> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.missingwitches.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Coven Values in Practice - URL: https://www.missingwitches.com/coven-values-in-practice/ - Published: 2026-09-18T15:45:31.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-18T15:45:31.000Z - Description: This is not a shame space. - Author: Editor - Tags: State of the Coven, What is Witchcraft? **What are the values of the Missing Witches Coven?** Missing Witches is a witchcraft community for people who are curious about magic, history, ritual, feminism, ecology, spirituality, science, and the strange and beautiful question of how we might live differently, how we might approach a fertile joy, how we might conjure a bumptious equality. We’re not all going to believe the same things. We’re not all going to practise magic in the same way. And we’re certainly not going to agree about everything. 💡 [What is a Coven? What is a Witch?](https://www.missingwitches.com/what-is-a-coven-what-is-a-witch/) In our online coven, what we share is a set of living values that shape how we gather. The Missing Witches Coven is: - **Anti-racist** - **Feminist and liberatory** - **Anti-ableist** - **Trans-inclusive** - **Welcoming to men and not gender essentialist** - **Pro-science** - **Curious over certain** - **Imperfect and evolving** These aren’t a checklist for being a Good Person. They’re not a test you have to pass before you’re allowed to call yourself a witch. They’re commitments we use to shape the culture of this community: how we speak to one another, whose knowledge we centre, how we make room for difference, how we approach difficult questions, and what we do when we get something wrong. ## What do these values look like in practice? ### We are anti-racist Magic has never existed outside of history, power, colonialism, race, or culture. The stories, rituals, plants, symbols, divination systems, and spiritual traditions we encounter have histories. Some have been carried across generations by living communities. Others have been appropriated, erased, romanticized, commercialized, or stripped from their cultural context. Being an anti-racist witchcraft community means asking whose voices are being centred, whose knowledge is being treated as universal, and who has historically been excluded from the room. It means making space to talk about racism and colonialism when they appear in our conversations. It means learning the histories behind the practices we engage with. And it means being willing to notice when something we love has a complicated history. We won't always get this right, as we've always said: we're gonna try not to fuck it up too much. The point is to keep looking. A touchstone for us is these words from Maya Angelou: ## "Do the best you can until you know better. Then **when you know better*, **do better*." ### We are feminist and liberatory We’re interested in magic not only as a way to make individual lives more comfortable, but as a practice for imagining and building freer worlds. For us, feminism means paying attention to power: gender, labour, bodies, sexuality, race, class, disability, colonialism, and all the other forces that shape who gets to be safe, heard, believed, and free. We’re interested in witchcraft as a practice of transformation and liberation. That doesn’t mean everyone in the Coven has to use the same feminist language or arrive at the same political conclusions. There are many feminist traditions, many ways of understanding power, and many paths toward liberation. The important thing is that we keep asking: **what kind of world is our magic helping us create.** ### We are anti-ableist Disability is not a failure, punishment, spiritual defect, or moral failing. It also isn't something that needs to be magically transcended. At the same time, we want to be careful about turning disability or neurodivergence into the opposite stereotype: the idea that disabled or neurodivergent people are inherently more magical, spiritually gifted, intuitive, or enlightened. A person may have particular strengths, insights, perspectives, or ways of perceiving the world that are connected to their lived experience. Those things can be honoured without romanticizing the realities of disability. We can recognize what someone has learned through their experience without turning that experience into a superpower they’re expected to be grateful for. This is one reason our moderation team within the Coven may sometimes gently call in language around disability, autism, or mental health—even when a post was shared with care and good intentions. We’re trying to notice the stories we reproduce, not shame the people who are learning. ### We are trans-inclusive Trans people belong here. So do non-binary, genderfluid, agender, and gender-questioning people. You don't have to have a particular theory of gender to be part of the Coven. But people do need to be treated with dignity. That means trans and gender-diverse people shouldn't be expected to debate, defend, or justify their existence in our spaces. We can have complicated conversations about gender while remembering that the people having those conversations are real people sitting beside us. ### We welcome men, and we aren't gender essentialist Witches don't have to be women. Men are welcome in the Coven. So are people of every gender, including people who don't identify with gender at all. This matters because the history of the witch is deeply tangled up with ideas about women, power, sexuality, nature, danger, and gender. We want to explore that history without reproducing the binaries that created some of those stories in the first place. Someone might arrive carrying very real experiences of misogyny, gendered violence, or oppression. Those experiences deserve room. But we also don't believe that people have inherent qualities, virtues, or faults simply because of their gender. The world is more interesting than that. And we think witchcraft should be, too. ### We are pro-science Being a witch doesn't require rejecting what humanity has learned through generations of observation, experimentation, research, and care. We're fascinated by the edges of scientific knowledge. Consciousness, ecology, embodiment, synchronicity, altered states, animal cognition, the microbiome, the intelligence of plants—there are enormous territories here where wonder and investigation meet. But curiosity isn't the same thing as rejecting established knowledge because it doesn't fit our worldview. **Our Coven can't be a place where someone is encouraged to abandon evidence-based medicine in favour of a magical explanation that could make them sicker.** Vaccines save lives. Antibiotics can save lives. Medical care saves lives. Scientific and clinical knowledge matters. We can hold mystery and evidence in the same hands. ### We choose curiosity over certainty We value questions. That doesn't mean every idea is equally well supported, or that we can't say clearly when something is harmful or demonstrably untrue. It means we're willing to ask better questions, follow evidence, listen to other perspectives, change our minds, and say **“I don't know.”** A witchcraft community full of people allowed to be curious is much more interesting to us than one where everyone has to arrive with the correct answer. We don't need to flatten mystery. ### We are imperfect and evolving We aren't trying to create a Coven where everyone gets everything right all the time. We expect to make mistakes. We expect our understanding to change. We expect people to arrive with different experiences, different histories, and different levels of knowledge. That means we're interested in **calling in rather than calling out wherever possible**. If something you've said lands badly, you may be invited into a conversation about it rather than publicly shamed. If a moderator flags something, it doesn't necessarily mean you've done something terrible. Sometimes it means we're noticing a pattern or piece of language that we want to think about together. We're also careful about cultural boundaries. **We don't lead circles on closed practices** that aren't ours to teach. We don't believe a few books, a workshop, or an enthusiastic weekend of research gives us ownership of someone else's living tradition. And when we discover that we've misunderstood something? We want to be able to change course. ## This is not a shame space. Strong values don't have to create a culture of purity. We want the Coven to be a place where people can practise living their values without having to perform ideological perfection. Human lives are messssssy. Let's say it again: This Is Not A Shame Space! Someone can care deeply about the environmental and cognitive costs of generative AI while also using an AI tool because it makes something *accessible* to them. Someone can have serious ethical commitments around animal agriculture while eating in a way that meets the *realities* of their body, family, culture, finances, or circumstances. Someone can care about liberation and still trip up and say the wrong thing. Someone can have been thinking about disability, race, gender, or colonialism for thirty years and still have shit to learn. That's not hypocrisy. That's being a a human bean, baby. So we're outlining our values here, and within the coven as part of our welcome course, with hopes of helping us to build a more generous, an liberatory coven, and from within that loving space (not a shame space!) to ripple and resonate out into the world. We believe we can hold strong commitments without demanding purity. We can disagree without dehumanizing one another. We can be challenged without being shamed. We can say, *I hadn't thought about it that way.* We can change our minds. And we can keep becoming. To keep crafting ourselves towards joy and a world in raucous harmony, THAT is the work of the witch. ## A living Coven These values aren't a finished doctrine. They're more like a compass, a sketch, a collab pastiche. As Missing Witches grows, we'll encounter new questions, new people, new knowledge, new disagreements, and new situations we couldn't have anticipated. Our promise is to keep tending the culture together. That's part of what makes a coven different from a collection of people who happen to share an interest. **We practise being in relationship—with one another, with marginalized knowledge and practices, with history, with the mysteries, with the living world, and with the possibilities of what comes next.** Find Out More - [About Missing Witches](https://www.missingwitches.com/about/) ⚡ The Missing Witches coven is home to a rainbow of magical people: solitary practitioners, community leaders, techno pagans, crones, baby witches, neuroqueers, and folks who hug trees and have just been looking for their people. [Join us. ](https://coven.missingwitches.com/membership/?ref=missingwitches.com)