Grimoires sold online, altars photographed for Instagram, collective spells cast against an American president... The witch has never been more present. Behind the trend lies a history of bonfires, tamed nature, and women deemed too free, which the witches of the 21st century have decided to confront.
If witches are making a comeback today, it is primarily because an entire generation grew up with them: Harry Potter, the series Charmed and its three witch sisters, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the shy high school student Willow becomes a formidable witch. But the modern witch is not just a television memory: she sells spellbooks on Etsy, photographs her altar adorned with crystals for Instagram, and even participates in protests.
Witchcraft is both a spiritual practice, a political commitment, an aesthetic... and a real market. It has its hashtags, its influencers, and its self-employed entrepreneurs who offer online spells, candles, spellbooks, essential oils, crystals, or superfoods. Fashion designers draw inspiration from it, and brands eagerly adopt it.
The phenomenon was spotted quite early. In August 2015, a New York style agency, K-Hole, announced a new cultural trend called "chaos magic." The same year, a survey was published in the United States about the million Americans who follow a pagan cult (its author recounted that at the beginning of her work, people looked at her with blank stares, and by the time of publication, she was accused of riding the trend!).
Why such enthusiasm? In a world that seems to do everything to undermine individuals, magic paradoxically appears as a very pragmatic recourse, a way to anchor oneself in one’s own life. The ecological crisis also plays its part: when a society that claims to be perfectly rational damages the very environment upon which humanity depends, its power of intimidation diminishes, and daring to call oneself a witch becomes easier.
For contemporary feminists, the figure of the witch is a double symbol: that of persecuted women whose memory is defended, and that of a power that judges of the past attributed to them and that they now reclaim defiantly. More than their predecessors from the 1970s, they have made it the emblem of a woman freed from all dominations.
A famous slogan encapsulates the idea well: "We are the granddaughters of the witches you couldn't burn." In Italy, in the 1970s, people were already chanting "Tremate, tremate, le streghe son tornate!", which means "Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!"
The militant witch also takes to the streets. Here are some striking examples:
In 1968, on Halloween, members of the New York movement WITCH marched down Wall Street in black capes and danced hand in hand in front of the Stock Exchange.In February 2017, a group of witches, joined by singer Lana Del Rey, gathered at the foot of Trump Tower to provoke the president's impeachment, with a precise list of ingredients: black thread, sulfur, feathers, salt, orange or white candle, "unflattering" photo of Donald Trump.On September 6, 2017, the WITCH group from Louisville, Kentucky, protested to defend the last abortion clinic in the state.In September 2017, a feminist and anarchist Witch Bloc marched in Paris and Toulouse wearing pointy hats, behind a banner reading "Macron in the cauldron."
The opponents of feminists are also obsessed with this figure. In 1992, American televangelist Pat Robertson accused feminism of pushing women "to practice witchcraft," among other evils. And during the 2016 American presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton was frequently compared to a witch, attacked as a woman much more than as a political leader: in response, female voters wore badges saying "Witches for Hillary."
Victim or rebel? The witch represents both at once: the absolute victim of the great European hunts, for whom justice is demanded, and the elusive rebel, one who responded, lived alone, or healed without permission. These two faces come from the same very real story, which cost the lives of tens of thousands of women.
On the victim side, the numbers are staggering. Current estimates speak of fifty to one hundred thousand executions (it was claimed to be a million in the 1970s), not counting lynchings, suicides, and deaths in prison. Women represented an average of 80% of the accused and 85% of the condemned. Contrary to popular belief, these hunts did not occur in the Middle Ages but during the Renaissance: they began around 1400, escalated especially from 1560, and Anna Göldi was still executed, beheaded in Glaris, Switzerland, in 1782. Another surprise: it was mainly civil courts, not the Inquisition, that pronounced the sentences.
It should be noted: men were also executed for witchcraft, and some historians refuse to see these hunts as a war against women. But most of the accused men were charged as relatives of a "witch" or for this crime added to other charges.
On the rebel side, it often sufficed to step out of line. Responding to a neighbor, speaking loudly, having a strong character, or a sexuality deemed too free could mark you out. Many of the accused were healers and midwives, respected until then, and single women as well as widows, who depended on no man, were overrepresented. Today, this memory is being defended tooth and nail: the canton of Glaris rehabilitated Anna Göldi in 2008, and Norway inaugurated the Steilneset memorial in 2013, designed by architect Peter Zumthor and artist Louise Bourgeois, in tribute to the ninety-one people executed in Finnmark.
French feminism has long harbored a marked distrust of spirituality, and the year 2003 offers a very clear snapshot of this. That year, publisher Philippe Pignarre and philosopher Isabelle Stengers released the first French translation of "Women, Magic, and Politics," a text by California witch Starhawk published in 1982.
In their introduction, the two editors present an unvarnished observation. In France, they explain in essence, those who engage in politics are wary of anything related to spirituality, quickly suspected of being far-right. Magic and politics do not mix well: when women call themselves witches, they dismiss old beliefs, seen as superstitions, and focus only on the persecution suffered from patriarchal powers.
Who is Starhawk? Born Miriam Simos in 1951, she published "The Spiral Dance" in 1979, which became a reference on the neo-pagan worship of the goddess. However, her name only reached European ears in 1999 during the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization meeting, considered the birth of anti-globalization. In the early 2000s, in France, the expression "neo-pagan witchcraft" still readily elicited sarcasm.
The climate has changed significantly since then. In 2015, Isabelle Cambourakis created a feminist collection called "Witches" and began by republishing this same text by Starhawk, which this time found a much wider resonance (the French translation of "Caliban and the Witch" by Silvia Federici had just been released). Fifteen years after 2003, the reference has lost much of its strangeness.
Modern witches today are young feminists, but also gay men and trans people, in France as well as in the United States, who quietly claim the use of magic. Unlike activists from previous generations, they no longer just honor the memory of the persecuted: they practice.
These new practitioners do not follow any common liturgy. For Mael, a French witch, witchcraft is a practice and not a religion: it can exist without worship or be added to it without contradiction. Thus, we encounter:
Christian, Muslim, or Jewish witchesAgnostic or atheist witchesPagan and neo-pagan witches: polytheists, Wiccans, Hellenists...
How does one go about it, concretely? The central idea is to invent rituals according to one's needs rather than following a fixed manual. Californian witch Starhawk recounts the birth of the ritual by which she and her friends celebrate the winter solstice. One evening, on the beach, a woman exclaimed, "Let's take off our clothes and jump into the water!" They did so, and then, a few years later, they added a large fire to avoid hypothermia. The ritual now consists of lighting this fire on the beach, then plunging into the waves, arms raised, singing and shouting with joy. Her motto: do something once, it's an experience; do it twice, it's a tradition.
Nota Bene: Wicca is a neo-pagan religion (a reimagined paganism in contemporary times), and it is the very broad framework within which Starhawk operates. The worship of the goddess replaces the image of a male god with a female figure. For writer Carol P. Christ, it is the only way to act on symbols: one does not reject them, one replaces them.
Witch, Please is the newsletter that journalist and author Jack Parker edited between the summer of 2017 and the spring of 2018, presented as "the newsletter for modern witches." It gathered several thousand subscribers, a sign that everyday witchcraft was of interest well beyond a small circle of initiates.
The content of Witch, Please was very concrete. Jack Parker shared:
photos of her altar and personal grimoiresinterviews with other witchesritual advice related to the positions of the stars and the phases of the moon
One particular issue encapsulates the mindset of these modern witches. On July 16, 2017, Jack Parker refused to choose between "placebo effect" and "true ancestral magic": what mattered, she wrote in essence, is that it works and feels good. Since we spend our lives searching for the meaning of our existence, why deprive ourselves of a few reassuring gestures that we feel we can control?
For those who want to draw inspiration from the approach of Witch, Please, the recipe is simple: set up a small personal altar, keep your own grimoire, align some rituals with the lunar calendar, and regularly allow yourself some time alone, away from the world. This practice flirts with personal development (it often discusses positive thinking and the "inner goddess"), but it also sometimes aligns with a genuine feminist reflection on how to take control of one's life.
Carolyn Merchant's theory on the domination of nature and women can be summed up in one idea: at the dawn of modern science, Europe stopped viewing nature as a nurturing mother and began to see it as a wild force to be tamed, and women, deemed closer to nature, suffered the same fate. Carolyn Merchant articulated this in 1980 in "The Death of Nature," subtitled "Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution."
For Carolyn Merchant, everything changes with the mechanistic view of the world. The disorder of the living gives way to stable mathematical laws, matter becomes passive, the world is perceived as dead, and the clock serves as a model for everything. Descartes compares animals to automata, and Thomas Hobbes reduces reasoning to a series of additions and subtractions.
The key figure in this story is Francis Bacon (1561-1626), considered the father of modern science. For about a decade, he advised King James I, who himself authored a treatise on demonology that made any practice of witchcraft punishable by death. According to Carolyn Merchant, Bacon transposes to nature the methods applied to suspects: it must be subjected to interrogation to extract its secrets, "enslaved," and "put in chains." Our language bears traces of this, with "penetrating spirit" or the English "hard facts," these "hard" facts presented as indisputable.
Carolyn Merchant's final diagnosis has remained famous. Writing in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in Pennsylvania in March 1979, she concluded: "The world must once again be turned upside down." In other words, to escape this dual domination, we need to rethink both our relationship with women and our relationship with nature.
The link between witch hunts and the domination of nature lies in a common project of subjugation: the witch embodied the violence of a chaotic nature that needed to be brought under control just like herself. She was accused of unleashing storms, causing diseases, destroying crops, preventing childbirth, or killing the young.
In reality, the scapegoat logic was fully at play. In 1565, in Belgium, ships were in distress at sea: Digna Robert was arrested and burned. In 1619, near Bordeaux, a mill stopped working: Jeanne Noals, known as Gache, was accused of having bewitched it. It didn't matter that these women were harmless; their neighbors attributed to them an unlimited capacity for harm.
At the same time, nature became a "resource" to be managed. The rise of commerce demanded enormous quantities of wood for docks, bridges, locks, barges, and ships, as well as for soap, beer barrels, or glass. As early as 1470, in Venice, a law entrusted the cutting of oaks to the Arsenal rather than to the city's officials. Forests receded, marshes were drained, canals crisscrossed the landscape, and hydraulic wheels, forges, and cranes became essential in daily work.
Once tamed, women and nature could be reduced to a decorative role, mere sources of relaxation for the "exhausted entrepreneur-husband." In the 19th century, sculptor Louis-Ernest Barrias depicted "Nature Revealing Herself" as a woman gracefully removing her veil. An image that echoes the practice of completely shaving suspected witches to inspect every inch of their bodies: to see everything, in order to dominate better.
The legacy of witch hunts on women today is primarily measured in the prejudices that still target three profiles once persecuted: the independent woman, the childless woman, and the elderly woman. These negative images, forged and maintained over the centuries, produce at best censorship and self-censorship, and at worst hostility, even violence.
Even women who have never been accused have suffered the effects of witch hunts. Public tortures served as a collective lesson: to be discreet, docile, and not to make waves. The supportive female culture of the Middle Ages has eroded, replaced by a retreat largely dictated by fear.
Specifically, here’s what remains:
the independent woman: single and widowed women were overrepresented among the accused, and the legal incapacity of married women was enshrined in France by the Civil Code of 1804. The "cat lady," an object of mockery, retains something of the witch accompanied by her familiarthe childless woman: in France, a law from 1556 requires any pregnant woman to declare her pregnancy and have a witness present at childbirth. Those who do not want children are still sometimes suspected of being heartlessthe elderly woman: a favorite victim of hunts, she remains associated with ugliness and threat, from Goya's witches to those of Walt Disney, and white hair, well accepted in men, is still frowned upon in women
How to outsmart these old reflexes? By exposing oneself to other models, quite simply. Designer Annabelle Adie recounts deciding never to dye her hair after seeing Marie Seznec, a model for Christian Lacroix with entirely white hair, walk the runway in the 1980s. Fashion journalist Sophie Fontanel, who made the same choice, recalls that in Burgundy, in 1460, a woman named Yolande was burned because a depigmentation spot was found on her shaved head, mistaken for the mark of the Devil. Replacing an image that confines with an image that liberates: this is, at its core, a very modern form of witchcraft.
Clarissa Pinkola-Estés' "The Wild Woman" is one of the most well-known gateways to a women's ecology: in her bestseller "Women Who Run with the Wolves," published in 1992, she describes the archetype of a woman with particular affinities for the wild world. Clarissa Pinkola-Estés does not strictly identify with ecofeminism, but her thesis, which presents women as closer to nature, is its most famous version.
Two other names serve as reference points. Susan Griffin, in "Woman and Nature" (1978), catalogs the great "truths" imposed over the centuries about men, women, nature, or knowledge, and simply presents them for critical scrutiny, which is enough to reveal their arbitrariness. Celene Krauss has focused on popular environmental mobilizations led by women, in a text with a deliberately provocative title: "Hysterical Good Women." Nota Bene: ecofeminism emerged in the 1980s in Anglo-Saxon countries when activists linked the exploitation of natural resources to the domination they experienced.
This women's ecology also has its detractors. Associating women with nature would be to revive an old cliché, some argue, like Janet Biehl, who sees it as a return to essentialism (the idea of a fixed feminine nature). Philosopher Catherine Larrère responds that simply bringing women into the realm of culture would only do half the work and leave nature behind. For Émilie Hache, these texts are better read as acts of healing and cultural repair, and ecofeminists firmly reject the notion that "nature" serves as an excuse to impose motherhood or heterosexuality, as shown by lesbian communities in the 1970s who moved to the countryside in Oregon.
What should we take away from modern witches? A figure of victimhood turned symbol of rebellion, a history of pyres linked to the subjugation of nature, and heirs who freely reinvent their rituals. To go further, start by looking around you: identify the images of "old hag" or "cat lady" that still linger in conversations, and seek out models that give you wings rather than paralyze you.
Author Loïc on 17 September 2025
Art and Culture : Collection
Author Audrey on 02 July 2024
Art and Culture : Literature