What do you think?
Rate this book
The Witch Belongs to the World: A Spell of Becoming
Cast on Yourself a Living Spell of Becoming with this Love Song to Witches
We are emergent, embedded, arising, collapsing, changing beings in all worlds at all times. You will find that it takes that leap―that fall, that breaking apart of what is considered to be certain―to dance with the queer cunning current of witchery.
This book is offered as a spell of becoming that you cast on yourself with every step―a living spell of you and your intimacy with the life-force and the mystery. You will dance with your demons and make pacts with your spirits and gods. You will sing yourself back to life by letting yourself be sung and danced through the eye of the needle by all that calls you to this work. If you take the risk, you will learn to capture the glorious essence of magic and navigate witchcraft with your own heart.
Includes a foreword by Courtney Weber, author of Goddess of Witches
We are emergent, embedded, arising, collapsing, changing beings in all worlds at all times. You will find that it takes that leap―that fall, that breaking apart of what is considered to be certain―to dance with the queer cunning current of witchery.
This book is offered as a spell of becoming that you cast on yourself with every step―a living spell of you and your intimacy with the life-force and the mystery. You will dance with your demons and make pacts with your spirits and gods. You will sing yourself back to life by letting yourself be sung and danced through the eye of the needle by all that calls you to this work. If you take the risk, you will learn to capture the glorious essence of magic and navigate witchcraft with your own heart.
Includes a foreword by Courtney Weber, author of Goddess of Witches
320 pages, Paperback
Published August 8, 2023
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
February 7, 2024
The Witch Belongs to the World is a love letter to what the Craft can do for us. Steeped in gratitude and love for deity, and all the expressions of beauty in this world, this book has much to teach. I’ll be percolating on much of this wisdom for a long time.
I found reading this to be an exercise in shadow work, helping me realize where my Craft has gotten quiet or unassuming rather than bold and expressive. It is an honest look within at the ways that practicing witchcraft is a spell of becoming.
If we let it, it is our greatest journey in this life to commit to the path of the witch. All we have to do is show up and bear witness, and be ready to recieve all the gifts that this animistic world has to offer.
I found reading this to be an exercise in shadow work, helping me realize where my Craft has gotten quiet or unassuming rather than bold and expressive. It is an honest look within at the ways that practicing witchcraft is a spell of becoming.
If we let it, it is our greatest journey in this life to commit to the path of the witch. All we have to do is show up and bear witness, and be ready to recieve all the gifts that this animistic world has to offer.
June 16, 2024
So beautiful, what a love spell, thank you Fio
August 20, 2026
The Witch Belongs to the World is one of those rare witchcraft books that feels less like someone explaining the Craft to you and more like someone reaching across the page, grabbing you by the hand, and pulling you back into the mystery of why you became a witch in the first place. Fio Gede Parma isn't particularly interested in giving us another Witchcraft 101. There are no obligatory chapters explaining what an athame is or providing correspondence tables we've encountered a hundred times before. This is a book about becoming the witch, and more importantly, about understanding becoming as something that never actually ends.
That distinction matters. Witchcraft publishing is filled with books about what witches do, but considerably fewer books ask what practicing witchcraft does to the witch. If you spend years entering altered states, speaking with spirits, making offerings to gods, working magic, confronting your shadows, developing relationships with the land, undergoing initiations, and repeatedly placing yourself in contact with mystery, presumably you should not remain exactly the same person who began. The Craft should change you. Parma takes that transformation seriously and builds an entire book around it.
I loved the idea of the book itself functioning as a spell of becoming. That's not merely poetic packaging. The structure asks you to move through experiences, reflections, workings, stories, poetry, relationships, heartbreak, spirits, gods, and the body in ways that gradually accumulate. You're not just reading arguments about witchcraft. You're being invited to participate in something. This is one of those books where racing through fifty pages because you have an hour free almost feels like missing the point. It wants digestion.
Parma's writing is intensely poetic, and I can imagine that being divisive, but it worked beautifully for me. There are subjects within witchcraft that become diminished when we insist they be explained exclusively through clean instructional prose. Mystery doesn't always behave like an instruction manual. Ecstasy doesn't. Initiation doesn't. Spirit contact doesn't. Love doesn't. Grief doesn't. Sometimes poetry can communicate dimensions of magical experience that definitions and numbered instructions cannot.
What prevents that poetic quality from becoming empty mysticism is that Parma has clearly practiced witchcraft for a very long time. There is experience underneath the language. The spirits and gods don't feel like literary metaphors pasted onto psychological concepts. They are relationships. Magic isn't merely a synonym for personal transformation. There is actual witchcraft here: spirits, gods, daimons, familiars, ritual, the land, the dead, the crossroads, the compass, the circle, invocation, initiation, and the strange web of relationships within which a witch gradually discovers themselves.
That relational understanding of witchcraft may be my favorite aspect of the entire book. The witch does not exist as an isolated individual standing in the middle of the universe commanding reality to provide desired outcomes. The witch belongs to the world. That title gradually becomes almost a cosmological statement. We belong to landscapes, spirits, gods, ancestors, communities, bodies, histories, memories, and mysteries. We affect those relationships and are affected by them. Magic becomes less about imposing yourself upon reality and more about learning how to participate consciously in an already enchanted world.
There is something deeply animistic underneath that perspective. The world isn't simply raw material waiting for the magician to assign correspondences to it. It speaks back. Relationships have obligations. Spirits have agency. The land isn't scenery for ritual. Gods aren't archetypal vending machines. The witch becomes powerful not by standing outside this network but by becoming increasingly intimate with it.
I found the treatment of heartbreak especially powerful because it refuses the increasingly common idea that spirituality should make us invulnerable. Parma understands something much more difficult: being opened by the world means becoming capable of being wounded by it. Love creates vulnerability. Devotion creates vulnerability. Caring about people, spirits, gods, places, traditions, and communities means accepting that those relationships can transform us in ways we cannot completely control.
That feels much closer to initiation as I've come to understand it. Initiation isn't simply receiving a title, completing a curriculum, or having someone place a cord around your waist. Sometimes initiation is what happens when life breaks your existing understanding of yourself badly enough that something larger has room to emerge. The threshold isn't always pleasant. Becoming frequently requires some form of unbecoming first.
Parma is particularly good at allowing contradiction to remain contradiction. Witchcraft here is beautiful and dangerous, ecstatic and painful, embodied and spiritual, ancient and constantly emerging. The witch belongs to tradition while simultaneously participating in its transformation. That last point feels especially important because occult communities can become obsessed with authenticity as though the goal of tradition were to preserve something perfectly unchanged forever.
Living traditions don't work that way. They inherit, remember, reinterpret, experiment, forget, recover, argue, adapt, and create. Every generation receives something and inevitably alters it through the act of living it. Parma respects lineage and inheritance without turning them into museum exhibits. The Craft has ancestors, but it also has descendants.
I also appreciate how embodied this book is. Witchcraft can become surprisingly cerebral, particularly when someone has been practicing for years and accumulated an enormous amount of occult theory. Parma keeps returning us to bodies that breathe, dance, sing, desire, hurt, age, love, grieve, experience pleasure, and eventually die. The body isn't an inconvenient container carrying the "real" spiritual self around. It is one of the places where magic happens.
Dance and song therefore make complete sense here. Magic doesn't have to occur exclusively through perfectly memorized ritual scripts spoken solemnly before an altar. Humans have entered altered states through rhythm, movement, breath, music, repetition, sexuality, exhaustion, silence, darkness, and communal ecstasy for an incredibly long time. Parma remembers that witchcraft can be visceral.
I was equally moved by the emphasis on spirits and gods because the book never seems embarrassed by its own supernaturalism. There has been a tendency in some contemporary spiritual writing to translate everything potentially uncomfortable into psychology. Spirits become aspects of the psyche. Gods become archetypes. Magic becomes intention-setting. Ritual becomes self-care. Parma leaves room for psychological interpretation without requiring the universe to collapse entirely inside the human mind. The Other remains genuinely other.
That matters to me. One of the reasons I practice witchcraft is precisely because I want encounters with things that challenge the boundaries of myself. If every god, spirit, omen, dream, and magical experience ultimately turns out to be another disguised version of me, the cosmos becomes unbearably lonely. Parma's world is populated.
The book is also unapologetically queer without reducing queer witchcraft to identity labels inserted into otherwise conventional material. Queerness operates much more deeply as a magical principle of crossing boundaries, destabilizing fixed categories, transforming, becoming, refusing prescribed forms, and discovering possibility in places where certainty breaks down. That feels particularly appropriate to witchcraft, which has always occupied culturally unstable boundaries between acceptable and forbidden, human and spirit, healer and poisoner, sacred and transgressive.
I can understand why someone looking for straightforward spells might struggle with this book. You can't flip immediately to "spell for money" or "ritual for protection." But that would be like criticizing a book on mystical theology because it doesn't contain enough candle spells. Parma is doing something different. This is a book about the interior and relational architecture that makes a magical life possible.
And I think experienced witches may get considerably more from it than absolute beginners. Once you've learned how to ground, cast a circle, enter trance, perform divination, communicate with spirits, make offerings, and cast spells, another collection of techniques eventually produces diminishing returns. The harder questions begin emerging. What kind of witch am I becoming? What does my practice ask of me? What relationships am I accountable to? What has magic changed in me? What am I willing to surrender? What happens when my Craft breaks my heart? What remains when certainty disappears?
Those are much harder questions than which herb corresponds with Jupiter.
The Witch Belongs to the World reminded me that becoming a witch isn't something that happened once when I decided to practice witchcraft. It is something that keeps happening. Every major experience rearranges the relationship. Every spirit encountered, every ritual that succeeds spectacularly, every working that fails, every loss, every initiation, every period of doubt, every teacher, every student, every god, every place, and every mystery leaves something behind.
Eventually you realize that the Craft you've been practicing has also been practicing upon you.
That is what I think Parma captures so beautifully. Witchcraft isn't simply a collection of techniques we acquire until we've accumulated enough of them to call ourselves advanced. It is a relationship with mystery capable of changing the person who enters it. The witch casts spells upon the world, certainly, but the world is casting spells upon the witch at the same time.
The question isn't whether we will change. The question is whether we are willing to participate consciously in what we are becoming.
That distinction matters. Witchcraft publishing is filled with books about what witches do, but considerably fewer books ask what practicing witchcraft does to the witch. If you spend years entering altered states, speaking with spirits, making offerings to gods, working magic, confronting your shadows, developing relationships with the land, undergoing initiations, and repeatedly placing yourself in contact with mystery, presumably you should not remain exactly the same person who began. The Craft should change you. Parma takes that transformation seriously and builds an entire book around it.
I loved the idea of the book itself functioning as a spell of becoming. That's not merely poetic packaging. The structure asks you to move through experiences, reflections, workings, stories, poetry, relationships, heartbreak, spirits, gods, and the body in ways that gradually accumulate. You're not just reading arguments about witchcraft. You're being invited to participate in something. This is one of those books where racing through fifty pages because you have an hour free almost feels like missing the point. It wants digestion.
Parma's writing is intensely poetic, and I can imagine that being divisive, but it worked beautifully for me. There are subjects within witchcraft that become diminished when we insist they be explained exclusively through clean instructional prose. Mystery doesn't always behave like an instruction manual. Ecstasy doesn't. Initiation doesn't. Spirit contact doesn't. Love doesn't. Grief doesn't. Sometimes poetry can communicate dimensions of magical experience that definitions and numbered instructions cannot.
What prevents that poetic quality from becoming empty mysticism is that Parma has clearly practiced witchcraft for a very long time. There is experience underneath the language. The spirits and gods don't feel like literary metaphors pasted onto psychological concepts. They are relationships. Magic isn't merely a synonym for personal transformation. There is actual witchcraft here: spirits, gods, daimons, familiars, ritual, the land, the dead, the crossroads, the compass, the circle, invocation, initiation, and the strange web of relationships within which a witch gradually discovers themselves.
That relational understanding of witchcraft may be my favorite aspect of the entire book. The witch does not exist as an isolated individual standing in the middle of the universe commanding reality to provide desired outcomes. The witch belongs to the world. That title gradually becomes almost a cosmological statement. We belong to landscapes, spirits, gods, ancestors, communities, bodies, histories, memories, and mysteries. We affect those relationships and are affected by them. Magic becomes less about imposing yourself upon reality and more about learning how to participate consciously in an already enchanted world.
There is something deeply animistic underneath that perspective. The world isn't simply raw material waiting for the magician to assign correspondences to it. It speaks back. Relationships have obligations. Spirits have agency. The land isn't scenery for ritual. Gods aren't archetypal vending machines. The witch becomes powerful not by standing outside this network but by becoming increasingly intimate with it.
I found the treatment of heartbreak especially powerful because it refuses the increasingly common idea that spirituality should make us invulnerable. Parma understands something much more difficult: being opened by the world means becoming capable of being wounded by it. Love creates vulnerability. Devotion creates vulnerability. Caring about people, spirits, gods, places, traditions, and communities means accepting that those relationships can transform us in ways we cannot completely control.
That feels much closer to initiation as I've come to understand it. Initiation isn't simply receiving a title, completing a curriculum, or having someone place a cord around your waist. Sometimes initiation is what happens when life breaks your existing understanding of yourself badly enough that something larger has room to emerge. The threshold isn't always pleasant. Becoming frequently requires some form of unbecoming first.
Parma is particularly good at allowing contradiction to remain contradiction. Witchcraft here is beautiful and dangerous, ecstatic and painful, embodied and spiritual, ancient and constantly emerging. The witch belongs to tradition while simultaneously participating in its transformation. That last point feels especially important because occult communities can become obsessed with authenticity as though the goal of tradition were to preserve something perfectly unchanged forever.
Living traditions don't work that way. They inherit, remember, reinterpret, experiment, forget, recover, argue, adapt, and create. Every generation receives something and inevitably alters it through the act of living it. Parma respects lineage and inheritance without turning them into museum exhibits. The Craft has ancestors, but it also has descendants.
I also appreciate how embodied this book is. Witchcraft can become surprisingly cerebral, particularly when someone has been practicing for years and accumulated an enormous amount of occult theory. Parma keeps returning us to bodies that breathe, dance, sing, desire, hurt, age, love, grieve, experience pleasure, and eventually die. The body isn't an inconvenient container carrying the "real" spiritual self around. It is one of the places where magic happens.
Dance and song therefore make complete sense here. Magic doesn't have to occur exclusively through perfectly memorized ritual scripts spoken solemnly before an altar. Humans have entered altered states through rhythm, movement, breath, music, repetition, sexuality, exhaustion, silence, darkness, and communal ecstasy for an incredibly long time. Parma remembers that witchcraft can be visceral.
I was equally moved by the emphasis on spirits and gods because the book never seems embarrassed by its own supernaturalism. There has been a tendency in some contemporary spiritual writing to translate everything potentially uncomfortable into psychology. Spirits become aspects of the psyche. Gods become archetypes. Magic becomes intention-setting. Ritual becomes self-care. Parma leaves room for psychological interpretation without requiring the universe to collapse entirely inside the human mind. The Other remains genuinely other.
That matters to me. One of the reasons I practice witchcraft is precisely because I want encounters with things that challenge the boundaries of myself. If every god, spirit, omen, dream, and magical experience ultimately turns out to be another disguised version of me, the cosmos becomes unbearably lonely. Parma's world is populated.
The book is also unapologetically queer without reducing queer witchcraft to identity labels inserted into otherwise conventional material. Queerness operates much more deeply as a magical principle of crossing boundaries, destabilizing fixed categories, transforming, becoming, refusing prescribed forms, and discovering possibility in places where certainty breaks down. That feels particularly appropriate to witchcraft, which has always occupied culturally unstable boundaries between acceptable and forbidden, human and spirit, healer and poisoner, sacred and transgressive.
I can understand why someone looking for straightforward spells might struggle with this book. You can't flip immediately to "spell for money" or "ritual for protection." But that would be like criticizing a book on mystical theology because it doesn't contain enough candle spells. Parma is doing something different. This is a book about the interior and relational architecture that makes a magical life possible.
And I think experienced witches may get considerably more from it than absolute beginners. Once you've learned how to ground, cast a circle, enter trance, perform divination, communicate with spirits, make offerings, and cast spells, another collection of techniques eventually produces diminishing returns. The harder questions begin emerging. What kind of witch am I becoming? What does my practice ask of me? What relationships am I accountable to? What has magic changed in me? What am I willing to surrender? What happens when my Craft breaks my heart? What remains when certainty disappears?
Those are much harder questions than which herb corresponds with Jupiter.
The Witch Belongs to the World reminded me that becoming a witch isn't something that happened once when I decided to practice witchcraft. It is something that keeps happening. Every major experience rearranges the relationship. Every spirit encountered, every ritual that succeeds spectacularly, every working that fails, every loss, every initiation, every period of doubt, every teacher, every student, every god, every place, and every mystery leaves something behind.
Eventually you realize that the Craft you've been practicing has also been practicing upon you.
That is what I think Parma captures so beautifully. Witchcraft isn't simply a collection of techniques we acquire until we've accumulated enough of them to call ourselves advanced. It is a relationship with mystery capable of changing the person who enters it. The witch casts spells upon the world, certainly, but the world is casting spells upon the witch at the same time.
The question isn't whether we will change. The question is whether we are willing to participate consciously in what we are becoming.
June 11, 2024
To say this book is “essential for all Witches” strikes the wrong chord - because I dislike that kind of imperative and I suspect the author does as well.
Simply put, it is a marvelous gift to all Witches given by one of today’s bright voices.
Anyone who has taken classes or workshops or seen any of her generous YouTube offerings will immediately hear Fio Gede Parma’s unique voice and knowledge and energy singing off the page - it moves along with the fluidity and lilt of the bard and the sinuous elegance of a dancer. From taking one into silence and darkness where the journey of discovery begins all the way to its ecstatic soul-song eruption, The Witch Belongs to the World is a love spell for all seekers on the path of witchery and spirit and transgression.
This is not a Witchcraft 101 book - so many books on witchcraft have pages and pages of front matter on “the basics” - how to ground, cast a circle, the witches tools, etc., and sometimes little else. Fio instead weaves craft with arte, offering their unique workings and provocations, aligning them with the inner and outer lives of the witch, using her lived experience as an example - of spirit, of love and heartache, of ally-ship from beyond, initiation and instruction. And then asks the reader to do the same - using poetry and song, even a playlist to take one into the working of a journey of becoming.
This is not a quick read to find a cool spell or tidbit of arcana. This is a working book - like other reviews here have said - allow yourself time to read each section/chapter/working so that you can enter into a conscious stream of becoming. And then go back and do it again as a practice.
Plus it has appendices. I love appendices.
Simply put, it is a marvelous gift to all Witches given by one of today’s bright voices.
Anyone who has taken classes or workshops or seen any of her generous YouTube offerings will immediately hear Fio Gede Parma’s unique voice and knowledge and energy singing off the page - it moves along with the fluidity and lilt of the bard and the sinuous elegance of a dancer. From taking one into silence and darkness where the journey of discovery begins all the way to its ecstatic soul-song eruption, The Witch Belongs to the World is a love spell for all seekers on the path of witchery and spirit and transgression.
This is not a Witchcraft 101 book - so many books on witchcraft have pages and pages of front matter on “the basics” - how to ground, cast a circle, the witches tools, etc., and sometimes little else. Fio instead weaves craft with arte, offering their unique workings and provocations, aligning them with the inner and outer lives of the witch, using her lived experience as an example - of spirit, of love and heartache, of ally-ship from beyond, initiation and instruction. And then asks the reader to do the same - using poetry and song, even a playlist to take one into the working of a journey of becoming.
This is not a quick read to find a cool spell or tidbit of arcana. This is a working book - like other reviews here have said - allow yourself time to read each section/chapter/working so that you can enter into a conscious stream of becoming. And then go back and do it again as a practice.
Plus it has appendices. I love appendices.
September 30, 2024
This book is incredible. This 'go-at-your-own-pace' style of transformational work and collection of deeper insight into the beating heart of witchcraft, sets this book apart. The writing style is both poetic as is the expectation when peering and participating in the very core of what it is to be a Witch. This book is both informative and inspiring. Definitely not another rehashed, rewritten beginner's book on witchcraft! Thank the God/ds
If you are craving a deep dive into witchcraft as a witch who longs for the real deal, then this is for you!
If you are craving a deep dive into witchcraft as a witch who longs for the real deal, then this is for you!
December 8, 2023
This book is rich with words and those words are rich with magic and stories. It invites you to let the poetry in and change you, to sink into it and let it sink into you, to lead you within to the wilds and the woods and then out again. If you’re looking for something different, maybe something more, read this book.
January 20, 2026
This book was SO juicy and unlike any witchcraft book I’ve yet read. Rich in poetry, workings, stories, and invitations into your own becoming. This book supported me in a thoughtful progression of rituals & magical workings during a really pivotal time in my life. I feel more connected to my magic, myself as a Witch, my gods and the greater cosmos because of this book. Highly recommend!
June 26, 2024
It’s great to read something different about the craft.
April 3, 2025
Rich. Otherworldly poetic. Will reread!
August 18, 2024
I have been trying to find the words to accurately describe just how great a book this is for well over a year now. I still haven't found them, and I'm not sure I ever will. What I do know is I am an owner of a witchcraft store and this book is one of my most recommended books and a book I seriously strive to never be out of stock of. It's existence is a gift and I could not recommend it more!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews