What is Vegan Witchcraft?
Vegan witchcraft is a variant of green witchcraft that is informed by ecofeminism and explicitly rejects the use, exploitation, killing, and consumption of fellow animals. As such, it finds relationships with the natural world and other species to be empowering and seeks to employ magic for personal wellbeing as well as ecosystemic healing and animal liberation.
Vegan witchcraft also overlaps with kitchen witchery as it looks to herbs, plants, fruits and vegetables as powerful sources of energy, growth, healing, and regeneration. It eschews the use of animal products – milk, cheese, eggs, and honey included – in practice. Likewise, it calls for natural or human-made ritual tools that do not rely on the exploitation of fellow animals, namely bones, antlers, feathers, furs, and leather.
Most fundamentally, vegan witchcraft asks for a reimagining of the witch’s relationship to the earth and cosmos, suggesting a retooling of the witches’ wheel of the year to align with plant-based agricultural traditions and ecosystemic changes. Samhain, for instance, is not celebrated by vegan witches as a harvest festival requiring the slaughtering of fellow animals but instead a time for honoring our many ancestors, regardless of species. After all, humans, too, are animal and can claim many different species in their evolutionary heritage. Nonhuman animals are seen as kith and kin in vegan witchcraft rather than ritual ingredients, sabbat feasts, or servants.
Vegan Familiar Politics
A reverence for nature and appreciation for plant magic are not the only commonalities between contemporary witchcraft and veganism. The two paths also find a sacred power in close psychic relationships with fellow animals. Although the close connection between witches and other animals was a relationship of suspicion in times past, many witches today openly embrace this kindship as an important element in magical living. The familiar, in particular, whether psychically imagined or physically real, is often called upon to guide the practitioner and assist in their magical biddings.
That said, the prevailing trend in modern witchcraft discourse is to treat familiars as servants rather than consorts. When the familiar is called upon, it is usually to serve some interest of the practitioner. Even if well-meaning, this exploitative relationship must be understood in its historical context. The familiar was usually framed as the witch’s servant, in league with evil forces to accomplish nefarious ends. While contemporary witchcraft has subsequently rebranded its reliance on the familiar in an effort to distance itself from Satanism (and Christianity), it nonetheless continues to abide by the Satanic and Christian tendency to position nonhuman animals as subservient objects bound to their human masters. Exceedingly few leaders in the Craft and authors of influential books identify the familiar as a free agent, someone with their own interests and motivations who is not subject to the whims of their human’s wants and desires. This is a pattern I discerned following a discourse analysis of dozens of leading publications spanning the past 50 years of witchcraft literature. Vegan witchcraft challenges this vestigial domination and encourages a more egalitarian relationship with the animals with whom we share our homes and lives.
How to Find Your Familiar
The witch’s relationship with fellow animals, whether real or imagined, holds important consequences for the authenticity of contemporary magical practice. Human supremacist attitudes have supported unprecedented institutionalized violence against fellow animals in the industrialized West and they run counter to witchcraft’s desire to promote global healing and avoid causing unnecessary harm. Indeed, witchcraft of the 20th and 21st centuries coalesced to reclaim a more harmonious coexistence with nature and other species. The pagan community’s untamed rootedness in nature and its multispecies consciousness were deeply threatening to a patriarchal religious order and violently stamped out. The status of women plummeted as wild spaces were privatized, fenced, and domesticated. Reclaiming this connection could be an important means for liberating women, fellow animals, and nature herself.
Liberation, in other words, begins with a mindset. Thus, vegan witchcraft celebrates human connections with fellow animals but calls for a more egalitarian approach to working with them. Consent and reciprocity are key to mindful familiar working. Nonhuman animals should not be forced into magical practice, nor should they be framed as servants for human will.
For living familiars kept as pets, their agency should be respected to maximize the potential for a safe and respectful magical household. Purchasing living beings from breeders violates consent and objectifies them (and their parents) as consumable objects created for human enjoyment (at the expense of unhoused animals at high risk of “euthanasia” in shelters). Adopting your familiar is a more ethical approach as it saves a living being in need, respecting them as persons rather than products and thus establishing the relationship on more equal footing. Ensuring the have enrichment, veterinary care, and healthy food is also important for improving the egalitarianism of the relationship. An inability to provide these safeguards suggests that a metaphysical familiar would be more appropriate for the vegan witch’s household.
Working with the familiar should be give and take. Fellow animals provide much in the way of love, companionship, and psychic strength, but humans must also provide them with spiritual and corporeal enrichment. While familiars can also enhance ritual practice to improve the wellbeing of the witch, witches might also allow themselves to act as familiars from time to time, to do the bidding of fellow animals to promote healing for their species as well. Choosing plant-based foods, directing spells toward animal liberation, and supporting community efforts to protect the environment are all ways to sustain a more equitable (and empowering) relationship with the familiar and the nonhuman realm.
