Modern witchcraft and the online occult

The fastest-growing religious identity in several Western countries, mostly practised alone, mostly by people under thirty, and largely learned from strangers on the internet.

What it is

The contemporary practice of witchcraft as a spiritual identity, largely outside the initiatory structures of Wicca — solitary, eclectic, self-defined, and substantially transmitted online.

Its recurring features:

Solitary practice as the norm rather than the exception
Eclecticism — herbs, crystals, tarot, astrology, deity work, folk magic, all combined personally
Political framing — witchcraft as feminist, anti-authoritarian, queer-affirming, with the historical witch read as a persecuted woman rather than a practitioner
Ancestor and folk practice, often reconstructed from a person's own heritage
A wide spread of belief about efficacy, from literal to entirely psychological — and a notable comfort with not deciding

Numbers are hard, but the direction is not: censuses and surveys in the US, UK and Australia have recorded pagan and witchcraft identification growing several-fold since the 1990s, and it skews young and heavily female.

Where it came from

Modern witchcraft as a religion begins with Gerald Gardner in 1950s England, whose Wicca was initiatory, coven-based, hierarchical and secret.

The subsequent history is the steady dismantling of all four of those.

Alex Sanders and the Alexandrian tradition (1960s) loosened the lineage requirement in practice.
Feminist witchcraft in the 1970s — Zsuzsanna Budapest's Dianic tradition, and Starhawk's The Spiral Dance (1979) — reframed the practice politically and made it accessible without initiation. The Spiral Dance is probably the single most influential book in the field.
Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (1988) did the decisive thing: it told readers they could self-initiate and practise alone. Initiates were furious. It sold enormously.
The 1990s pop-culture wave — The Craft, Buffy, Charmed, Sabrina — brought a large young audience.
The internet, from Usenet through LiveJournal and Tumblr to TikTok, removed the last practical barriers.

How it is done

Personally and variably: an altar, seasonal observance of the eight sabbats or of a personally chosen calendar, herbs, candles, divination, deity work if any. There is no shared liturgy and this article does not instruct.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the historical claims have been settled and the community largely accepted the answer, which is genuinely to its credit and is unusual in this section.

Gardner's claim to a surviving pre-Christian witch-cult rested on Margaret Murray's thesis, which historians dismantled comprehensively — the witch trials did not persecute a hidden pagan religion, because there was no such religion to persecute. The "nine million" figure for those executed is off by roughly two orders of magnitude; the historical estimate is around forty to sixty thousand, and a substantial minority of them were men.

Modern witchcraft is a twentieth-century creation drawing on Freemasonry, ceremonial magic, Aradia, folklore collections and Gardner's own construction. Most practitioners now say this openly. The response to Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon (1999), which established the history, was mostly acceptance — the practice was found not to need the lineage. That is a healthier response to disconfirmation than almost anything else described on this site.

We can say the appeal is legible. It offers authority without hierarchy, practice without doctrine, a female-centred and queer-affirming religious space in a landscape where those are scarce, a relationship with seasons and land, and agency to people who feel they have little. Those are real goods and they explain the growth without any reference to belief.

We can say the online transmission carries the problems named under spirituality online — no vetting, monetised "witchcraft courses" of no fixed content, hexing discourse as engagement bait, and a market in crystals with the sourcing problems described there. There is also a specific version: the appropriation debate is unusually live in this community, where practices from closed traditions — Vodou, Santería, Native American, Romani — are routinely offered to anyone with a card to enter, and are objected to by the traditions concerned.

We can say the safeguarding gap is real. A solitary practitioner learning from strangers has none of the protections a coven's slow initiation provided, and the community has documented problems with predatory teachers, particularly involving young practitioners. The questions worth asking apply directly.

And we can say the efficacy question is held more lightly here than elsewhere. A large proportion of practitioners describe spellwork as psychological — focused intention, ritual as a way of committing to an action — without regarding that as a lesser form of the practice. That is a sophisticated position, it is common, and it sidesteps most of what this site would otherwise have to say.

We cannot say what modern witchcraft is, because it is deliberately not one thing. What we can say is that it is young, growing, largely honest about its own history, and the clearest example on this site of a tradition that lost its origin myth and carried on.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is done

What we can and cannot say

Further reading