The Rise of Astrology, Witchcraft, & ‘Self-Transformation’ in the Post-Pandemic West
I have noticed that the year 2020 has seemed to produce a bunch of witches in the West.
There has been a huge boom in tarot and astrology and psychic services and reiki, etc over the last two years, and I've been praying about it a lot because it's personal in nature for me.
The rise of the occult has gone hand in hand with the rise of several other things: wellness culture, consumerism, feminism, a sense of boredom, the assertion of the subjectivity of truth, and feelings of lack of control over our lives (brought on with new intensity due to political unrest, a deadly virus, home quarantines, racial tensions, unjust power structures, etc).
The on-the-go, a la carte, hyper-individualist nature of Western culture fits well with new-age occultism as well.
The fact that the occult can be personalized means it can be everything and it can be nothing. One can call it an expression of feminism while another can call it a wellness journey and another can call it a quest to live a positive life and achieve personal cleansing, and another can call it a mere fashion trend.
But what can't be ignored is that it is has been adapted as a spirituality that is constructed to fit better within our transient and consumeristic culture and economy.
In our modern transient culture, as generational ties are cut and communities become less rooted, each new generation is less attached to strong social institutions — to include formalized religion.
The ways in which we live have become more individualized, and this new age consumerist version of the occult allows a person to cherry-pick from it and even to pull multiple religious or spiritual practices together to create an individualized, new spirituality.
This modern variation is a choose your own adventure spirituality.
Many Americans, especially those born after 1980, are not only religiously unaffiliated today, but were also raised outside any organized religion. They have also adopted a strong distaste for institutional and religious traditions and structures, holding them in part to blame for a lack of desired progress in the social square.
So over the last several years, young people have been cobbling together a spiritual life-- many of them without necessarily even having something to either draw upon or reject from their own upbringing. For many in this position, the instinct is to gravitate toward what seems ancestral, ancient and rooted, which might be tied to geography or race or gender or some other piece of their identity.
Thousands of young people are drawing upon a consumeristic occult as a result of looking for something that feels like their own, or that has allowed people to tap into something meaningful.
Historically, during times of political and civil turmoil, people have turned to alternative spirituality. Witchcraft seemingly allows people to have autonomy and a sense of agency over their circumstances where they formerly felt they had none.
But as I mentioned, the practice also ties in well with the American consumerist mindset. There’s a lot of material culture around witchcraft — things like crystals and tarot cards and T-shirts and tote bags. On the coasts, where new age spirituality is shamelessly capitalistic, many people spend thousands of dollars over several years on spiritual healers, astrology readings and sessions with their shaman.
As more people feel scared or marginalized due to politics or civil unrest or public health crises or natural disasters, or as others feel bored with a lonely consumeristic life devoid of deep meaning, it seems witchcraft will only become more popular.
Ten years ago, I worked with a woman who considered herself a Wiccan. She was a lovely and kind woman who was very ugly according to the worldly standard, very overweight, and a lesbian. She had experienced a deep sense of rejection and ridicule from men and women throughout her life, and a deep sense of rejection from the Catholic church over her sexuality, and eventually became a suicidal atheist.
As she told the story, one day she was sitting on a park bench mindlessly scratching patterns in the dirt with a stick when a woman asked her if she knew what she was drawing.
She said she wasn't drawing anything, she was just doodling. And this woman told her that she had actually just written a spell in the dirt in an ancient symbolic form and that she must have a strong spiritual power within her if she was able to do that unconsciously.
This woman became my friend's introduction into the occult. She became deeply immersed in spellbooks.
But more than that- she found belonging. For the first time in her life, somebody saw something in her- and used words like powerful and magical to describe it. Suddenly, my friend wasn't nothing. She was something. And life and relationships were no longer things that happen TO her passively, but she, through this power within her and cooperating with the ancient spiritual powers, could influence the events in her life.
My friend was empowered by witchcraft. It lifted her, in a temporal, deceptive way, out of depression and isolation and self-loathing. (On this note, it was no surprise to me at all that when I was at a Barnes and Noble bookstore this week, there were three entire bookshelves labeled "Self-Transformation" that were loaded with nothing but books about witchcraft, astrology, palm reading, and potion brewing.)
But this new community was no different than the communities that had rejected her in the past. They accepted her on the basis that she fit in- as long as she was a witch, she was one of them. But what if she was just Sharon? What if she didn't have special spellcasting ability and was just a lonely woman on a park bench?
I would press in on this. I would tell her that just because people who claimed to believe in God treated her poorly doesn't make God real or not real. And just because people who believe in earth spells treated her well doesn't mean it's real or not real. She is worthy of dignity and respect and love, independent of what flaws or abilities she brings to the table or how she conforms to a social group.
I told her that just like when a cheerleader breaks her arm and can no longer compete and suddenly finds that she has no real friends because her friendships were based on the cheerleading, and she can no longer participate, she is putting herself in a position where her friendships are based on her witchcraft and if she can't just be herself and keep those friends, then she is no better off than she was sitting alone on that bench.
But day after day, month after month, year after year, she and I were true friends. Actual friends. I liked her and she liked me not on the basis of a shared interest (we had nothing in common) but out of sincere care for another human. I taught her how to play piano and what the Scriptures actually say about Jesus, and she taught me about Keith Richards and Thomas Jefferson.
When she got breast and lung cancer that would eventually take her life before age 50, she didn't try any spells. She knew the charade was no help in the face of cancer. Her friends in the Wiccan community texted her some spells to try and some half-hearted encouragement, but none of them showed up to her house or her hospital bedside.
As she was dying, I would visit her at her apartment to pray and chat and read the Bible to her like we used to do when she was able to come to work.
She professed faith in Christ alone for her salvation a month before she died, and passed away with a Bible and the biography of Keith Richards that I bought her at her side. She left her keyboard, one of her only possessions in life, to me when she died. I grieved her death deeply, but I rejoiced that after a lifetime of searching, she met Christ.
False Christianity is no different than new age witchcraft. Name it and claim it, power of positive thinking, claim your blessings with a gift offering of faith today, unlock the power within you, obey your way into favor with God-- these are pseudo-Christian cults that are as Satanic, if not more, than the occult.
There is but one true God and only one way into his presence, and that is through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ on behalf of humankind.
“Witches’ Sabbath,” - Francisco de Goya, 1798.
