It’s happened before ~ more than once

The current revival didn’t emerge from nowhere. There’s a clear pattern: whenever society hits a period of crisis, disconnection, or upheaval, interest in witchcraft surges.

Two of the most significant waves happened in the 1920s and the 1970s, and both tell us something useful about where we are now.

The 1920s: grief and the need for something beyond the rational

After four years of industrialised slaughter in the First World War, millions of people were left traumatised, bereaved, and deeply suspicious of the institutions, church, state, science, that had failed them so catastrophically. The supernatural didn’t seem like a step backward. It seemed like the only honest response to a world that had stopped making sense.

Into this mood stepped Margaret Murray, an archaeologist and folklorist who published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe in 1921. Her argument was provocative: the witch trials of the 15th-18th centuries weren’t hunting down dangerous criminals. They were the Church’s systematic attempt to destroy a surviving pre-Christian religion. An underground cult with its own gods, rites, and cosmology that had endured for centuries despite everything thrown at it.

Critics went for her. Forced conclusions from weak evidence, they said. Made things up, others claimed. But her argument had teeth, and it planted seeds. She documented case after case of pagan belief persisting in Christian England – fertility dances led by priests, folk rituals, the quiet persistence of a horned god in communities that publicly attended Mass every Sunday.

Murray distinguished between “operative” witchcraft, which could include Christian practitioners casting spells for practical good, and “ritual” witchcraft, the deeper devotion to pre-Christian deities. Her work divided scholars for decades but it lit a fire under popular imagination.

That fire jumped the Atlantic. In the United States, the 1920s interest in witchcraft was its own peculiar cocktail. Puritan anxieties about dark forces (barely below the surface since Salem), Irish and Italian immigrant folklore brought from the old world, African spiritual traditions carried through generations of enslaved people, and Native American belief systems. All mingling in a country already primed to believe in powers beyond the ordinary.

The era also produced its famous intellectuals of the occult. Arthur Conan Doyle, yes, the Sherlock Holmes author, had been giving public speeches on witchcraft since the 1890s, and his interest deepened dramatically after losing multiple family members in the war.

Aleister Crowley was in his notorious prime. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, published at the turn of the century, gave the whole conversation a serious anthropological framework that proved impossible to dismiss.

The 1970s ~ liberation, horror, and the search for something real

Half a century later, witchcraft came roaring back – and this time it had infrastructure.

Several things made this possible. In 1951, the UK’s Witchcraft Act, which had been on the books since 1735, was finally repealed. Witches could exist openly without fear of prosecution. In 1954, Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today, which essentially defined what we now call Wicca.

By 1962, Raymond and Rosemary Buckland had established the first modern Wiccan coven in the United States, operating out of Bay Shore, Long Island.

The 1970s cultural landscape did the rest. The counter-culture of the late 1960s had already dismantled faith in mainstream institutions. Feminism was becoming militant and organised, and for many women, reclaiming a tradition that had been persecuted specifically for embodying feminine power was not just spiritual – it was political.

And the decade was obsessed with horror and the occult in ways that seeped into the mainstream: The Wicker Man (1973), Suspiria (1977), Season of the Witch (1972). The cinema kept the images circulating. The bookshops kept the ideas moving.

Raymond Buckland, who ran a Museum of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Long Island and became one of the most publicly visible voices of the movement, was asked directly why witchcraft was reviving. His answer was striking for how simple it was: people were dissatisfied with organised religion, and they were looking for something else. Not necessarily something dark. Just something real.

By 1973, covens were forming across the United States. Detroit’s Gundella the Witch, Marion Kuclo, who claimed descent from the “Green Witches of Scotland”, was giving interviews, teaching, and proving that witches looked nothing like the cultural stereotype. Colleges in Michigan were running academic courses on witchcraft. The movement had escaped the margins.

What he missed ~ the 1990s bridge

There’s a gap in most histories of the witchcraft revival that deserves attention – the 1990s.

Between the 1970s Wicca movement and today’s WitchTok generation came a crucial cultural bridge built largely by popular media. The Craft (1996), Practical Magic (1998), and Charmed (1998–2006) introduced witchcraft to an entire generation of younger women not through academic texts or covens but through mainstream storytelling. These weren’t campy horror films, they were stories about women using power, protecting themselves, and finding community. They hit differently.

The internet of the 1990s and early 2000s did the rest. Before TikTok, before Instagram, before WitchTok, there were forums, Yahoo groups, early Tumblr communities, and personal Geocities pages where solitary practitioners could find each other, share spell books, and learn in private. The groundwork for the current explosion was laid in those dial-up years. Social media didn’t create the witchcraft revival – it just gave something that was already there a much louder amplifier.