What it all meant

WItches when I was young...(not too long ago)

Granted, i am a bit younger than most of you guys so my experience wasn't too bad in terms of seeing a witch as something awful, or strange.When I was growing up a witch was a wise woman.
Its kinda funny actually now that I think of it. My whole family does to some degree believe in most witchcraft related ideas. For one thing most of the people do believe in some form of divination mainly tarot and scrying with a bowl of water and reading coffee cups.
I remember being a young kid and hearing stories about old ladies who lived within the community that were basically the wise women of the area. They knew a lot of different herbal remedies and did different kinds of divination for the people. They would always talk about how you could go to her with any problem or question you had, and she could help you find the answer. But its interesting, after they would tell us about them they always said at the end,
"oh you know, she was just some sick old woman with no family who just lived on the land and moved a lot."

Now, on the other side of the coin, if my family talked about actual "witches". It was very stereotypical. She was a crazy widow who killed her husband and drowned her kids. Oh and she was a servant of Satan. She also didn't have a warm heart it was almost always ice cold.
So with those two ideas, I saw magic and witch as two completely different things. Magic was okay in some places but a "witch" was always evil and bad.
I think the reason remains the same,people fear the unknown. They knew about magic but didn't see it as evil. Witch on the other hand was pure evil. I think that's why now I'm sort of hesitant about telling my family Im a witch. I mean they accept my practices because its something they are familiar with but dont make the connection with it to a witch/Wicca/paganism because they see that as evil.


As for my personal discovery of what a real witch was, that started about 7 years ago. I think it was sometime around when the harry potter movies had come out and everyone and their mother was obsessed. I was really drawn to it and started reading now childish books about becoming a wizard. I read about 2 books on the subject only one really touched anything close to Wicca. Anyways, after reading that second book and getting a minuscule taste of Wicca I felt that there definitely something more to this "wizardry" and witchcraft stuff than I was lead to believe. Mind you, this realization came after about 3 years after going off on the "wizards quest" as the book called it. So after doing some personal growing and reading I finally came across a book about witchcraft. Now this book was a bit more accurate but still lacking the spiritual aspect of Wicca. I want to mention that in the midst of all this my picture of what a witch was had changed dramatically. I began to see the witch I read about as the wise woman of my past. So a few more years past and I found Scott Cunningham book, Wicca a guide for the solitary practitioner. This book pretty much sealed the package. All the pieces acquired over the years finally made sense. It also filled the spirituality part of Wicca that was missing from the other books.

So here I am today. A witch. Bound to the path of the wise ones and loving every bit of it.