The Treatise — Why This Tradition Exists

"Practice your practice."

Awful Witchcraft did not begin in a book. It began on a small farm in Louisiana in the work of raising animals and working the land side by side. It was birthed in the slow realization that the work was the practice — not a metaphor for one. 

Your practice is in the dirt, the daily chores, working with the seasons, the livestock’s natural life cycles, and their slaughter. All of these things are already sacred and spiritual in nature. We as practitioners taking part in it does not make it any more important than it already is. Awful Witchcraft is about living in symbiosis with creation and perpetuating it. It holds that regenerative and sustainable farming is not separate from spirituality — it is a spiritual discipline, one that most modern people, even most modern witches, no longer have hands-on access to.

This tradition exists because butchery, preservation techniques, and animal husbandry are no longer common knowledge — not because they've stopped working, but because the old ways were tossed aside for shiny new ones. Awful Witchcraft is an attempt to keep that knowledge alive, and to insist that it was never "just farming." It was always sacred work. There were always rituals. It was in the quiet ways the farmer sharpened his blade for the goat's throat, made offerings for rain, and planted seeds by the moon. The way he worked in service to the seasons. The way the livestock were held in deep gratitude.

Awful Witchcraft does not prescribe who a practitioner's offerings are directed toward — the land, a particular animal, an ancestor, a personal god, are all valid. What it does require is that the offering goes to someone specific, made with real attention — not vague ambiguity. 

This tradition is for people seeking a deeper connection than what modernity has to offer: to their food, to the animals that become that food, and to their own two hands. It teaches that magic isn't separate from the land, the livestock, or labor — it's found by paying attention to all three, and it grows richer in the practitioner's body, mind, and spirit the longer they stay close to the work.