🧙‍♀️3 - Modern Witchcraft Course | Module 3 — The History of Modern Witchcraft

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Module 3 — The History of Modern Witchcraft

Modern Witchcraft • Orientation

Why history matters

A witch practicing without knowing her tradition's history is practicing in a vacuum. She doesn't know why certain things are taught the way they are, can't tell which of her teachers are speaking from the published tradition of the 1950s and which are speaking from a synthesis assembled last week on social media, and has no map for the disagreements she is bound to encounter — because she does not know where the disagreeing positions came from.

History gives the practice context, depth, and lineage. The witch with a historical orientation can hear a teaching, recognize what tradition it comes out of, and place it accurately. She can recognize the reconstructions and the inventions and the inheritances, and respect each for what it is. The history that follows is not academic. It is the working witch's orientation to where she stands in time — what came before her, what she has inherited, and what she is part of now.

Before Christianity

Pre-Christian Europe contained thousands of local religious and magical traditions — Celtic, Germanic, Norse, Slavic, Mediterranean, Baltic, and many more, each with its own deities, practices, ritual structures, and working methods. Magic was woven through ordinary religious life rather than separated from it. Healers, seers, ritual specialists, and household practitioners all existed within these cultures, in forms that varied widely from place to place.

When Christianity spread across Europe, much of this was lost. Some traditions were violently suppressed, others absorbed into Christian framings — saints replacing local deities, holy wells continuing as pilgrimage sites under new names — and still others preserved in folk practice that ran underneath official religion for centuries. The historical record is incomplete because the people doing the preserving rarely had access to writing, and the people doing the writing were often the ones doing the suppressing.

Modern witchcraft often claims continuity with these old traditions. The honest position is that much was lost, much was reconstructed in the modern revival from fragments and scholarship, and some was genuinely preserved in folk practice. A modern witch who invokes Brigid or Freya or Hekate is doing something real, but she is not identical to the ancient practitioner who did the same. The continuity is imaginative as well as historical — and that is not a problem, as long as the practitioner is honest about what she is doing rather than claiming an unbroken line that did not actually run unbroken.

The trials, and the long terror

From roughly the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, witch panics swept across Europe and into the European colonies. The estimated death toll was forty to sixty thousand people, though regional records remain incomplete. The figure could be higher.

The victims were disproportionately women. They were also disproportionately old, poor, single, widowed, or otherwise without male protection in cultures that required it. Most were not practicing witches in the sense that modern witchcraft uses the term. They were healers, midwives, herbalists, fortune-tellers, folk wise women, neighbors who quarreled with the wrong person, women whose children died and who could not produce a more acceptable explanation, women who lived alone, women who knew too much, women who were inconvenient. Some genuine folk-magic practitioners died. Many more women who had no magical practice at all died because they fit the shape of the accusation.

The trials devastated folk practice across Europe. They killed practitioners. They broke transmission lines that had run through families for generations. They taught entire populations to fear and report what neighbors were doing, particularly what women were doing. They embedded into European and colonial culture a fundamental association of the word witch with criminal evil, an association that took centuries to begin loosening.

The trauma of this is part of what the modern witch inherits when she takes the word. The lineage she stands in includes the women — and some men — who were tortured, hanged, burned, drowned, and killed under that name. 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.

The long silence

After the trials wound down across most of Europe by around 1700, witchcraft as a public identity disappeared.

This does not mean folk practice disappeared. It went underground, or it continued under names that were not "witch." Cunning folk in England, granny women in the American mountains, curanderas in Latin America, herb doctors in Black communities North and South — practitioners continued their work, sometimes openly, mostly under cover of acceptable framings. Folk Catholicism absorbed much of it. Folk Protestantism absorbed some. The practitioners themselves frequently identified as healers or wise women or simply Christians who happened to know how to do certain things, rather than as witches.

Serious occult practice continued in adjacent streams — primarily in ceremonial magic, which carried on through Renaissance hermeticism, eighteenth-century rosicrucian and masonic currents, and into the nineteenth-century revival. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1888 and became the most influential ceremonial magic order of its era; its members included W. B. Yeats, Aleister Crowley, and many others who would shape twentieth-century occult culture. None of this was called witchcraft. The word was still a slur.

The silence was long, and it was not total. The work continued. It just continued under different names.

The Victorian revival

The nineteenth century saw a flowering of esoteric interest across Europe and America. Spiritualism, with its séances and mediums and communication with the dead. Theosophy, the synthesis Helena Blavatsky built from elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, ceremonial magic, and her own visionary writing. The Golden Dawn and its descendants in ceremonial magic. Folk-magic revivals in various streams. Romantic-era poetry and scholarship rehabilitating pre-Christian European mythology as cultural inheritance rather than satanic survival.

In the early twentieth century, the anthropologist Margaret Murray published a series of books arguing that the witch trials had not killed innocent women but had persecuted a surviving pre-Christian pagan religion, organized into covens and fertility rites, that had run beneath Christianity from antiquity. The scholarship is now largely discredited — Murray's witch-cult hypothesis does not hold up against subsequent historical research, which has shown it was constructed from selective and sometimes manufactured evidence. But the books were enormously influential when they appeared. They gave the twentieth-century revival the mythological frame that what came 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 member of various occult and naturist circles in mid-twentieth-century England. He claimed in the 1940s to have been initiated into a surviving witch coven in the New Forest. Whether such a coven existed in the form he described is contested — the historical evidence is thin, and most current scholarship treats his New Forest origin story as embellishment if not invention.

What he did do is more important than what he claimed. In 1951, the Witchcraft Act in England was repealed, removing the legal prohibition on publicly practicing or teaching witchcraft for the first time in centuries. In 1954 Gardner published Witchcraft Today; in 1959, The Meaning of Witchcraft. He named what he was doing publicly, gave it a structure, and presented it as a living tradition — initially under the name "the witch cult" and later under the name Wica, which subsequent generations would write as Wicca.

The tradition he publicized was a synthesis. It drew on ceremonial magic — especially the Golden Dawn through Crowley, with whom Gardner had personal contact toward the end of Crowley's life — on English folk tradition, on Margaret Murray's by-then-influential scholarship, and on Gardner's own creative invention. Whether he was transmitting something genuinely ancient or constructing something new from old materials is still debated. What is not in dispute is the result: modern English-speaking witchcraft as a visible, organized, public tradition began with what he published.

Valiente

Doreen Valiente joined Gardner's coven in 1953 and became his most important collaborator. She wrote much of the liturgy that shaped what Wicca became, including most of the Charge of the Goddess in the form Wiccans still recite today, and significant portions of what was called the Gardnerian Book of Shadows. She edited Gardner's drafts. She trained other practitioners. She eventually broke with Gardner over differences in how the tradition should be conducted, and continued her own practice and writing for decades after.

She is often called "the mother of modern witchcraft," and the title is fair. Without her, what Gardner had assembled would have remained closer to ceremonial magic than to the recognizable Wiccan ritual that spread across the world. The poetry, the warmth, the specifically goddess-centered emphasis that came to define the tradition were in significant part her contributions.

That two of the founders of modern Wicca worked in close collaboration, then conflict, then independent development — and that one was the man whose name became the brand of the tradition while the other did much of the actual liturgical work — is itself a piece of the history worth knowing.

The expansion: 1960s and 70s

Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, Wicca spread internationally and diversified.

Alex Sanders developed Alexandrian Wicca, a parallel tradition with its own initiatory line, drawing on Gardner's work but emphasizing ceremonial magic more heavily. Raymond Buckland brought Gardnerian Wicca to the United States in 1964, opening the first American coven and authoring books that introduced the tradition to American readers. Scott Cunningham, writing in the 1980s, would later democratize Wiccan practice further with books pitched to solitary practitioners who would never join a coven.

Alongside Wicca's expansion, traditional witchcraft began to crystallize as a distinct counter-current. Robert Cochrane, working in England in the early 1960s, founded what became the Clan of Tubal Cain, deliberately distinguishing his approach from Gardner's — earthier, darker, more attentive to folk-mythological figures and to the particular British landscape, less interested in the Wheel of the Year as the central calendar. The tradition he started gave rise to a much wider range of non-Wiccan witchcraft over the following decades.

What had begun as a small English esoteric circle was, by the end of the 1970s, a recognizable international religious and craft movement.

Starhawk and the political turn

The second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s embraced witchcraft as a specifically feminist spiritual practice.

In 1979, Starhawk's The Spiral Dance appeared. Witchcraft framed as feminist, political, ecological, and radically inclusive — drawing on Wiccan ritual structure but stripped of the more rigid initiatory hierarchy and reframed around women's empowerment, environmental commitment, and direct political action. The Reclaiming tradition Starhawk co-founded in San Francisco continues to shape progressive American witchcraft, and The Spiral Dance remains one of the most widely read books in the modern craft.

Feminist witchcraft did something the earlier Wicca had largely not. It made the political dimensions of the practice explicit — the connection between goddess-centered spirituality and women's liberation, between earth-centered practice and ecological politics, between spiritual community and direct action. The witch hunts became a politicized historical reference rather than just a historical horror. The link between the persecution of women historically and the conditions of women contemporarily became part of the lived theology. Not every witch shaped by feminism took up the explicitly political frame, but the political dimension entered the broader craft through this current and never left.

The queer current

The same cultural moment that produced feminist witchcraft saw gay liberation movements finding witchcraft as a spiritual home.

The Radical Faeries, founded by Harry Hay in 1979, blended queer identity with pagan and witchcraft practice in a specifically gay-male spiritual community. Lesbian and feminist witchcraft circles developed alongside, often within the broader feminist-craft current. Trans witches, bisexual witches, and queer practitioners of every kind found in the broader craft a religious and spiritual culture more welcoming than most of what was on offer elsewhere.

Wicca itself, with its Goddess-and-God polarity at the structural center, was sometimes a complicated fit for queer practitioners — and the polarity was either reframed, expanded, or set aside in many lineages over the decades that followed. The broader witchcraft movement has been disproportionately queer for as long as it has been visible, and the contributions of queer witches to the tradition are inseparable from what the tradition is.

Chaos magic

In 1978, Peter Carroll's Liber Null and Ray Sherwin's The Book of Results appeared in England. The two books, drawing on the earlier work of Austin Osman Spare and on broader currents of postmodern thought, founded what became chaos magic as a self-conscious school.

The Illuminates of Thanateros, the chaos-magic order Carroll co-founded, spread internationally through the 1980s. The school's pragmatic, results-focused edge fit the cultural moment of late-twentieth-century occultism, and its emphasis on sigil work introduced a working technology that spread far beyond its formal practitioners.

Chaos magic remains a distinct school, but its influence has run far beyond its visible membership. Many witches who would not call themselves chaos magicians use techniques developed within the school. Many witches who have never read Carroll have absorbed his approach through teachers shaped by it. The school has been significantly more influential than its membership numbers would suggest.

The new age crossover

Between roughly the 1970s and the 1990s, modern witchcraft and the new age movement overlapped substantially.

Crystals. Channeling. Astrology as self-help framework. Tarot as personal-growth tool. The chakra system absorbed wholesale from yogic traditions and recontextualized for Western consumption. The Mind, Body, Spirit publishing category. The new age movement brought witchcraft-adjacent practice to mass audiences and made shops and supplies available in cities and suburbs that had nothing of the kind before. It also introduced significant flattening — practices stripped from their cultural and lineage contexts, sold as universal spiritual technology, divorced from the rigor and the responsibility their original traditions had built around them.

Contemporary witches often have a complicated relationship with this inheritance. Much of what circulates as witchcraft-adjacent in mainstream spiritual culture came through this stream — and much of what beginners now have to unlearn, particularly around appropriation and around the difference between depth practice and consumer spirituality, came through it as well. The new age crossover made the modern craft visible at scale. It also made the modern craft easier to confuse with its commercialized shadow.

The 2000s: literature, scholarship, screen

The turn of the millennium brought witchcraft into the cultural foreground in ways the earlier decades had not managed.

The Harry Potter phenomenon, beginning in 1997, introduced witchcraft imagery to a generation of children who would grow into adults, some of whom would later find the actual craft and recognize the imagery. Witchcraft-themed television — Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, later The Witcher and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina — shaped popular imagination of what witches looked like and what they did. The aesthetic of the modern witch, as visible in current photography and fashion, owes more to these screen sources than most practitioners realize.

In scholarship, Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon, published in 1999, provided the first serious academic history of modern Wicca. Hutton's research demolished much of Gardner's claim to ancient lineage while honoring what the tradition had become — a serious religious tradition built recently, drawing on real folk and ceremonial sources, deserving of academic respect on its actual merits rather than on the inflated claims of its founders. The book changed how the tradition was discussed in serious circles, and its influence is still felt.

The decade was a turning point. Witchcraft was no longer a small esoteric subculture. It was a visible cultural phenomenon, with millions of people who had at least passing familiarity with it.

The social media era

From roughly 2015 onward, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have made witchcraft visible at a scale never seen before.

Information access is higher than at any point in history. A practitioner with no local community can find teachers, traditions, lineages, supplies, and other practitioners through her phone. Beginners can locate themselves in the field within months rather than years. The democratization is real, and so is the value of it.

The other side is also real. Quality control is lower than at any point in history. Closed-practice appropriation runs rampant — hoodoo techniques, Indigenous traditions, Vodou practices, all repackaged as generic "witch tradition" and sold by people with no connection to the source communities. Ungrounded teaching circulates with no correction mechanism. Fast-fashion witch commerce — the eight-dollar smudge bundle, the mass-produced ritual kit, the aesthetic curated for Instagram and entirely empty of practice — has flooded the field. The reduction of the craft to aesthetic, of identity to performance, of practice to content all happens at scale.

The student entering witchcraft now enters through this contemporary noise. Part of what the craft asks of her is the discernment to recognize signal when she sees it — the difference between a practitioner who has worked something for years and one who learned it from another aesthetic feed two weeks ago. That discernment is built rather than instinctive. It takes time.

The contested present

The modern witchcraft field as it stands now is the layered result of every historical wave that built it. The Wiccan founders, the traditional-witchcraft counter-current, the feminist and queer politicization, the chaos magic pragmatism, the new age commercialization, the academic scholarship, the social media democratization — all of these have left their mark, and all of them coexist in the field at once.

The result is a tradition that is not unified and likely never will be. Strict Wiccan traditionalists, politicized feminist and queer witches, traditional witches who reject the modern Wiccan synthesis, chaos magicians, cultural revivalists, eclectic solitary practitioners, closed-practice practitioners, open-practice teachers, and critics and scholars all share the field with no central authority that could resolve their disagreements even if anyone wanted resolution.

These groups disagree on most of what matters. The disagreements are not arbitrary — each one traces back to a specific historical moment, a specific lineage, a specific working position. A witch with a sense of the history can hear an argument and recognize where it comes from. The Wiccan critique of chaos magic comes from one place; the traditional witchcraft critique of Wicca comes from a different place; the closed-practice critique of eclectic practice comes from a third. These are not just opinion conflicts. They are conflicts between historically situated traditions that genuinely see the craft differently.

A witch practicing in this moment is practicing in contested territory, with real ethical questions arising at almost every step of her development. The history is part of her orientation to those questions.

The witch's place in time

She is new here.

The tradition she stands in — whatever specific version she practices — is young as organized traditions go. The published modern craft is younger than her grandparents in most cases. The visible movement is younger than her parents. Her own lineage may be younger than she is. She is not standing in a tradition with millennia of unbroken transmission behind her. The tradition is recent, the public form is recent, the visibility is recent.

She is also standing in a lineage that runs deeper than the visible tradition.

The folk practitioners killed in the trials. The cunning women of medieval villages who knew which herbs and which prayers and which gestures. Pre-Christian priestesses of cultures whose names are partly remembered and partly lost. Countless ordinary people who across thousands of years tended fires, spoke to the dead, gathered medicine from forests, washed children clean of bad luck, blessed houses, called rain, marked moons. The unbroken chain may be largely imaginative. The deeper lineage of human practice with magic — across every culture, in every generation, since long before writing — is real.

Both the newness and the depth are part of what the modern witch is taking on. She practices with both in view. She does not pretend to a continuity that history does not support, and she does not dismiss the depth that runs beneath the recent organized tradition. She enters the stream where it now runs. She adds her practice to it. The stream is older and longer than she is.

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