Why Witches?

People have asked me why I write about witches. It sounds like a simple question, but it rarely is. Behind it sits an entire history of discomfort. Why speak of witches when Brazil already has established initiatory religions? Why use a word so heavy with fear, mockery, and misunderstanding when so many traditions fought hard to escape it? Why not speak only in the language of priesthood, lineage, and temples?

The honest answer is that I am not trying to create a new tradition, nor am I interested in founding a new priesthood. I am writing about a form of practice that predates institutions and survives without them. A practice rooted in personal power, direct encounter, and responsibility. Witchcraft, for me, is not a religion. It is a way of standing in the world.

To understand this, it helps to look closely at the word bruxa itself. In Brazil, it still makes people uneasy. It is a word whispered to frighten children, or used to describe a neighbour who knows too much and cannot quite be controlled. It arrived through colonial mouths, shaped by European fears of heresy, demons, and forbidden knowledge. Yet long before that, it described people who worked with what was close at hand. Land, plants, spirits, dreams, the dead. People who healed, divined, cursed, protected, and mediated between worlds. The word became dangerous only when knowledge itself became a threat.

When enslaved Africans and displaced Indigenous peoples brought their spiritual technologies to Brazil, their practices were quickly labelled in the same way. Witchcraft. Sorcery. The devil’s work. This was not a theological judgement but a political one. Anything that gave people power outside the Church had to be controlled or destroyed. The persecution was systematic. Drums were burned. Ceremonies were raided. Practitioners were humiliated, punished, or arrested. To practise openly was to risk everything.

People adapted because they had to. Gods were hidden behind saints. Rituals were disguised. Languages were softened or broken apart. Over time, this process of survival gave rise to the great Afro Brazilian religions we know today. Candomblé emerged as a structured religion with hierarchy, theology, and clear initiatory boundaries. Umbanda developed its own forms, blending spiritism, Catholic imagery, and Afro Atlantic cosmology. These were not compromises made lightly. They were strategies of survival in a hostile world.

I hold deep respect for that history. Without it, much would have been lost forever. Initiation preserved lineages, ritual technologies, songs, and cosmologies that might otherwise have vanished. These religions carry dignity, depth, and beauty born of resistance. They deserve care and seriousness. I have walked those paths myself and know their weight.

But survival always comes at a cost. As religion became respectability, something else was pushed aside. The informal, unsanctioned practices that lived in kitchens, back rooms, streets, fields, and cemeteries. The magic that did not belong to a house, did not require permission, and did not wait for recognition. The figure of the witch became an embarrassment, a reminder of a time when spirituality was messy, dangerous, and uncontained. The bruxa was something to be disowned, not honoured.

Yet she never disappeared. She lived on in the hands of healers who never joined a terreiro. In whispered prayers passed through families. In personal pacts made at crossroads and gravesides. In dreams that would not leave people alone. The witch was not the enemy of religion. She was its shadow, its forgotten twin. The part that remembers that spirits answer before institutions exist.

This is where my writing sits. I am not arguing against initiation, nor am I claiming that lineage does not matter. But I am pushing back against the idea that power only exists inside formal structures. Especially when it comes to Quimbanda.

Quimbanda, as I have encountered it in Brazil, and as I practice it, is not primarily an initiatory religion. It is a practice. A way of working with spirits who inhabit liminal spaces. Crossroads, cemeteries, borders, thresholds. These spirits are not owned by temples or priests. They do not belong to anyone. Exu does not ask for credentials. He responds to honesty and consistency.

In the West, Quimbanda has increasingly been marketed as something only accessible through initiation. A closed system with gatekeepers and titles. That model may work for some, but it does not reflect the nature of the spirits themselves. The spirits of the crossroads are, by definition, open. They meet whoever comes with truth, whether that person wears beads or not.

When I write about witches, I am writing to those who feel that call but have no doorway. People who are not initiates, and may never be, yet find themselves dreaming of spirits, feeling watched at night, drawn to places others avoid. For them, witchcraft is not rebellion. It is access. A way to approach the sacred directly, without waiting to be authorised.

Power, in this sense, is not inherited. It is learned through relationship. It grows through failure, attention, and persistence. Through listening when no one else is listening. The witch learns from the land, the city, the dead, and the inner world. Her rituals may be small, but they are alive. A candle lit with intent. A glass of water placed at a window. A name spoken three times in the dark. These acts are not lesser because they happen outside a temple. They are how the spirit world stays in motion.

This is why I write the way I do. Not to teach a new system, but to point toward an attitude. Witchcraft, as I use the word, is about stepping into responsibility for your own spiritual life. It does not require initiation. It requires honesty.

None of this erases the importance of history. In fact, it demands that we face it more directly. Brazilian spirituality cannot be understood without acknowledging the violence that shaped it. The line between religion and witchcraft was not natural. It was drawn by fear, colonial power, and the need to survive. But centuries later, that line no longer needs to be so rigid.

The witch can return as a reminder that the sacred was never meant to be owned. That spirits are not bound by our categories. That power begins in the body, in attention, and in the willingness to act.

I write about witches because they survived what others tried to erase. Because they carry memory that did not make it into official histories. Because they remind us that before walls, titles, and initiations, there was practice. There was relationship. There was intuition. My books are written for those who feel that memory stirring again. They are for anyone ready to meet the spirits directly, to listen carefully, and to take responsibility for what answers back.

Mario dos Ventos

Journey through the Mysteries of the Spirit World

© Mario dos Ventos, 2026. All rights reserved.