Modern Witchcraft

Witchcraft in our century cannot remain the quaint domain of candlelit altars and half-remembered folkways; it must evolve into a living strategy for survival and rebellion inside the very circuitry of the world. We inhabit a cyberpunk present—rain-slick streets threaded with cameras, biometric checkpoints at every gateway, algorithms that guess our fears before we speak them, and capital markets that liquify our most intimate data into profit. The old dystopian futures arrived early and quietly, delivered to our pockets as polished devices promising frictionless convenience. In this reality of control grids and creeping dehumanisation, the true craft of the witch becomes an insurgency of spirit, mind, and flesh—a refusal to be automated, sorted, downgraded to a predictable consumer node.

Here, the Luciferic spark regains its original meaning: not the cartoon adversary of medieval imagination, but the bearer of light—the archetype of irreducible individual will. Lucifer’s rebellion against imposed cosmic hierarchy echoes every time a human being asserts inner sovereignty against systems that deny their complexity. To invoke that flame today is to insist that consciousness cannot be finalised by code, that the messy grace of embodiment still matters even in the shadow of machine ascendance. It is to seize back authorship of one’s narrative from predictive engines that claim to know our next thought. Modern witchcraft therefore begins with an act of ontological defiance: I am not property, not an algorithmic product, not a passive endpoint of data extraction. I am a living node of intention.

Because the battlefield has expanded from village gossip to global surveillance, the witch’s toolkit must stretch accordingly. Sigils inked by candlelight now find their counterparts etched into blockchains, slipped as fragments of will into the pulse of financial networks. Altars glow behind encrypted screens, where chaos magicians seed memes—digital servitors—to pry open cracks in official realities. A financial spell might look like a collective shifting capital away from extractive banks into community-owned credit unions, or like farmers forming decentralised co-ops that bypass commodity markets entirely. Money is merely frozen intent; witches learn to thaw and redirect it. In the same breath, we remember that land remains sacred circuitry older than silicon: hands in soil, seed exchanges, food forests, mycelial webs that ignore human borders. Living off the land is not escapism; it is a counter-infrastructure, a redundant system that outlasts fragile just-in-time supply chains engineered for profit rather than resilience. To plant a garden today is to plant a flag of autonomy.

This financial terrain is no longer neutral; it is the dominant force shaping our futures. Adam Curtis, in shifty, a truly disquieting documentary, captures this new spell of paralysis: how, after the collapse of industry and the decline of the political imagination, human agency was quietly stolen—not by soldiers, but by spreadsheets. The finance sector replaced the democratic ideal with the language of inevitability: market logic, austerity, risk modelling. Politicians surrendered to a world they claimed could no longer be shaped—only managed. We are no longer ruled by leaders but by indices and shadow banks. The witch understands this for what it is: a black enchantment, a grand spell of impotence. She breaks it not with slogans, but with direct, embodied acts of re-enchantment—rituals of refusal, of reclamation, of returning power to where it always belonged: the will.

Transhumanism has also entered the stage promising liberation from decay and finite lifespan, yet often carries the odour of managerial eugenics—an upgrade path sold by the same powers that wrote the original operating system of inequality. The witch regards these shiny prosthetics with wary eyes: enhancement is desirable, but not at the price of surrendering biological agency to corporate firmware. The task is to redeem technology, steering it toward amplifying life rather than replacing it. A cybernetic implant that restores mobility to a paralysed limb is a triumph; a neural lace that tracks emotional compliance for an employer is techno-slavery. Witchcraft’s role is to hold the line where augmentation tips into domination, to insist that progress serves flesh, spirit, and the planet rather than feeding a Machine God obsessed with limitless extraction.

Yet we cannot leapfrog the cyberpunk phase; we must traverse it consciously. The journey through neon nights and data smog is an alchemical ordeal, burning away sentimental fantasies of simpler times. It forces us to master the very tools designed to master us—cryptography, mesh networks, off-grid power, permaculture, ritual, philosophy—until the apparatus of control finds no easy purchase on our minds or communities. Only after this baptism in circuitry can true reconnection occur: a synthesis where advanced tech becomes just another organ of a balanced ecology. Picture off-grid server farms cooled by mountain streams, feeding open-source knowledge to cooperative schools; or rural maker-labs printing spare parts for wind turbines beside ancient stone circles. In such spaces the binary between high-tech and deep-green collapses; the witch stands as mediator, translating code into compost and star-data into soil lore.

Defending Earth against tyranny, then, is not a nostalgic march backward but a spiral forward—integrating the wisdom of the past with the cunning of the present. It is building parallel economies where debt is not the master narrative, where finance becomes reciprocal energy rather than extraction. It is reminding every neighbour that the body is sacred territory, not a platform for perpetual monetisation. It is teaching children that rebellion can be creative, that hacking a drone’s firmware to plant seeds instead of dropping bombs is as magical as any hex in a grim-moor cottage. Witchcraft modernised becomes a suite of distributed practices: cryptographic sigils, guerrilla gardens, sensor-jammer cloaks, community land trusts, breathwork circles under LED skies, mutual-aid banking apps that dissolve interest into gift.

And when these earthly labours root us once again in sovereignty—when we have reclaimed agency from algorithms and restored reciprocity with the soil—another horizon reveals itself: space magic. Not the escapist fantasy of deserting a dying world, but the joyous realisation that Earth was always a launchpad, not a prison. The same urge that drives seeds to sprout drives consciousness to look upward. Having learned to tend our home, we may now re-engage the stars—not as plunderers, nor fugitives, but as emissaries of a balanced civilisation. In the lore of the Watchers, it was from the heavens that freedom first whispered its possibilities; returning skyward completes the circle.

Space magic is the art of carrying our hard-won wholeness beyond the atmosphere: rituals written in ion trails, solar sails etched with sigils of gratitude, orbiting observatories that double as temples of wonder, colonies whose first law is reverence for the biome that birthed them. The witch becomes navigator, reading constellations as once she read crow-flight and cloud. Each launch is a spell for continuity; each docking, a liturgy of interdependence. We do not leave because Earth is exhausted—we leave because stewardship has taught us the humility and courage required to meet the wider cosmos as equals.

Thus the circuit closes: from soil to silicon, from silicon to star-fire, all in service of life’s unbroken experiment in freedom. Witchcraft for modern times stands guard at every threshold, ensuring that neither machine nor market nor vacuum erases the mystery at the heart of being. We rise, rooted. We travel, connected. And in that union of earth-sense and sky-sense, the human story begins anew—bright, rebellious, and unafraid.