A Legacy for WitchVox , The Internet Hearth That Found a Family

By Marty Mullenax-Bull & Thorn

In the early internet days, when Netscape ruled and chatrooms were the map for anyone traveling the web, a quiet revolution began: in 1997 Wren Walker and Fritz Jung launched The Witches’ Voice — better known to generations of Pagans simply as WitchVox. For twenty-two years it functioned as a global meeting place, an informal university, a bulletin board, and a record-keeping hearth for Pagan, Wiccan, and witchcraft communities everywhere. Wikipedia+1

WitchVox wasn’t just a website with articles. Its greatest gift was infrastructure: a searchable network of personal profiles, groups, shops, and festivals organized by region and tradition — “Witches of the World,” listings, Bardic Circle music, regular columns, and a lively news hub called “Wren’s Nest.” People used it to find covens, meet teachers, advertise rituals and festivals, and publish essays and poetry — often for the first time in a public, searchable space. In short, it was social networking for the Pagan world long before Facebook and Twitter filled the same roles. Wikipedia+1

WitchVox also won recognition beyond the community: it claimed the People’s Choice Webby for Spirituality in 2002 — a small but telling sign that the site’s impact reached outside niche circles. Wikipedia

By the late 2010s, social platforms and niche blogs redistributed the community energy that once concentrated on WitchVox. Site traffic dwindled, sponsorship income declined, and the team decided to retire the traditional site. The founders announced the retirement in November 2019 and formally retired the site on December 31, 2019. Many voices in the Pagan press and community wrote elegies and thank-you pieces — not to mourn the end so much as to honor the shelter it had provided for a generation. Patheos+2The Wild Hunt+2

WitchVox’s legacy isn’t only its archived HTML. It’s the people who met there, the covens that formed, the teachers who found students, the artists who shared music in the Bardic Circle, and the impression it left on how Pagans network and publish online. Scholars of religion and media cite WitchVox as a major early example of faith communities forming online, and countless personal stories describe the site as a lifeline for isolated seekers. scholar.colorado.edu+1

Where to find WitchVox material now

• Much of WitchVox’s public content was archived on the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) and remains searchable there — a primary resource for anyone wanting to recover old listings, articles, and pages. Wikipedia

• Numerous retrospectives and community posts (Patheos, The Wild Hunt, personal blogs) collect memories and quote the site’s retirement notice — useful context when reconstructing timelines or tracing particular listings. The Wild Hunt+1

If you or your group benefitted from WitchVox and want to help preserve its history, here are practical ways to honor that legacy:

1. Harvest and donate: If you have original articles, event listings, or photos you posted there, back them up and consider donating them (with permission) to a local archive, Pagan historical project, or a university special collection that accepts digital ephemera.

   
   

2. Oral histories: Record short interviews with people who found covens, teachers, or careers via WitchVox. Those personal stories are the social history that archives rarely capture.

   
   

3. Mirror curated archives: A small, curated, permissioned collection of key materials (with credits and permissions) hosted by a community organization or museum can make the site’s spirit accessible without recreating the entire database.

   
   

4. Write and teach: Include WitchVox’s story in classes, panels, and blogs about the history of modern Paganism and online religion — it’s a concise case study of community-building on the web.

WitchVox was more than code and content; it was a gathering place that helped many people move from solitary practice to belonging. Its retirement marked the end of a distinctive era of the web — but the networks it seeded continue, scattered into social media groups, journals, festivals, and covens around the world. Remembering WitchVox is not nostalgia alone; it’s a reminder of how intentional platforms can build communities and how those communities — when archived thoughtfully — can continue to teach and inspire future seekers. Patheos+1