Disappearing Acts: Attending “Witch School” in Brooklyn, New York

This chapter draws upon participant observation of Witch School, hosted by queer witch-owned Catland Books, as a site of modern witchcraft ritual performance. Through a dramaturgical lens motivated by questions of form—what witchcraft ritual forms are, how they work, and what they make possible—the chapter analyzes purification and protection rites as belonging to a category of ritual performance called “disappearing acts”: ritual practices that engage magic through structures and techniques that are predicated on loss and absence but perform as/through rites of exposure. Analysis of disappearance in witchcraft ritual suggests that one accesses magic by actively acknowledging and accessing loss, of doing something with and to it. Considering modern witchcraft's growing popularity and intersectionality, particularly in the context of the global pandemic, the chapter argues that witchcraft ritual allows people to access a sense of magic through loss and, by doing so, it capacitates them to act in service to life.