Elisabeth Krohn is Norwegian, lives in London, and started Sabat as a zine while studying journalism at the London College of Fashion. The idea grew out of two observations: the nineties were everywhere in pop culture again, and the decade's most underexplored legacy was not grunge or Britpop but teenage witches — The Craft, Buffy, Charmed, the particular kind of sisterhood those narratives offered young women. Meanwhile, on Instagram, a thriving community of modern witches was building its own visual language of crystals, tarot, rituals, and dark feminine aesthetics. Nobody had made a magazine for them. Krohn decided to change that.
Sabat — named after the witches' sabbath, imagined as a place for women to feast on the darker sides of themselves — was conceived as a trilogy, mirroring the Neo-Pagan Triple Goddess and the three phases of the moon. The Maiden Issue explored what it means to discover your powers within. The Mother Issue examined the complex, dark, unsentimental relationship between women and their mothers. The Crone Issue completed the cycle. Each ran to nearly two hundred pages of brooding, atmospheric black-and-white photography, essays on satanic feminism and the esoteric influences on high fashion, and contributions from witches, writers, and artists across the UK, the US, and Brazil.
The design, by art director Cleber Rafael de Campos — whom Krohn found on Behance and who turned out to be deeply immersed in Brazilian esoteric tradition himself — is moody and spare, with serifed typefaces and layouts that treat emptiness as a design element. The magazine won a D&AD Wood Pencil for independent magazines in 2017. Vice called it the magazine for the modern witch. But Krohn's ambition went deeper than aesthetics. She wanted to empower women to embrace their more complex, darker urges — to treat witchcraft not as costume or kitsch but as a framework for self-transformation, creative ritual, and focused intention. As the writer Pam Grossman put it in the magazine's pages: a witch is a person who takes responsibility for her own transformation. Sabat is the magazine that shows her how.
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