What Witchcraft on Sark Would Look Like

A chant held over a struck match, meant to keep the rain off a football pitch: “Taba taba taba, rain, taba taba taba… Leave the storm you brew, come warm yourself by the fire.” A name written on paper and sealed inside a heavy book, meant to quiet a bully, who stopped bothering her, whether from the spell or simply from growing up. A circle of six school friends round a small fire in the woods at lunchtime, chip trays balanced on their knees, holding hands, talking about their futures: who would marry first, what their children would be called. None of it needed anything grand. These were the teenage experiments of a Lancashire schoolgirl in the 1990s, learned partly from a paperback called Spells for Teenage Witches.

Ordinary ritual, ordinary people

Nobody in that circle was ever in danger of arrest. Witchcraft prosecution in England had been abolished in 1735, and the Pendle witch trials, which took twelve people from the same Lancashire county to court, had happened nearly four centuries before. That gap, between a schoolgirl’s tea light and a scaffold, is the whole distance modern witchcraft has travelled.

As an adult, she still has her tarot read occasionally, and jokes about Mercury being in retrograde when a week goes wrong. Her own definition of what she is actually doing, stripped of the aesthetic: magic, she says, whether white or black, is energy, and setting an intention, whether through tarot, meditation, or simply writing a goal down on paper, is “essentially modern witchcraft.” Read that way, it looks less like a belief system and more like a habit: deciding what you want, and paying it more notice than you otherwise would.

People have always:

• made wishes,
• carried lucky objects,
• read signs,
• performed rituals before uncertain events,
• asked what the future holds,
• said words intended to make something happen.

What changed dramatically was what society believed those actions meant.

In one period, authorities could interpret certain practices as evidence of a supernatural crime deserving death.

In that Lancashire childhood, they’re girls mucking around with a paperback during lunch.

That’s fascinating because it suggests that perhaps ordinary magical thinking never disappeared. The danger attached to it did.

Slower, and outdoors

For some, the practice runs slower and deeper. One woman, recovering from a depressive episode, rebuilt her routine around the old Pagan festival calendar, Yule at the winter solstice, Imbolc in early February, Ostara at the spring equinox, and around simply being outside: watching the moon through its phases, learning the names of wildflowers, sitting under trees. She cites research suggesting at least two hours outdoors a week measurably improves wellbeing, and contrasts that slower attention with shop-bought “self-care,” a scented candle standing in for an afternoon actually spent outside.

What does witchcraft actually do for the person practising it?

The schoolgirl’s witchcraft was intention. The slower practice is becoming attention.

That distinction matters.

The teenage spells point towards something desired: stop the rain; stop the bully; tell us our futures. There is an attempt, however playful, to affect or anticipate what happens next.

The slower practice almost reverses that. She isn’t asking nature to do something. She’s training herself to notice what nature is already doing.

The moon changes. The seasons turn. Wildflowers appear and disappear. Winter becomes spring.

She has learned to notice that winter has reached its darkest point; notice the first signs of spring; notice that the days and nights have become equal.

Modern life already divides time into significant dates: birthdays, Christmas, New Year, school terms, financial quarters. The Pagan calendar simply organises the year around changes in the natural world.

That is important for Sark. On an island, these things are unusually difficult not to notice. Darkness, tides, weather, moonlight, migrating birds, flowering plants, the lengthening evening: they materially change what the place feels like. And you cannot help noticing.

The schoolgirl gives us intention, deciding what matters.

The slower practice gives us attention, noticing what is there.

The schoolgirls around the fire give us ritual and belonging, doing something meaningful together.

The bully spell gives us agency, doing something when you otherwise feel powerless.

And the Pagan calendar gives us orientation, locating yourself within a cycle larger than your own immediate problems.

Those are much more interesting than a catalogue of spells and crystals.

Because none requires us to believe that magic exists.

And yet they begin to explain why perfectly ordinary modern people might find practices labelled witchcraft useful.

Take away the broomsticks and spells, and what remains?

Attention. Intention. Ritual. Nature. Agency. Belonging. Time.

And then the question becomes: how different are those things from practices the rest of us already have, but call by other names?

What’s already here for it

None of this needs anything invented for Sark specifically. Sark has had no street lighting anywhere on the island for as long as anyone can remember, and in 2011 it became the world’s first Dark Sky Island: exactly the kind of unbroken view of the moon’s phases such a routine is built around.

An annual Foraging Weekend already sends people out along the same cliffs that once exported rock samphire by the barrel, looking for wild thyme, gorse and sloes, a present-day version of the wildflower-naming in that slower practice.

Informal women’s circles are held regularly on Sark, in homes rather than at a fixed venue, rotating between the women who take part: ordinary evenings that look, from the outside, a good deal like that six-a-side circle round a bonfire in the woods.

None of that makes Sark a witchcraft retreat, only a place where the raw materials, dark skies, wild coastline, women meeting in each other’s homes, are already there, whatever anyone decides to call them.

Why the word still costs something

None of this comes free of the word’s older weight. Across European and colonial witch trials, another pattern appears: women who possessed property, earned independently or worked in occupations where everyday misfortune could easily be attributed to them were unusually vulnerable to accusation. Katherine Harrison inherited a farm in Wethersfield, Connecticut, ran it herself, brewed her own ale, kept bees, and was tried for witchcraft in 1668. The historian Carol Karlsen found that women from families with no male heir made up 64 percent of those prosecuted for witchcraft in colonial New England, 76 percent of those convicted, and 89 percent of those executed. A Cambridge University study by Dr Philippa Carter found a version of the same pattern in 16th and 17th century England: women whose work was healthcare, food preparation, dairy production or livestock management carried a measurably higher risk of accusation.

Harrison’s danger came from her independence, not her confidence. Rachel Alexandre, on Little Sark, faced the same test: she ran a farm alone for seven years, and sour milk and a lingering cat were eventually enough. Sark’s Witch Trials tells her case in full.

The word never fully retired. In June 2026, billboards went up across Melbourne showing the Victorian premier Jacinta Allan in a black pointed hat. Nobody was arrested, nobody was in physical danger, but the same word, four hundred years on, was still being reached for to do the same job: take a woman’s authority away by making her strange.

Words themselves do things.

Calling Katherine Harrison a witch did something.

Calling Rachel Alexandre a witch did something.

Putting Jacinta Allan in a witch’s hat is intended to do something.

Calling yourself a witch also does something.

So without necessarily intending it, you’re circling back to the very premise of magic: the idea that words, symbols and ritual actions can alter the world.

Historically, the word witch unquestionably could.

It could change a neighbour into an enemy, a healer into a suspect, an independent woman into a criminal.

No supernatural belief is required to recognise that kind of power as real.

The historical woman could be punished because others determined what she was.

The modern practitioner sets her own intention.

The woman who rebuilt her routine chooses where she puts her attention.

The financially independent woman controls her own property and labour.

The contemporary woman can even take the formerly hostile word witch and decide for herself what it means.

So “Woman in Total Command of Herself” becomes almost a proposition for what the retreat might actually be about.

Not spells.

Not pretending to be seventeenth-century witches.

Not necessarily Wicca.

Agency.

And that’s much stronger.

Whether those threads add up to something worth travelling to Sark for is the part we cannot answer on our own. Read the retreat idea, and tell us if you would come.