1801–1881 · New Orleans
Marie Laveau
The most famous Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Free Creole woman of color, devout Catholic, hairdresser to the city's white elite (which gave her unmatched intelligence networks), and a working priestess who held public rituals on Lake Pontchartrain. She wove Catholic, African, and Indigenous practices into a sovereign New Orleans Voodoo tradition that survives today. Her tomb in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 is still the most visited in America.
Why she matters
She is the proof that magical authority does not require apologizing for itself. She was openly powerful in a society that punished both her race and her practice — and she built a reputation so durable that her name still moves money two centuries later. Study her business model, not just her magic.
1922–1999 · England
Doreen Valiente
The mother of modern witchcraft. High Priestess to Gerald Gardner, she rewrote the rough early Wiccan rituals into the poetic Book of Shadows the modern craft still uses. The 'Charge of the Goddess' is hers. She broke with Gardner over publicity, founded her own coven, and spent decades quietly proving that witchcraft was a living religion worth taking seriously.
Why she matters
Without her, Wicca would have been a footnote. Read her work to see what it looks like when a practitioner refuses to let a tradition stay clumsy. The grandmother of every Book of Shadows including yours.
c. 1674–after 1693 · Salem
Tituba
Enslaved Indigenous woman (likely Arawak from Barbados) owned by Reverend Samuel Parris. She was the first person accused in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Under coercion, she confessed elaborately — possibly to save her own life, possibly because her confession gave the accusers what they wanted. Her trial testimony shaped the entire panic. She survived the trials. The white women accusers did not all survive history.
Why she matters
Tituba is the wound at the root of the Salem story. She also lived. Most accused witches did not. When the witch trials are romanticized, remember whose body was used as the doorway into the panic — and that her name is rarely spoken at the center of the story it began.
1917–1982 · England / United States
Sybil Leek
Self-described 'Britain's most famous witch.' Hereditary witch from the New Forest, astrologer, occultist, author of over 60 books including 'Diary of a Witch' (1968) — which broke the cone of silence in popular publishing. She walked her pet jackdaw on her shoulder through 1960s London. Moved to America in the late 1960s and became the country's most public-facing witch through television appearances.
Why she matters
She is the patron saint of witches who refuse to be tasteful about it. She made being a witch impossible to dismiss as wallpaper. The visibility playbook for every public-facing witch since.
Pre-Greek antiquity
Hekate
Goddess of the crossroads, magic, ghosts, the moon, and the in-between. Older than Olympus — likely Thracian or Anatolian in origin, absorbed into Greek myth and then almost lost to it. Patron of witches, midwives, herbalists, dog-keepers. Her sacred animals are dogs and black bitches in particular. She holds the torches at the threshold and decides who passes.
Why she matters
If you work with the dead, with thresholds, with crossroads, with dogs, with the dark of the moon — you are working under Hekate's hand whether you named her or not. Speak her name. The unnamed deity is the unfed one.
Italian folk tradition · published 1899
Aradia
The witch-goddess of the Stregheria tradition. Charles Leland's 'Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches' (1899) claimed she was the daughter of Diana sent to earth to teach the oppressed peasantry the arts of witchcraft as a tool of resistance against the rich and the Church. Scholars argue whether Leland invented her or recorded a genuine surviving Italian folk tradition. Either way, she became central to modern witchcraft.
Why she matters
She is the goddess of witchcraft as rebellion. Not witchcraft as decoration, not witchcraft as wellness, not witchcraft as commerce — witchcraft as the resistance practice of the people who were stepped on. Remember this when the craft starts feeling too pretty.
1734–1782 · Switzerland
Anna Göldi
The last person executed for witchcraft in Europe — beheaded by the Protestant canton of Glarus in 1782, more than two centuries after the witch panics began. Her real crime: she was a servant who had an affair with her employer, and accusing her of witchcraft was the cleanest way to discard her. The Swiss government formally exonerated her in 2008.
Why she matters
Anna Göldi is what the witch panic actually was, stripped of all the romance: an instrument of getting rid of inconvenient women. Two hundred and twenty-six years between her death and her exoneration. The state takes a long time to apologize. We do not have to wait.
Born 1940 · Hungary / United States
Z. Budapest
Founder of Dianic Wicca, the women-only feminist branch of modern witchcraft. Arrested in 1975 for fortune-telling in Los Angeles and won her case, which struck down the anti-divination law in California. Her 'Holy Book of Women's Mysteries' (1980) was a foundational text for feminist spirituality. Controversial in contemporary craft for trans-exclusionary positions — practitioners reckon with her contribution without endorsing her politics.
Why she matters
She built infrastructure where there was none, and parts of what she built do not hold up. Both are true. Studying her is studying how to keep what serves and discard what does not — including from your own elders.
Born 1951 · United States
Starhawk
Co-founder of Reclaiming, author of 'The Spiral Dance' (1979) — the book that gave modern witchcraft its political backbone. She fused goddess religion, feminism, environmental activism, and anarchist organizing into a coherent practice. Spent decades on protest lines, in permaculture farms, and at climate actions. Still teaching.
Why she matters
She is the witch who proved magic and political organizing are the same skill: pattern recognition, intention setting, group ritual, sustained effort over time. Read her to remember that the practice was never supposed to stay in your altar room.
Contemporary · United States
Pam Grossman
Host of the 'Witch Wave' podcast, author of 'Waking the Witch' (2019), curator and writer at the intersection of art, feminism, and the magical. Co-curator of major museum exhibitions on witches in art history. Has spent over a decade in deep public conversation with practicing witches, scholars, and artists.
Why she matters
She is what generous scholarship looks like inside the modern craft. Her interview archive alone is a graduate education in contemporary witchcraft. Listen, then go read what her guests wrote.
1946–2014 · United States
Margot Adler
Journalist for NPR, granddaughter of psychologist Alfred Adler, lifelong Pagan and Wiccan priestess. Her 1979 book 'Drawing Down the Moon' is the first serious academic-quality survey of the American Neo-Pagan movement — written by a journalist who was also a practitioner. Updated three times during her life. She refused to make the craft sound either smaller or weirder than it actually is.
Why she matters
She is the reason the modern craft has a documented history at all in America. When the practice gets dismissed as 'made up in the 1960s,' you can point to her book. She did the receipts.
Born 1933 · Salem, Massachusetts
Laurie Cabot
Salem's Official Witch — title bestowed by Governor Michael Dukakis in 1977. Founded the Witches' League for Public Awareness in 1986 to fight defamation of witches. Wears full ritual robes in public every day. Operates a shop on Pickering Wharf. Has spent fifty years being the unembarrassed face of witchcraft in the city that built its tourist economy on burning witches.
Why she matters
She is what showing up for the work looks like over decades. Not five years of being witchy. Fifty. The compounding interest on visibility is not a trend strategy — it is a life.
