04/15/2026
A dear friend shared this with me and I want to share it with you.
https://www.facebook.com/share/1FvbHQ36A9/
In 1972, a woman in New Orleans did something almost no one had done before.
She didn’t just practice witchcraft.
She built a church around it.
Legal. Named. Declared.
Her name was Mary Oneida Toups.
And she was not interested in permission.
This was New Orleans, 1972, the American South, in the thick of a cultural revolution, in a city that has always known something the rest of the country pretends not to.
Oneida was a businesswoman. A real estate agent. She ran a bar. She operated magick shops. She founded the Temple of Isis for her personal practice and inner circle ritual work.
And on February 2, 1972, she founded the Religious Order of Witchcraft. The first legal church of witchcraft in the United States.
In 1975 she published the only book she would ever write. Magick High and Low.
She shared it with women’s auxiliary groups.
It found its way into university collections.
It became a reference for scholars of religion and the occult.
She passed in 1981.
She left behind a living tradition.
What followed her was complicated, as lineages often are. There were those who carried it forward. There were those who diminished it.
Much was lost, including most copies of her book and may of the Order’s documents, taken by Hurricane Katrina.
In 2017, the Order came to me.
I said yes before I understood how to balance the weight of it. I said yes because I felt it in my bones. I said yes because the path that brought me here, winding, heartbreaking at times, never accidental, had always been leading here.
I did not know how I would bring the Order back to life. Back to people. Back to New Orleans.
I only knew I had to say yes first.
The portrait below always hung in Oneida’s shop. It has been in my care ever since.
We are still here.
The lineage is real.
And her book is coming home.
🕯️ The Religious Order of Witchcraft
Founded February 2, 1972 — New Orleans, Louisiana
