Overview
It feels like I woke up one day — sometime in the last six months — with a mysterious pull towards the occult. Witchcraft, tarot, crystals: things that once felt "woo woo" and faintly contrived suddenly began to feel ritualistic. The lines between meditation and manifestation blurred into something I'd more readily describe as secular spirituality. My friends and I sincerely gift each other carefully chosen crystals imbued with particular properties. Everyone seems to have an oracle deck of choice. I know of more than one bride who has quietly tasked an Etsy witch with guaranteeing sunshine on her wedding day.
Like most trends I seem to absorb by digital osmosis, it probably began with TikTok (or, more specifically, "WitchTok"). Yes, there are the cursed tarot readings that appear on your FYP when you're at your most emotionally fragile, but it runs deeper than that — it's women speaking about matriarchy; women talking about intuition, cycles, and reclaiming control; women gathering online in ways that could, theoretically, be described as covens.
In 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade; in Australia in 2023–24, an average of one woman every eight days was killed by an intimate partner; and by 2026, the word "manosphere" has entered global common parlance. Surveying what it feels like to be a woman right now, I do have to wonder if a modern witchcraft revival is less about Ouija Boards and gothic aesthetics, and much more about female autonomy, intuition, and collective power. "Witchcraft" as a covert disguise for fourth-wave feminism.
Fiona Horne
Witchcraft has always resurfaced at moments of rupture. It crests when institutions feel brittle and women sense that something is shifting beneath them. In the 1970s, it threaded through second-wave feminism. In the 1990s, it returned via underground punk grrrl movement, The Craft and a generation of teenage girls learning to name their anger. In 2026, it is back again — algorithmic, aesthetic and quietly radical. And few people understand that arc better than Fiona Horne.
Long before Etsy witches and TikTok tarot, Horne publicly identified as a practising witch in the late 1990s, publishing Witch – A Personal Journey at a time when the word still carried real stigma. She had already been in the public eye as the frontwoman of Def FX, but stepping "out of the broom closet," as she has described it, positioned her as a lightning rod for modern witchcraft.
"I never get asked if I worship Satan anymore," she tells me, reflecting on the cultural shift. "I never get asked if I'm a white witch or a black witch or a good witch or a bad witch. There's just more understanding now. People know that a witch is someone who honours nature as sacred, who recognises a Goddess as well as a God, who does spells and rituals to help and heal themselves and others."
Nearly three decades later, Horne is releasing her 17th book, Coven – Where Witches Gather, alongside a companion oracle deck, and embarking on a national tour designed to bring witches — and the witch-curious — together in person. "The alchemy that occurs when we come together is really potent," she says. "There's something that happens in a circle that doesn't happen alone. We celebrate seasonal rites together. We create intentional circles. We support each other. It's about ethical gathering. It's about boundaries. It's about leadership. It's about healing. It's about remembering that we're not meant to do this alone."
If fourth-wave feminism is about collective voice, witchcraft offers up collective ritual — but these days, it doesn't always look like a candlelit circle. Michelle Cook is a psychic, medium and practising witch who also hosts the podcast How to Witch, Bitch!, described as "an overview of witchcraft for the new and experienced alike."In a fitting crossover, Fiona appeared on the show while travelling in Egypt, and the two Australian witches' conversation drifted less toward spectacle and more toward what modern practice actually looks like. "[It used to be] the kid on her own in the corner of the classroom getting down into the bush and doing some spells. And now all of a sudden — it's so massive," says Horne.
In 2026, the next generation of teenage witches is discovering the craft not through dusty metaphysical bookstores or even '90s cult-classic movies, but through TikTok and Spotify. The music streaming platform has reported dramatic surges in manifestation-themed playlists and spell-inflected audio — some up nearly 300 percent in recent years — suggesting that ritual language hasn't disappeared. It has simply migrated.
"If words are spells [that's why it's called spelling], then songs could be your ritual. Your playlist could be your altar," says Cook. "The energy you listen to is the energy you're inviting in." The coven, in other words, might now look like a shared Spotify link. The altar is portable, the circle digital, the incantation algorithmically delivered.
But the resurgence runs deeper than algorithms, Cook insists. "Women are looking for something that they feel they have control over. They're looking for something that's theirs. Something that says, 'I can influence my world. I can choose what I bring in.'"
That search for agency sits squarely within the concerns of fourth-wave feminism. When bodily autonomy is contested and social contracts feel unstable, reclaiming power at a symbolic level becomes both personal and political. Lighting a candle will not rewrite legislation; gathering in a circle will not dismantle patriarchy, but it does create a space where women's voices are centred rather than mediated.
Horne articulates witchcraft less as spectacle and more as ethics. "The core laws are simple," she explains. "Do what you will, but do not harm. Do not interfere with another's free will. And understand that what you send out returns. There's accountability in that. There's responsibility."
#witchtok
That distinction matters in a marketplace increasingly eager to monetise magic. In February 2026, VICE reported that Etsy had begun removing sellers offering spellcasting services, despite the platform's longstanding prohibition on selling supernatural outcomes. Sellers described the move as abrupt, even likening it to a "modern witch hunt." The policy itself was blunt: you can sell a candle, but not the promise that it will fix someone's life. "[It was] preying on fear," Cook says plainly of some online spell-selling spaces. "That's not what this is meant to be. It's not about dependency. It's not about giving your power away to someone else and saying, 'Fix it for me.' It's about coming back to yourself."
And the archetype itself has shifted. "When we think of a witch, we think of a woman who is in power, who's in control of her life," says Horne. "If we were describing a man, it would be great. But when we're describing a woman, suddenly it's a bad thing. So reclaiming that word matters. It matters that we say, 'Yes, I'm powerful. Yes, I trust myself.'"
Strip away the iconography of pentagrams, cauldrons, and altars, and this message feels like the quiet core of the revival: not supernatural intervention so much as authority redirected inward. In that sense, witchcraft begins to look less like rebellion and more like recalibration — akin to meditation, mindfulness, or even some forms of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Maybe it's more about hope, or control, or a combination of both. Is modern witchcraft just accessible, secular spirituality dressed up in a velvet cape?
If history is any guide, this wave will crest and quieten again. The aesthetic may change, the algorithms will pivot, but the underlying impulse remains evergreen and essential — women gathering, naming their experience and refusing to relinquish authority over it.
FYI I wrote this piece while listening to my own Spotify spell playlist. When in Rome.
Images: Larnce Gold