Witchcraft as an Act of Rebellion?

Here comes your fair warning…it’s about to get political here.

To be honest I am not even sure why I should warn you. We are living in times where being political should be on everyone’s agenda, not just for witches, but maybe especially for them.

Yet here we are, in the year 2026, and not for the first time I am asking myself why so many people stick their head in the sand when it comes to politics. Why do so many witches, pagans, spiritual people, try to “stay away from all that”, when we are firmly standing on the shoulders of victims of repressive systems of the past?

Witchcraft traditions and values come from a line of people that were, more than once in history, punished for living outside the sanctioned order.

When we announce to the world “I am a witch!” or “I am Pagan.”, we make a conscious decision, to step out of line and re-claim that which would have been punishable in the past.

This reclamation matters right now, because we are once again living through a period of moral panic and authoritarian drift, most prominently in the United States, but it’s happening on our door steps in the UK too.

In the US, the return of Donald Trump to the presidency after the 2024 election has emboldened reactionary forces that openly frame immigration, feminism, queer liberation and secular pluralism as threats to the nation.

In the UK, despite the landslide election of a Labour government in 2024, the legal architecture of protest restriction, surveillance, and “law and order” politics built over the last decade remains largely intact, combined with the "hostile environment" (which Theresa May was largely responsible for when she was Home Secretary) for any kind of immigration and the scapegoating of refugees.

Let’s not forget the rise in popularity of Reform UK, which I quite frankly find terrifying!

So what has all that to do with witches or Pagans?

Let me give you a quote from a recent article by Professor Ronald Hutton about the current rise in Paganism in Britain:

“The sort of person most likely to become a Pagan in Britain today is somebody who is by nature independent, enquiring, fond of reading, listening and questioning, eager for self-betterment and impatient of authority.”

Exactly the sort of person the far right would brand an enemy, don’t you think?

Historically, witch hunts were never really about magick and broom riding crones, they were about control. In the early modern period, the infamous witchcraft laws across Europe and later in the American colonies, functioned as tools for enforcing gender roles, religious obedience, and economic hierarchy. Midwives, healers, widows, and women who owned property or lived alone were disproportionately targeted. So were people whose knowledge existed outside church or state approval: herbalists, cunning folk, and those who remembered older, spiritual practices connected to the land. Accusations of witchcraft provided a socially acceptable way to punish people who were in the way, especially women.

I can highly recommend the book “How to Kill a Witch” if you want to read more about this.

The violence of these persecutions was not incidental either, they were a deliberate means to frighten people into submission.

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, tens of thousands were executed across Europe, often after torture, public humiliation and property seizure. In England and Scotland, witchcraft laws made “consorting with the Devil” a capital crime, although Germany had the worst death toll (close to 7000 people were executed) and in colonial America, the Salem trials showed how quickly paranoia could blow up into mass accusation. These were not simply irrational eruptions in an otherwise rational society, they were expressions of state and church power being weaponised against the vulnerable.

Most who were convicted of witchcraft in Europe were hanged then burned. The witch burned at the stake didn't happen often, but that doesn't make the history any less brutal!

And don’t think for a second that we live in much more enlightened times now and that “that was then”, just have a look at the much more recent “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s, which occurred primarily in the USA and saw over 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of “Satanic Ritual Abuse”, including the case of the “West Memphis Three”, which had three teenagers convicted of murders they never committed. Two of them received life sentences, one of them, Damien Echols, was sentenced to death! It’s a horrible long story, like so many others, but at least they were freed eventually.

What links those histories to the present is not a literal belief in witches or the Devil, but the recurring need of authoritarian systems to invent enemies. Today’s “witches” are trans people accused of corrupting children, migrants framed as invaders, climate activists branded extremists, and feminists painted as enemies of “family values” and evidently people who stand up to ICE (Immigrationand Customs Enforcement) thugs in the US.

The language might have changed, but the structure is familiar: Identify a group that refuses the prescribed social order, exaggerate its threat, then justify repression as protection and in the most recent case, justify them being murdered in brought daylight!

I don’t have to draw any parallels to the Third Reich here, do I? That one is staring everyone in the face!

In the US, the rollback of reproductive rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 continues to endanger women’s lives.

Under a second Trump administration, federal and state-level attacks on bodily autonomy, LGBTQ+ protections and secular governance have accelerated, often expressed in explicitly Christian nationalist rhetoric.

I should add that I believe that this has nothing to do with actual Christian values, but rather that they have been bastardised to serve a far-right agenda.The state once again claims authority over bodies, reproduction and morality. In such a context, identifying as a witch or Pagan for that matter, as someone who claims sovereignty over their own body and spiritual life, is a direct attack on the ideology of enforced virtues.

The UK might be a bit less violent in this matter, but the overall picture is not a comforting one. Labour’s sweeping victory in 2024 ended fourteen years of Conservative rule, yet it did not dismantle the protest-criminalisation framework introduced through legislation like the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the Public Order Act. Climate protesters can still be arrested for “serious disruption”, the definition of which is up for interpretation.

Demonstrators can be pre-emptively restricted based on anticipated inconvenience and shall we mention the Palestine Action group being classed as a "terrorist organisation", making it a punishable offence to support them in any way.

The message is clear…Protest is tolerated only when it is quiet, symbolic and ignorable.

And that’s exactly what witches should not be!

Witches on protest in the US

In my opinion, modern witchcraft and Pagans should be by their very definition left-leaning and liberal, whether you want to call it that or not. It aligns with the principals of inclusivity, with feminist traditions and women’s liberation, with equal rights, with the protection of nature and an overall open minded attitude.

Ritual, spell work and seasonal observance become ways of reconnecting with land, cycles and community in a world that treats both nature and people as resources to be managed.

To light a candle for the victims of suppression, to bless a protest or to hex an unjust system (not saying you should, but it certainly has been/is currently being done) is an act of rebellion, however small.

Maybe these acts are just symbolic, but symbols can shape imagination, imagination fuels action and at the very least, they remind us that the current order of affairs is neither natural nor inevitable.

A major reason for oppressive systems and ideals to reject or exclude Pagans and witches is their idea of sexual freedom and non-conformity. The term “Witch” itself is genderless, it exists outside the nuclear family ideals, reproductive futurism (the obsession with the duty to produce children for a better future) or respectability politics.

Historically witches or rather those that were on trial for witchcraft (we need to remember that these people weren’t actually witches), were accused of sexual deviance, of refusing marriage and consorting (that’s posh for having sex) with the Devil and his demons.

Sexual freedom is still, especially if expressed by women or people from the LGBTQ+ community, deeply threatening to people of a certain rigid mindset.

And there is more of course, witchcraft and paganism provides a language for self definition, which does not require permission from anyone, which certainly does not fit in the prefabricated categories and rules imposed by certain court rulings and general moral outrage.

Critics sometimes dismiss this reclamation of the witch identity as aesthetic or unserious, eagerly pointing towards the thousands of instagram accounts that sell the “witchy vibe”.

What difference, they ask, does it make to call yourself a witch?

Why would that be political, rebellious or of any consequence at all?

So I ask: Hasn’t identity always been political?

To accept the labels handed down by power is to accept its worldview.

To choose your own, especially one that has been historically demonised, is to refuse that inherited label.

The witch as a symbol and identity is a reminder that those in power once feared people like us enough to torture them and kill them. In all honesty, they still do, not just actual witches or pagans of course, but it’s just not that easy anymore (or not yet if you want to be bleak) to shut us up, but their fear can also tell us something about the weakness in their power.

Reclaiming the word “witch” is not trying to erase the historical suffering inflicted under that name, instead it needs to sharpen our understanding and awareness of how quickly moral panics can turn lethal and just look how recently it has.

Of course I am not saying that Renée Good or Alex Pretti had anything to do with witches, but they certainly fell victim to a witch hunt against “undesirable aliens”.

When politicians talk about “eradicating” ideologies and entire groups of people, when the sensationalist press amplifies narratives of contamination and decay, when laws are passed that make protest or nonconformity a crime, we are closer to those histories than we like to admit.

I don't know her, but I support the message.

To identify as a witch, then, is not to retreat into a fantasy world and pretty aesthetics, but it is to engage in historical memory, to say that spirituality can be a means of resistance rather than submission.

It means to align oneself with a tradition of refusal; the refusal to be owned, to be silent and to be made legible only on the state’s terms.

In an era where both the US and UK are wrestling with the limits of liberal democracy, where elections coexist with repression, and rights feel increasingly conditional, the witch can stand as a stubborn figure of autonomy.

Personally I believe that being a witch brings with it a duty to not be quiet, to draw the line in the sand and be difficult when it really matters and it in my lifetime is has never mattered more than now.

So you see why I think witchcraft can and probably should be an act of rebellion.

I’d exchange my broom for a pitchfork if necessary and see you on the barricades, while I also pray that we can stop this madness before it gets that far.

Sending you blessings on this grey Imbolc day

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