UNC Charlotte professor’s podcast connects witchcraft, how we interact on social media

The intersection of mythology, pop culture and science intrigues Heather D. Freeman, professor of art and digital media at UNC Charlotte.

“I’ve been studying the history of magic for six or seven years,” said Freeman, 46. “One of the things that’s really exciting to me is how diverse magical practice is. There are people all around us who practice magic.”

Last year, Freeman created a 21-episode podcast, “Familiar Shapes.” It features interviews with computer scientists, historians, philosophers and sociologists from her research from 2016 to 2018 for a film she was creating before the COVID-19 pandemic changed the course of the project.

The podcast compares the history of witchcraft and witch trials with disinformation on social media today. Listeners come from all different backgrounds including biochemists, historians, publishers and theologians, many of whom self-identify as magical practitioners.

The podcast was her answer to the pandemic pivot that so many artists, businesses and community organizations have made. Each episode ranges from 19 to 45 minutes and is available free on all podcast-hosting platforms.

Freeman’s desire to share the history and research about witchcraft and magical practices led her to this project. She wanted people to know more than what they learned in high school about the Salem witch trials.

“When I was in school, we thought people lost their minds and there wasn’t a real good explanation for it,” Freeman said. “Now, a lot of sociologists and historians and researchers are saying, ‘Let’s look at this thing again and try to understand what’s really happening.’ ”

Freeman hopes the podcast encourages social media users to apply a popular communications mnemonic device, T.H.I.N.K., before commenting, liking or posting on a social media platform such as Instagram or Facebook. Each letter represents a question: Is it True? Is it Helpful? Is it Inspiring? Is it Necessary? Is it Kind?

Engaging in social media with intention could guide people to be more empathetic to others’ situations, Freeman said. The THINK device can serve as a mechanism for people to begin to value others’ belief systems.

“It’s not just your immediate friends who see social media posts,” Freeman said. “It’s strangers, people very different from you. We tend to think of social media as being these communities, but they are not. Some of them will be similar to your experiences, and most of them won’t be.”

Since the podcast’s launch in May 2020, she’s had feedback from listeners who said they changed their behavior surrounding social media.

Some shared how they reflected on the language in a post before hitting enter. “Just taking a step back to think about what you’re doing changes your behavior,” Freeman said.

Familiar spirits

Author Thorn Mooney, a pen name for Raleigh resident Mary Hamner, met Freeman in 2014, while studying and then working at UNC Charlotte.

When she heard about Freeman’s project, Mooney wondered how it would pull together familiar spirits, a witch’s helper who sometimes carries out mischief, and social bots, automated programs that engage with social media.

Mooney believes Freeman succeeded in making the comparison and showing how humans, throughout history, tend to believe something is true when it’s common. They are blind to the danger of the familiar.

“We all sort of understand that trolls exist, bots exist and scams exist, but we fall for things so readily,” Mooney said. “Initially what’s most interesting in what Heather is doing is taking something that feels far away and foreign and from a time long ago, and making us think about how those impulses manifest themselves in our everyday lives online.”

Cunning folk

Freeman finally finished her original film project — also called “Familiar Shapes” — this year. The 20-minute film premiered at the Bristol International Short Film Festival in England and screened at the Charlotte Film Festival earlier this month.

It will spend one year on the film circuit before being available on the website for public viewing.

In addition to the interviews and research, Freeman created visual art pieces for the film during a one-month residency in 2018 at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, in the United Kingdom.

She applied photogrammetry, the process of shooting images from different perspectives, to the folk magic objects in the museum and library archives. The photos were then used to make 3D models, which influenced the animations in the film.

Cornwall is an area famous for folk magic, which focused on solving practical problems: Make your plants grow, ease childbirth pains, heal a person with an illness, honor the dead.

Cunning folk practiced magic and were paid for it. In this all-Protestant community, cunning folk might read a Catholic prayer in Latin and it would sound magical.

“Cornwall has a reputation for folk magic and cunning folk,” Freeman said. “If you had a sick child, you may go to your local cunning man or cunning woman and say, ‘My child is sick.’ They were famous for having excellent magical practitioners.”

Never were the cunning folk called witches, a label that could get them thrown in jail or killed. “The word ‘witch’ as a word of empowerment is an incredibly modern thing, like 1960s in the United States,” Freeman said.

Magical practices in the US

Next year, Freeman will release a 12-episode podcast about the history of magical practices in the U.S.

She is fascinated by what people think about how they are practicing and what the community perceives they are practicing. One episode will be dedicated to satanic panic, a period in the 1980s and 1990s when unsubstantiated reports led to arrests, trials and prison for the accused.

“In the history of the United States, you have these really interesting cultural innovations happening where people are either practicing something that looks like magic but they don’t think of it that way. Or they’re practicing something that for them is religion and other people decide it’s magic,” Freeman said. “Very often, there are racial and gender and class biases that really impact people.”

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