Witchcraft Through The Ages: The 90s

The 90s - a decade where witchcraft started to become a lot less scary in the eyes of the general public and it started to become much more fun and relatable. This is a decade where the books, popular media, and the movement as a whole expanded our understanding of the witch’s role in society. While the trope of the terrifying witch in the woods didn’t fully dissipate, this decade opened the doors for a whole spectrum of different witch manifestations. From wholesome, to gothy outsider, or sexy charmer - this decade showed that witches don’t have a singular look, motivation or personality.

Witchcraft really started to explode in popularity during the 90s so there’s a lot to cover. I’m going to divide this post into 3 sections: we’ll go over the pop-culture -- so the movies and tv shows that influenced witchcraft practice. Then we’ll discuss influential books that came out during this decade. And finally, we’ll talk about the movement as a whole and how it evolved and grew.

PART 1 - THE POP-CULTURE
The 90s were epic when it came to witchy movies and I won’t be able to cover all of them, but I am going to share a few that I feel really made a mark on both the witchcraft movement as a whole and my own personal witchcraft journey.

The Craft
Where better to start then with The Craft. This movie plays upon the idea that witches are the outsiders in a community. This has usually always been the case both historically and in pop-culture but this movie really does it in a fun way. Nancy and her crew use witchcraft as a way to empower themselves in a world that so often demeans those who are different. The protagonist, Sarah, is new to the school and as such is also an outsider who through witchcraft finds a friend group, or coven, to belong to. Of course this is a kind of a horror movie so things do eventually get out of hand. As Nancy becomes more and more power hungry, the magic eventually takes over and makes her go crazy so I guess this movie can also be a warning to be careful with witchcraft because power can be difficult to control.

This movie is also interesting because they hired an actual wiccan to advise the producers. And while a lot of the witchcraft practices and terminology in this movie are not very accurate, the fact that they hired an actual witch to assist with the movie really shows that witchcraft was starting to gain more respectability and interest among the general public.

I think the main influence that this movie brings is the idea that even though witches will always be outsiders, you can embrace your outsider status and even find power in it. Also, The Craft’s famous line “we are the weirdos” fits in with the overall 90s’ grunge vibe and the decade’s love of individuality and desire to celebrate otherness. This brand of witchcraft was a natural extension from the 90s anti-establishment subculture. It presented the notion that magic could be a force to challenge the status-quo and carve out a place of your own.

Practical Magic
You know witchcraft is trending when they get stars like Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman on board. While this movie plays upon classic witchcraft tropes, like love spells and bringing people back from the dead, it does so in a really fun and engaging way. Like with the girls in The Craft, the Owens family initially struggles with their outsider status and feeling rejected by their community. But while The Craft was saying F U the establishment, embrace the weirdo, Practical magic is showing that witchcraft can be a force to come together as a community. It’s only when Sally and Gillian embrace and help their wider community in the village do they dispel the villagers' fear of witchcraft - so at the end of the film they all can come together and defeat the evil.

This movie mirrors how witchcraft in the 90s likewise became more generally accepted among others and moved away from only something to fear. This is quite a huge shift from the 80s, which was dominated by the Satanic Panic and a generalized fear around any type of witchcraft.

The Blair Witch Project
Next, let’s dive into the horror category and talk about one of the most successful movie marketing campaigns and found-footage films ever created. People seem to either love or hate this movie -- for some it scared them to death and others thought it was just silly. Though you can’t deny that what it did was unique for the time. The Blair Witch was one of the first “found footage” movies and its success led to the creation of a whole new genre of horror. Up to this point, no movie had utilized internet marketing and “found footage” so effectively, with audiences truly believing the people in the film had actually died.

What I love about this movie, is you never actually see the Blair Witch. For me, that somehow made it more terrifying. Even though movies like The Craft and Practical Magic made witchcraft seem more mainstream, on the other end of the spectrum the Blair Witch project reminded us that the archetype of the witch also represents a primal fear of the unknown and unseen.

This movie also shows us the power in lore and legends. By starting the film with the lore of the Blair witch, it serves to build anticipation and dread. It helped to kick off a reinvigoration of our love of folklore, which we’re still seeing today. Blair Witch's genius and innovation was also that it translated folklore into the new digital era. This was the precursor to 21st century digital folklore communities, such as creepy pasta, the nosleep subreddit, with characters like Slenderman. All modern manifestations of digital folklore.

There are so many other amazing Witchy TV shows and movies that came out in the 90s. There was Hocus Pocus, Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Witches, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sleepy Hollow, HalloweenTown, and so many others. I think the main takeaway from 90s pop-culture is that witchcraft not only started to become a big trend, but that it also started to become more mainstream and varied in it’s representation. There was a whole spectrum of different types of witches, from wholesome sitcoms like Sabrina to darker representations such as the Blair Witch. This decade really expanded upon who the Witch was in society, what she looked like, and what she believed in.

PART 2 - THE BOOKS
Believe it or not, witchcraft used to be something that was difficult to find books and resources on. Back in the day you usually couldn’t do it on your own and you needed to find a mentor or a coven to start learning witchcraft. This all started to change in the 90s. As the 90s witchy movies and tv shows made witchcraft more popular, witchcraft teachings as a whole started to become more accessible to the general public.

If you grew up in the 90s and wanted to learn witchcraft there were two main places you could go to find books. Firstly, you could go to a new-age shop if you were lucky enough to have one in your city. But if you were a young teen like me, that meant I had to ask my parents to drive me there, which was something I was not going to do. Instead, what I could do was ask my parents to drop me off at Barnes & Noble. Once there I would find the single bookshelf that was now dedicated to New Age books and there I would find a selection of maybe 20-30 books about witchcraft. I would sneakily buy a book, hide it in my purse, and once home I would be able to read about witchcraft without my parents knowing a thing.

As witchcraft books became easier to find and purchase in the 90s, it really opened the doors for people to explore these ideas that were once seen as extremely taboo. And as more and more people started buying books about witchcraft, it opened the doors for many new writers and new types of witchcraft books. Of course classics like Spiral Dance by Starhawk, Wicca by Scott Cunningham, and Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft become easier to find. But also new writers entered the scene and a combination of scholarly and “fluffy” witchcraft books began to hit the shelves.

This is also when the idea of the celebrity witch started to really take hold. Laurie Cabot expanded her celebrity status as the “official witch of Salem” with her release of “The Power of the Witch” in 1990. Despite the book's glaring historical inaccuracies, it really made big waves in the movement as a whole by claiming an unbroken line from the ancient witches of the stone age to modern day witches.

One of the most famous, or perhaps infamous witch writers in the 90s was Silver Ravenwolf. Her release of the book Teen Witch was one of the first witchcraft books written exclusively for teens. And I’m not afraid to admit that I totally bought that book and read it cover to cover. Silver Ravenwolf also released several other generalized witchcraft books and her growing popularity created a backlash from other witches who found her content too “fluffy” and lacking substance. And to be fair they had a point, though you cannot deny the size of the impact she had on the witchcraft community as a whole. Her books were kind of like “witchy training wheels” for people first discovering this practice. They were light and relatable enough to draw in tons of new people into the witchcraft movement and that might have not happened without her.

One other thing I should also mention is that the vast majority of books that came out during the 90s were focused around wicca and western European forms of witchcraft. Witchcraft traditions from other cultures around the world unfortunately did not get to experience the same amount of publicity. So even though in the 90s the archetype of the witch was expanding in both pop-culture and literature, it still was mostly restricted to white women and a western European version of witchcraft.

PART 3 - THE MOVEMENT
In looking back at the 90s, how would you define it as a decade? In general I think of the 90s as a time of relative peace and prosperity. The decades-long Cold War came to an end and the rise of the dotcom companies and the Internet created a new era of optimism and possibility. So is this likewise true for the witchcraft movement as a whole during this decade? In a lot of ways I think so, being a witch in the 90s definitely seemed much more widely accepted and fashionable than in previous decades. Witchcraft stopped being something to fear and instead became an avenue for empowerment, especially among young women.

The 90s as a whole was also really dominated by teen culture, so naturally witchcraft was dominated by teen culture as well. The popular witchcraft movies and tv shows often featured teens and for the first time new witchcraft books were written specifically designed for teens. This did create some animosity between the new teen witches and the older generations who felt that the teen-centric content was making witchcraft less serious and more “fluffy.” This division between generations of witches is still very much felt today where you now have young witches learning and communicating entirely digitally compared to previous generations of witches who learned from books and met other witches in secret.

Though overall, I am eternally grateful for the witchcraft movement of the 90s. It’s because witchcraft became so much more accessible during this decade that I was first able to learn what it was and what it was about. And because witchcraft started to become much less taboo during this decade I was able to eventually build up the confidence to share my beliefs with others and ultimately that’s how I ended up starting this YouTube channel.

So next I’d love to hear from you. How would you define witchcraft in the 90s? What were the books and media from this decade that influenced your practice? And how does 90s witchcraft compare to today?