Luisa Francia (born 2 August 1949 in Markt Grafing[1]) is a German author and filmmaker. She sees herself as a modern witch.
Luisa Francia grew up in a family of women in Bavaria. She learnt mountaineering from her mother. She initially studied German language and literature, was a trainee at the Manchester Evening Star, sang in clubs and in the musical Hair and worked as a dance teacher for African dance.
From the 1980s, she travelled to Africa, India and Nepal several times in search of magical traditions, folk healing and shamanism and wrote reports and books about her experiences (including Waiting for Blue Wonders, The African Dream[2]). In 1988, she received a scholarship from the German Literature Fund.[3]
In her numerous publications, often in guidebook style, she deals with the topics of witches, tarot, horoscope interpretation, goddesses, female shamanism and gives instructions on how to create magical and meditative rituals for life stages and for women's everyday lives. She has also organised workshops and performances on these topics. Ariane Barth wrote about Francia's 1986 book Moon – Dance – Magic in Spiegel: "Anyone who reads her book about her creation of thirteen moon festivals will easily be seduced by the archaic power of this woman, seduced into a strange world in which modern intellectuality and magical ideas get on well together."[4] In the early 1990s, she undertook a Kailash circumnavigation alone. Her book about female mountaineers was published in 1999 under the title Der untere Himmel. Women in Icy Heights.[5]
Francia co-authored the screenplays for Margarethe von Trotta's feature film The Second Awakening of Christa Klages (1978), which won the German Film Award, and Schwestern oder Die Balance des Glücks (1979). She made her own films such as the documentary television feature film Hexen (1980) and wrote the theatre monologue Fischmaul (1986).[6]
Francia is the best-known representative of the witchcraft scene, which emerged in Germany in the 1980s at the intersection of neo-paganism and feminism.[7] Like the American Starhawk, she represents a socialist and feminist current.[8]
Luisa Francia is the mother of a daughter; she lives near Munich and in Portugal.[9]