Of course, nobody thought those Etsy witches — with whom I’ve had my own brushes in the past — had succeeded in bringing about Kirk’s assassination. The mini-scandal was more a question of taste and timing: the article had been circulated around X in the hours after the shooting with jokey comments (“can she do my ex next?”). But it was far from the first time that a political figure had been on the receiving end of a hex.

In 1968, the feminist group W.I.T.C.H. — the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell — convened on Wall Street to form a circle and bring about the collapse of the stock market. Later, it would hex the inauguration of Richard Nixon (was Watergate the result of the eye of a newt?). Decades on, Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh and the Stanford predator Brock Turner would be on the receiving end of viral “collective castings”. Binding spells would seek to stay their hands from committing harm; castration spells would invite impotence.

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All this is, depending on how you look at it, either very fortunate or very unlucky for Emma Quilty. Later this week, the self-described “witchy anthropologist” will publish Witch Power, a guide to “hexing the patriarchy with feminist magic”. In it, she visits various covens and gatherings to “collect data” on modern witchcraft, which consists of bands of kooksters convening at hippyish events or online to cast spells, hawk essential oils and hex enemies. We meet some of the original bands of Sixties/Seventies witches — harmless women in hemp — but Quilty’s main focus is the Millennial and Gen Z cohort for whom being a witch seems to connect directly with identity politics.

Quilty, for her part, can be found writhing in a tent in someone’s garden, weeping in a New Orleans graveyard or sitting in a Voodoo Queen’s grotty living room. At the same time, she goes through a personal crisis: a breakup with her boyfriend. The details often feel like furious diary entries: “Even the way he turned the overhead light off was aggressive.” The book is a big old middle finger to a presumably recent ex who represents everything the witches are not: he is square, buttoned-up and miserable. They are groovy, kinky and dreamy. Unfortunately they are also, for the most part, insufferable.

For Quilty, being a witch is not about cackling or wearing dangly sleeves. It turns out the price of admission is just being a bit punk: “To live in defiance of society’s expectations and rules, that is what it means to be a witch.” Written by and for someone truly drunk on the witch’s brew, the book gives a portrait of feminism in a moment of utter identity crisis. To Quilty, the witchcraft scene is disappointingly “white and middle class”; she spends much of the book tutting at covens which engage in “biological essentialism” by focusing on rituals around menstruation or female fertility. Women-only gatherings are admonished for “excluding trans women” (ew, girls, don’t talk about your periods — you’ll make the men feel left out!). There are obligatory trigger warnings, the inevitable popping-up of our old friend Edward Said, groanworthy nods to BDSM and kink. In one amusing aside, a “Blak fat queer feminist witch” called Raphael Lavallee organises a workshop titled “A Sacred Round on Stolen Ground: Decolonising your Magical Practice”. In a deflated postscript, we learn that “unfortunately the workshop ended up not running”. Could it possibly be that there hadn’t been enough appetite for wafting burnt sage about and exorcising unconscious bias? No, that can’t be it.

Modern witchcraft seems like a big interpretative dance group, in the sense that I imagine participants trying their absolute hardest never to laugh, especially during the seemingly endless orgies. Witch camps at times seem like swingers’ weekends by another name. At one “hands-on” workshop, we witness “a circle of people masturbating together”; little wonder, you’d think, that Quilty’s killjoy boyfriend is less than delighted when she returns from this “fieldwork” to breathlessly update him on her discoveries. In the event he grunts and grumbles, presumably just as impressed by all this panting and self-discovery as I am. He is such a consistent irritant that I half wonder whether Quilty’s reinvention as a witch is less a revolt against the patriarchy than a revolt against him.

Now you might think it’s a little risky to be critical of a witch; a hex may indeed be in the post. Thankfully, Quilty gives absolutely no indication that she thinks these spells ever actually work. In fact, we learn that speculating about this is reductive and misses the point: “It ignores the political power and potential of mass group spells.” So there you have it: for those Right-wing men fearing the wrath of the covens of Portland, stand down. Even the witches themselves don’t think magic really works.

At a time when the witch has hobbled her way back into the spotlight, it is very useful indeed to have Quilty’s field notes. Like so many feminist subcultures today, I sense that witchcraft has lost its way, mired in the relentless compulsion to include and flatter both men and sex positivity at the cost of its own intellectual coherence. It turns out that because this movement is founded on a very minimal amount of historical evidence, the rest is filled in by guesswork from fickle adherents with their own moral crusades, and the modern waves are hopelessly inflected by whichever cultural context they happen to spring up in.

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What we know about the women originally accused of witchcraft is that they genuinely did offend patriarchal norms by being haggish or prickly or interfering with emerging schools of science to administer herbal remedies and bring about, among other things, abortions. The women burned by the Witchfinder General would hardly have self-identified as witches; the label is a woman-hating fantasy that targeted midwives, folk healers or simply the common-or-garden crone. But modern “witchcraft” disregards this, turning away from the tragedies of misrepresentation suffered by these women and choosing, in a real sense, to believe their accusers.

Because such an interpretation is based on magical thinking and liberal interpretation, it follows that successive iterations are entirely warped by the politics of the day: the witches of the Sixties were obsessed with sexual availability, those of the Seventies were compelled by questions of bodily autonomy, and today they seem to be transfixed by the question of gender. The witchy women Quilty admires may claim to be radical, skulking on society’s margins, taking their lives in their hands by defying gendered expectations. Who’d have thought, then, that they also happen to be captured by the dogma of mainstream progressivism? As ever, it’s funny how in the most radical places, people tend to be the most cowed.

That Etsy witches even exist is thanks to the feminine vogue for the nebulously “spiritual”, from horoscopes to pagan rituals, with a smattering of Kate Bush in between. Coupled with the modern mantra of “manifestation” — whereby you can will something into existence by simply thinking about it really hard — the TikTok-coded woo-woo of the 2020s young woman has conjured an ideal market for the small-business sorceress. I have heard of friends commissioning these spiritual services — half-jokingly, of course — but cloaked in irony is a kernel of faith, the same that admittedly propelled me to visit a psychic in Skellingthorpe once upon a time. This All Hallow’s Eve, I feel an invisible tie pulling me towards the witch’s lair. Can I make my dreams come true?

After a perusal of wares and a shrewd consideration of the various deals on offer (a surprising amount of spells are being flogged at 50% off), I select five preternatural purchases. First, the Instant Revenge Spell — I will use this against a close friend who is uncharitable about my writing. Next, the Ultimate Beauty Spell, Hex Your Ex (deserved) and a Mind Control Spell, which I specify must be used to convince my parents I am their favourite daughter so as to really test the boundaries of what is possible. Finally, I commission the most exciting of the lot: the Future Soulmate Drawing. For a mere £5.79 (70% off, don’t you know!), I will receive a hand-drawn image of the man of my dreams.

To conduct a fair experiment, I order these spells in secret. Having told my closest friends that I had cursed one of them, I check in once the spell has been cast: “Anyone feel like they’ve been hexed?” One pipes up — she’s just woken up ill for the first time this year, the day she starts a new job. Wrong! The target of my sorcery appears entirely unscathed. That’s £4.35 down the drain. But looking at the reviews of this particular revenge spell, you’d never doubt its effectiveness: all 29 give five stars, with ominous comments such as “I have faith that the spell is starting to work”. A customer’s “faith” seems to be a big part of the jig: as with other smoke-and-mirrors services (hypnotism, seances, etc) the best conductors have a habit of blaming your disbelief when things go wrong. One Etsy witch, in an email exchange, warns me that my “commitment to [my] desires is a powerful driving force that will influence the results”.

The remaining spells have mixed results. The Ultimate Beauty Spell conjures nothing but a mottled forehead rash and, as my sister informs me loudly on a packed Victoria line train, “peeling skin on my chin”. “Hex Your Ex” would probably require me to unblock them to see that they have had an untimely death (to be clear, I did not specify this; just a mild case of facial boils would suit), which I am unwilling to do. The image attachment in that particular email, of black pillar candles, wilting flowers and a Tarot deck arranged on a trestle table, was encouraging. The Mind Control Spell on my beloved parents seemed to have done the trick of getting me in their good books — but I did also take them out for dinner. Finally, and most excitingly of all, I receive the image of my soulmate:

My caster, Psychic Zen, has used a technique called “astrograms” to produce the image, created with the aid of a “neurohelmet”, which allows her to see a “reading of brain activity”. This technique produces, I am assured, “an average racial appearance”; in practice, this means “white”. “Racial discrimination is excluded in the neurohelmet software,” the pamphlet notes. Thank Beelzebub for that.

Along with the image, I get a blow-by-blow account of my reading. The card my psychic artist draws is, encouragingly, the hanged man. I take it as a good omen; at least something’s gonna be hung. The “powerful and prominent” letter T appears somewhere in his name, and he was “born during the refreshing and rejuvenating months of March or April, when the flowers begin to bloom and the world awakens”. This man is said to share my interest in “nature, art and intellectual pursuits”, I read with one eye on Below Deck, puffing on my lithium vape. Sure, Zen.

I am assured that our meeting will consist of “a chance encounter at a concert or a gallery opening” between May and August. But a word of warning: “The planets suggest that past relationship trauma and patterns can affect your ability to attract healthy love.” Has she foretold my Hex Your Ex purchase? “Negative beliefs about love and self-limiting beliefs about your worthiness can also be a major obstacle,” she continues. “Release your past and limiting beliefs and trust that the universe will bring you the love you deserve.”

That is, ultimately, what this is all about: vague woo-woo wellbeing-core fashioned into tame little spiritual packages. It’s a comforting dose of TikTok girl-speak, with some therapy language thrown in. What’s the harm? And because of the tactical get-outs peppered throughout the accompanying literature (of the drawing, she cheekily asks: “Please overlook any inaccuracies”), this inoffensive, generic, undoubtedly AI-generated image can be tweaked in whichever way I like, becoming nothing more and nothing less than an emblem of hope. I respect the hustle here — far more than for those Etsy witches who, if social media is to be believed, stalk buyers on Facebook and find a sketchable picture of their ex. Less appreciative, I suspect, might be my actual boyfriend who was not born in March or April, I did not meet at a concert or gallery opening and looks absolutely nothing like the picture. Guess the writing’s on the wall.

Generally harmless, perhaps — but there are things about digital witchcraft which warrant concern. All but one seller tries to hawk an additional package, marketed as a “booster” spell. While I am assured that “the energies have already started aligning to bring about the results you desire”, I am encouraged to add the “Protection Shield Spell to ensure nothing interferes with your results”. These booster spells typically cost another few quid, and boast perks such as “20X faster results!” and “ongoing monitoring”. How much cash can the average lovelorn, credulous Tarot girlie spare?

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Aside from these cynical money-grabbing exercises — white witches have heating bills too, you know! — the Etsy witch has one more truly disturbing weapon. While most of these “spells” are notionally benign, a little bit of inexpensive fun or hope for the gullible, some pander to dark desires. Of these, the worst is the Powerful Death Spell, a cinch starting at just £5. I do not buy one of these, even though I’m one of the faithless. What would happen if it worked? Would I have technically ordered a hit? This must be a legal grey area, for even if in the eyes of the law these services are bogus, the buyer may sincerely believe that they have visited the Reaper on their target. The reviews for death spells are frighteningly chirpy, with casual references to “Rachel’s customer service”. Under a £55 spell advertised with the image of an overturned car, a buyer threatens: “I’m excited to see the results.” Under another (which ominously invites: “Seek justice which can only be found in the beyond realm”) a reviewer notes: “Fast delivery.”

Do Etsy witches matter? On a grand scale, probably not. I can’t see “Rachel” the spiritual sniper taking out Donald Trump, or otherwise changing the course of history. But the intersection of blind faith, cash and marketing at which these sellers sit suggests that Gen Z’s urge to shape reality knows no bounds — apart from normal in-person interaction. Living half their lives in their bedrooms, manifesting their way through their twenties, this is a generation who would rather pay a stranger for an AI-generated text than take on the emotional and reputational risk of managing your own relationships by telling people to their faces that you like them, or to piss off. I suspect that in reality, the Etsy witch trades in reassurance, not results — providing spiritual certainty and protection for the conflict-avoidant. Rather than swilling each other in nightclubs, we’re hunched over our laptops ordering Instant Revenge Spells. Isn’t that the scariest thing of all?

The fictions of the internet — a world in which we conjure, project and pretend without limits — pander to the neuroses of modern love, where anxious and inept suitors have swapped necking in pubs for sneaky perusals of dating apps, scheduling aggressively nonchalant texts and editing vanishing hairlines. To an ever-greater extent, “dating” simply means swapping customised avatars, hopes of connection waxing and waning with the presence or not of a lover’s Snapchat Bitmoji. This state of affairs is so unprecedentedly bleak that it’s no surprise women are resorting to chucking a few quid at a fantastical venture like the Etsy witch — often herself, ironically, a bot. Girls throughout time have been sentimental, quixotic, even pious, about the prospect of romantic love — throwing coins into fountains, plucking petals from daisies, tossing an apple peel over one’s shoulder to see what initial unfurls. The pining idealism of girlhood is a special thing, and grasping any sense of control over today’s cold and impersonal romantic world must be a greater temptation than ever. So we must not scorn the weird ways this desire shows itself. Besides, if you thought a £5 spell would guarantee you true love, what would stop you?

Today, a stone’s throw away from the site of their execution, the General Assembly of Connecticut is debating a resolution to exonerate 11 women and men convicted of witchcraft in Connecticut between 1647 and 1663. So far, 17 members of the Assembly have backed the resolution, but the bill must yet pass through both chambers. And this is far from certain: there has been more resistance here than in neighbouring Massachusetts, where in 2001 all the Salem “witches” were exonerated by the House of Representatives. The fear in Connecticut, as Republican senator John Kissel put it, is that a precedent would be set; that we would “have to go and redress every perceived wrong in our history”. Similar concerns have been expressed elsewhere. A journalist writing in the Scottish newspaper The Herald worried that pardons vilify accusers and that “we should not judge people for living in the past”.

In some ways, this precedent has already been set. In 2006, Grace Sherwood, a Virginian planter’s wife, was pardoned for allegedly bewitching livestock and crops, and there have been similar rulings in Germany, Switzerland and Catalonia. In March 2022, Scotland’s then First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, apologised for the persecution of 4,000 people as witches, describing it as “injustice on a colossal scale”. For their part, Scottish campaigners for exonerating witches cited their parliament’s Historical Sexual Offences Act, which in 2018 retrospectively decriminalised sodomy. And the Connecticut campaigners have indicated how inspired they’ve been by developments in Scotland.

Yet, it remains reasonable to ask: how can we exonerate a crime that modern society no longer believes exists? This is a question not just of history, but of jurisprudential ethics. An empirically supported understanding of “the great witch-craze” should inform questions of whether we need to act, and if so what to do. Are we quashing what now seem like unsafe convictions of witchcraft or offering modern pardons for contemporaneously just ones?

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If a crime is to be pardoned, we surely need to define the crime. The Connecticut resolution says only that the “witches” were “falsely accused” — but doesn’t say what exactly they were falsely accused of. In Scotland, Sturgeon’s apology stated that so-called witches were “killed because they were poor, different, vulnerable or in many cases just because they were women”. Accused witches often fitted that profile, it’s true, but that wasn’t why they were accused. It’s hard to comprehend this fully but the reason was usually that people believed them to be dangerous agents of the devil. When the people of Wethersfield accused the Carringtons of using satanic power to perform “works above the course of nature”, we should probably assume that they meant it. Nor were the accused exempt from suspecting others of witchcraft: some, even without duress, believed they had become witches, deliberately or simply because witchery was in their blood. After all, the concept was firmly established in law, theology and custom, and then in specific cases impelled by furious emotions, given that these alleged deeds were not just unnatural but prejudicial to the lives and livelihoods of struggling communities.

If we are to exonerate convicted witches, we must ensure that the process is historically rigorous. It undermines the enterprise if, say, we set out to pardon five million people tried for witchcraft when, in fact, we have evidence for only around 100,000. We should know that our ancestors were surprisingly sceptical and wary about pointing the finger, and that across continental Europe about half of trials resulted in acquittal. In England and Connecticut, it was more like 75%, owing to the caution of judges and juries about passing guilty verdicts where the proof for this most secretive crime amounted to little more than hearsay.

It’s also important to realise that most witch trials arose not from hysteria or malice but from historically specific collisions of social and economic crises, polarised religious and political mentalities, and the anxiety and terror fomented by these conditions. When it hanged its first witch in 1647, Windsor, Connecticut, was in the grip of a flu epidemic. This wasn’t blamed on witches, but a five-fold increase in mortality that year made people exceptionally fretful and eager to appease God by purging sinners from their midst. Historians try to understand our ancestors objectively but also on their own terms. Otherwise, we risk flattening out the moral landscape of the pre-modern and the backward export of our own attitudes and values.

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We might also ask who the exoneration of witches is for. Is it a public crusade or a private one? The dead don’t care and it’s hard to imagine their ninth-generation descendants feeling the same pain as the Salem families who, in the decade after the witch panic, successfully petitioned to restore their reputations and be awarded compensation. The motion to pardon Connecticut’s “witches” states its purpose thus: “that although these accusations, prosecutions, trials and executions cannot be undone or changed, no disgrace or cause for distress should attach to the heirs of those persons.” These heirs and their supporters are seeking to right wrongs they have come to feel personally by retrospectively identifying with the suffering of their forebears. Appearing before Connecticut’s judiciary committee, Dr Beverly Kahn of Fairfield, a descendant of a “witch” executed there in 1653, declared that her ancestor “acted nobly” and that living relatives “deserve to have the name of Goodwife Knapp cleared”. Commenting on the Connecticut campaign, Sara Jack, whose ninth great-grandmother was accused of witchcraft, has said that these women were “heroes, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, just like we have today… And we know, for certain, that none of them were covenanting with the devil”. Yet for all their talk of historical trauma, it goes without saying that the exoneration campaign concerns the feelings of the living rather than those of than the dead.

There is another route to a similar, and perhaps better, end. A bronze statue of Grace Sherwood stands on Independence Boulevard in Virginia Beach, and scores of other monuments and plaques can be found around the Western world. Public memorials might seem like a passive form of redress, but at least by remembering the dead in the context of their own times they let them rest in peace, and, like the Cenotaph and other great war memorials, invite quiet contemplation. The Steilneset Memorial in Vardø, Norway, is a dramatic architectural installation, designed (partly by the artist Louise Bourgeois) to commemorate the execution of 91 people there in 1621. But it’s done in such a hauntingly abstract way that we are transported to a place between the past and the present where meaningful memories are created. Perhaps the victims of witch-hunting need imaginative recognition from this and subsequent generations more than they need clean sheets at law.

At the same time, the success of public commemoration projects like Steilneset, which has attracted thousands of visitors, is not an argument against pursuing legal initiatives filed under individual names. Every execution for witchcraft, every life destroyed and family bereaved, was a tragedy, and deserves to be acknowledged as such. John and Joan Carrington of Wethersfield were not walk-ons in a costume drama: they were real people, with hopes and dreams, who had emigrated to America in the 1630s to build new lives, only to become fatally ensnared in a web of adverse circumstances spun from the hostility of their neighbours.

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We should be glad that people still care. It’s never a bad thing to shine a light on intolerance and cruelty, however long ago it happened, and formal pardon campaigns are a valid way to achieve this. As Jane Garibay, the State Representative who proposed the Connecticut exoneration resolution, remarked: “To me, that’s an easy thing to do if it gives people peace.”

But in the end, we are better at saying what we want — the exoneration of “witches” — than why. Why witches, and not, say, heretics or traitors guilty of no more than exercising freedoms of conscience, thought and speech? Why not every victim of torture, once standard procedure on the Continent, or the countless minors hanged for petty theft? The answer, I suspect, is straightforward. Memory, like morality, is subjective: a relationship with our ancestors, and a lop-sided one given they have no say. History, though obviously about the past, is produced and consumed in the present. Each generation holds a mirror to modern times, demonstrated most vividly by our choices. The lives of John and Joan Carrington may not have been extraordinary in 1651 — but in 2023, they certainly are.

Bri Luna is a magical influencer, whose posts appeal to the increasing number of people — especially young women — who self-identify as witches, and who account for the 6.8 million Instagram posts with the hashtag #witchesofinstagram. It’s clear that many of those posting use it simply to attract attention to their hot Goth selfies; to interior design ideas with not-much-of-a-twist — “Last Minute Beltane Ideas … place a bouquet of fresh flowers in your home. Light a red (passion) and a white candle (purity) [sic]. Decorate your home with ribbons and flowers…”; or to promises of a miracle — “Any Finger That will like this will never lack of money” (though they may lack of grammar).

On TikTok, witches are even more popular: witchtokboy, who offers spells and curses, has had 8.2 million likes and offers bookings. But it’s not just a digital phenomenon — Taylor Swift’s latest album, Evermore, has seen witches welcome her to their tribe. In the last few years, witchcraft manuals, such as Ariel Gore’s 2019 Hexing the Patriarchy: 26 Potions, Spells and Magical Elixirs to Embolden the Resistance, have been published in number and sold well. Gore writes that “magic has always been a weapon of the disenfranchised” and promises to teach her readers how to make “salt scrubs to wash away patriarchal bullshit” and “mix potions to run abusive liars out of town.”

Elsewhere, self-identifying witches have become political, like the protestors in Boston in August 2017 who dressed as witches and carried signs saying, “Witches against White Supremacy”, “Hex White Supremacy”, “Good Night Alt-Right”, and — note the acronym — “We Interrupt Those Choosing Hate”. Some of this has been taken very seriously: when, in February 2017, Michael Hughes posted online “A Spell to Bind Trump and All Those Who Abet Him” and urged other witches to join him in casting it, Christian Trump supporters put out urgent calls for prayer and fasting to counter the spell.

Having studied the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, I find this resurgence both fascinating and a little disturbing. Historically, people turned to magic when things felt uncertain or inexplicable. They were more likely to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft in times when money was tight or disease was rife. And while men could be and were accused of witchcraft, in most places in Europe women made up the vast majority of those who were prosecuted and executed as witches, because women were perceived to be innately weaker and more sinful than men, and so more easily tempted by the Devil.

In a culture fixated on fecundity, older women were especially vulnerable to accusation, because the witch was seen as infertile, an anti-mother. Above all, it was the idea of magical, diabolical power being used by the socially powerless that made witches especially scary. In today’s world, when money is tight, disease is rife and many people feel politically impotent, the resurgence of witchcraft among young women is both a mark of powerlessness and an attempt to reclaim power.

Professor Ronald Hutton suggests that the word “witch” was once used as a kind of smear campaign for all types of folk magicians. Many names that were originally insults — Protestant, suffragette, sans-culotte, queer — have been reclaimed, and that seems to be happening again as, for many modern sorceresses, “witch” has become a synonym of “feminist”. Much of the identification comes from seeing the history of the witch-hunts as a story of female oppression. Modern-day witch Gabriela Herstik told Sabat Magazine that “Witchcraft is feminism, it’s inherently political. It’s always been about the outside, about the woman who doesn’t do what the church or patriarchy wants.”

She is echoed by April Graham, whose sweep is even broader: “A Witch is somebody who stands against patriarchy and everything that is currently wrong with our society and any society throughout the ages.” By that definition, we could all be witches — which may, indeed, be the point; Luna says, “Every woman is a Witch.”

Witchcraft, then, has been repackaged as a kind of female empowerment. Erica Feldman, the proprietor of HausWitch shop in Salem, Massachusetts, says that for her the initials WITCH stand for “Woman In Total Control of Herself”. Deborah Blake, author of Modern Witchcraft: Goddess Empowerment for the Kick-Ass Woman (2020) gives away her stance in the title, but adds that “Many women are feeling frustrated, frightened, triggered, and down-right furious with the current social and political environment, but also feel powerless to create positive change … Witchcraft can give them both a sense of personal empowerment and a number of goddesses through whom they can channel those feelings in healthy and productive ways.”

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Though not always. There is a burgeoning genre of books on how to hex your ex, including Deborah Gray and Athena Starwoman’s How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad and Other Spells. You can feel the fun they had composing these: ingredients needed for “The Forget Me Not Spell” are “a square of white cloth, a sprig of mint, a photograph of you and your lover together, a pair of your lover’s underpants, a pair of your sexy underpants, a piece of scarlet ribbon”. The Toad Spell needs to be done at midnight on a Full Moon and involves making a cloth bag, filling it with dirt and a picture of your ex, and drawing a toad on it. If you can’t draw, you can probably find someone on Tiktok to cast a spell for you. This is the commodification of witchcraft.

Some of the modern elision between witchcraft and feminism, however, has a less capitalist edge. The notion of using the figure of the witch to fight patriarchy has roots in the 1960s American women’s liberation group W.I.T.C.H. — Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell — who protested societal inequalities by dressing up as witches, “hexing” Wall Street, and gluing shut the doors to the New York Stock Exchange — but they were using the term with their tongues conspicuously in their cheeks: they didn’t consider themselves to be “real” witches.

Instead they adopted the name because they believed accused witches of the past were “the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against oppression — particularly the oppression of women down the ages” (WITCH manifesto, 1969). The group was revived in 2015-16 and its modern iteration takes its witchiness much more seriously. Its founding members, who all identify as witches, staged a ritual performance to focus attention on the lack of affordable housing in Chicago. One of them, Jessica Caponigro, objects to being called a “witch” in inverted commas, and resents threats from Wiccans who don’t think her witchy enough. She considers witchcraft to have always been “an act of social protest.”

In this reading, witches were always activists, rebels and non-conformers, who were punished for the resistance they mounted to the patriarchy. In the women’s marches of January 2017, protesters wore T-shirts, pin badges and placards bearing the line (from Tish Thawer’s 2015 novel The Witches of BlackBrook): “We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn” (even though, in England and New England, witches were hanged). Witchcraft has become a signifier of both systematic violence against women and of women’s attempts to resist that violence. This creates a binary of “we” — the assumed descendants of the oppressed — and “you” — the assumed oppressor.

This involves holding two dissonant ideas in tension: witches are women who exploit their power, and magic is something used by those who have no power. It is worth noting that neither aligns with the historic reality of the European witch-hunts in which large numbers of powerless, innocent people were prosecuted, tortured and executed — by which I mean that most of the witches accused in the 16th and 17th centuries protested that they were not guilty because they had not used magic. To believe witchcraft is making a comeback, you have to believe it was around in the first place. But today’s witches do, and they believe in both using and celebrating their supernatural powers. But here’s the rub: do they claim to actually practise magic?

Much hinges on our definition of the word. Witches in the past were thought to practice maleficium or evil magic that caused harm to people, animals or property, but Professor Hutton suggests we need a broader definition of magic that includes “any formalised practices by human beings designed to achieve particular ends by the control, manipulation, and direction of supernatural power or of spiritual power concealed within the natural world.” Witchcraft today seems to be about accessing supernatural power without faith in a deity. It promises to tap into unseen sources of power as a way to tackle life’s problems. Luna claims that witchcraft offers “resources for collective healing in our fraught political and social climate.”

But what does this magic look like? There is normally mention of the sort of things you might expect: Juliet Diaz, whose 2018 book Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within was an Amazon bestseller, describes a “Magick” that includes herbs, working with lunar cycles and the solar year, and setting up a sacred space. Others mention shrines, crystals, tarot cards, astrology, reiki, and auras. But there’s much that emulates Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret – that the universe will yield up its bounty in response to repeated affirmations. I’ve seen a spell defined as “a prayer to the universe”.

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Diaz offers a “manifesting spell”, for example, for which you need a bay leaf, some matches, a pen (she recommends menstrual blood as ink), a burn-safe bowl or cauldron, and some plant seeds (perhaps sage, eucalyptus or mint). Then: in a place of stillness, repeat aloud your desire as an affirmation (“I am blessed, money flows into my life easily and effortlessly”), and write the affirmation on the bay leaf before burning it in the bowl and planting the ashes with the seeds. Elsewhere magic is presented in the language of self-care – aromatherapy and meditation feature frequently. Magic is aligned with accessing what Luna calls “the deepest parts of ourselves”, Diaz’ “witch within”.

“Natural magic” — what Hutton referred to as the direction of “spiritual power concealed in the natural world” — also seems to play a major part. Here witchcraft manuals overlap with another genre of books that have boomed in sales as the young feel more politically powerless: books about getting back in touch with the world around you and reconnecting with nature.

Dr Alice Tarbuck’s A Spell in the Wild: A Year (and Six Centuries) of Magic (2020) — a beautifully-written meditation for the urban witch — seems to speak of magic where other words might do. Her “healing ritual for winter pains” is an affirmation of the healing power of food. Her euphemism for masturbation — “solitary sex magic is a way of observing the energy of witches’ Sabbats” — made me laugh out loud. But there is much that is metaphorically enchanting about the way she comprehends magic to be about connecting with the earth and attuning oneself to nature.

“Witchcraft is,” she writes, “I believe, the practice of entering into relation with the world, of exerting your will in it and among it, and learning how to work with it in ways that are fruitful for yourself and the world.” The warm, lyrical, and tender tone of her writing wins her many five-star reviews, but you don’t need to be a witch to wonder with her at “the curious magic of the world, the way it shimmers and changes if you walk through it … with your eyes open”. So why do she and others think that you do?

I think the rise in people identifying as witches might come from a combination of factors: not only does witchcraft promise you the mystical power to change your life, but in the same breath calling oneself a witch claims a victim status — as part of a historically downtrodden minority — and offers a reassuring place in the world: membership of a community with a shared language, set of rituals, and an identity. It provides the comforting framework of religion for the non-religious and a fellowship of believers for the unbeliever, and it does so in a very capacious way, as befits an age of identity politics. “Witch” and “witchcraft” have become such all-inclusive, amorphous categories that they can mean anything and everything — and sometimes even nothing.

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This mantra is repeated again and again: Diaz states that “A Witch can’t be defined, because a Witch is an embodiment of his or her own unique Magick.” Caponigro argues that “There is no right way to be a witch. If you say you are a witch, and feel you are a witch, you are a witch. End of story.” That there is no definition, no criteria, appears to be a major part of the appeal. Being a witch is conceived, as Luna puts is, as “the freedom to be your most authentic self. To embrace ALL aspects of whoever that may be, and fiercely.” Diaz is even more startingly postmodern: a witch is “an embodiment of her truth in all its power”. Being a witch is whatever you want it to be, as long as it is self-actualising. Focusing on the self is legitimated by the language of healing nature and scaring the patriarchy.

In the European witch-hunts, witchcraft was invoked in times of poverty or pandemic, when people felt disenfranchised, and when things seemed inexplicable, and it chiefly concerned women. For similar reasons it is being invoked today (humans, universally, it seems do not cope well with the brutal unfairness of the concept of chance). But those characteristics in early modern Europe caused people to accuse their neighbours of witchcraft, not to name themselves as witches.

In the witch-hunts, nearly everyone who confessed themself to be a witch did so only out of fear and pain, like Gertrauta Conrad who, in Germany in 1595, changed her robust denial into a confession of witchcraft only after being left to hang for five hours with her arms tied behind her back and lifted above her head, her shoulders dislocating as they bore the weight of her body and of the weights attached to her feet. Today — at least in the West — people freely self-identify as witches. And in contrast to the witches of old, today’s witches practise magic. Or, at least, they say they do.

This piece was originally published in May.

Given that New England’s ideas about witches had been imported from the old country, the trials shared characteristics: illnesses that could not be explained, except by magic; familiars — demons in animal form — sucking on witches’ bodies; victims being tormented from afar, via apparitions or dreams (this “spectral evidence” would later dominate at the famous Salem witch trials). Both trials, too, have much to teach us about rationality and its limits, the power of collective opinion, and the psychology that leads people to identify others — and themselves — as evil.

The story of the Parsons is told in Malcolm Gaskill’s magnificent new book, The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World (out 4th November). Hugh and Mary were among the 25,000 Puritans who fled to New England in the seventeenth century to build a Promised Land. Both settled in Springfield, a town unusual in Massachusetts because it had at its heart not only a godly enterprise, but also a commercial one: its founder William Pynchon ran a trade in furs, buying them from the Native Americans they called Indians and sending them on to London.

Gaskill vividly evokes the reality of early colonial life, from the voyage in the crammed, low-ceilinged hold of a pitching ship — the reek of unwashed bodies, the snoring and bickering of other passengers — through to the sheer hard labour that made up their lives on land — the unremitting work of felling timber, breaking rocks, digging drains, mowing grass, tending cattle, chopping firewood, slaughtering pigs, clearing chimneys, sweeping floors, and on and on.

Their external struggle with nature was matched by internal wrestling: Puritan theology required its adherents to be gravely introspective. Gaskill describes it as a “strained, oppositional way of seeing oneself and the world, poised between flesh and spirit, self-loathing and elation.” As frontier neighbours, they were completely dependent on each other (and literally indentured to Pynchon), yet the contemplation of their own sins led quickly to the censure of others. And if the melancholy, constant toil and endless self-doubt were not enough, this was a society facing the constant, terrible death of beloved young children.

In this fraught environment, the accusations of 1651 settled on Parsons — an ambitious man whose eyes seemed full of sullen envy — and his wife — who talked too much of witches. The evidence of their witchcraft could be seen in many incidents — trivial in themselves but creating a cumulative, attritional effect: trowels and knives went missing and mysteriously reappeared; the making of a pudding repeatedly failed; people received night-time visitations from snakes or a small boy with a face as red as fire, while others suffered fits and convulsions; a two-year-old saw a spectral dog; and, above all, children were bewitched to death. All these incidents occurred after the victims had crossed the Parsons.

Gaskill’s finely tuned story unfolds less like your average history book and more like a Stephen King novel, building such a convincing sense of the mounting tension that it is possible to see why the inhabitants of Springfield came to believe that this must incontrovertibly be witchcraft — and yet also why their inferences were disbelieved by the court in Boston. The journey from enchantment to disenchantment was a mere 90 miles. What is collective and rational and what is unconvincing and marginal depends largely on where one is standing.

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Perhaps it’s surprising to discover that scepticism was less in evidence 30 years later, where the accusations of Bideford carried undiminished to the court at Exeter. In The Last Witches of England: A Tragedy of Sorcery and Superstition (out last week), John Carrow meticulously explores the haunting tale of the Bideford witches: three women who were accused of witchcraft chiefly, he argues, because of “their poverty in the midst of plenty”. People don’t like to be reminded of their privilege. Temperance Lloyd was probably an abandoned wife, left without resources; the widowed Susanna Edwards, who had lost children, came from a family tarred by a history of unwed births; and Mary Trembles is seldom granted her own identity in the records Carrow has painstakingly trawled, suggesting her physical and mental dependency. All three were long-term recipients of the dole and begged for their living.

One thing that sets the Bideford witches’ case apart from the Parsons’ is that theirs was a story of emotional discrepancies between people of different economic status. Susanna Edwards’ visits to beg for food at the door of John Barnes’ house were seen by Barnes’ wife as “frivolous”; soon she was an alleged victim of Edwards’ witchcraft. Parsons, too, bothered people by turning up without obvious purpose — on “sleeveless errands” — but for New England the “most sensitive fault-lines,” Gaskill observes, “lay between near neighbours of similar status.” Yet even between the New Englanders, envy and perceived envy was at the root of accusations. Fear also, writes Gaskill, “incubated guilt, which was projected and returned as anger — much as colonists in New England imputed their own aggression to Indians, easing their own consciences and justifying drastic counter-measures”. In the New World, witches were not the only Other.

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In 1680s England, the monarchy had recently been restored, bringing with it an Anglican regime. In Bideford, a substantial proportion of the population were nonconformist or Puritan, but now had to put up with an Anglican rector who drank, swore and extorted. Just when the witch trials hit, the Puritans had little in the way of responsible leadership, and that would turn out to matter.

The case against the three women started with an encounter in September 1681 between Lloyd and a sick woman called Grace Thomas. In attempting to appear kind and concerned, Lloyd instead seemed overfamiliar and intrusive. That evening, Thomas experienced “sticking, pricking pains”. These continued for months, and her memory of the conversation with Lloyd took on a sinister tone. A stray cat left a doll on her bed: the cat was deemed to be a witch’s familiar, the doll a poppet used to direct the stabbing pains to her body. A magpie that flew confusedly into Thomas’s sick chamber appeared as invasive as the beggar woman: it was thought to be another imp, acting on his mistress’s bidding. Both cat and bird, unwelcome visitors who scavenged for food and lived in the alleyways and fringes of the town, were reminiscent of the sinister figure of the beggar and, by equating them, Thomas was effectively dehumanising Lloyd.

She could because Lloyd already had a reputation as a witch and had even been tried — though acquitted. This past run-in with the law laid the groundwork for her later condemnation, for it meant that the respectable matrons of Bideford had once before searched her naked body for a “witch’s mark” or a teat on which a demon could suck. When they examined her again in 1682 — the violation far more genuinely invasive than the charges against her — they found what had not been there before: “two Teats hanging nigh together like a piece of flesh had suckt … in her Secret Parts … each … about an Inch in length.” What Carrow suggests might have been cervical polyps — not uncommon in menopausal women who have had children — was thought to be evidence that Lloyd had been feeding diabolic imps.

Lloyd herself quickly confessed to a devilish pact and to causing sickness with witchcraft. But she couldn’t get her story right: the familiars seemed to have control over her rather than the other way around; she had no grudge against her victim. The devil appeared not as a handsome man dressed in black, but as a creature (“about the length of her Arm”), with very big eyes, that capered, hopped, and leapt before her; he failed to entice her with promises of wealth and power.

What motivated Lloyd’s confession? She was highly suggestible, for one thing, and eager to please. But there was also potential satisfaction in appropriating one’s reputation as a witch (as many self-describing witches are finding today). Carrow suggests that Lloyd came to assume the identity that her neighbours had assigned to her because owning it gave power to a woman who had formerly been powerless. Thinking of herself as a witch made her feared and able to extract more charity. But the disguise came at a price: she came to believe it was real, and with that came guilt and shame, and an inability to defend herself convincingly. Mary Parsons, who claimed for some time that she was a witch, too, also experienced guilt, though Gaskill wonders if it slipped into the dangerous “thrill of notoriety”.

Mental ill-health was very obviously at play. Mary Parsons suffered from severe postnatal depression — possibly even postpartum psychosis. All three witches from Bideford were noted to be slipping into depression during their imprisonment — but it was only viewed as a further symptom of demonic suggestion. A later account by Roger North described them as “miserable old creatures that … were scarce alive; but were overwhelmed with melancholy, and waking dreams, and so stupid as no one could suppose they knew either the construction or consequence of what they said.” Another commentator said that they appeared “weary of their lives”.

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In this age, on the cusp of the Enlightenment, much responsibility lay with authority figures who could validate or dismiss fears of witchcraft. In Bideford, every unexplained ailment that later became part of the evidence of witchcraft had first been suggested by a doctor or apothecary to be of unnatural origin. The town’s Anglican ministers, in an unusual annotation, wrote “bewitched” in the parish register when Lydia Burman died in 1672 — a clear sign that they believed in the reality of witches.

Much also came down to the application of the law, for witchcraft was a crime and had to be proved as such. And here the Justices of the Peace in Bideford abrogated their responsibilities, by allowing the gathering of all pre-trial evidence to be conducted by the alleged witches’ chief accusers. In gaol, Lloyd was questioned by Grace Thomas’s sister and brother-in-law without the supervision of authorities. It was to them that she confessed to having met the devil and having tried to destroy Thomas by witchcraft. We do not know, therefore, “how many of her recorded words were actually her own.” Edwards was questioned by a man called John Dunning, about whom we know little: he did not give sworn testimony, and his questioning was reported second-hand by one Joane Jones, whose husband claimed to experience spectral tormenting by Edwards. We don’t know what she made up.

But it is clear that the accused assented to much that was put to them, even when it did not make sense. There were so many slips in the chronology and inconsistencies in the substance of what the women confessed that had anyone cared to cross-examine, analyse and pick apart their testimonies — if anyone had cared, in short, if they were innocent — then the huge holes would quickly have been exposed. No one spoke in their defence while they “talked themselves”, said North, “to the gallows”. The alternative — recognising how melancholy, pain and madness shaped their testimonies — meant taking on the responsibility of their keeping. It is often easier to condemn the vulnerable than to care for them.

By contrast, in Springfield Pynchon did not interpose his own views as he gathered testimonies about the Parsons. Nor did he take sides. The court in Boston listened to the depositions of 30 witnesses, though only seven were present, which made a material difference: undistracted by passionate speeches, the bench could easily sift the stuff of evidentiary substance from the “hotchpotch of trivia”. Under Massachusetts law, a witch was one who had made a pact with the devil and, while there was much that was suspicious surrounding the Parsons, it was hard to discern proof of a diabolic covenant.

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The trouble with witchcraft is that it was a “slippery crime, suspended between fantasy and reality, credulity and scepticism,” writes Gaskill. Now, some might think that believing in magic as absurd, but Carrow is at pains to stress its rationality in the seventeenth century. Gaskill similarly notes that we need to approach witchcraft as witchcraft and not as fraud, hysteria or delusion. Besides, belief and doubt are not quite as distinct as we might think. Even those who believed in witchcraft doubted, and those who doubted believed.

Giving testimony that would lead to one’s neighbour being hanged required the overcoming of one’s inherent doubt. This is why Gaskill concludes, citing Marina Warner, that “people believed what they heard, less in spite of its outlandishness than because of it”. What was being believed had to be sufficiently awful to contemplate, in turn, the awfulness of what might result from accusing someone. If you chant “witch!” loudly enough, you can drown out your misgivings. And you need to chant it with others for it to become true.

While both historians are keen to stress the non-hysterical nature of witchcraft charges, Carrow notes that the women of Bideford were questioned in “an atmosphere more akin to a bear-pit than a courtroom” and could not be acquitted for fear of mob reprisals. It is also evident that the weight of collective opinion can create guilt. Pynchon had prosecuted an earlier solo accusation of witchcraft as defamation, but when more than half the town had joined the chorus, reason dictated there must be something in it.

There is much of obvious parallel to today — the echo chambers of social media, the credibility of extreme fake news, the harshness of the judgements we make on the poor, on migrants, on our “Others.” But, quoting Peter Laslett, Gaskill reminds us that “only by taking the strange on its own terms can we understand ourselves in time”. It is that which contrasts with today that lends us understanding, not just that which is familiar; it is in deeply absorbing the realities of our predecessors’ lives — as witchcraft depositions, well handled, can help us to do — that we can perceive the otherness of the past and look more dispassionately on our own place in history.