what AGATHA ALL ALONG gets right (and wrong) about witchcraft
featuring mecca woods, cassandra snow, and meg jones wall
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Well, the Agatha All Along finale happened approximately an entire decade ago. Since it aired (and the inception for this piece was born), a felon was elected President of the United States, and Meg and I have planned an entire wedding/elopement, as we are now getting married much sooner than anticipated. (Sidebar: as self-employed queers who both work 24/7, if you’d like to support us taking an actual honeymoon, our link & paypal/venmo info is here!).
And we persist. Not by wearing blue bracelets (the new black squares!), but by actually showing up to the work of being in community. Not by only posting online, but by volunteering at our local food pantries, by donating to domestic violence organizations and women’s shelters, by learning how to can and preserve and, I will fucking say it, shoot a gun. (I know that I’m heading back to the shooting range in the new year.) By masking. By testing. By getting vaccinated. By getting a VPN. By by by.
In all this, art still has a place — a really fucking important place, as
wrote about today. With book bans and media censorship as a cornerstone of Project 2025, which labels any queer content whatsoever as pornographic and indecent (and therefore not protected under the first amendment), it feels more vital than ever to talk about queer art. Campy and literary. High brow and low brow. Queer art — art made for queers, art made by queers — is on the chopping block, and I refuse to shut up about it.The queerness of Agatha All Along is not precisely the topic of this essay. However, inasmuch as queerness isn’t just who you fuck but how you live, it is deeply connected to any discussion of witchcraft on the show. As I write in my memoir Heretic,
Queer joy is not hierarchical. Queerness is the freedom to belong to yourself and others without societal restriction, without the bonds of natal family, hierarchy, and the state pressing on you…. Queerness is getting to invent the communal structures that best serve your beloveds in real time.
It is this underlying worldview that informs both the practice and the conflict at the heart of Agatha All Along. Agatha, as a character, is not in community with her fellow marginalized witches. Agatha, like the patriarchal state, looks for other witches in order to kill them. Agatha, like the white supremacist state, targets Black witches. This is a central conflict that the show does not entirely reconcile: the marginalized person who seeks to annihilate their own. But again: not precisely why we’re here (although it’s certainly related to some critiques of the show below).
We are here because perhaps you, like me, are a witch and a Marvel fan who had extremely low expectations and were happily surprised. Maybe you’re a witch wondering if you can watch this show independent of any other Marvel material (I recommend WandaVision for maximum impact). Maybe you hated the show! Or maybe you haven’t seen Agatha and are witch-curious — but savvy enough to know that most witchcraft in most movies is bullshit and are consequently wondering what, exactly, this show got “right.”
The complex emotions this show raises are exactly why I wanted to talk to some of my beloveds — all Marvel fans, all witches — about the craft as shown on Agatha. In addition to my own thoughts, featured here are renowned industry leaders in astrology and tarot, Mecca Woods, Cassandra Snow, and (my affianced) Meg Jones Wall of 3am.tarot.
A disclaimer! to remember that witchcraft is a highly individual practice. That different lineages and traditions have different beliefs about certain things enumerated here. And, of course, that “right” and “wrong” are only words I use for SEO purposes — the show’s representation of witchcraft largely exists in the grey, in the space between “yes” and “not quite.”
And so without further ado: let’s get into it.
(Requisite reminder that here, there be spoilers. You have been warned.)
