Students at publicly funded Texas universities are now able to enroll in courses about witches, black magic and the supernatural — under the guise of women’s studies.
Texas Tech University is offering Women and Gender Studies course 4301 titled “Witches, Bruxas, & Black Magic” in a course listed June 12 on the Lubbock campus’ website.
According to the course description, students will “study beliefs and practices, past and present, associated with magic, witchcraft, spirituality, magical realism, and religion.” The course curriculum will cover topics including “ritual, symbolism, mythology, altered states of consciousness, and healing.”
While witches and black magic are familiar topics to many people, bruxas might not be as well known. A bruxa was a pre-Christian female witch figure from Portugal during the Middle Ages and is considered a type of vampire entity known for “bloodsucking attacks on infants.”