When Witches Mourn the Dead: Grieving Rituals of Contemporary Witchcraft in New England

Abstract

This project is underpinned by ethnographic and phenomenological methods used to analyze the grieving rituals of contemporary witches in New England through the lens of anthropology, ritual studies, and grief counseling. The results of this study will fill in the gap in the literature on the anthropology of witchcraft and contemporary American death rites, which currently lack studies on personal grieving rituals. The scholarly backdrop of my research traces recent trends in the anthropology of death that reflect a movement toward noninstitutionalized death-related coping strategies along with psychotherapeutic literature on bereavement that similarly shows a shift toward private and individualized rituals of death and grieving while addressing changes in institutional authorities on mourning and individual responses in the contemporary United States. This undertaking aims to answer the following critical questions: How does the magic worldview of contemporary witchcraft inform the way witches create grieving rituals? How do these rituals enable contemporary witches to process and heal from the critical experience of loss?