Emma Quilty’s Witch Power: Hexing the Patriarchy with Feminist Magic enters a crowded field. Witches are everywhere in contemporary publishing: as feminist icons, therapeutic archetypes, political rebels, lifestyle brands, Instagram aesthetics, and vaguely transgressive symbols of female empowerment. Much of this literature asks us to accept the witch’s radical potential as self-evident. Quilty is more ambitious. She wants to know what the witch actually does as a political and cultural figure, and what contemporary witchcraft might offer feminism beyond the familiar rhetoric of empowerment.
Quilty is an anthropologist and someone exploring witchcraft firsthand. She is an Australian writer working mostly within Australian communities, the one clear exception being Chapter Five, in which she travels to New Orleans and explores Voodoo directly. The book contains an introduction and seven chapters, each keyed to a specific community or field encounter: a Reclaiming Witchcamp, a Red Tent ritual, sacred kink, embodiment of the natural world, death and New Orleans Voodoo, feminist activism online, and finally, reclamation. She draws on feminist theory, anthropology, history, cultural studies and autoethnography.
Alongside the theory are passages of personal writing. At times, Witch Power moves close to memoir, and these sections give the book an intimacy that its academic framework alone could not provide. They also give the language of reclamation and power something concrete to work upon; we see Quilty trying to understand these ideas through the circumstances of her own life. The shifts between personal narrative and cultural analysis can be abrupt, and Witch Power does not always sit comfortably at the intersection of scholarship and memoir, but the result is a serious and pleasant book without the density of an academic monograph.
This is also a relatively young scholar’s book, in both the best and occasionally frustrating senses. Quilty has intellectual confidence, political clarity and an instinct for questions that witchcraft communities often avoid. At the same time, some arguments need another turn of the screw. The book can diagnose a problem brilliantly and then move on, perhaps because there are no easy answers.
Extraction, capitalism, and the monstrous feminine: where Witch Power shines
Quilty is strongest when she turns her anthropological gaze towards contemporary witchcraft communities and asks questions that eclectic spirituality avoids confronting: who gets to borrow from whom, what happens when spiritual practices are detached from their cultures, and when does eclecticism become extraction. This is particularly effective in The White Witch, one of the book’s strongest chapters. Her account of a Red Tent ritual is wonderfully uncomfortable. A group of predominantly white witchy women are “gathered on settler colonial land, LARPing an empowerment fantasy of an Arab woman who was the victim of rape.” Quilty observes that spiritual practices can flatten cultural difference until the violence and specificity of somebody else’s history become spiritually useful material for us.
Quilty is equally perceptive about the relationship between witchcraft, New Age spirituality and the wellness industry. Contemporary witches sometimes define themselves against New Age spirituality while participating in many of the same economic and cultural systems. She traces the overlap between witchcraft and wellness culture, particularly where practices drawn from Asian religions, psychology, mindfulness, prosperity thinking, and self-help become commodities for individual transformation.
There is something almost absurd about a countercultural spirituality organised around resistance to capitalism while simultaneously producing an endless succession of workshops, subscriptions, retreats, branded products, and purchasable identities. Quilty’s attention to the Protestant work ethic is particularly useful. Even ostensibly alternative spiritualities can reproduce the demand to work continually upon the self: heal yourself, manifest better, remove your blocks, transform your mindset, optimise your spiritual practice. Liberation becomes another project of individual labour.
Her analysis of sex and gender is just as sharp when she questions the supposedly positive association between women and nature. Feminist witchcraft has often celebrated precisely what patriarchal culture denigrated: menstruation, childbirth, sexuality, embodiment, the Earth, intuition and female reproductive power. Reclamation can be politically meaningful, but reversing the value judgement does not necessarily dismantle the underlying category. Quilty observes that defining women as “natural” because of their bodies or reproductive and healing knowledge continues to marry women to nature while positioning men alongside culture and civilisation. She asks whether the value judgment actually dismantles anything or whether a spirituality can praise the womb and still quietly reduce womanhood to biology.
Queer culture and the monstrous feminine offer a more unruly alternative. The contemporary witch can be feral, excessive, sexual, grotesque and deliberately resistant to palatability. Her discussion of the witch in digital and queer visual culture recognises that reclamation need not rehabilitate the witch into a respectable wise woman.
Quilty’s autoethnographic method gives these arguments force. Her own experiences and identity are part of the material she examines, including her awareness that she is often the only person of colour in the witchcraft spaces she describes. The personal and analytical remain closely intertwined.
History and magic: where Witch Power wobbles
The historical foundations are among the weaker parts of the book. Quilty gives Margaret Murray’s discredited witch-cult hypothesis more room than its historical credibility warrants. Murray initially appears as a viable historical theory before her controversial status receives fuller treatment much later in the book, and Quilty does not sufficiently reckon with the damage Murray’s thesis has done to witchcraft scholarship. But this and other historical slips don’t destroy her argument. Witch Power is fundamentally an anthropological study of contemporary witchcraft rather than a history of witchcraft and witch trials. It does, however, matter in a field already saturated with bad history. Modern witches have inherited enough folklore masquerading as fact without scholars inadvertently reinforcing it.
The later chapters raise questions that Quilty doesn’t always follow through on. In The Techno Witch chapter, Quilty takes up the question of whether a collective spell needs to “work” in any magical sense to matter. It’s a useful anthropological question, and an uncomfortable one to sit with as a practitioner. If magic is simply symbolic political action, emotional regulation, or collective self-soothing, the witch becomes remarkably easy to assimilate into secular psychology and activism. Quilty is similarly loose with the word “coven”, which by the book’s end has stretched to cover almost any group of people gathered around a witch-adjacent shared cause.
Quilty’s rigour softens in chapter five, The Death Witch. She turns to the relationship between contemporary witchcraft and New Orleans Voodoo, drawing on their points of contact to explore embodiment, race, and death as cultural ritual. Having examined so carefully how eclectic spirituality can obscure appropriation and extraction, she gives comparatively little attention to whether the same dynamic might be at work here.
More importantly, Quilty never fully convinces me that the witch is necessary to the political project she describes. Resistance, refusal, feminist solidarity, bodily autonomy, ecological consciousness, anti-racism and opposition to patriarchal power can all exist without witchcraft. If the central argument is that witchcraft offers feminism distinctive resources, we eventually need to identify what witchcraft contributes that other political, spiritual or communal formations do not.
The verdict
Witch Power succeeds most convincingly when Quilty applies feminist and anthropological analysis to the practices and contradictions of contemporary witchcraft. Her discussions of whiteness, cultural extraction, commodification, wellness culture, gender essentialism, and the politics of spiritual communities deserve serious engagement from modern witches, and her Australian perspective and participation from within give this book a distinct place in the current witchcraft publishing landscape.
Its weaknesses emerge when the historical foundations become shaky or when the witch’s political usefulness is assumed more readily than demonstrated. I finished the book persuaded that witchcraft can provide a rich language for feminist resistance. I remained less convinced that resistance requires the witch, or that calling something witchcraft necessarily gives it a political potency unavailable elsewhere.
Perhaps the most promising thing about Witch Power is that Quilty does not write as though the subject has been settled. This feels like the work of a scholar still developing an intellectual project rather than delivering its final statement. Contemporary witchcraft needs more writers willing to take it seriously enough to criticise it. We have no shortage of books telling witches that our practices are empowering. The more difficult task is asking what kind of power we are actually creating, where it comes from, who gets excluded from it, what we have borrowed to construct it, and whether our rituals of resistance change anything beyond ourselves.
Witch Power: Hexing the Patriarchy with Feminist Magic by Emma Quilty, published by Polity Press, is available now in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook. Find it at your local library or favourite local bookstore.