The Problem With Calling Witchcraft a Trend

Modern witchcraft has become very easy to photograph. That may be part of the reason it has become so easy to misunderstand.

A candle, little dish of salt, a deck of cards with gold on the edges, dried rosemary, a piece of quartz that, depending on where you stand, is either a mere mineral specimen or something considerably more interesting.

None of this looks particularly strange anymore.

You can buy most of it without entering an occult shop. Tarot decks are sold beside cookbooks. Crystals sit near the till. There are moon journals, spell candles, witchy subscription boxes and enough black ceramic cauldrons online to supply several small covens (and also a disappointing number of themed hen parties).

Witchcraft has become extremely good merchandise.

Now, this has had an odd consequence. At exactly the moment when identifying as a witch has become more visible, the practice in itself has become easier to dismiss. The candles look decorative. Your astrology app sends push notifications. Somebody on TikTok is explaining what not to do during Mercury retrograde while another person is selling a £38 “abundance spray” on your instagram reels. It is tempting to conclude that we are looking at an aesthetic.

Sometimes, of course, we are.

But also, sometimes the person lighting the candle is praying.

And those two things are surprisingly easy to confuse from the outside.

There is no single thing called modern witchcraft

The first difficulty with talking sensibly about witches is that the word has become almost impossibly crowded.

A Wiccan may call herself a witch. So may somebody practising an eclectic form of Paganism, a ceremonial magician, a practitioner of traditional witchcraft, a person working within an inherited folk tradition, or someone who believes in no gods whatsoever but only uses ritual and spellwork as a psychological or symbolic practice. Some witches worship deities. Some work with ancestors. Some speak about spirits. Some understand magic as a supernatural force; others understand it as the deliberate shaping of attention, intention or consciousness. Some belong to covens, others practise alone.

And plenty of Pagans are not witches at all.

Religious-studies scholars have become increasingly careful about this distinction. Ethan Doyle White, writing about contemporary witchcraft, describes a twentieth-century development in which people began deliberately adopting “witch” as a religious and esoteric identity. Wicca became the most famous expression of this, but it was never the whole of it. Modern witchcraft now contains multiple traditions with different histories, theologies and relationships to magic.

This may be less tidy than the popular version, but:

It is also more recognisable as religion.

Every religion, once they contain enough people, start to have internal disagreements as to how the belief should be practiced.

Wicca is modern. That does not make it pretend.

There was a time when defenders of modern witchcraft were very invested in proving that it was ancient.

In the early twentieth century, the Egyptologist Margaret Murray argued that the people prosecuted in Europe’s witch trials had actually belonged to a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion. Her theory was enormously influential. It was also later concluded to be incorrect.

Gerald Gardner, one of the central figures in the development of Wicca in Britain, drew on Murray’s ideas alongside ceremonial magic, folklore, occult societies and his own innovations. The religion that emerged publicly around the middle of the twentieth century was not the intact survival of a secret Stone Age witch cult.

Historians of contemporary Paganism are fairly comfortable saying this now. Modern Pagan religions generally draw inspiration from pre-Christian traditions, mythology and folklore, but the movements themselves developed largely during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For some reason, this fact still gets presented as a revelation capable of making the whole thing collapse.

But knowing when a religion developed is not the same as proving that nobody believes it.

Wicca has rituals, ethical ideas, sacred time, initiatory traditions, theological arguments, disagreements about orthodoxy, festivals, funerary practices, clergy, private devotion and communities that have now existed across several generations. Scholars routinely study it as a new religious movement and modern Pagan religion.

“New” is a historical description. It is not a synonym for “joke.”

What does a spell look like if nobody calls it one?

One of the more interesting people to have studied witchcraft is the anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann.

Long before she became known for her work among American evangelical Christians, Luhrmann spent time with practising magicians and witches in Britain. What interested her was not simply whether supernatural claims could be proved. She wanted to know what repeated spiritual practice did to the person practising it.

Years later, studying Christians who believed that God spoke directly to them, she noticed something familiar. Religious experience required quite some work.

People had a lot to learn: they learned to pray, learned which internal experiences to attend to, practised imagining the presence of God. They became better at recognising certain thoughts, sensations or coincidences as spiritually meaningful. Belief was not always a proposition somebody accepted one morning. Most times, it was cultivated through repeated acts of attention.

Witchcraft can work in similarly practical ways.

You clear a space.

You choose an object.

You speak words aloud.

You repeat an action on a particular day of the month.

You learn the associations attached to a plant, card, colour or deity. You become attentive to the seasons. Perhaps you ask for something. Perhaps you give thanks. Perhaps you sit in silence. Perhaps you believe something answered.

From the outside, this might look like theatre, but come to think of it; This has never been unique to witches.

Religion is full of physical things done because of the belief that invisible things matter.

Water is poured. Bells are rung. Bodies kneel. Incense burns. Food is blessed, restricted, offered or shared. Beads pass through fingers. Certain words must be said in a certain order. Particular days alter what one eats, wears or does.

We rarely demand from other religious practitioners that these actions stop looking peculiar before agreeing to call them devotion.

The crystal-shop problem

Now, let's be honest; Modern witchcraft does have a commercialisation problem and it would be silly to pretend otherwise.

Social media has flattened complicated traditions into lists of correspondences, deities into personality types and has encouraged a version of spiritual shopping in which one can apparently resolve almost any problem by purchasing another polished stone.

There are legitimate arguments within witchcraft and Pagan communities about cultural appropriation, dubious historical claims, spiritual consumerism and practices taken from closed traditions by people who discovered them three tiktoks ago.

But commerce tells us less about the seriousness of belief than we sometimes imagine. Religions have always had objects.

Pilgrims bought badges in medieval Europe. Shrines sold devotional goods. Homes have always bought icons, prayer books, statues, incense, candles, beads and amulets. Sacred objects have passed through marketplaces for a very long time.

An object being purchasable does not settle what it becomes after someone takes it home.

A candle can be décor, or can be a votive.

Contemporary witches themselves frequently push back against the idea that witchcraft can be reduced to crystals and an attractive altar. Smithsonian’s reporting on American witches found practitioners describing witchcraft variously as spiritual practice, healing, connection to the earth, community work and a system through which they make sense of their own lives. Even among people using the same word, the underlying beliefs differed considerably.

That diversity can make witchcraft look unserious if your idea of a religion requires everyone to agree.

It looks rather different if you have ever attended a committee meeting of any religion on the planet.

Perhaps the strangest thing is how ordinary it has become

The numbers are still small.

Pew’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study places people identifying specifically as Pagan or Wiccan at less than one per cent of American adults. It would be easy to exaggerate modern witchcraft into some enormous religious revolution when it isn’t one.

The more interesting change may be happening around it rather than in it. Large numbers of people who do not belong to conventional religious institutions nevertheless believe in souls, spiritual forces, sacred qualities in nature, or realities beyond what can be physically observed. In Pew’s recent surveys, 81 per cent of American adults said there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, while roughly half of the religiously unaffiliated described themselves as spiritual or said spirituality was important in their lives.

That creates quite a lot of room between Abrahamic theism and unbelief. Modern witchcraft has settled into some of it by offering rituals without requiring a central institution and sacredness without necessarily requiring a single god, a calendar marked by moons and seasons, and a spiritual vocabulary for people who care to have one.

This is not an explanation for why every witch becomes a witch. There isn’t one. I mean people rarely enter religions for one reason.

Family. Beauty. Fear. Love. Community. Habit. Revelation. Grief. A childhood experience they cannot quite explain. A book found at sixteen. A god they believe called them by their name. Their grandmother's ghost stories.

The witch we find easiest to believe in

There is an irony here. Western culture is perfectly comfortable believing in witches provided the witches are dead.

We believe in the accused woman in the seventeenth-century court record. We believe in the witch of the fairy tale, the village cunning woman, the sorceress painted into a manuscript margin. We put them in museums. We build tours around them. We publish their spells as folklore.

It is the living witch that causes more trouble for us.

She may have Wi-Fi.

She may work in payroll.

Her candles came in a pack of twenty-four.

Her altar is on an IKEA bookcase because that is where it fits.

None of this has the dignity of antiquity. But the sacred has always spent most of human history sharing space with laundry, bills, bad weather and whatever else was affordable. The medieval witches would have used a gas oven if they had one, but they didn't, so they settled for firewood.

A practice does not become folklore only after its last practitioner dies. Sometimes it is happening in the flat upstairs.

And perhaps modern witchcraft becomes easier to understand once we stop asking whether it looks enough like the religions we already recognise.

We do not have to believe that the card was drawn for a reason, or that the spell worked, or that anybody was even listening when the candle was lit.

But if someone builds a life around sacred time, ritual, ethical commitments, unseen powers, community, prayer, offering and a particular account of what the world contains, there is at least a familiar human activity taking place in the room.

The objects may have changed, but the idea certainly hasn't.

Further Reading

Ethan Doyle White, The New Witches of the West: Tradition, Liberation, and Power. Cambridge University Press, 2024. Cambridge Core

Sabina Magliocco, “Neopaganism,” in The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements. A very good scholarly introduction to modern Paganisms and their diversity. Cambridge Core

James Wood, “Does Knowing God Just Take Practice?” The New Yorker. On T. M. Luhrmann's work on how spiritual practices train religious attention, including her earlier anthropological work on British witchcraft. The New Yorker

Brigit Katz, “What Does It Mean to Be a Witch Today?” Smithsonian Magazine. Particularly useful for the variety of identities and purposes found among contemporary witches. Smithsonian Magazine

Pew Research Center, 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study. Useful context for Pagan/Wiccan identification and the much wider prevalence of spiritual beliefs outside conventional religious affiliation. Pew Research Center