Hex the System: How America's Witches Became Its Most Unexpected Radicals

On a Tuesday night in a Philadelphia row house, seven people are seated in a circle on the floor. There's a candle in the center, a printed list of local politicians' names, and someone's tarot deck fanned out on a scarf that probably cost twelve dollars at a thrift store. Nobody here would describe what they're doing as therapy, or as activism, or as church. But it's functioning as all three.

"We started this because none of the other options were working," says Dani, 27, who organized the gathering. "Therapy costs $200 a session. Protests feel like screaming into a void. Church was never our thing. So we came back to this."

This is the occult — broadly, messily, defiantly defined. And across America, in living rooms and community gardens and rented event spaces, it is having an unmistakable moment.

Not Your Grandmother's Witchcraft

To understand what's happening in American spiritual counterculture right now, you have to first ditch the idea that the occult is a monolith. It isn't. What's lumping together under that umbrella includes Wicca, eclectic paganism, chaos magic, folk traditions from the African diaspora like Hoodoo and Santería, astrology, tarot, herbalism, and a sprawling DIY spirituality that borrows freely from all of the above and answers to none of it.

What these practices share — at least in their current cultural resurgence — is a refusal to outsource authority. No priest mediating your relationship with the divine. No institution gatekeeping your access to meaning. No algorithm deciding what you should believe. The occult, in its current form, is fundamentally about reclaiming agency in a world that seems designed to strip it away.

That's not incidental. That's the whole point.

According to the Pew Research Center, the number of Americans who identify as Wiccan or pagan has grown significantly over the past two decades, with younger generations leading the shift. But the numbers probably undersell the reality, because plenty of people practicing tarot or casting spells on a new moon don't identify with any label at all. They're just doing what works.

Healing Outside the System

Here's where things get genuinely political: a huge driver of the occult revival isn't aesthetic or nostalgic. It's practical. America's mental health system is broken in ways that disproportionately hurt the people who most need it — the uninsured, the underinsured, communities of color, rural populations, anyone who's spent six months on a therapist's waitlist while their anxiety quietly ate them alive.

Into that gap, spiritual community is stepping. Healing circles, grief rituals, moon gatherings — these aren't replacements for clinical care, and most practitioners will tell you that emphatically. But they are filling a real need for communal processing, for witnessed emotion, for the kind of held space that formal systems rarely provide and that humans have always required.

Marcelina, a 33-year-old curandera and community organizer in San Antonio, Texas, has been running healing circles in her neighborhood for four years. Her practice draws on Mexican folk tradition, and she's watched it become something her community reaches for when everything else falls short.

"My grandmother knew how to do this. Her grandmother knew how to do this," she says. "It got interrupted — by colonization, by the church, by people telling us it was backward. What we're doing now is remembering."

That framing — remembering rather than inventing — matters. A lot of what gets called the occult revival is actually a reclamation, particularly among communities whose spiritual traditions were suppressed or criminalized. When Black practitioners reclaim Hoodoo, when Indigenous people revive ceremonial practices, when Latinx communities return to curanderismo, that's not a trend. That's resistance with centuries of context behind it.

The Tarot Card as a Political Tool

Divination — tarot, astrology, rune-casting, oracle cards — might be the most visible face of the current occult moment, and it's also the most misunderstood. Critics, from both the religious right and the rationalist left, tend to dismiss it as either sinful or silly. But practitioners describe something more interesting: a technology for self-interrogation.

A tarot reading doesn't tell you what will happen. What it does — at its best — is create a structured space to ask yourself what you actually think, feel, and want. The cards are a mirror, not a crystal ball. In a culture that bombards people with external noise from every direction, a practice that forces you to sit quietly with your own interior landscape is, arguably, a radical act.

"I use tarot the way some people use journaling," says Theo, a 25-year-old activist and tarot reader in Chicago. "It helps me figure out what I actually believe versus what I've been told to believe. That feels pretty political to me."

That sentiment — using spiritual practice as a tool for ideological clarity — shows up repeatedly in the progressive occult community. There's a reason covens started publicly hexing politicians, why witches showed up to Standing Rock, why astrology memes about Saturn Returns are somehow also conversations about late-stage capitalism. The spiritual and the political aren't separate channels. For this community, they feed each other.

The Backlash Is the Point

Naturally, none of this sits well with everyone. Conservative religious groups have spent years sounding alarms about the occult's growing visibility, and the anxiety has intensified as the aesthetic has gone mainstream — tarot decks at Urban Outfitters, crystals at Target, astrology apps with millions of downloads. There's a real debate within the occult community itself about commercialization, about whether Instagram witchcraft dilutes something that's supposed to carry weight.

It's a fair tension. Spiritual practice commodified into a vibe is very different from spiritual practice as genuine resistance. The question of who profits and who gets centered matters enormously, especially when traditions rooted in marginalized communities get aestheticized by people with no connection to their origins.

But the backlash from mainstream culture — the eye-rolls, the dismissals, the occasional moral panic — also functions as a kind of confirmation. Practices that make power structures nervous are usually doing something right.

Spell Work as Self-Determination

Back in that Philadelphia row house, the circle is wrapping up. Someone cries a little. Someone else laughs. They blow out the candle, eat chips, argue about a city council vote. It looks, honestly, like a lot of progressive community spaces — except for the tarot cards still spread across the floor and the very specific intention that opened the evening.

That intention mattered. It set the terms. It said: we are here deliberately, we take this seriously, and we are not waiting for anyone's permission to seek meaning on our own.

In a country where institutions keep failing the people who need them most, that's not a small thing. That might, in fact, be everything.