This is a two-part essay. The first looks at the cultural return of witchcraft and its origin in the shift away from Christianity; the second will focus on how cultural shifts, including even church practices, have opened a vacuum into which the obsessions with glamour and control (the essence of witchcraft) have entered. Amending that vacuum may provide a way to pull our culture back from the abyss.
The Dark Sisterhood Genre
A mother of a young girl walks week after week into the preschool library read-aloud hour. She never smiles, never laughs, and never makes eye contact with anyone. Each week she wears the same teal-colored shirt with three stark white words: “HEX THE PATRIARCHY.”
Upon a display shelf in the same library is a book: “The Little Witch’s Book of Spells”. There are spells to make sure you and your best friend are friends forever; how to find your coven and your grimoire; how to freeze a bully; how to make a pentagon, a sigil, an altar; how to pass tests and enrich yourself (“gain abundance”). Disney is set to release Hexed in the autumn of 2026. Practical Magic is enjoying a revival with a sequel in theaters and a Broadway musical in the works. The days of Harry Potter, in which characters more resembled superheroes with magical powers, or Wizards of Waverly Place & Sabrina the Teenage Witch, in which magical mishaps are fodder for screwball comedy, have passed in favor of redditor hexing. Today’s youth media is full of books that embrace the core wrongs of witchcraft under a sheen of pagan naturalism and goddess worship: manipulation, power, self-worship, and closed-heartedness.
The growth of these media narratives depend upon revisionism (i.e. Wicked) which subtly or overtly shifts from pro-social values which recognize the good in a variety of relationships to one which centers it solely in a Dark Sisterhood. The profusion of Condé Nast feminism has midwifed, via decades of inescapable headlines and talking points, a new way of being: a Sisterhood. In popular narrative this cult drenches itself in light and liberation, of love and shimmer and transcendence. In practice it looks a little different, something more like female jurors running to the press to complain about the mystifying male holdout juror of the infamous Clancy case who “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.”
Here is an army willing to do battle against any moral restraint on itself. Copycat killings emerge; the TikTok goddesses pursue their line of thought without remorse. The Sisterhood rebukes the concept of examination of conscience, preferring therapy which validates one’s grievances. It is a massive, massive cultural shift imbuing all human relations, even the mother to child, with its conflation of any self-giving with persecution (both Clancy and her copycat killer described their small sons as being “the antiChrist” or “devil”). The rise of this Sisterhood in tandem with the growth of the “women can do no wrong” belief has life or death repercussions.
History repeats itself as a lesson to those who won’t recognize patterns. Real wisdom is not a spell to give a shortcut to success; it is hard-earned bitter truths, dangerously faded into cliches, that reflect one’s heart back if one has the humility and courage for truth. What (sometimes) starts with a yearning for nature and meaning in an increasingly deadened culture is twisted by a desire for the same corrupting power that runs the anti-human technocracy.
It Starts with Glamour
In a public image-oriented society the practitioners of witchcraft are conscious not to reach for the jarring or unpleasant. At first. They rely instead upon selling an aesthetic draped in an aura of the exotic, but which is simply glamour: the Scottish word twist of grammar, with the ancient recognition of the power and potential for twisted meaning. Glamour immediately was associated with lying: a false promise of mystery, overlying the real, beautiful truth of things.
Lavender sachets and skin-clearing tonics are given this sheen of glamour in indigo cloth covered books, dappled with stars to suggest the secrets of the cosmos are within. But what begins with the desire for beauty, a sense of the exotic, doesn’t end that way. Our new witches don’t take out wands to hex, but the culture they immerse themselves in is openly comfortable wishing death and pain upon their enemies — and engaging in practices they believe will bring their utopia about. That attempt to seize power over life and death and pain and happiness is the witchcraft that innocents all over the world have feared.
Instagram Wiccans talk about positivity, framing their spellcraft as a simple pretty variant of herbal medicine, a cutesy reconnection to the earth in an age of artifice in which the natural continually recedes. But there is nothing “organic” about witchcraft: from the very beginning it is a choice on how one will respond to Creation. Witchcraft is one of millions of deliberate interpretations of reality, and what makes it unique in world philosophies is how it ultimately always centers the desires of the practitioner. Despite promising to draw witches closer to the “magic” of crystals, stars, and flowers, what witchcraft genuinely does is take them further away. They lose the capacity for communion with reality because they begin to manipulate objects for their own desires rather than listen to them. What could be more artificial than relegating all Creation to the handmaiden of the spellcaster who wants “abundance”?
Such a tool-user relationship, centered on power rather than humility, historically led to fear of the practitioners of such methods; having removed objective truth to center on power, it seems the practitioners of spellcraft continually fell into the same sorts of practices which communities evaluated as a threat to social life. A look at the r/witchcraft forum explains why. There are multiple posts celebrating successful hexes. Witches who worry about the old threefold rule (before the resurgence of witchcraft after the millennium Wicca used to teach that any harm you do will come back threefold) are treated as toxic, pseudo-Christian busybodies. Don’t you know there’s a war on?
Despite awareness of the resurgence of witchcraft, perhaps reaching a momentary peak after the website Jezebel had called upon witches to curse Charlie Kirk shortly before his murder, there is little exploration of it as a phenomenon. Perhaps in the hearts of many, particularly after Kirk, there is a fear: if I draw attention to this movement, will they hex me? It doesn’t take the whole movement, it just takes one. And there is always one.
It’s here we touch upon the profound difference between Christian surrender and power-seeking.
The reddit witch, the one not putting up TikTok displays of altar crystals, is where the most traditionally troubling phenomena reveal themselves. There, without images, lay women (and men) floating in a world where they pour forth their feelings unchecked. There is nothing, no one to balance them. No public to say “this is madness.” The public, if it did so, is the enemy. Here the feelings rule and all boundaries are enemies. The closest thing which should call them back is “As ye harm no one, do as thou wilt,” but who is to say what harm is? The witch. There is no injunction of “what about the log in your eye?” Instead, the witch sees what they perceive as harm (even if it isn’t) and centers it: it needs a response (but does it?). They write things like this:
“I just wrote out what was going to happen to him, step by step. I wrote it like I was speaking to him and commanding him, or telling him something inevitable. Something along the lines of ‘you will alienate everyone in the industry and no one will work with you. You will lose your business. You will be investigated and charged with fraud. Everyone will know about this and will know what you are. You will be shunned and ostracized. You will lose everything. Your wife will leave you and your children will resent you. You will never know happiness or security. You will die alone and bitter.’”
Don’t Be Afraid, But The Witch is Your Neighbor
The reddit witch is not a lonely phenomenon. Wiccans outnumber Presbyterians, and that is without counting the countless women who don’t formally identify with the religion but are being drawn into the practice.
Why does a practice which is, without any doubt, centered on the exercise of power over others, appeal to so many, including Christians? There are self-proclaimed Christians on the witchcraft forum who will take the time to say they no longer believe in the practice of forgiveness. While they are responsible for their deeds, this phenomenon should prompt questions. How could someone imagine themselves Christian and be a witch? How could they imagine themselves Christian when they reject the heart of Christian practice?
The growth of witchcraft owes something to the deadening artifice we are immersed in, an artifice which both comforts and entraps us. The beauty of flowers and herbs, as we live under LED lights, are deeply appealing to many, but witchcraft twists this desire for Creation with subtle ingenuity. A film like Practical Magic comes along, romanticizing witches, and quite a few Christian women will profess nostalgia for it. What is it? The faces of celebrities? Or is it that they find a reassurance of meaning in the presence of flowers and herbs, while overlooking or not understanding the implications of reducing people and creation to tools for one’s desire?
Certainly, after the anti-fundamentalist cultural surge of the 1990s and 2000s, many fear showing oneself a fuddy duddy. If one accepts Tolkien and Lewis’s worlds of layered beings, but gets angry about super-powers in Harry Potter, that seems ludicrous, and so suddenly any discernment whatsoever is seen as mean and uncool. It’s unfortunately simple, but we are not islands, and we are affected by a desire to share media. Once judging and thinking about that media is seen as the oppressive weapons of the patriarchy, there is no longer any limit. One likes whatever one feels.
In the face of increasing chaos and stripping of boundaries, we are not going to see less witchcraft. It is rising and rising steadily. “Halloween belongs to us,” the witches told me when I was a little girl. Halloween is an interesting celebration, mirroring back to us the deep shifts in our culture. It has moved away from the remembrance of the dead, the communion of saints, and the conclusion of the year’s harvest (a more breathtakingly poignant trinity of events I can hardly fathom) into one of increasing gore, of dreary longevity (for all the well-deserved frustration with the stores for creeping Christmas, who sees Christmas displays up on their street in early October? Meanwhile the Halloween ones near me, especially if they are ugly and intended to frighten, increasingly stay up all year or fill the lawns in mid-August), and of an embrace of the “spooky” without the transcendent transformation of our understanding of the supernatural towards the Beatific Vision.
Knowing the Witches
I was raised knowing several witches. It is not my wish to discuss private lives or relive scenes, so though these experiences shaped my life and my mind at the deepest levels, driving me towards the Church almost as soon as I could request it, I will not share personal details. But the bare minimum to establish my firsthand knowledge with the covens long before Practical Magic, or The Craft, or Instagrammers found it, a glimpse is needed: I observed the behavior and beliefs of witches as a youth, back when there were less than an estimated 8,000 Wiccans in America. I watched with confusion the stated good intentions, intelligence, and traumas which led them to this cult, and saw that the individuals I observed were often the foremost victims of their own responses to the challenges of life.
Some begin as victims. Others don’t at all. Some (a man) encountered later in life gleefully thought he might provoke me by sharing his enjoyment of performing a Satanic ritual with others on a mountain. He was a “nice” man who liked to help animals. He clearly expected me to be shocked. But I had already known witches, I’d already heard all sorts of rationalizations about “freedom” and “liberation,” and this was just one more pseudo-edgy move to establish unique counter-cultural credentials. Well, it fell flat. I’d known the counter-culture, I saw it becoming the actual culture, and it has no mystery or love. It all ends in banality and misery.
The yuppie dabblers of witchcraft and Satanism are the heralds of a changing social reaction to witchcraft, but what unites all practitioners is the culture of victimization. It is in the framing of one’s self as a victim that the quest for power is best rationalized. Even the most secure, successful, and content can find with an ease an avenue to make themselves a victim — and victims need revenge. The witches I knew came to their beliefs out of a response to pain, ie seeking revenge on an entire society whom they blamed. What has changed is that it is now not a few souls closing their hearts and choosing power; the culture of victimization is mainstream.
The past wasn’t perfect, people are not perfect: Christianity has never said otherwise. But if some failed to respond with love, leaving the way of love and forgiveness for self-glorification and revenge has only one end. This should concern the shepherds of the church, who seem to have missed that the dominance of victimhood culture has radicalized millions of women to the point that they are openly embracing hexing. We are in need of a missionary movement in our own communities, on Instagram at least as much as slums. Who is more bereft of Christ than those with hard hearts? What happens when the wounded encounter distracted, even insipid, shepherds who fail to realize preaching on the way of prayer and forgiveness means nothing to those who are proud to say they reject those concepts as outdated?
What happens when the shepherds don’t realize the magnitude of the task, and millions of young women, groomed to be angry, see a world of glamorous celebrities and influencers offering a “feminine” witchcraft aesthetic whose semi-obscured core is unshakably focused on using any substance in this world to enrich the self and punish one’s enemies? What happens when they encounter casual Satanists and hexers who tell them what they need is power and revenge?
The Hex and the Prayer
And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earth-quake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire, a still small voice. —1 Kings 19:11–12, RSV
We live in a world deluged with information. 200 years ago things we never would have known are instantly brought to our attention. Despite our tools we remain weak and fallible creatures. We cannot solve everything. For millennia a way of response has made its way through the jungles of our world, a way of prayer.
Prayer doesn’t “do” fashion. It’s beyond ancient, classic, modern categories. It’s not fit for a breaking news channel. It is a way of being, the only transformative way of being. It is, in a sense, the culmination of all human life and endeavor. It transcends every attempt to pull it down and mock it; however, that does not stop the culture of now, of fashion and social media and breaking news, from passing on the idea that prayer is a useless absurdity.
In the face of endless evil news, brought to us every hour of the day, “thoughts & prayers” became a target of jokes to the sophisticated. No one is less likely to recognize the narrowness of their understanding than the cosmopolitan who is convinced she knows everything already. It’s useless, it doesn’t work: in these charges we see that crucial cultural shift from hearts acknowledging limitations to one in which immediate effectiveness for the pursuit of power determines value.
A hex isn’t humble. By its nature it cannot acknowledge that one does not have a complete understanding. A hex doesn’t wait for more information to come in. It doesn’t grant that maybe one’s mood fluctuates or viewpoint is in error. A hex is an act of self-assertion targeting other selves. Not praying for their good while acknowledging God, not ourselves, is the source and end of all good. A prayer does not “target.” All prayer, even the most adolescent petitionary prayers, is a form of asking. By asking we acknowledge we do not control. That small, crucial acknowledgment is the beginning of all wisdom and goodness.
A hex flings that acknowledgment back. “Hail to you for taking back your power,” is the congratulations to one witch who hexed an ex. Taking back one’s power at another’s expense. The hexing witch sees the world as a mercenary exchange, as mere power to be seized and guarded. The hex is thus by nature impatient, as to wait is fundamentally to prioritize something other than power. The hex won’t re-evaluate. It’s out there: an act of projected malice to manipulate who does or doesn’t have power.
“How to Freeze a Bully” is the name of a spell in the witchcraft book for girls. All the coy manipulative language (forcing one’s will on another is the ultimate act of bullying) can’t erase that the spell is about revenge and power. Who is the bully? The spellcaster is certain. The process of learning about others is thrown out as soon as one throws out humility. Now there is great danger: “moral” certitude and a willingness to exert power.
With the Disney movie Hexed soon to arrive, which will likely repeat the “two-step forward-one-step-back” policy employed by modern media to normalize that which it is perilous to normalize, it is of increasing importance to understand the difference between hexing and praying. Hexing is not some outdated practice or gobbledigook imagined by a backwoods preacher. Hexing comes from a very real mindset of self-assertion and revenge, is given teeth to practice its malice, and is actively being practiced by thousands of witches in the Dark Sisterhood today, particularly in the realm of politics. Its resurgence tells us much about the nature of politics, but that is separate topic.
Don’t Be Afraid, The Witch is Still Your Neighbor
I abhor witchcraft and also have not written this essay to encourage panic or stoke rage. I have written because I have seen, time and again, the process of people mis-identifying their chronic misery in solutions which ultimately cause more misery as well as spread it to others. Witchcraft is returning because we live in a society whose governing ideals are the inversion of Christianity. It is a society which refuses to understand suffering.
At the core of witchcraft is a refusal to suffer. They understand the Cross well enough on that point. In that refusal suffering is passed on. In my first Iris Murdoch review of The Unicorn is a discussion of the Greek goddess Ate, the goddess of destruction & hubris who upends human lives. Behind her follow the Litae, the spirits of remorseful prayer. They are old women, haggard and lamenting, and it is they who come to clean up what they can of Ate’s mess.
They do not seek offerings or demand sacrifices from human being; they weep and offer their own prayers. They do not seek revenge or power; to do so would be to become Ate. The goddess rampages, the mere old women, content to be spirits but not goddesses, mourn — and pray. But in praying, from the old women unable to keep pace with Ate, emerges the small voice of remorse which changes the heart. From those prayers are born the humility and hope to stop passing suffering on. To clean rather than to cast spells; to mourn rather than to rage; to pray rather than to hex.
There is much wrong in our time. One doesn’t need a horror film to feel the ominous tugging between chaos and control, with no room for love or suffering or self-giving between men and women. If this sad, anxious, grasping dark sisterhood is reacting to the chaos by seeking control over it, to panic would accelerate the process. All witchcraft, however it cloaks itself, seeks to fulfill its desires by manipulative force. Simone Weil, almost a total personification of the Litae, wrote: “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.”
All ways of life without Christ, be they technocracy or witchcraft, are variations on the theme of Force. The Dark Sisterhood is no exception. Its self-mythology expresses itself in more flowery language than technocrat transhumanist, but in the end it is still the weaponization of reality in the pursuit of one’s desires, the force of Ate ravishing reality to fulfill what are really just lusts.
We are not alone, we need not only ever be prisoners of our desires and our fears and our grievances. The Holy Spirit is in our midst if we will listen. There is a sort of “mutual hexing” which can take place and ruin any chance for reconciliation. Christians are facing challenges from all angles, all levels, but the Cross is the center of all things, and from it Christ prays His prayers. Mere force will never do so, and though the challenges may be insurmountable, following Christ on the way forward is always good because the love born of Christ is the only true magic.
“It is a part of the destiny of man, wrote Malcolm Muggeridge, “to pursue both power and love, knowing them to be incompatible. ‘Here am I, captain of a legion of Rome,’ a recently discovered inscription runs, ‘who served in the Libyan Desert and learns and ponders this truth: There are in life but two things, love and power, and no one has both.” (Anthony Esolen, Wise as Pigeons, Harmless as Snakes)
Exceptional—thank you for addressing this dynamic. God bless you.