🧹✨“Uncle Bucky, Yard Sales, and the Accidental Coven: A Gen X Witch’s Guide to Surviving Modern Witchcraft”
Before TikTok taught you how to charge a crystal under a ring light,
before there were Etsy shops for ethically sourced moonstone runes and entire
social media ecosystems dedicated to aesthetic altar layouts, there were us:
the Gen X witches.
Not cottagecore. Not soft goth. Not coastal grandmother with a pentacle.
We were weird and underfunded and completely
unsupervised. And honestly? It was magical as hell.
📘 We Who Worshipped
Uncle Bucky
If you know, you know. I’m talking about Raymond Buckland’s Big
Blue Book — that absolute brick of a guide formally titled Buckland’s
Complete Book of Witchcraft, but lovingly referred to by many as Uncle
Bucky’s Big Blue Book. It was our grimy, dog-eared, triple-underlined
gateway into ritual, circle casting, and the deep realization that no one else
in our zip code was doing anything remotely like this.
It wasn’t a quick read. It was a workbook. And if you were a teenage
witch in 1993, filling out the little “homework” sections in the back felt like
spiritual homework from Hogwarts by way of OfficeMax. The only reason most of
us knew how to quarter a circle was because Uncle Bucky said we should.
And you did what Uncle Bucky said. Period.
🪦 We Didn’t Find
Covens. We Found Each Other.
The modern witch might casually drop “my coven” the way someone else
might say “my trivia night group.” But back then? Covens were mythical. Covens
were whispered about in the back of bookstores, or rumored about in coffee
shops if someone spotted a woman wearing more than three rings and a long
skirt.
Most of us didn’t join anything. We tripped over each other in
strange ways — at Renaissance fairs, behind the occult section of a dusty
secondhand bookstore, or at someone’s party where we both reached for the same
Anne Rice novel and locked eyes like, Wait… are you… are WE?
No social networks. Just weird vibes and instinct. I found my first coven in 1992, looking for an address given to me by a friend to come to their house. Before MapQuest or Google Maps. Like real handwritten directions.
I pulled into a driveway to talk to the lady trimming her lavender and she got me back on track and said, "Come see me when you want to know what you're really looking for."
Three weeks later, I showed back up on her doorstep ready to talk. And I dove headfirst into the most magical parts of my life, and built the foundation I stand on today.
📚 You Had to Earn
Your Books
And oh, the books. You didn’t just find them. You hunted them.
You drove three hours to a metaphysical shop tucked behind a bead store,
only open Thursdays through Saturdays, owned by a woman named Raven who maybe
used to be a nun. You spent an hour nervously wandering before finally
whispering, “Do you have anything by Starhawk?” like you were ordering from a
forbidden menu.
Barnes & Noble was a treasure trove if it had an occult
section (and if no one from your church saw you there). And gods help you if
you had to ask a sales associate.
"Witchcraft? Is that in Self-Help or New Age?”
“…Yes.”
The one time I almost fell out of my skin was the day I went to a yard
sale on the Air Force base my bestie lived on. It was in the basement of their
church and on the sign, it clearly said, “Wiccan Circle Saturdays 7pm”. Turns
out the sale was being run by the circle. I had a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket.
I left with a handmade tote bag full of books, and a collection of magazines
and newsletters about witches and pagans all over the world. I left with five
dollars in my pocket and a treasure trove of books.
🕯️ We Made Magic Out
of Yard Sales and Gumption
Altar tools? We didn’t have Etsy wish lists. We had Goodwill and garage
sales. Our chalices were mismatched goblets from the 70s. Our athames were
letter openers with enough personality to scare a nosy neighbor. Candles came
from the clearance aisle. And every antique mirror had deeply haunted
vibes — which we considered a bonus.
My most beloved athame at the time was a piece of wrought iron that
someone had cut from an old stair banister, put a curl on one end and a blade
on the other. That one served me until I was gifted one. Then I gifted it to
someone very special to me.
Our materials were scavenged, gifted, or stolen from nature with
whispered apologies. We foraged herbs before “wildcrafting” was a buzzword. We
dried orange peels on windowsills, hoarded eggshells, and blessed our spell
jars with spit and stubbornness.
I once found a mason jar FULL of very old coffin nails in South Dakota at
a junk store for $2. The proprietor said they’d been found around an old mortuary/graveyard
where the dead were put in coffins to view and then put in graves only shrouded
in a sheet. That jar, to this day vibrates with power. I’m very stingy with
those nails.
My mom called my collections eccentric and just smiled when I brought in
another weird jar of stuff. Even the dead fire ants didn’t make her wince.
We didn’t call it “low budget.” We called it resourceful.
🖤 And Yet, We Built a
Foundation
Were we messy? Oh yes.
Did we mix pantheons? Frequently. Still do to be honest.
Did we sometimes confuse Wicca with witchcraft, chaos magic with kitchen
spells, and think any vaguely Celtic symbol was “authentic”? You bet your broom
we did.
But we also tried. We built something from almost nothing. We
didn’t have a spiritual roadmap. We had one copy of Drawing Down the Moon,
a half-burned stick of nag champa, and a deep, aching desire to connect — with
the divine, with each other, with the parts of ourselves that didn’t fit into
church or school or suburban expectations.
And let’s not forget the other titans of our early witchy education: Silver
RavenWolf, who gave every teen witch in the '90s permission to mix glitter
with spellwork in To Ride a Silver Broomstick (1993), even if some of us
cringe at parts of it now — back then, it was everything. And if you
were lucky enough to find Stewart and Janet Farrar’s The Witches’
Bible tucked on a dusty metaphysical shelf, you knew you were leveling up.
Their work had weight, tradition, and that deep British occult seriousness that
made you sit up straighter while reading. Between them all, we were cobbling
together our practice with whatever we could get our hands on — and grateful
for every single page.
💬 So Here’s to the
Gen X Witches
To those of us who cast our first spell in a closet with a tea light and
a stolen piece of quartz.
To those who stayed up late writing moon rituals in spiral-bound
notebooks, only to burn them later out of fear, love, or transformation.
To those who never found a coven, but built a community out of whispers,
weirdness, and welcome.
We’re still here.
We’ve got some grays now.
Our altars are better stocked.
But we still light the same candle.
And sometimes, when the moon is full and the incense is just right, we
whisper a little thank you to Uncle Bucky and remember the first time we
realized:
“I’m not alone.”
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