🧙♀️Module 3: The History of Modern Witchcraft | Modern Witchcraft Course
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Module 3: The History of Modern Witchcraft
Why History Matters
A witch practicing without her tradition’s history is practicing in a vacuum. She cannot tell which of her teachers speaks from a tradition published in the 1950s and which speaks from a synthesis assembled last week on social media. She has no map for the disagreements she is bound to meet, because she does not know where the disagreeing positions came from. History gives the practice context, depth, and lineage, and it hands her something surprisingly practical: the witch who knows the story can hear any teaching and place it in time, the way Module 2 taught her to place it on the map.
What follows is not academic history. It is the working witch’s orientation to where she stands in time: what came before her, what she has inherited, what she is now part of. It ends, like every module in this course, with something to use. This time it is a detector, a short set of questions that will catch the most common false historical claims in the witchcraft world, claims this module will meet one by one along the way. The story earns the skill. Here is the story.
Before Christianity
Pre-Christian Europe, meaning Europe before Christianity spread across it, held thousands of local religious and magical traditions: Celtic, Germanic, Norse, Slavic, Mediterranean, Baltic, and many more, each with its own deities, rituals, and working methods. Magic was not separated from religion in these cultures; it was woven through ordinary religious life. Healers, seers, ritual specialists, and household practitioners all existed, in forms that varied enormously from valley to valley.
As Christianity spread, much of this was lost. Some traditions were violently suppressed. Some were absorbed into Christian shapes, with saints replacing local deities and holy wells continuing as pilgrimage sites under new names. Some survived quietly in folk practice, running underneath official religion for centuries. The record is incomplete for a hard reason: the people doing the preserving rarely had writing, and the people doing the writing were often the ones doing the suppressing.
Modern witchcraft often claims continuity with these old traditions, and the honest position matters here. Much was lost. Some was genuinely preserved in folk practice. And much was reconstructed, a word worth knowing: reconstruction is the modern work of rebuilding a broken tradition from historical fragments, archaeology, and scholarship, and whole communities, such as modern Norse and Greek polytheists, practice this way openly and honorably. A modern witch who calls on Brigid, the Irish goddess of the hearth and the forge, or Freya, the Norse goddess of love and magic, or Hekate, the Greek goddess long associated with witchcraft itself, is doing something real. She is not identical to the ancient practitioner who did the same. The continuity is imaginative as well as historical, and that is no scandal, so long as the practitioner is honest about it rather than claiming an unbroken line that did not run unbroken. Hold that phrase. It returns at the end of this module with teeth.
The Trials, and the Long Terror
From roughly the fifteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, witch panics swept Europe and its colonies. The craft’s own name for this era is the Burning Times, and the numbers deserve to be stated carefully, because this is the single piece of witch history most often gotten wrong. Historians who have systematically counted the surviving trial records estimate about one hundred thousand trials and somewhere between forty and sixty thousand executions across three centuries. Records are incomplete, so the true toll may run somewhat higher. It was a horror by any honest measure.
What it was not is nine million. That figure, born of nineteenth century guesswork and spread through twentieth century books and songs, still circulates in older witchcraft writing, and when a book or teacher repeats it, that is useful information: it means the source has not caught up with roughly fifty years of careful scholarship. A second correction worth carrying: in England and its American colonies, convicted witches were hanged, not burned, because witchcraft there was a felony rather than a heresy. Burning belonged mainly to continental Europe, and in Scotland the condemned were strangled before the fire. The image of the burning witch is true history for some places and pure invention for others, including Salem.
Salem deserves its own paragraph, because it is the trial most students of this course will have grown up nearest to. In 1692, in colonial Massachusetts, a panic that began with afflicted girls in Salem Village spiraled into roughly two hundred accusations. Nineteen people were hanged, one man was pressed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea, and several more died in jail. No one at Salem was burned. Within a few years, jurors and at least one judge publicly repented, and the colony eventually declared the trials unlawful, which makes Salem one of history’s rare witch panics that apologized.
Across the whole era, the victims were disproportionately women, most of them past forty, and disproportionately poor, widowed, solitary, or otherwise without protection in cultures that required it. Most were not practicing witches in any sense this course uses. They were healers, midwives, herbalists, fortune tellers, folk wise women, neighbors who quarreled with the wrong person, women whose misfortunes could not be given a more acceptable explanation, women who lived alone, women who knew too much, women who were inconvenient. Some genuine folk practitioners died.
Far more people with no magical practice at all died because they fit the shape of the accusation.
The trials devastated folk practice across Europe. They killed practitioners, broke lines of family transmission that had run for generations, and taught whole populations to fear and report their neighbors, particularly their women. They fused the word witch to criminal evil so thoroughly that the bond took centuries to begin loosening, which is exactly the weight Module 1 asked every student to feel before taking the word up. The grief is real, the rage is real, and so is the long quiet of the practitioners who survived by never claiming the word at all. This inheritance belongs to every modern witch, and this module’s closing practice includes a way to honor it.
The Long Silence
After the trials wound down across most of Europe by around 1700, witchcraft as a public identity simply disappeared. Folk practice did not. It went underground or continued under safer names. The cunning folk of England kept working. Granny women, the folk healers of the Appalachian mountains, kept working. Curanderas, the traditional healers of Latin America, kept working. Herb doctors in Black communities North and South kept working. Folk Catholicism absorbed much of the old practice, folk Protestantism absorbed some, and the practitioners themselves mostly identified as healers, wise women, or simply Christians who happened to know how to do certain things. Never witches. The word was still a slur.
Meanwhile, serious occult practice continued in an adjacent stream: ceremonial magic, the formal ritual tradition defined in Module 2. It ran through Renaissance hermeticism, a stream of mystical philosophy tracing itself to ancient Egypt and Greece, through the esoteric brotherhoods of the eighteenth century such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, and into a full nineteenth century revival. In 1888 came the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most influential ceremonial magic order of its era, whose members included the poet W. B. Yeats and the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, and whose ritual structures would quietly shape almost everything that followed. None of this was called witchcraft. The silence around that word was long, but it was never total. The work continued under other names.
The Revival Gathers
The nineteenth century saw esoteric interest flower across Europe and America. Spiritualism swept through parlors and stages: the movement built around communication with the dead, with its séances, meaning sittings held to contact spirits, and its mediums, meaning people who relay the spirits’ messages. Theosophy arrived: the vast synthesis Helena Blavatsky assembled from Hindu and Buddhist ideas, ceremonial magic, and her own visionary writing, which carried Eastern concepts into Western spiritual vocabulary where many remain today. The Golden Dawn and its descendants worked their rituals. And Romantic era poets and scholars began rehabilitating pre-Christian European mythology as cultural treasure rather than devilish survival, teaching the educated public to feel wistful about the old gods instead of afraid of them.
Into this atmosphere, in the early twentieth century, the anthropologist Margaret Murray published a series of books arguing something electrifying: that the witch trials had not murdered innocent Christians at all, but had persecuted a real, surviving, organized pre-Christian religion, complete with covens and seasonal rites, running secretly beneath Christianity since antiquity. This is known as the witch-cult hypothesis, and it needs remembering by name, because its ghost still walks. The scholarship is now thoroughly discredited; later historians showed it was built from selective and sometimes manufactured evidence. But the books were enormously influential in their day, and they handed the coming revival its founding myth: the belief that what happened next was the rediscovery of an ancient religion rather than the construction of a new one. The frame was wrong. What came next was real anyway.
Gardner
Gerald Gardner was a retired English civil servant, an amateur folklorist, and a fixture of various occult and naturist circles, naturist meaning nudist, which is simply true and delights every generation of students who learn it. He claimed in the 1940s to have been initiated into a surviving witch coven in the New Forest, initiation meaning a formal ceremony of being brought into a tradition by its existing members. Whether that coven existed as he described is contested; the evidence is thin, and most current scholarship treats his origin story as embellishment if not invention.
What he did matters more than what he claimed. In 1951, England repealed its Witchcraft Act, lifting the legal prohibition that had shadowed the practice for centuries. Gardner walked through the open door. In 1954 he published Witchcraft Today, in 1959 The Meaning of Witchcraft, and in between he did the genuinely historic thing: he stood in public, named what he was doing, gave it structure, and presented it as a living tradition, first calling it the witch cult and later Wica, which the next generations would spell Wicca.
What he publicized was a synthesis. It drew on ceremonial magic, especially the Golden Dawn current as it reached him through Crowley, whom Gardner knew personally near the end of Crowley’s life. It drew on English folk tradition, on Murray’s by-then-famous witch-cult scholarship, and on Gardner’s own invention. Whether anything genuinely ancient passed through his hands is still debated. What is not debated is the result: modern English-speaking witchcraft as a visible, organized, public tradition begins with what he published.
Valiente
Doreen Valiente joined Gardner’s coven in 1953 and became his most important collaborator, and the plain truth is that much of what the world now recognizes as Wiccan ritual is her writing. She composed much of the tradition’s liturgy, meaning the fixed spoken words of ritual, including most of the Charge of the Goddess, Wicca’s most beloved ritual text, a speech delivered in the Goddess’s own voice that Wiccans still recite today. She wrote significant portions of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows, edited Gardner’s drafts, trained practitioners, eventually broke with Gardner over how the tradition should be run, and continued her own practice and writing for decades.
She is often called the mother of modern witchcraft, and the title is earned. Without her, Gardner’s assembly would have stayed closer to ceremonial magic than to the warm, poetic, goddess-centered ritual that actually spread across the world. That the man’s name became the tradition’s brand while the woman did much of the actual liturgical work is itself a piece of the history worth knowing, and worth saying out loud.
The Expansion: 1960s and 70s
Through the 1960s and 70s, Wicca spread and diversified. Alex Sanders founded Alexandrian Wicca, a parallel tradition with its own initiatory line, meaning its own unbroken chain of teacher initiating student initiating the next, leaning harder on ceremonial magic. Raymond Buckland carried Gardnerian Wicca to the United States in 1964, opened the first American coven, and wrote the books that introduced American readers to the tradition. Later, in the 1980s, Scott Cunningham would democratize the craft further with warm, plainspoken books aimed at solitary practitioners who would never join a coven at all, and for a whole generation his Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner was the front door.
Alongside Wicca’s growth, the counter-current crystallized. Robert Cochrane, working in England in the early 1960s, founded what became the Clan of Tubal Cain, deliberately setting his craft against Gardner’s: earthier, darker, tuned to folk-mythological figures and the particular British land, and unimpressed by the eight-spoke Wheel of the Year. From his stream, the broad river of traditional witchcraft met in Module 2 took its modern rise. By the end of the 1970s, what had begun as a small English esoteric circle was an international movement.
Starhawk and the Political Turn
The feminist movement of the 1970s, the era’s great push for women’s liberation, found in witchcraft a spiritual practice that fit its politics, and in 1979 the meeting produced a book: Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance. Here was witchcraft framed as feminist, ecological, and radically inclusive, built on Wiccan ritual bones but stripped of rigid hierarchy and reframed around empowerment, environmental commitment, and direct political action. The Reclaiming tradition Starhawk co-founded in San Francisco still shapes progressive American witchcraft, and The Spiral Dance remains one of the most read books in the modern craft.
Feminist witchcraft did something earlier Wicca largely had not: it made the political dimension explicit. The witch hunts became a politicized historical reference, the link between the persecution of women then and the conditions of women now became lived theology, and the connection between earth-centered practice and ecological politics entered the craft’s bloodstream. Not every witch took up the political frame, but the political dimension entered the broader craft through this current and never left. It is also, for honesty’s sake, the current through which the nine million figure spread most widely, carried by passionate books and songs before the archival scholarship of the 1980s corrected the count.
The Queer Current
The same cultural moment brought gay liberation to witchcraft’s door, and the fit was immediate. The Radical Faeries, founded by Harry Hay in 1979, blended queer identity with pagan and craft practice in a specifically gay male spiritual community. Lesbian witchcraft circles grew within and beside the feminist current. Trans, bisexual, and queer practitioners of every kind found in the craft a spiritual culture more welcoming than nearly anything else on offer.
Wicca itself, with the Goddess-and-God polarity at its structural center, was sometimes a complicated fit, and over the following decades many lineages reframed, expanded, or set the polarity aside. The wider truth is simple and worth stating plainly: the modern craft has been disproportionately queer for as long as it has been visible, and the contributions of queer witches are inseparable from what the tradition is.
Chaos Magic Arrives
Module 2 already introduced chaos magic’s ideas; here is its moment in time. In 1978, Peter Carroll’s Liber Null and Ray Sherwin’s The Book of Results appeared in England, drawing on the earlier sigil work of the artist-magician Austin Osman Spare and founding chaos magic as a self-aware school.
The order Carroll co-founded, the Illuminates of Thanateros, spread internationally through the 1980s. The school has always been more influential than its membership numbers suggest: countless witches who have never read Carroll use sigil techniques his school refined, absorbed through teachers shaped by it. Watching for that hidden influence is part of the map-reading skill from Module 2.
The New Age Crossover
Between roughly the 1970s and 1990s, witchcraft overlapped heavily with the new age movement, the broad commercial spirituality of crystals, self-help astrology, tarot as personal growth, channeling, meaning the practice of receiving messages from spirits while in trance, and the chakra system, the map of the body’s energy centers absorbed wholesale from Indian yogic tradition and repackaged for Western consumption. The crossover brought witchcraft-adjacent practice to mass audiences and put supplies within reach of cities and suburbs that had never seen an occult shop.
It also introduced a flattening the craft still wrestles with: practices stripped from their cultures and lineages, sold as universal spiritual technology, divorced from the rigor and responsibility their home traditions had built around them. Much of what circulates as witchy in mainstream culture came through this stream, and much of what beginners now have to unlearn, especially around appropriation and around the difference between depth practice and consumer spirituality, came through it too. The new age made the craft visible at scale, and made it easy to confuse with its commercialized shadow. Both things are true at once.
The 2000s: Page, Screen, and Scholarship
The turn of the millennium pushed the witch into the cultural foreground. Harry Potter, beginning in 1997, put witchcraft imagery in front of a generation of children, some of whom later found the actual craft and recognized the furniture. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, and their successors shaped the popular image of what witches look like and do, and the aesthetic of the modern witch owes more to these screens than most practitioners realize.
Scholarship arrived in the same decade. In 1999 the historian Ronald Hutton published The Triumph of the Moon, the first serious academic history of modern Wicca. Hutton’s research dismantled the claim of ancient lineage while honoring what the tradition had actually become: a real religious tradition, recently built from genuine folk and ceremonial sources, deserving respect on its true merits rather than its founders’ inflated claims. The book changed how the craft talks about itself, and this module stands partly on its shoulders. A tradition that can survive its own honest history is a tradition worth taking seriously, and modern witchcraft passed that test.
The Social Media Era
From roughly 2015 onward, the platforms made witchcraft visible at a scale never seen in history. The gifts are real: a practitioner with no local community can find teachers, traditions, supplies, and kindred spirits through her phone, and beginners can orient themselves in months instead of years. This course exists inside that gift.
The costs are just as real. Quality control is lower than it has ever been. Closed practices are repackaged as generic witch content by people with no connection to the source communities. Ungrounded teaching circulates with no correction mechanism. Fast witch commerce floods the field with mass-produced kits and aesthetics curated for the feed and empty of practice. The student entering now enters through this noise, and part of what the craft asks of her is discernment: the built, unhurried ability to tell a practitioner who has worked something for years from one who learned it from another feed two weeks ago. That discernment is not instinct. It is a skill, and the next section begins building it.
The Skill: Five Questions That Catch False History
Everything this module just told carries a practical payoff. The most common false claims in the witchcraft world are historical claims, and having walked the true history, the student can now catch them on sight. These five questions, asked of any book, teacher, video, or product, will do most of the work of a historian in under a minute.
Does it claim an unbroken ancient lineage? The phrase to listen for is any version of passed down in secret since ancient times. That is Murray’s discredited witch-cult hypothesis still walking around, and it is the single most reliable red flag in the entire field. Real traditions are honest about their construction; Wicca survived Hutton’s history and stands taller for it.
Does it cite nine million dead, or witches burned at Salem? Either one dates the source’s research instantly. The honest numbers are forty to sixty thousand killed across three centuries, hanged rather than burned in England and America, and Salem hanged nineteen. A source wrong about its own martyrs will be wrong about other things.
Does it call a practice ancient without saying where it came from? Much of what is marketed as ancient is decades old, and here is the liberating part this module has been building toward: that is fine. Old does not mean true, and new does not mean false. The Charge of the Goddess was written in the 1950s, largely by Doreen Valiente, and it is no less beautiful or effective for it. A teacher who says this is modern, and it works is showing integrity, not weakness.
Does it claim a family line back to the Burning Times? Module 2’s friendly skepticism now has its historical teeth: the trials broke family transmission lines rather than preserving them, and most of the era’s victims were not practitioners at all. Treasure inherited family folk practice where it truly exists. Doubt centuries-long secret witch dynasties.
Does it name its sources and its place on the map? This is the positive test that balances the four warnings. Trustworthy teachers say where a practice comes from, which tradition they speak for, and what is their own invention. The habit of crediting is the single best marker of signal in the noise, in a book from 1954 or a video from last week.
None of this is taught to make the student suspicious of everything. It is taught so her trust lands where trust is earned, which is precisely what discernment means.
A Witch Practice: Taking a Place in the Stream
The notebook returns, and this practice has three parts. Two are pages that join the Names page and the Map page. The third is the course’s first candle, and it is offered gently.
Part One: The Witch’s Own Entry
This whole module has been a chronicle of arrivals: Gardner in 1954, Valiente in 1953, Buckland in 1964, Starhawk in 1979. The practice begins with the student writing her own entry in the same chronicle, a short dated paragraph in the notebook, in whatever words are true. The shape many witches use: when I entered the craft, what brought me through the door, whose voices taught me first, and where those voices stood on the map. However modest it feels to write, it is a true line of the same history this module just told, because the stream is made entirely of individual practitioners stepping into it.
Part Two: The Sources Page
Next, a fresh page titled Sources. On it go the books, creators, teachers, and shops that have taught the student anything about the craft so far, and beside each one, two brief notes: where it stands on Module 2’s map, and how it fares against this module’s five questions. No source needs to be discarded for failing a question; a beloved older book that repeats the nine million figure can stay on the shelf with a small honest note beside it. The page grows for as long as the witch keeps learning, which is to say forever, and keeping it current quietly turns the two skills of these last two modules into a lifelong habit.
Part Three: A Remembrance
Last, and only for those who want it: a remembrance for the people who died under the name this course’s students are now learning to carry. One plain candle, any candle in the house, and a quiet minute. This is not yet spellwork; candle magic is taught later in the course, and this flame is something older and simpler than magic, the memorial light humans have always lit for their dead.
The candle is lit, the minute is kept, and words are spoken if words feel right. Witches at this threshold often say something like:
“This light is for the ones who were named witch and killed for it.”
“This light is for the ones who kept the old skills quietly, and were never thanked.”
“I know the weight of the word I am learning. I carry it with respect.”
Then the candle is put out, with thanks, and that is the whole practice. Small as it is, many witches count some version of it among the most important things they ever do, because it is the moment the history stops being information and becomes inheritance.
The Witch’s Place in Time
So where does the student now stand? She is new here. The tradition she is entering, whatever form she eventually practices, is young as organized traditions go: the published modern craft is younger than most grandparents, the visible movement younger than most parents, and her own lineage may be younger than she is. She does not stand in millennia of unbroken transmission, and after this module she knows better than to claim it.
She also stands in a lineage deeper than the visible tradition. The folk practitioners killed in the trials. The cunning women who knew which herbs, which prayers, which gestures. Priestesses of cultures half remembered and half lost. Countless ordinary people who, across thousands of years, tended fires, spoke to the dead, gathered medicine, washed children clean of bad luck, blessed houses, called rain, and marked moons. The unbroken chain may be largely imaginative. The deep human practice of magic, in every culture, in every generation, since long before writing, is real.
Both the newness and the depth belong to the modern witch, and she practices with both in view: claiming no false continuity, dismissing no true depth. She enters the stream where it now runs and adds her practice to it, and as of Part One of tonight’s practice, she has already written herself in. The stream is older and longer than she is. The next module turns from where the craft has been to how it works, because Module 4 finally answers the question every page so far has been saving: what actually happens when a witch works magic?
Disclaimer: Everything IFS Academy is an independent educational platform and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the IFS Institute. While we strive for accuracy, errors can occur, and users are encouraged to cross-reference critical information. The courses in the Witchcraft & Folk Magic Series explore witchcraft, folk magic, and related spiritual and cultural practices for educational and personal-interest purposes only. Nothing in them guarantees any particular result, and no ritual, spell, correspondence, or practice is offered as a substitute for professional medical, psychological, legal, or financial advice. Practices that involve fire, candles, herbs, plants, or other physical materials carry real risks such as burns, allergic reaction, or toxicity, and any practice is undertaken at your own discretion and risk. They do not constitute therapy, mental health treatment, clinical training, or crisis support, and they should not be used as a substitute for professional mental health care.
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A few calls I made you should sign off on:
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