Witches, Prophecy and the Disruption of Linear Time

Throughout history, witches have been feared and persecuted mostly by men who fear their power and industry that wants to consolidate their “services”. Patriarchy and capitalism go hand in hand and they fear individuals that have a connection with nature and the supernatural, that can present an alternative to the shitty world that they aim to create. However, throughout mythology and folklore, witches seem to have a more disruptive underlying role when it comes to time and the nature of reality. They manifest this role through curses and prophecy.

A witch is, fundamentally, a being out of sync with time. Witches do not merely live in the present; they haunt the past, manipulate the future, and exist in loops outside conventional cause and effect. In many ways, they are anomalies in the fabric of reality, glitches in the timeline, figures who have seen the code behind existence and know how to rewrite it.

Prophecy has always been one of the witch’s most feared abilities. But prophecy is more than a supernatural gift, it is a disruption of causality itself. If someone can see the future, does that future become inevitable? Or does the act of seeing it create the potential for change? 

Many witch myths imply that knowledge of the future distorts the future. The classic trope of the self-fulfilling prophecy stems from this: by foreseeing an event, a witch either ensures its occurrence or triggers a desperate attempt to prevent it (which often causes it to happen).

Witches are beings who reject linearity. They are proof that fate can be altered, that knowledge changes the flow of history, and that reality is not as stable as it seems. The fear of witches often manifests in cycles: burn them, drown them, strangle them and yet their knowledge, their presence, always returns. This reflects a deeper fear: that witches are not bound by the linearity of history. This is why folklore often insists on killing a witch properly (staking, burning, drowning, dismembering) to ensure she does not simply resume her existence. However, if a witch has uttered a prophecy or a curse, you can extinguish her physical existence, yet you will never be rid of the trajectory she has created. It is also interesting to note that this power only comes with a belief in the powers of witches. If you do not believe that the prophecy or the curse is real, then it would not affect your reality. Yet if you do then you better not anger any witches, because they will fuck you up. 

Curses and prophecy are not the only way witches exist outside of time. Sometimes, it is a bit more straightforward. In many traditions, witches are depicted as ancient, through unnatural longevity such as Baba Yaga or Lilith. They can also exist outside traditional aging, as the Maiden-Mother-Crone cycle in Wicca suggests that all three can exist simultaneously as aspects of the same entity. The idea that a witch is immune to time reinforces her unnaturalness; she is not beholden to entropy like normal people. 

Whether in folklore or in futuristic speculation, witches are terrifying not only because they wield magic and can sic their cat on you, but because they disrupt causality itself. They exist at the crossroads of past and future, acting as both messengers and manipulators of fate. If history has always sought to silence them, it may be because they represent the ultimate rebellion: the refusal to accept a world where the future is already written.

A contemporary setting might not need cauldrons or broomsticks to create witches; it only needs a reality where some individuals can see the patterns of time more clearly than others. What kind of prophecies or curses would you use on the likes of Mark Zuckerfuck? And how would you make sure they believe it? Should it come from a predictive AI or will you do it inception style?

[originally posted to Patreon on 4/4/25]