The Books That Made Me a Witch

On the shelves that opened doors, the pages that said 'you are not alone', and why the most powerful witch in literature was written by a man who didn't believe in any of it.

Every now and then, if you're lucky, you will find a book that doesn't just give you a story. It gives you a mirror, held up at the exact right angle, at the exact right moment, so that you see something in yourself you hadn't quite named yet.

I've been lucky enough to find several of those. Some of them were practical — grimoires, guides, the kind of thing you open at 11pm when you're improvising a spell and need to know which herb does what. Some of them were novels that turned out to be a lot more true than they were meant to be. And one of them was a children's book about a garden, which I still reread and which still, every single time, makes me feel like the world is larger and more alive than I'd remembered.

This is not a definitive reading list. It's just mine. The shelves that made me.

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Where it all started

The Secret Garden  —  Frances Hodgson Burnett

I want to begin here because this is where I begin. Not with spells or sabbats or any formal introduction to witchcraft — with a locked garden, a sickly boy, and a girl who arrived in a foreign, cold, and unwelcoming country and decided, with characteristic stubbornness, to make something grow anyway.

I was a child when I first read it. I didn't have the vocabulary to process what it made me feel. Only later I did understand that what Burnett was describing — the idea that neglected things can be brought back, that tending matters, that the act of caring for something changes you as much as it changes the thing you're tending — is as good a description of magic as I've ever read. She didn't call it spell. She didn't need to.

I still reread it. I still feel it. The sense of a door opening onto somewhere green and hidden and entirely, stubbornly alive. That feeling is why The Quirky Witch exists.

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The book that said: you're not alone

Book of Shadows  —  Phyllis Curott

If The Secret Garden gave me the feeling, Phyllis Curott gave me the framework — and more importantly, gave me the relief of recognition. Here was a woman, a no-nonsense lawyer in New York, intelligent and grounded and entirely serious, describing experiences I had privately been having and publicly been keeping very quiet about. The sense of something present in the world. The pull toward ritual and intention. The absolute certainty, arrived at through no logical process I could properly explain, that paying attention matters. The recognition of power within yourself.

I remember reading it and thinking: oh. So it's not just me.

That is not a small thing. For a lot of people who end up finding their way to a magical practice, the journey starts not with certainty but with a kind of embarrassed suspicion — a feeling you've been carrying around privately, slightly convinced it makes you odd. Curott wrote it down, clearly and without apology, and handed it back. You're not odd. You're paying attention. Sometimes that's all a book needs to do.

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The one that is genuinely magic

The Sea Priestess  —  Dion Fortune

I want to be careful how I describe this one, because The Sea Priestess defies easy descriptions. It is ostensibly a novel. It is also a working in progress. Dion Fortune — occultist, psychologist, founder of the Society of the Inner Light — who lived at the turn of two centuries, wrote fiction the way some people cast spells: with full intention, specific symbolism, and the expectation that it would do something to the reader.

It does.

I'm not going to tell you what, because I think it's different for everyone, and I think half the point is finding out for yourself. What I will say is that there are passages in this book that I have read so many times the pages know me, and they still land differently depending on what I'm carrying when I open it. That is not a thing novels are supposed to do. Dion Fortune didn't much care what novels were supposed to do.

“There is something very intimate and personal about one’s book. They reveal so much of one’s private soul.” (The Sea Priestess - Dion Fortune)

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The one that lives on my desk

Grimoire of the Green Witch  —  Ann Moura

Right. Enough atmosphere — let's talk about the book I actually reach for when I need to get something done.

Ann Moura's Grimoire of the Green Witch is, bluntly, a working tool. Thorough, practical, organised, and — crucially — written with genuine respect for the tradition it's drawing from rather than a vague New Age enthusiasm for things that sound witchy-ish. It covers correspondences, seasonal rituals, spellwork, moon magic, and a great deal else, and it does so without either dumbing things down or disappearing up its own symbolism.

I've owned a copy of it since first I saw it in my store. My copy has notes in the margins, certain pages have been opened so many times they fall naturally to the right place, and there are traces of what I suspect is dried rosemary in the binding. It is, in the most literal sense, a used book. That is the highest compliment I know how to give one.

If you're looking for a place to start building a practical magical practice — not the philosophy, not the history, but the actual how — this is the one I'd hand you.

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The worlds I got lost in — and the complicated bit

The Mists of Avalon / Harry Potter  —  Marion Zimmer Bradley / J.K. Rowling

I'm going to put these two together, because they belong together in my head — and not just because they're both fantasy series that swallowed me whole at impressionable ages.

The Avalon cycle bewitched me. Bradley retelling the Arthurian legends through Morgaine, through the priestesses, through the women who were always there but got three lines and a reputation for inconvenient magic — it felt, when I first read it, genuinely revelatory. The sacred woven through landscape and season. The Goddess not as abstract concept but as apple trees, mist off water, the particular quality of autumn light. I read the whole cycle. I got very lost in it for a while.

And Harry Potter — well. Entire generations after mine grew up in that world. I discovered it as an adult, and it still enchanted me. I don't think I need to explain what it meant to a bookish, slightly odd child (or a nerdy grown up) to read about a place where being different wasn't a liability, where the people who didn't quite fit the ordinary world turned out to be the ones with the most interesting lives, or destined to greatness. The magical imaginary of entire generations runs through those books whether we like it or not.

Here's the complicated bit, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't there: what has emerged later about both Bradley and Rowling as people has made these books sit differently in my hands. That's not a small thing. I'm not going to go into detail — this isn't the space for it, and frankly others have written about it better than I could — but I won't pretend I haven't felt the particular deflation of discovering that someone whose work opened something beautiful up for you has also done real harm to real people.

What I've landed on, for myself: I can hold both things at once. These books were part of my magical imaginary. They genuinely were. But I no longer find them inspirational in the way I once did, because that word implies something about the person behind the work that I can't separate out anymore. What they gave me — the wonder, the sense of a world alive with meaning — I've taken with me. It belongs to me now. The rest I've put down.

Tiffany Aching would call that thinking about what you're thinking. Knowing the difference between the feeling a book gave you and the authority you grant its author. They are not the same thing. They were never the same thing.

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And then there's Sir Terry

The Discworld Witches books (and everything else)  —  Terry Pratchett

Here's where I need to be honest with you about something that I find genuinely fascinating, and slightly paradoxical, and ultimately rather wonderful.

Terry Pratchett — Sir Terry, knighted for services to literature and a well-deserved knighthood that he celebrated by making his own sword from iron ore personally collected in a field, and including in it a piece of thunderbolt iron (which is the most Pratchett thing imaginable) — was, by his own repeated admission, a profoundly unmagical person. He didn't believe in the supernatural. He was deeply sceptical of organised religion, and of the idea itself of God. He was, at heart, a humanist who trusted human beings to sort themselves out and was furious and grief-stricken when they didn't. He was not, in any traditional sense, a witch.

He also wrote Granny Weatherwax. And Tiffany Aching. And in doing so, accidentally or deliberately — and I suspect deliberately, because Pratchett was never accidental about anything that mattered — he produced what I would argue is the most accurate description of a magical mindset I have ever read.

He didn't believe in magic. He just understood, completely, how it works.

Headology. The word Pratchett invented for what Granny Weatherwax does, and what any witch worth the name actually does. It is not trickery. It is not manipulation. It is the understanding that belief shapes reality (go back to Dion Fortune, about this) — that the story you tell yourself about who you are and what is possible it's not just a story, it is the architecture you live inside. Change the story and you change what you can do.

“If you don’t turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else’s story”. (Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents)

That’s it. That's the whole thing. Centuries of magical tradition, compressed into one made-up word by a man who (allegedly) didn't believe in any of it.

And then there's Tiffany — serious, practical, occasionally furious Tiffany, who learns early that the most important thing a witch can do is think about what she's thinking. First Thoughts and Second Thoughts and the crucial, devastating Third Thought that watches the other two. Tiffany doesn't cast spells to escape responsibility. She casts them because she has looked at a situation clearly and decided that this is the right thing to do, and she is prepared to own whatever comes of it.

“I choose. This I choose to do.” (Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith)

I am, I want to be clear, fiercely resistant to the argument from authority — the idea that something is true or right simply because someone important said so. I don’t like gurus, I don’t like High Priests/Priestesses.  I don't follow Pratchett because he was famous or beloved (though he was both). I follow his thinking because when I read it, it describes something I had already felt to be true in my bones, more precisely than I had been able to describe it myself. That's not authority. That's recognition.

The fact that he built the most useful philosophy of magic I've encountered from a position of vigorous scepticism is not, I've decided, a contradiction. It's actually the whole point. Magic is not about what you believe in the sky. It's about how seriously you take your own mind, your own responsibility, your own capacity to do harm or good with the choices you make. Pratchett understood that completely. He just set it on a flat world carried by four elephants standing on a turtle, which is, if anything, the correct approach.

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What books do, if you let them

The through line in all of these — the garden, the lawyer, the sea priestess, the grimoire, the seers of Avalon and the Chosen Child in Hogwarts, the witches of the Disc — is that they all handed me something I didn't know I was looking for. Permission, mostly. Permission to take my feelings seriously. Permission to build a practice around it. Permission to think carefully about what I was doing and why, and to own the consequences.

None of them told me what to believe. The best ones never do. They just open a door and stand aside, and you walk through it, and you come out the other side slightly different from how you went in — a bit more yourself, somehow, which is the strangest and most useful kind of magic there is.

If any of these are new to you, I hope you find your way to at least one of them. And if you already have your own list — the books that opened doors for you — I'd genuinely love to know. Drop it in the comments. This coven is a circle. Pull up a chair. ✦

With magic (and a very full bookshelf),   

Francesca

The Quirky Witch  ✦  thequirkywitch.com