How Do You Know What Kind Of Witch You Are?

You don’t.

When it comes to "types of Witches", this concept ultimately developed in the 2010's surrounding NeoPagan forms of Witchcraft. In these forms of magic it's now common to seemingly "specialize", eventually, in certain areas of magical interest; to "niche down" magically, so to speak.

Because of this, you'll find people calling themselves everything from "Storm Witches", to "Techno Witches", "Death Witches", and "Green Witches", and so on; hundreds of these "types" of Witches now exist- including cute little infographics to go along in order to show you everything from their aesthetics to the tools of their craft. And now, on top of it, new Witches are often directed to figure out which one they are.

Unfortunately for anyone sucked into this, it's all nonsense.

You can't just "find out what kind of Witch you are". Not like that, anyways. Because these “types of Witches” or “types of Witchcraft” don't actually exist- nor is there anything that legitimately distinguishes a person as a Witch from any other normal person; the reality is that there are only normal Human Beings with normal special interests who happen to practice Witchcraft. And those special interests eventually happen to impact their Witchcraft- just as our interests ultimately impact every other aspect of their lives.

This terminology didn't develop out of thin air, however. So where did it come from? The long short of it is that we created it out of a legitimate need in the 2010's, and with an explicit purpose in mind: To communicate something very specific to those around us. Unfortunately, to understand that, you have to first understand that when we initially developed terms like “Storm Witch”, “Death Witch”, and “Urban Witch” in the early 2010′s? It was an era when information about Witchcraft was still semi-difficult to actually access at the time.

You largely couldn’t find books about Witchcraft outside of chain bookstores- and those just weren’t available in most cities; Metaphysical shops that may have carried them were (and largely still are) fairly rare outside of large cities, too; most people didn't know they could get books on the topic through the public Library, or that the Inter-Library Loan System existed to check out books across Libraries; E-readers and websites like Amazon were still brand new and up-and-coming, then- and a lot of people were still very iffy on selling their products digitally (especially books).

The internet existed, however, and that’s where most of us got our information; Yahoo!Groups and Yahoo!Chats. Various forums. LiveJournal communities. GeoCities and AngelFire websites that were were individually made and hosted. There weren't many, and most were low quality; it was a wild west of self-hosted nonsense. But it was our nonsense- and for many of us, it was the only access we had to learning about Witchcraft of any form ... Until suddenly we didn't even have that anymore.

Suddenly in the 2010's, many of those forums, groups, and website hosts started shutting down their services for good. Almost all of them did so with very little warning, and with no backups. Almost overnight, we lost platforms that'd been our main resources for decades as a result. And when those sites started going, for a while information on Witchcraft suddenly became even harder for people to find ... Not because of some great conspiracy to wipe it out, or anything like that. But simply because of a massive shift in how we viewed information technology as a whole. Witchcraft and other alternative religions, as a topic, just happened to get caught on the wrong end of the crossfire.

This forced many of us to scramble to make what we knew available elsewhere as quickly as possible, in order to fill the gaps that were being left while everything adjusted to what was ultimately a rather sudden and completely unexpected change in information dissemination and technology. And in some places, what this meant was that everyone was suddenly sharing any amount of information they had- whether it was good, or bad (and boy, was most of it pretty bad). As an unfortunate result of this, nearly every one of us making this information available- especially on sites like Tumblr- immediately became viewed by others as a sort of pseudo-teacher in lieu of access to traditional teachers and old previously trusted sources we'd once had access to.

In other words: If you shared any kind of information at all about Witchcraft, you got asked questions left and right, near constantly; basic questions, advanced questions ... Anything that anyone needed to know, you were expected to field them regardless of your particular personal interests or expertise; you were expected to essentially be a human encyclopedia and walking training resource that was publically available at the drop of a hat (or the click of an "ask" link). And sometimes the entitlement and demands were absolutely surreal.

Now the problem in this specific case, is what I said above: People have special interests, because people are people- and not every person is interested in the same things. As a result, no one studies everything. We all study what we’re interested in regardless of what traditions we’re a part of. And so after a while, those of us being forced into positions of resource, education, and leadership eventually needed some kind of shorthand in order to communicate what we actually knew about to those asking us questions- particularly so that people would stop asking us about the stuff we didn’t know about.

Shorthand terminology for things like Greencraft, Hedgecraft, and adjacent magics kind of already existed to a small extent by that time. And so we expanded on the language that we already had available, in order to convey similar ideas on a much broader spectrum than had previously been done before within the community. And it worked. It caught on, and it helped ... It helped tremendously, actually. And for a while, it was great!

I sat at the forefront of it as one of the very first “Big Name Pagans” on Tumblr to ever earn that “title” (which I hate). I even coined some of these terms and wrote some of the very first resource sets for them in the first place. None of them are good by today’s standards. But they were needed at the time. Because frankly it was annoying to constantly be asked (and expected to know) everything about anything- even about a bunch of things you had absolutely no interest in. Especially when people tended to get violently rude and hateful with you whenever you didn’t know (or even refused to answer) a question. Which is a behavior that became more and more common as time went on, before the big community crash finally around the 2015 era.

Until suddenly it wasn't great ... Until suddenly the internet took what was a good and useful thing coined out of need, and does what it always does: Twisted it into something horrid; a thin shadow of itself that has nothing to do with its original intent and purpose. Turned it into a commodity; just another something else they could market and use to make people feel horribly about themselves and their craft.

But these terms were never meant to be boxes for people to shove themselves into, or concepts and models to which to conform … They were never meant to be things people intentionally sought out in order to identify as- or worse: Poor aesthetics meant to define one’s craft and how it looks ... They were only ever meant to describe what kind of knowledge we already had, after years of already studying.

So no. You don’t find "what kind of Witch you are” … You’re just a Witch, plain and simple. Everything else boils down to you being a normal human being whose expressed interests naturally impact your craft- just like every other area of your life. And that’s really all there is to it.