Rapper Azealia Banks brought witchcraft back into the mainstream by tweeting ‘I’m really a witch’. But women in the US have been harnessing its power for decades as a ‘spiritual but not religious’ way to express feminist ambitions

This fascinating story written by Sady Doyle in the UK GUARDIAN explains how a new burst of ‘witches’ is taking place in the modern world..

The GUARDIAN seems to credit modern pop culture and entertainment with the new witchcraft of our age.. Things like AMERICAN HORROR STORY and the COVEN. Doyle even gives a nod to the TUMBLR site http://charmcore.tumblr.com/.. I have visited it, though it seems more that it’s a site of reblogs as opposed to original content.

But there is another angle, one more political: Feminism and the power of the female, symbolized by the strength of a witch..

Doyle writes,

Wicca, with its focus on a goddess (rather than a male god – though it has those too) and its relatively open approach to creating canon, was a natural fit for many feminist women interested in writing their own spiritual script. But women who weren’t explicitly Wiccan were also drawn to “witchy” ways of processing the world: not only did women make feminist tarot cards in the 1970s, author Alice Walker personally endorsed one set – the Motherpeace deck. Feminist psychologists such as Jean Shinoda Bolen and Clarissa Pinkola Estés wrote books on using goddess imagery and myths as means of understanding female subjectivity.

There has been a long and wrong series of centuries in which witches were proclaimed evil.. they were stoned, drowned to death, and ‘pressed’ with heavy objects.

I know several people who practice Wicca. They are fine, amazing people. While they may have one too many ‘coexist’ bumper stickers, they don’t cause harm to me or society.

Suddenly witches are trendy. Get ready for that..