SpiritedIrish (@SpiritedIrish)

The Return of Witchcraft: The Dark Sisterhood Genre Tara Thieke Substack, Sept 9, 2026 The Dark Sisterhood Genre A mother of a young girl walks week after week into the preschool library read-aloud hour. She never smiles, never laughs, and never makes eye contact with anyone. Each week she wears the same teal-colored shirt with three stark white words: “HEX THE PATRIARCHY.” Upon a display shelf in the same library is a book: “The Little Witch’s Book of Spells”. There are spells to make sure you and your best friend are friends forever; how to find your coven and your grimoire; how to freeze a bully; how to make a pentagon, a sigil, an altar; how to pass tests and enrich yourself (“gain abundance”). Disney is set to release Hexed in the autumn of 2026. Practical Magic is enjoying a revival with a sequel in theaters and a Broadway musical in the works. The days of Harry Potter, in which characters more resembled superheroes with magical powers, or Wizards of Waverly Place & Sabrina the Teenage Witch, in which magical mishaps are fodder for screwball comedy, have passed in favor of redditor hexing. Today’s youth media is full of books that embrace the core wrongs of witchcraft under a sheen of pagan naturalism and goddess worship: manipulation, power, self-worship, and closed-heartedness. The growth of these media narratives depend upon revisionism (i.e. Wicked) which subtly or overtly shifts from pro-social values which recognize the good in a variety of relationships to one which centers it solely in a Dark Sisterhood. The profusion of Condé Nast feminism has midwifed, via decades of inescapable headlines and talking points, a new way of being: a Sisterhood. In popular narrative this cult drenches itself in light and liberation, of love and shimmer and transcendence. In practice it looks a little different, something more like female jurors running to the press to complain about the mystifying male holdout juror of the infamous Clancy case who “had the hardest time getting off the fact that Lindsay viciously killed her children.” Here is an army willing to do battle against any moral restraint on itself. Copycat killings emerge; the TikTok goddesses pursue their line of thought without remorse. The Sisterhood rebukes the concept of examination of conscience, preferring therapy which validates one’s grievances. It is a massive, massive cultural shift imbuing all human relations, even the mother to child, with its conflation of any self-giving with persecution (both Clancy and her copycat killer described their small sons as being “the antiChrist” or “devil”). The rise of this Sisterhood in tandem with the growth of the “women can do no wrong” belief has life or death repercussions. History repeats itself as a lesson to those who won’t recognize patterns. Real wisdom is not a spell to give a shortcut to success; it is hard-earned bitter truths, dangerously faded into cliches, that reflect one’s heart back if one has the humility and courage for truth. What (sometimes) starts with a yearning for nature and meaning in an increasingly deadened culture is twisted by a desire for the same corrupting power that runs the anti-human technocracy. It Starts with Glamour In a public image-oriented society the practitioners of witchcraft are conscious not to reach for the jarring or unpleasant. At first. They rely instead upon selling an aesthetic draped in an aura of the exotic, but which is simply glamour: the Scottish word twist of grammar, with the ancient recognition of the power and potential for twisted meaning. Glamour immediately was associated with lying: a false promise of mystery, overlying the real, beautiful truth of things. Lavender sachets and skin-clearing tonics are given this sheen of glamour in indigo cloth covered books, dappled with stars to suggest the secrets of the cosmos are within. But what begins with the desire for beauty, a sense of the exotic, doesn’t end that way. Our new witches don’t take out wands to hex, but the culture they immerse themselves in is openly comfortable wishing death and pain upon their enemies — and engaging in practices they believe will bring their utopia about. That attempt to seize power over life and death and pain and happiness is the witchcraft that innocents all over the world have feared. Instagram Wiccans talk about positivity, framing their spellcraft as a simple pretty variant of herbal medicine, a cutesy reconnection to the earth in an age of artifice in which the natural continually recedes. But there is nothing “organic” about witchcraft: from the very beginning it is a choice on how one will respond to Creation. Witchcraft is one of millions of deliberate interpretations of reality, and what makes it unique in world philosophies is how it ultimately always centers the desires of the practitioner. Despite promising to draw witches closer to the “magic” of crystals, stars, and flowers, what witchcraft genuinely does is take them further away. They lose the capacity for communion with reality because they begin to manipulate objects for their own desires rather than listen to them. What could be more artificial than relegating all Creation to the handmaiden of the spellcaster who wants “abundance”? Such a tool-user relationship, centered on power rather than humility, historically led to fear of the practitioners of such methods; having removed objective truth to center on power, it seems the practitioners of spellcraft continually fell into the same sorts of practices which communities evaluated as a threat to social life. A look at the r/witchcraft forum explains why. There are multiple posts celebrating successful hexes. Witches who worry about the old threefold rule (before the resurgence of witchcraft after the millennium Wicca used to teach that any harm you do will come back threefold) are treated as toxic, pseudo-Christian busybodies. Don’t you know there’s a war on? Despite awareness of the resurgence of witchcraft, perhaps reaching a momentary peak after the website Jezebel had called upon witches to curse Charlie Kirk shortly before his murder, there is little exploration of it as a phenomenon. Perhaps in the hearts of many, particularly after Kirk, there is a fear: if I draw attention to this movement, will they hex me? It doesn’t take the whole movement, it just takes one. And there is always one. It’s here we touch upon the profound difference between Christian surrender and power-seeking. The reddit witch, the one not putting up TikTok displays of altar crystals, is where the most traditionally troubling phenomena reveal themselves. There, without images, lay women (and men) floating in a world where they pour forth their feelings unchecked. There is nothing, no one to balance them. No public to say “this is madness.” The public, if it did so, is the enemy. Here the feelings rule and all boundaries are enemies. The closest thing which should call them back is “As ye harm no one, do as thou wilt,” but who is to say what harm is? The witch. There is no injunction of “what about the log in your eye?” Instead, the witch sees what they perceive as harm (even if it isn’t) and centers it: it needs a response (but does it?). They write things like this: “I just wrote out what was going to happen to him, step by step. I wrote it like I was speaking to him and commanding him, or telling him something inevitable. Something along the lines of ‘you will alienate everyone in the industry and no one will work with you. You will lose your business. You will be investigated and charged with fraud. Everyone will know about this and will know what you are. You will be shunned and ostracized. You will lose everything. Your wife will leave you and your children will resent you. You will never know happiness or security. You will die alone and bitter.’” Don’t Be Afraid, But The Witch is Your Neighbor The reddit witch is not a lonely phenomenon. Wiccans outnumber Presbyterians, and that is without counting the countless women who don’t formally identify with the religion but are being drawn into the practice. Why does a practice which is, without any doubt, centered on the exercise of power over others, appeal to so many, including Christians? There are self-proclaimed Christians on the witchcraft forum who will take the time to say they no longer believe in the practice of forgiveness. While they are responsible for their deeds, this phenomenon should prompt questions. How could someone imagine themselves Christian and be a witch? How could they imagine themselves Christian when they reject the heart of Christian practice? The growth of witchcraft owes something to the deadening artifice we are immersed in, an artifice which both comforts and entraps us. The beauty of flowers and herbs, as we live under LED lights, are deeply appealing to many, but witchcraft twists this desire for Creation with subtle ingenuity. A film like Practical Magic comes along, romanticizing witches, and quite a few Christian women will profess nostalgia for it. What is it? The faces of celebrities? Or is it that they find a reassurance of meaning in the presence of flowers and herbs, while overlooking or not understanding the implications of reducing people and creation to tools for one’s desire? Certainly, after the anti-fundamentalist cultural surge of the 1990s and 2000s, many fear showing oneself a fuddy duddy. If one accepts Tolkien and Lewis’s worlds of layered beings, but gets angry about super-powers in Harry Potter, that seems ludicrous, and so suddenly any discernment whatsoever is seen as mean and uncool. It’s unfortunately simple, but we are not islands, and we are affected by a desire to share media. Once judging and thinking about that media is seen as the oppressive weapons of the patriarchy, there is no longer any limit. One likes whatever one feels. In the face of increasing chaos and stripping of boundaries, we are not going to see less witchcraft. It is rising and rising steadily. “Halloween belongs to us,” the witches told me when I was a little girl. Halloween is an interesting celebration, mirroring back to us the deep shifts in our culture. It has moved away from the remembrance of the dead, the communion of saints, and the conclusion of the year’s harvest (a more breathtakingly poignant trinity of events I can hardly fathom) into one of increasing gore, of dreary longevity (for all the well-deserved frustration with the stores for creeping Christmas, who sees Christmas displays up on their street in early October? Meanwhile the Halloween ones near me, especially if they are ugly and intended to frighten, increasingly stay up all year or fill the lawns in mid-August), and of an embrace of the “spooky” without the transcendent transformation of our understanding of the supernatural towards the Beatific Vision. Knowing the Witches I was raised knowing several witches. It is not my wish to discuss private lives or relive scenes, so though these experiences shaped my life and my mind at the deepest levels, driving me towards the Church almost as soon as I could request it, I will not share personal details. But the bare minimum to establish my firsthand knowledge with the covens long before Practical Magic, or The Craft, or Instagrammers found it, a glimpse is needed: I observed the behavior and beliefs of witches as a youth, back when there were less than an estimated 8,000 Wiccans in America. I watched with confusion the stated good intentions, intelligence, and traumas which led them to this cult, and saw that the individuals I observed were often the foremost victims of their own responses to the challenges of life. Some begin as victims. Others don’t at all. Some (a man) encountered later in life gleefully thought he might provoke me by sharing his enjoyment of performing a Satanic ritual with others on a mountain. He was a “nice” man who liked to help animals. He clearly expected me to be shocked. But I had already known witches, I’d already heard all sorts of rationalizations about “freedom” and “liberation,” and this was just one more pseudo-edgy move to establish unique counter-cultural credentials. Well, it fell flat. I’d known the counter-culture, I saw it becoming the actual culture, and it has no mystery or love. It all ends in banality and misery. The yuppie dabblers of witchcraft and Satanism are the heralds of a changing social reaction to witchcraft, but what unites all practitioners is the culture of victimization. It is in the framing of one’s self as a victim that the quest for power is best rationalized. Even the most secure, successful, and content can find with an ease an avenue to make themselves a victim — and victims need revenge. The witches I knew came to their beliefs out of a response to pain, ie seeking revenge on an entire society whom they blamed. What has changed is that it is now not a few souls closing their hearts and choosing power; the culture of victimization is mainstream. More https://tarathieke.substack.com/p/the-return-of-witchcraft-part-one?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=663141&post_id=211290389&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ke0l&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email