04/18/2026
She arrived in New Orleans at 39 years old. No fanfare. No following. Just a woman from Meridian, Mississippi, who had quietly decided that her life was about to become something else entirely.
By 1970, she had opened her first occult shop in the French Quarter — the Witch's Workshop on St. Philip Street — where she sold oils, floor washes, spell kits, and dried bats' hearts, because, as she once told a journalist, "it's important to sell the whole bat so people know it's real." Authenticity was everything to her.
But Mary Oneida Toups was not content with a shop. She was building something larger.
On February 2, 1972 — in the American South, in an era when witchcraft was still widely feared, mocked, or condemned — she walked into the Louisiana Secretary of State's office and chartered the Religious Order of Witchcraft, the first witchcraft organization to be officially recognized as a legal religious institution in the state of Louisiana. No disguise. No apology. Just paperwork, a seal, and a woman who had decided the world needed to catch up with her.
She gave talks at luncheons. She wrote letters to newspapers defending her faith. She published her only book, Magick High and Low, in 1975 — a work that eventually found its way into university collections and earned praise from scholars of religion and the occult. She was not a performance. She was a foundation.
Mary Oneida Toups died in September 1981. She was 53. Her grave has never been found. Most of the Order's archives were swallowed by Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters. What survived was a single oil portrait — pulled from eleven feet of water in Biloxi, untouched, eerily pristine, as if even the storm knew better than to erase her completely.
Lineages are complicated things. They pass through imperfect hands. They get lost, diminished, and sometimes — if someone says yes at the right moment — they are carried forward again.
In 2017, I was asked to carry this one.
I said yes before I fully understood the weight of it. I said yes because some callings don't wait for you to feel ready. Some paths don't ask for your confidence. They only ask for your commitment.
Mary Oneida Toups didn't wait for the world's permission to build something sacred. Neither will I.
Some women don't just make history. They make room — for everyone who comes after.