The Spinster's Soliloquy

HIS361 – Witchcraft and Heresy Final Essay

One of the most interesting questions raised for me in this course is what makes witchcraft authentic. As a history student, my instinct is to look backward. Where did a tradition come from? How old is it? Can its claims about itself be supported by historical evidence? What surprised me in studying contemporary witchcraft was not learning that modern witchcraft differs from witchcraft in the ancient and early modern worlds. I expected that. What surprised me was discovering how little that difference seems to threaten the authenticity of contemporary witchcraft for many of its practitioners.

Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches provides an interesting contrast because Rice creates what historians cannot establish in contemporary witchcraft: a continuous, hereditary family of witches whose supernatural identity truly passes from one generation to another. Looking at the Mayfairs alongside the history of modern witchcraft suggests that historical, religious, personal, and community authenticity are distinct. A tradition can lack one and still possess the others.

The history of modern witchcraft makes these distinctions especially important. Margaret Murray famously argued for the survival of an ancient pre-Christian witch religion, an idea that influenced later understandings of witchcraft. Gerald Gardner’s Wicca, however, drew from a variety of sources and influences, including Murray, Charles Godfrey Leland, Aleister Crowley, Freemasonry, and ceremonial magic. Modern witchcraft continued to change after Gardner. Alexandrian Wicca, Dianic Wicca, Reclaiming, solitary witchcraft, and other traditions developed in different directions and reflected the cultures in which they emerged. The Module 5 lecture reduced the historical problem to a wonderfully blunt statement: “There were not really witches. It’s myth. Including Margaret Murray. There is no ancient witchcraft” (Lanahan-Kalish, Module 5 lecture). What I found even more interesting was what followed. We discussed contemporary witches who essentially respond to that problem with, “Yes, and…” Historical discontinuity does not necessarily invalidate their religion or identity.

That response initially struck me as strange because, for me, historical accuracy and religious authenticity were almost the same question. If a group claimed ancient history and historians demonstrated that the history was inaccurate, I expected that discovery to create a problem. Contemporary witchcraft demonstrates that it doesn’t need to. Traditions can be borrowed, reconstructed, adapted, and reinterpreted while remaining meaningful to their practitioners. This does not make history irrelevant. It means that the historian and the practitioner may be asking different questions. The historian asks whether a claim about the past can be supported. The practitioner may be asking whether a ritual, community, identity, or experience has meaning in the present.

Historian Ronald Hutton’s approach is particularly useful here. Sabina Magliocco describes Hutton’s work as interdisciplinary because he considers magic and paganism within their cultural and historical contexts rather than separating folklore, society, culture, and history. She emphasizes his attention not only to what stories say but to why they are narrated within particular cultures and historical circumstances (Magliocco, 2022). This approach allows modern witchcraft to be studied seriously without requiring historians to accept every historical claim made about it. Tradition can be historically modern and still be culturally significant.          

Anne Rice turns this historical problem on its head in Mayfair Witches. The AMC series follows Rowan, a neurosurgeon who discovers that unusual abilities she has experienced throughout her life are connected to her Mayfair ancestry. She belongs to a multigenerational line of witches whose history reaches back centuries. The family’s relationship with the supernatural entity Lasher begins with Suzanne in Scotland and continues through generations of Mayfair women until Rowan becomes the thirteenth designee (Mayfair Witches, 2023–2025). Rowan does not study her way into witchcraft, adopt it as a religion, or choose it as an identity. She inherits it. In Rice’s fictional universe, bloodline does exactly what claims of historical continuity attempt to do in the real world: it connects the present witch directly to witches of the past.

This is one reason the transference ritual in the first season is such an effective scene for thinking about authenticity. Rowan desperately wants to be free of Lasher and the identity imposed on her. She wants to return to the life she understands, particularly the identity she established for herself as a physician. The Mayfair family instead approaches her problem through its collective traditions and supernatural knowledge. The women come together to perform a ritual intended to transfer Lasher away from Rowan. Tessa, a younger Mayfair, stands in striking contrast to Rowan because she longs for the position and power Rowan wants to escape.

Rowan possesses the inherited identity but does not want it. Tessa wants the identity and the special relationship with Lasher, but that desire does not make them hers. Even the troubled Mayfair family can put aside some of its internal dysfunction long enough to participate collectively in an inherited ritual. The scene, therefore, makes witchcraft feel old and established without needing to stop and prove its age to the audience. Ritual objects, family relationships, inherited knowledge, supernatural power, and shared memory perform that work instead.       

This is where the fictional Mayfairs become particularly interesting beside contemporary witchcraft. Rice gives her witches the kind of continuity that history cannot provide to modern Wicca. However, the contemporary practitioners discussed in class do not necessarily seem to need it. The comparison suggests that “authenticity” may actually contain several different ideas. Historical authenticity asks whether historians can demonstrate the claimed origins of a tradition. Religious authenticity asks whether the tradition provides practitioners with meaning and a coherent religious world. Personal authenticity asks whether an identity or practice feels true to the individual. Community authenticity asks whether other practitioners recognize someone as legitimately belonging to the tradition. These forms of authenticity can overlap, but they do not have to.

Rowan demonstrates the distinction particularly well. Within Rice’s fictional world, her historical and familial authenticity is almost impossible to challenge. She was born a Mayfair. Her powers existed before she understood them. Her connection to Lasher was inherited. However, her personal identification with witchcraft is far less secure because she does not initially want the identity that everyone else insists belongs to her. Contemporary witchcraft can present the almost opposite situation. A practitioner can lack an uninterrupted hereditary connection to an ancient witch religion while possessing a strong personal, religious, and community identity as a witch. From the historian’s perspective, these situations are completely different, but from the perspective of lived identity, lineage may not be the deciding factor.

Rice’s own complicated religious history makes this treatment of the supernatural even more interesting. Raised Roman Catholic, Rice left the Church, later returned to Christianity, and eventually distanced herself from organized Christianity again. Her relationship with Christianity nevertheless remained important to her writing. In Called Out of Darkness, Rice describes Christianity as “a religion in which the heart is essential to faith” (Rice, 2009). She writes about experiencing faith both intellectually and emotionally and about the relationship between her religious life and her supernatural fiction. At one point, she explains that she no longer felt complete writing only about supernatural beings excluded from salvation and wanted to write more directly about her relationship with God (Rice, 2009). Religion and the supernatural in Rice’s work, therefore, cannot be reduced to spooky cobwebs. Her fiction repeatedly returns to belief, temptation, evil, identity, power, and the possibility that unseen realities have consequences.

That point also connects with another lesson I took from this course. The anthropology of religion asks different questions from history. Evans-Pritchard examined how the Azande used witchcraft to explain cause and effect, while Favret-Saada emphasized immersion and positionality in understanding beliefs about witchcraft. The point is not simply to stand outside a belief system and announce whether it is rational or irrational. It is also important to understand what that system accomplishes for the people living within it. That approach helps make sense of the contemporary witches who are not particularly disturbed by historical discontinuity. If witchcraft provides identity, ritual, community, meaning, or a way of interpreting experience, proving an uninterrupted line to the ancient world may not be the question they are trying to answer.

I still think historical accuracy matters. If someone makes a historical claim, historians should be able to investigate it, challenge it, and distinguish evidence from myth. What changed for me during this course was realizing that proving a historical story wrong does not necessarily answer the religious question. I expected contemporary witches to distinguish more clearly between ancient witchcraft and their own modern practices, and I expected historical discontinuity to create more concern about authenticity than it apparently does. Instead, I encountered practitioners and traditions that acknowledged modern reconstruction without treating it as disqualifying.

Mayfair Witches makes a useful comparison precisely because Anne Rice does not have to solve the historical discontinuity problem. She is writing fiction. She can give the Mayfairs the ancient bloodline, inherited power, family rituals, and supernatural continuity that historians cannot simply give to modern practitioners. Rowan can reject being a witch and remain one because Rice has written authenticity into her blood. Real religious identity is considerably messier. People choose traditions, inherit them, reconstruct them, leave them, and return to them. Studying witchcraft has therefore made me less interested in asking whether something is “authentic” or “inauthentic.” The better question is who gets to decide, and whether history and religious meaning are even trying to answer the same question.

Works Cited

Lanahan-Kalish. (2025) Module 5: The re-creation of witchcraft [Lecture].

Magliocco, S. (2022). The man with the waistcoat and cravat: Ronald Hutton’s contributions to anthropology, folklore, and pagan studies. Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, 17(1), 4–12.

Mark Johnson & Logan Kibens, Haifaa Al-Mansour, Axelle Carolyn, Alexis Ostrander, Michael Uppendahl, & Sarah O’Gorman. (Directors). (2023–2025). Mayfair Witches [TV series]. AMC Studios.

Rice, A. (2009). Called out of darkness: A spiritual confession. Arrow.