Magic and witchcraft groups and movements are merging with organizations holding to Eastern and other forms of spirituality and are being offered together on the same digitized platforms, writes Lionel Obadia in the journal Social Compass (online in December). “At the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, references to magic and witchcraft seem to have disseminated in almost every sector of Westernized modern cultures and societies: Media, cinema, science, technologies and AI, the economies of well-being, ordinary life, the workplace, politics, religion, fashion, and music all allude to it in [one] way of another.” Magic and witchcraft have especially found a place in popular culture and social media among younger generations, with young female “TikTok witches” promoting such services as casting spells, rituals, gem magic, different kinds of herbal and olfactory treatments, tarot card reading, and palmistry. The trend of magic turning more spiritual can also be seen in how such platforms include Yoga, Buddhist-inspired meditation, and other techniques from the New Age movement.
Source: Focus on the Family.
In Obadia’s study of 50 of these “postmodern” witches’ websites, he finds a similar blending of Eastern and nature-based spiritualities with magic and witchcraft. The new hybrid approach also embraces environmentalism and identity politics, such as advocacy for LGBTQ and African American rights. Prominent magic writers and practitioners blending witchcraft with politics as well as spirituality include David Salisbury, author of Witchcraft Activism, and Michael Hughes, author of Magic for the Resistance. Obadia writes that modern spirituality is currently being reinvented under new economic and ecological conditions and is interacting with a “reinvented magic which is just as modernized and which has largely lost its dangerous and violent character—at least in the particular forms it assumes.” This triad of magic, spirituality, and technology can be considered a “spiritualization of witchcraft” as well as a “bewitchment of spirituality,” he concludes.
(Social Compass, https://journals.sagepub.com/home/scp)
