People have been calling the Rev. Laura González a witch since she was a teenager in Mexico City.
She has always welcomed that description.
“When you’re 16 and people call you a witch, it feels very empowering,” she said.
On Monday afternoon, González, 51, had just returned from Wisconsin, where she spent three days in a sacred nature preserve mourning the deceased. At the festival, González and other pagans honored the dead by cleaning tombs and the surrounding cemetery. They chanted for their ancestors, and they reflected. They read tarot cards to mark the thinning of the barrier between worlds of the living and the dead.
Sitting in her office in a White Sox sweatshirt, surrounded by books on pagan religions and indigenous theology, González explained that a major part of her work as a feminist witch revolves around liberation for women, girls and gender-nonconforming people in particular.
“My goal is to help people, starting with women, (to) empower themselves, to find power in their spirit, and then find freedom of choice,” she said.
For González, the business of being a witch is a little subversive — reflecting a female empowerment that she doesn’t see in mainstream politics — and thoroughly practical.
Witchcraft has historically existed on the outskirts of society, an association perhaps most tragically illustrated with the executions and deaths of more than two dozen people in the Salem Witch Trials in the late 1600s. Today, though, witchcraft often draws what one pair of witches referred to as “the weird ones”: people who might not feel accepted in mainstream society or who are seeking a different spiritual, social and political order from what they were born into.
Though it’s hard to find a definite count of how many people practice witchcraft in Chicago, one minister whose congregation serves northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin estimated that the Chicago area is home to between 20,000 and 27,000 pagans, whose religions are anchored in the Earth’s rhythms and may employ witchcraft as part of their spiritual practice.
Some people who practice witchcraft, like the Andersonville-based author Christopher Allaun, get a kick out of secular Halloween celebrations and pop-culture representations of themselves as old women with green skin and black hats. While Allaun does have pagan friends who find the holiday offensive, he appreciates a good costume and a harmless practical joke.
“I actually enjoy the stereotype of the green witch and the skeletons,” he said. “I think (Halloween) is one of the few times of the year that grownups allow themselves to just be expressive and free and silly and have fun.”
But Allaun — a co-founder and ordained minister of a queer, pagan church with branches in Chicago and Seattle who has been practicing magic since 1992 — also sees traditions of witchcraft and pagan practice as important spiritual tools for people who face discrimination or injustice.
“The idea of witchcraft as empowerment, as spells to actually make your way through the world, attracts a whole lot of people,” he said.
González takes very seriously the root of the word “witch,” from the Gaelic “wicce” for “wise woman.” Traditionally, she said, wise women or wise people were healers that used incense, dance, music, chanting, gatherings and other practices now thought of as tools of witchcraft to meet spiritual goals.
“For me, witch is a job title,” she said. “We are working people. We work on healing ourselves and healing the collective.”
On Thursday, González is planning to hold a private ritual in her Bridgeport home, where she keeps a broom over the door as a symbol of protection. She will meditate on memories of her ancestors, and likely leave them an offering of food and water on an altar she built on Wednesday and will dismantle in early November.
That ritual will recognize the eve of a pagan holiday called Samhain, which marks the end of the harvest season and the coming of winter.
For pagans, the holiday is an opportunity for the living to confront their mortality and to try to connect with their dead loved ones.
“This holiday is all about celebrating our ancestors and honoring the lives of those who have passed on, and honoring the cycles of life and death,” González said. “We give ourselves this holiday to highlight those who have passed before us, to remember them, to mourn them and to understand that we are the ancestors of the future.”
Her other activities on Thursday night will look a lot like her neighbors’.
“For Halloween, I celebrate by giving candy to children,” she said.
‘Dance with the dead’
The Rev. Angie Buchanan is a senior minister with the Earth Traditions Church, a congregation that serves pagans in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. It will celebrate Samhain with an invitation-only ritual later in November.
The observance will include a meal taken in absolute silence known as the “dumb supper,” meant to help participants appreciate “all of these embodied things that we do while we are still having our human experience that our beloved dead no longer do.”
The dumb supper precedes a second ritual known as a dance with the dead.
Though the dance begins in candlelight, participants extinguish their candles partway through. The rest of the ritual takes place without light.
“There’s a meditation in total darkness that happens about standing on the shore and getting on the boat that will take you to the Isle of Apples, where your beloved dead are waiting,” Buchanan said. “And you get to see them and to commune with them and to talk with them.”
The dance is brief: “You can’t linger in the land of the dead for very long,” Buchanan said.
Then there are observances that fall somewhere in the middle.
The Rogers Park store Malliway Bros. Magic and Witchcraft, owned and operated by brothers Blake and Wycke Malliway, advertised a ritual on the store’s Instagram that brought several dozen people to gather around an altar inside the popular magic store on Oct. 26. The party hoped to establish a connection with the dead.
After people formed a circle around the altar, the door to the store was opened for spirits to enter. A skull sat on a chair, representing the deceased people participants were trying to reach and a mirror was available for people to catch glimpses of spirits.
Blake Malliway walked the skull around the circle so each participant could give a message to the skull directly.
The ritual had gone well, judging by the disturbances Wycke Malliway had at home that night: “There were things in my house that were falling down and trying to get my attention.”
The Malliways are planning to celebrate Halloween itself as both a secular and religious occasion.
“We’re going to order pizza, sit on the couch, hand out candy, watch scary movies and then we’ll have a ritual in the woods at midnight,” Wycke Malliway said. “You know, the usual.”
