Generally speaking, witches are women and wizards are men. The most powerful Discworld voodoo-women can deliberately create moderately powerful gods for a specific purpose. Although magical talent tends to run in families, witches do not teach their daughters, feeling that this would cause a sort of magical inbreeding.ĭiscworld Voodoo is considered to be an aspect of witch magic, combined with a sort of do-it-yourself religion, relying heavily on the power of belief described below. Unlike wizard magic, which is taught en masse, witch magic is taught on a one-to-one basis by older witches to apprentices. However, the same zen-like knowledge that gives them this ability generally discourages them from making a big deal about it, beyond refusing to take wizards seriously. As a result it is less energy intensive, which means that a witch can do more than a technically equally powerful wizard. This can be taken very far - a witch's way of magically setting fire to a log of wood consists of staring at the log until it burns up from pure embarrassment.
Witches rarely do any magic, in fact, relying more on common sense, hard work, and a peculiar brand of psychology known as headology.
In the Discworld series, witch magic is very different from the wizard magic taught in the Unseen University, and consists largely of finding the right lever that makes everything else work.