming year.

Lisa Lister offers libations on her ancestors' altar matching what her family members loved in life, such as a Black Russian for her mum and cold beer for her dad.

• Make an Ancestors' Altar by gathering photographs, items, and souvenirs of deceased loved ones, lighting candles, and offering libations.
• Be reflective by looking back at journals and photographs from the past year to document growth and challenges.
• Burn a list of everything you want to let go of in the Samhain flames, circle clockwise, visualize yourself rising from the flames, and use divination for future guidance.

Yule marks the Winter Solstice, celebrating the shortest day and longest night as a time of rebirth, returning light, and the first planted seed. The solstice represents a turning point where light conquers death and promises new growth. Fire, candles, and evergreen trees symbolize the endurance of life through darkness.

Lisa Lister married the Viking on December 21, 2012, because the Winter Solstice reminds them that light always returns.

• Prepare sacred space with incense, spray, or smudge 12 hours before the Winter Solstice.
• Light charcoal and add herbs like thyme, marjoram, lavender, hawthorn, basil, garlic, or mint.
• Light a white candle marked into seven sections, meditate on the light, and repeat the affirmation of strength and abundance.
• Snuff the candle when one seventh has burned and journal your insights, repeating daily until the candle is consumed.

Imbolc on February 2 celebrates the quickening of light, the Earth's awakening, and the Celtic Goddess Brigid, serving as a time for developing psychic skills like psychometry. Imbolc marks the first sprouting of leaves and the manifestation of resolutions. It is also an ideal time to practice psychometry, which is reading information from an inanimate object using the left hand.

• Hold an object belonging to someone else in your left hand to pick up words, names, images, sensations, or colours.
• Keep a diary of what certain impressions and colours mean to you while practicing with items from friends.
• Welcome the sun by turning on every light in the house or lighting a candle in each room, and trace an image of the sun in the snow if available.

Ostara, the Spring Equinox, is a festival of balance, new life, and fertility, celebrated by sowing intentions and working with subtle inner energies. Day and night are equal during the equinox while the light grows stronger, making it a prime moment to balance chakras, masculine and feminine qualities, and internal polarities.

Lisa Lister and the Viking bury their magic eggs every year under her matrilineal rose bush for extra SHE juju.

• Whisper or sing your wishes and intentions into an egg representing fertility and rebirth.
• Draw two interlocking triangles forming a six-pointed star symbolizing 'as above, so below' on the egg.
• Bury the egg in Mumma Nature and ask her to help manifest your goals.

Beltane heralds the Celtic summer and the light season through fertility celebrations, bonfires, and spirit communication. Falling on May 1, Beltane is one of the three spirit-nights when faeries can be seen, and features traditions like jumping balefires, making Maypoles, and brewing love potions under the full moon.

• Wash your face in dew at sunrise on Beltane for beauty in the coming year.
• Cast a circle outdoors or near a window, fill a chalice with spring water reflecting the moonlight, and call upon Aphrodite.
• Add rose petals, a consecrated quartz crystal, and a touch of rose or jasmine oil to the water.
• Pour the water into a bottle with an equal amount of vodka to seal the potion, storing it in a dark place to use as perfume for love spells.

Esbats and Moon Magic

Esbats are moon rites dedicated to the Goddess and serve as the active working times for performing spells, attraction, and banishing. While Sabbats celebrate seasonal changes via fire and sun, Esbats follow moon phases. Different lunar phases dictate specific magical works: new moon for new ventures, waxing for attraction, full for banishing, waning for rejection of negativity, and dark moon for internal rest.

• Map out moon phases and Sabbats in your yearly calendar on Samhain or using smartphone apps.
• Create a dream pouch for psychic dreams by putting mugwort and bay leaves in a piece of yellow material, sewing it with red thread, and placing it under your pillow.

Cyclic Alignment

A woman's menstrual cycle mirrors the moon cycle, seasons, and goddess archetypes, acting as an internal monthly map.

Aligning menstrual phases with nature creates holistic harmony. Pre-ovulation mirrors Spring, the Maiden, and the waxing moon; ovulation mirrors Summer, the Mother, and the full moon; premenstruation mirrors Autumn, the Wise Woman, and the waning moon; and menstruation mirrors Winter, the Crone, and the dark moon.

• Breathe deep into your womb space for 10 minutes a day to grow strong roots and resist patriarchal constructs.

5. Spells, Tools, and Intentions

A spell is an active prayer or intentional way of manifesting desires using personal energy.

Spells range from simple mental focuses in nature to complex rituals involving moon cycles, specific days, herbs, oils, colors, and deities. The primary tool of a witch is not external gear but the focus, concentration, intentions, and desires residing within the individual.

Lisa Lister waited for the new moon on 11 July 2010 to perform her Manifest a Man spell, which subsequently led to meeting a 6ft 6in Viking online exactly one moon phase later.

• Wait for the new moon
• Light a candle and write a detailed list of what you want
• Make a mojo bag filled with a rose quartz crystal, the wish paper, herbs, and a scent
• Place the list under your pillow and carry the mojo bag daily
• Visualize the outcome in morning meditation and take practical real-world action

Magical Tools and Focus

A Book of Shadows or Grimoire serves as a personal written record for a witch to track spells, rituals, correspondences, and internal insights.

Modern witches can maintain digital folders or physical journals. The book functions as a container for tracking the Wheel of the Year, element correspondences, herbal and crystal properties, moon phases, candle magic, recipes, and meditation records, allowing you to engage in heart riffing to receive guidance.

• Keep journals or digital folders for spells, rituals, and notes on what worked
• Record correspondences including oils, herbs, colored candles, dates, and moon phases
• Use heart riffing by asking a question in writing until insight takes over
• Log the Wheel of the Year, element properties, crystal notes, and dream symbolism

Casting a Spell

Casting a spell requires setting a clear intention, planning supplies, making offerings, cleansing the space, casting a protective circle, and detaching from the outcome.

Practical magic relies on focus and intent rather than dramatic complexity. You prepare your space, invoke elements, set up purposeful altars, perform the spell, and then properly close the circle and ground your energy afterwards, giving the ceremony about an hour.

• Set a clear intention for what you want to bring, release, or heal
• Plan and gather all necessary physical supplies and altar items in advance
• Make an offering to spirits, the universe, or the Earth
• Cleanse, purify, ground, and center using sage or breath work
• Cast a circle using a wand, athame, or your finger to visualize a protective dome
• Set up an altar with purposeful items, ceremonial candles, and element bowls
• Perform the spell, let go of the outcome completely, and close the circle

6. Divination, Healing, and Elements

An Oracle is not someone with supernatural fortune-telling powers, but a woman who deeply trusts her body, nature, and the wisdom of her womb. Lisa Lister remembers her calling as an Oracle while standing barefoot in Mnajdra, a 5,000+ year-old temple in Malta dedicated to the Goddess.

• Know thyself by trusting your body wisdom, signs, and power points.
• Take responsibility for your decisions without looking for a single right answer, asking yourself what you would do if you already knew.
• Rest often, using the pre-menstrual and menstrual phases or waning/dark moon to slow down and receive.

Divination Tools

Tarot is an intuitive process of divination where cards act as guidelines and focal points rather than rigid future predictions. A tarot deck consists of 78 cards, split into the 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana divided into Swords, Cups, Coins, and Wands. The author spent 78 weeks studying a single tarot card each week, letting it guide her and charting what came up.

• Choose a tarot deck that feels right for you, such as the Rider Waite for beginners, Crowley Thoth, or Gustav Klimt tarot.
• Lay out cards using spreads like the Celtic Cross, Tree of Life, Romany spread, or Pentagram Spread.
• Keep readings positive and real, reminding querents that outcomes can always change based on their decisions.

Reading tea leaves, also known as tasseography, uses loose leaf tea and intuition to interpret patterns and symbols left at the bottom of a cup.

• Brew loose-leaf tea in a white or light-coloured teacup without using a strainer.
• Drink the tea, place the base of the cup in your dominant hand, and swirl it clockwise three times so the leaves settle.
• Read the images starting from the handle or 12:00 point, noting that the rim represents the present, the middle represents the near future, and the bottom holds the overall answer.

A pendulum is a simple divination tool using a pointed crystal on a chain to answer yes-or-no questions after proper calibration.

• Hold the pendulum by the free end of the chain so the weighted end hangs loose and perfectly still.
• Ask a simple yes/no question with a known answer, such as your gender or living country, and note the directional movement for 'Yes'.
• Repeat the process with a known 'No' question to identify your unique 'No' direction.

Scrying involves gazing at a reflective surface like water, a crystal ball, or a black obsidian bowl to clear the conscious mind and open a direct line to the Divine.

• Prepare the room by casting a circle, dimming lights, and burning incense, then place your scrying tool on a table.
• Relax with deep womb breaths, look at the object in a relaxed manner focusing just past its surface, and keep your mind blank except for a single question.
• For moon scrying, hold a jug of water to the moon to charge it, fill a dark bowl, reflect the moon's light into the water, and write down all thoughts and visions in a journal.

Healing Arts and Herbs

Menstruation was historically a sacred time of radical rest and dreaming, functioning as an internal oracle and natural method of receiving divine vision. Lisa Lister sat in the womb tomb at the Hypogeum and received a vision of the Maltese Dreamer bleeding between her legs.

• Honor your womb as the source of your magic and intuitive center.
• Rest during your menstrual bleed or the dark of the moon instead of medicating cramps away, allowing yourself to receive visions.
• Listen to anchoring tracks like Jennifer Berezan's song Returning to return home to your womb space.

Conscious breathing, or pranayama, is foundational medicine that releases muscle tension, relieves anxiety, and sends vital healing energy to the pelvic bowl.

• For Womb and Belly Breath: Place one hand on your lower belly, inhale through your nose expanding your tummy, ribcage, and collarbones, pause, and exhale audibly from your womb through your mouth.
• For Ocean Breath: Inhale deeply through your nose with a closed mouth while constricting your throat muscles to create a sound resembling ocean waves or Darth Vader.

Herbs possess both medicinal and magical properties, with witchcraft focusing largely on leaves and flowers while rootworking emphasizes plant roots. Clare Fairhurst joined the author's retreat, bringing tubes of herbs and practicing the daily ritual of preparing and sipping tea.

• Keep basic staples like frankincense resin, sandalwood chips/powder, and dragon's blood powder for rituals and spells.
• Use herbs in charms, sachets, incense, baths, oils, teas, and spell work, while respecting plant life and consulting medical practitioners before internal use.
• To make Immuni-Tea: Mix equal parts dried elderberries, elderflowers, chamomile, rose hips, and echinacea; steep 1 tsp per cup of hot water for at least 20 minutes.

Crystals and Breath

Crystals are Earth-given spiritual multitaskers that hold potent healing properties, store energy, and amplify magical work when properly cleansed and programmed.

• To cleanse crystals: Hold under running water for a few minutes, or pass metal jewellery through sage smoke or leave on an amethyst cluster.
• To re-energize crystals: Place in sunlight and moonlight for 24 hours, 3 days, or 7 days.
• To programme crystals: Hold the stone in your dominant hand, visualize white light flowing from your womb through your body into the crystal, and thank the crystal for its specific purpose.

7. The Sorceress and Sisterhood

Rewilding the feminine through pelvic awareness and gathering in sisterhood creates the ultimate defense against patriarchal control.

The Sorceress and Rewilding

The Sorceress archetype represents owning every single part of oneself, including both the dark and the light. Rewilding requires turning inward, facing personal and collective wounds in the cosmic womb, and breaking free from constrictive societal expectations.

Over two hundred women signed up for the author's online rewilding programme. During this time, her nervous system went into overdrive, experiencing migraines, sickness, and doubt, realizing that rewilding is an immersive, messy, and non-linear process rather than a quick fix.

Womb Cleansing and Pleasure

Your pelvic bowl acts as an inbuilt cauldron of creativity and a powerful internal power source called Shakti. Suppressed emotions and patriarchal projections muffle this connection to Shakti and intuition, requiring conscious clearing of emotional residue, past relationship entanglements, and cultural projections.

The Eve Stain of shame and sin has disconnected women from their bodies, their cyclic powers, and their fundamental right to pleasure. Reclaiming multi-dimensional pleasure and self-sourcing are radical acts against patriarchal conditioning.

Sisterhood and Gathering

Dismantling patriarchal structures requires women to gather in circles, rebuild mutual trust, and heal collective wounds together. Patriarchy has historically pitted women against each other to maintain control.

The author began gathering women in her front room for SHE ceremonies on the dark moon to practice breathwork, drink ceremonial cacao, share stories, and witness one another. You can invoke your inner power and heal yourself through simple nature-based practices and radical intuition.

• Go on a herb walk: go walking in nature, and take or draw pictures of the plants that you find. Then get geeky and find out what they are, and what they can be used for.
• Find a herbalist near where you live who offers seasonal herb walks or foraging lessons: it’s an education in Mumma Nature.
• Don’t be afraid to question anything: in fact, question EVERYTHING.
• Be safe and take radical self-responsibility, but also trust your intuition.

10 Key Ideas

1. Reclaiming the historic title of the witch allows women to dismantle patriarchal conditioning and access their innate creative power.
2. Witchcraft encompasses diverse paths rooted in nature, while waking up requires daily practices of truth-telling and boundary setting.
3. The witch hunts were a systematic gendercide that created generational trauma, which modern women must heal through somatic awareness.
4. Aligning with the Celtic Wheel of the Year and womb-moon phases allows women to resist linear patriarchal demands and access natural power.
5. A spell is an active prayer or intentional way of manifesting desires using personal energy and focus rather than complex gear.
6. Divination tools like tarot, tea leaves, pendulums, and scrying act as intuitive guidelines and focal points for deep inner wisdom.
7. Honoring your womb and practicing conscious breathing serve as foundational healing arts that connect you to your natural oracle.
8. Crystals are Earth-given spiritual multitaskers that hold potent healing properties, store energy, and amplify magical work when properly cleansed and programmed.
9. Rewilding the feminine through pelvic awareness and clearing the Eve Stain of shame allows women to reclaim pleasure and step into the Sorceress archetype.
10. Dismantling patriarchal structures requires women to gather in sisterhood circles to rebuild mutual trust, question everything, and heal collective wounds together.