You'll run into a handful of self-descriptive terms pretty quickly once you start reading around witchcraft online or in books. None of these are required labels, and you don't owe anyone a tidy category for what you do. This is just context for words you'll see, so you can recognise them and decide, entirely on your own, whether any fit or feel useful.
Terms about approach
- Eclectic witch: draws from multiple traditions and sources rather than following one fixed system. Probably the most common way people actually practise today, even if they don't use the word.
- Hedge witch: a solitary, folk-magic-focused practitioner, historically associated with herbalism and local healing. The "hedge" refers to a boundary between the everyday world and something beyond it, sometimes tied to trance or spirit work ("hedge riding").
- Kitchen witch: practice centred in the home and cooking, finding ritual in everyday domestic acts rather than elaborate ceremony.
- Green witch: focused on plants, gardening, and herbalism specifically, overlapping heavily with hedge witchcraft but usually with less emphasis on trance work.
- Secular or atheist witch: practises ritual and craft as symbolic and psychological work, without belief in literal deities or supernatural forces. Entirely valid and increasingly common.
Terms about structure
- Solitary: practising alone, by choice or circumstance. The majority of modern practitioners.
- Coven: a group that practises together, sometimes with a formal structure and initiation, sometimes informally.
- Hereditary witch: someone who describes their practice as passed down through family. This is a personal claim rather than a verifiable credential, and isn't something to gatekeep around either direction: you don't need a family lineage to practise, and someone claiming one doesn't need to prove it to you.
- Wiccan: specifically, a practitioner of Wicca, a defined modern religion with its own structure. Not a synonym for "witch" in general: see our history of witchcraft post for the full distinction.
The actual point of this list
You don't need to pick one. Most practitioners borrow across several of these without much thought, and plenty of people never bother with a label at all. If a term above happens to describe something you already do, that's useful shorthand. If none of them quite fit, that's fine too: the practice comes first, the vocabulary is optional.
