Tired of Trees: Discarding Nature Religion for a Rhizomatic Model of Contemporary Witchcraft

Witches on social media are not only redefining the boundaries of their traditions, they are eschewing the category of religion entirely, adopting the language of secularism to describe their magical identities. Secular witches compose a rapidly growing presence on sites like TikTok, Tumblr, and Instagram, and their perspectives are making their way into traditional publishing, sometimes to the bewilderment of both other witches and scholars alike. When witches of previous decades have fought so publicly to be members of a “religion,” how do practitioners who actively defy this categorization fit into these movements? With an understanding of religion as an inherently political category, this paper affirms the efforts of secular witches to recast their craft by using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome to think about not just how we define religious groups, but how we consider groups that insist that what they are doing is firmly not religion.