The Witch Wave

Ronald Hutton is a professor of history at Bristol University. He is a leading authority on ancient and medieval paganism and magic, the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and on global context of witchcraft beliefs. He is the author of seventeen books, including The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft , The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times...

Paulina Stevens and Jezmina Von Thiele are the co-hosts of Romanistan , a podcast that celebrates Romani identity, culture, and tradition. They are also the co-authors of the book, Secrets of Romani Fortune-Telling: Divining with Tarot, Palmistry, Tea Leaves, and More . Paulina Stevens is a California-based author, activist, and spiritual entrepreneur. She was the subject of the LA Times podc...

Mitch Horowitz is one of today’s most literate voices of occultism, mysticism, and the unexplained. He has bylines in The New York Times , The Washington Post , Politico , Time , and The Wall Street Journal , and appearances in Sundance-premiering movies, popular TV docuseries, and award-winning documentaries, as well as on CBS Sunday Morning , Dateline NBC , NPR’s All Things Considered , and othe...

Danielle Aykroyd is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who performs under the name Vera Sola . Sometimes called the "lost love child of Leonard Cohen and Nancy Sinatra," Vera Sola’s smoky vocalization and searing, soaring songs have a cinematic aspect to them, and would feel equally at home in a David Lynch film or a prairie full of phantoms. A trained poet, her lyrics are twisting...

Matt Marble  is an artist, author, audio producer and director of the  American Museum of Paramusicology  ("brilliant and humbling,"  The Paris Review ). Both creatively and through historical research, his work explores the inspired intersections of art and metaphysics and the intuitive disciplines they mutually employ. Matt is the author of  Buddhist Bubblegum: Esot...

Leila Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer, speaker, and designer whose work focuses on the intersection of history and horror and the gothic in contemporary culture. She’s the author of  Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread (out Feb 11, 2025) and  Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul , her essays have appeared in  Us: The Complete Annotated Scr...

Erica Feldmann   is the owner and founder of HausWitch , a company devoted to helping people heal their spaces and love their homes. She holds a Master's degree in Gender and Cultural Studies, with a research concentration in Witches. Her innate interest in the connection between home spaces and wellness led to the creation of HausWitch in 2012, and what started as a “micro budget +...

Astraleyes is a Los Angeles-based occult collage artist, archivist, and curator. He is also the publisher of  Bibliomancers , an independent press dedicated to exploring vintage print design and its ties to cultural movements, with a special focus on the esoteric. Through  Bibliomancers , Astraleyes seeks to uncover the connections between historical design, mysticism, and the hidde...

Lakshmi Ramgopal is a musician and dancer who performs under the name Lykanthea . Her electro-mythic debut EP, Migration , received much-deserved praise from such outlets as The Chicago Tribune , Noisey, and Public Radio International’s The World (and listeners will recognize its track “Hand and Eye” as The Witch Wave theme song). She’s collaborated with Savage Sister on their sundrowned EP, and s...

Laura Tempest Zakroff (she/they) is a professional artist, author, performer, and Modern Traditional Witch based in New England. She holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, and her artwork has received awards and honors worldwide. Her work embodies myth and the esoteric through her drawings and paintings, jewelry, talismans, and other designs. Laura is the author of several b...

Damsel Elysium is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and experimental sound and visual artist who uses double bass, violin, and original recorded sounds to explore alternative communication and connections with space, nature, and the unseen world. Their performances combine improvisational music-making, ritual, costume, and fantastical worldbuilding, giving the audience a sensation of being transp...

Robert Shehu-Ansell is a publisher, curator and independent scholar. Through his publishing company Fulgur Press he has represented esoteric artists in book form since 1992. These books are exquisitely produced, highly collectible, and deeply magical. From grimoires to artist monographs to tarot decks, everything Fulgur publishes is meticulously crafted with eye towards elegance and deluxe be...

Joanna Ebenstein is the founder and creative director of Morbid Anatomy , which is the world’s leading community that focuses on, among other things, the culture and contemplation of death. Morbid Anatomy has taken many forms since its founding in 2007. It’s been a wildly popular blog, a library, a museum, a project-in-residence at Green-Wood Cemetery, just to name a few, and it’s currently both a...

Judika Illes is the author of numerous books devoted to spells, spirits, and witchcraft, including  Encyclopedia of Spirits , as well as  Pure Magic, Daily Magic ,  Encyclopedia of Witchcraft ,  Encyclopedia of Mystics, Saints, and Sages , and  Magic When You Need It . Judika also was a significant contributor to the Witchcraft book Pam co-edited for Taschen’s Library of E...

Welcome to Season 8 of The Witch Wave! Cécile McLorin Salvant is a three-time Grammy-winning singer and composer, considered by many to be the Ella Fitzgerald/Sarah Vaughan/Billie Holiday/choose-your-own-iconic-vocalist of our time. The late opera legend Jessye Norman described Salvant as “a unique voice supported by an intelligence and full-fledged musicality, which light up every...

This season finale of The Witch Wave features Suranne Jones , the award-winning English actor, producer, and series creator. She’s been nominated for several awards for acting and won a BAFTA for her starring role in the hit series Doctor Foster: A Woman Scorned . Some highlights from her decades long television career include starring roles in Gentleman Jack , Vigil , and Scott and Bailey , and s...

Cat Willett is a Brooklyn-based artist. She has written, illustrated, and published two full-length books. The first is  The Queen of Wands: The Story of Pamela Colman Smith, the Artist Behind the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck . Her newest book,  Women of Tarot, An Illustrated History of Divinators, Card Readers, and Mystics is out next week. Cat is fascinated by tarot as a facet of art hi...

Kimberly Rodriguez ( @poetagoddess ) is a first-generation Indigenous Mexican artist and writer based in the Bay Area, CA. Her art reflects her journey toward reclaiming her indigenous roots and exploring different forms of self-expression. As an artist, Kimberly is deeply committed to creating work that is inclusive and accessible to all. She believes that art has the power to heal, connect, and...

  Pati Dubroff is an iconic, world-renowned makeup artist. She has worked with such glamazons as Margot Robbie, Kirsten Dunst, Elizabeth Olsen, Laura Dern, Christy Turlington, Priyanka Chopra, and Emma Watson to name but a few. She’s also collaborated with such photographic phenoms as Annie Leibovitz, Peter Lindbergh, and Tom Munro, and her artistry has been featured on countless covers,...

Christopher Marmolejo is a Brown, queer, and trans writer, diviner, and educator. They use divination to promote a literacy of liberation, and their new book Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy is an in-depth exploration of how tarot can be a tool of freedom, magical interrogation, and energetic support for anyone, and particularly for BIPOC folks. Christopher was born and raised...

Ron Regé, Jr. is a Los Angeles-based cartoonist who began drawing and self-publishing comics in the early 1990s in Cambridge, MA. Though he came out of zine culture and the underground comics scene, his work took a distinctly mystical turn thanks to a spiritual awakening he had the early 2000s. From that point on, his comics turned cosmic, exploring ideas of the occult, esotericism, and magic all...

Jodi Wille is a director and producer of the critically acclaimed documentary The Source Family and her brand new feature documentary Welcome Space Brothers which is about The Unarius Academy of Science. Her work explores people whose extraordinary true stories and creations leave us with new ways of seeing, and she has a special interest in so-called outside artists, alternative spiritual seekers...

Penny Slinger is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work investigates the feminine, the magical and the erotic. In the late 1960s, her encounters with the work of Max Ernst initiated an enduring involvement with both the Surrealist movement and the medium of collage. Her groundbreaking publications such as 50% The Visible Woman  (1971) and An Exorcism: A Photo Romance (1977) explore the im...

Robin Ha  is an award-winning author and illustrator of several graphic novels including the best-selling comic recipe book  Cook Korean!: A Comic Book With Recipes and the illustrated memoir  Almost American Girl which is about her move from South Korea to America when she was 14. Robin’s new graphic novel, The Fox Maidens is her first foray into fiction, and is based on the Korean...

Soull & Dynasty Ogun are identical twins who together are the forces behind their design and thought incubator, L’Enchanteur , which they founded in 2017. L'Enchanteur is a multifaceted design house, creating unique and ethereal fine jewelry, accessories, and garments which draw from esoterica and alchemical symbolism, the mystical practices of their Nigerian and Dominican ancestors, and their...