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The Craft Today

Every October the newspapers discover witches again, as though we had been kept in a cupboard since the previous Halloween. This page is about where the Craft actually stands now: how many of us there are, why people are coming, what the internet and the shops have done to it, and what the law has to say.

How many of us are there?

Nobody knows, and anyone who gives you a precise figure is guessing. Many witches are solitary, many are private about their path, and many tick "none" or "other" on any form that asks. But every count that has been made points the same way.

• In the United States, which has no religious census, the American Religious Identification Survey estimated about 8,000 Wiccans in 1990 and about 342,000 in 2008.
• In 2014 the Pew Research Center found that around 0.4 per cent of American adults described themselves as pagan, Wiccan or New Age, which would be well over a million people. Pew's projections since have expected the share of Americans in smaller faiths to keep growing, largely because people are choosing their way into religions like ours.
• In the 2021 census of England and Wales, some 74,000 people wrote in "Pagan" and nearly 13,000 "Wiccan," with thousands more naming Heathenry, Druidry and shamanism.

We are small, then, and growing, and mostly quiet about it. The sociologist Helen Berger, who has spent decades surveying pagans in America, has said simply that the numbers are clearly increasing. Her work on solitary practitioners suggests that most of us now come to the Craft alone, through books and screens, long before we meet another witch.

Why now?

Wicca reached America in the 1960s and found its first home among feminists, environmentalists and people looking for a spirituality without an institution. In the 1980s a wave of popular books opened it to solitaries. In the 1990s films and television, The Craft and Charmed among them, sent a generation of teenagers to the library shelf. Then came the internet, and with it the chance of finding other witches without having to recognise their jewellery at a bus stop.

The deeper reasons are older. Fewer people belong to a church than at any time in modern history, but very few of them have stopped wanting what a religion gives: a calendar of holy days, a way to mark birth and death, a community, a sense that the world is alive and that what you do in it matters. The Craft offers all of that without asking anyone to sign a creed. As Berger has put it, you can do your own thing. Add a century of loss in the natural world, and the Craft's insistence that the earth is sacred begins to look less like an eccentricity and more like common sense. Add the long struggle for women's equality, and so does a religion in which the divine has a woman's face.

And some of it, we suspect, is simply that people want to do something. When the news is all catastrophe, the oldest human answer is to light a candle and say out loud what you hope for. Witches have always done that. It is no surprise that others are joining in.

WitchTok and the internet

The witchcraft tags on the big video and photo platforms count their views in the billions. A teenager in a small town who would once have had a single Cunningham paperback hidden under the bed now has thousands of witches talking to them every day. That is a great gift, and the Hearth exists partly because of it: most of the people who write to us found us by searching.

It has costs too, and we would be failing our readers if we did not name them.

• Speed. The Craft is learned over a year and a day, and then over a lifetime. A sixty-second video can teach the look of a spell, but not the practice underneath it.
• Curses for clicks. Hexes, love spells aimed at particular people and revenge jars get far more attention than healing and gratitude. They do not represent most witches, and we do not publish them. See our note on ethics.
• Borrowed sacred things. Closed practices from living cultures are passed around as content by people who have never met a member of those cultures. See borrowing well.
• Bad history and bad science. "Nine million witches burned" is wrong by a factor of more than a hundred; historians put the executions of the European witch trials somewhere between forty and sixty thousand, which is horror enough. And you will be told that quantum physics proves magic. It does not, and we would rather you heard that from witches. We do not need physics to vouch for a practice that makes people steadier, kinder and more awake.

Our word to anyone who learned their first spell from a phone: welcome. Keep going. Slow down. Read a book written by someone who has practised for twenty years. Find people you can actually meet. And never pay anyone who tells you that you have been cursed.

The shop window

Walk down the main street of Salem, Massachusetts, in October and you will see the Craft as a market: spell kits, candles to bring money, pentacles beside the crosses at the big chain stores, tarot decks in the fashion pages. Some witches find this hard to bear, and argue that the Halloween costume trivialises a religion and keeps the old stereotypes alive. Others point out that a pentacle on a supermarket shelf is a kind of recognition their grandparents would never have believed.

We are somewhere in between. Witches have always bought things; candles and incense do not make themselves, and plenty of honest people earn a living making beautiful tools. But three things are worth saying plainly.

1. Nothing you need is for sale. Salt, water, a candle, a length of string and your attention will carry you through the first year of practice. See The Altar and the Tools.
2. Initiation is never sold. Traditional covens do not charge for training or for entry into the Craft, and neither do we. Books and classes are fine. Anyone selling you a lineage, a degree or a title is selling something that is not theirs to sell.
3. Fear is the oldest con. "There is a curse on you, and lifting it will cost..." is a swindle centuries old, and it still works. No genuine witch will say it to you. If someone does, walk away, and tell somebody.

The Craft and the law

Within living memory, in Britain, it was a crime to claim to be a witch. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 no longer punished anyone for working witchcraft, which Parliament had decided did not exist, but for pretending to. It was used as late as 1944 to jail the Scottish medium Helen Duncan after a séance, and it was not repealed until 1951. Three years later Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today, and the modern Craft walked out into the open.

In the United States, the courts have treated Wicca as a religion since 1986, when a federal appeals court said so in a case brought by a prisoner, Dettmer v. Landon. In 2007, after a long campaign led by Circle Sanctuary and the families of fallen service members, the Department of Veterans Affairs agreed to allow the pentacle on military headstones, alongside the cross, the Star of David and the crescent. Pagans now serve as prison and hospital chaplains in several countries, and a good many of us have been married by a pagan celebrant with the full force of law.

That does not mean the work is done. Pagans still lose jobs, homes and custody of their children because of their faith, quietly and usually without a court case. If you live or work somewhere it would cost you to be known, you are not obliged to tell anyone; see our answers about telling people. If you think you have been treated unfairly because of your religion, the law in most places is on your side, and the pagan organisations on our Kindred Hearths page can help you find advice. Nothing on this page is legal advice.

Our own voices

The Craft has its own press now, and it is worth reading. The Wild Hunt has reported news for and about pagan and polytheist communities since the mid-2000s, from religious liberty cases to archaeology to the weekly tarot, and it does real journalism, which is rarer than it ought to be. The Pagan Federation's Pagan Dawn and a host of smaller magazines carry the long conversation on. And the scholars who study us, Ronald Hutton, Helen Berger, Sabina Magliocco, Chas Clifton and others, have become some of our best friends by telling us the truth. There is more in the reading list.

Next: Common Misconceptions