In Disney+’s Agatha All Along, a teen—initially known only as “Teen,” but later revealed to be Billy, Wanda Maximoff’s (the Scarlet Witch) son—tells the show’s witchy antihero just how much he digs her magic.
“Agatha, confession,” he says. “I know an egregious amount about you. Been obsessed since I first read up on your Salem days.”
Billy isn’t the only one obsessed with pop-culture witchery. According to Disney+, more than 9 million people watched the first episode of Agatha All Along—a substantial number in the fragmented world of streaming. The movie Wicked, a sympathetic origin story of sorts for The Wizard of Oz’s the Wicked Witch of the West, is set to become a box-office monster. (Its originating stage musical is one of the highest-earning Broadway productions of all time.) The witch-hub town of Salem, Massachusetts, drew about 2.2 million visitors in 2022, according to The Ringer—a million of those coming during the month of October alone.
There’s even now a design trend called “witchcore,” which is (according to RealHomes writer Jessie Quinn) “all about embracing a lifestyle of occult-inspired décor and practices such as Tarot card reading, potion making, herbalism and … collecting crystals.”
Granted, it is the season. Every October, popular culture is awash in witches, joining ghosts, vampires, mummies and the like. You might even see a few pint-size witches—their hats almost as tall as they are—come to your door and ask for candy.
But it seems that our society has been particularly, um, spellbound by witches as of late—and they have, as of late, taken a darker turn.
A Pop-Culture Cauldron
Turn the clock back a few hundred years, and witches were no laughing matter. Showing an affinity for witchcraft back then was liable to get you hung or burned at the stake.
(Fun fact: One of my reported ancestors, a Puritan preacher named George Burroughs, was executed as a witch in Salem. He recited the Lord’s Prayer on the scaffold—thought to be impossible for a witch to do at the time—but it did him no good.)
And why were alleged witches so hated and feared? Well, simple: Their powers came straight from the devil. Witches were thought to be in league with Satan, and no community wanted a lot of powerful, curse-wielding devil worshippers running around, right? So even if many convicted witches were guilty of nothing more than running afoul of a neighbor (whose cow might’ve gotten sick at just the wrong time) or using backyard herbs to treat a headache, you can understand the fear.
But by the late 19th century, America was already seeing a switch in witches. They were showing up in advertisements. Frank L. Baum was writing about “good” witches in his Oz books. By the time the TV sitcom Bewitched rolled around in 1964, the pop-culture image of magic users was almost completely divorced from its Satanic underpinnings. They were humorous Halloween staples who wore pointy hats and popped newt hairs in big cauldrons. Their magic often became more of a genetic thing (as we see in the Harry Potter stories) or from harnessing the powers of nature or, well, it just was. But it certainly didn’t come from Satan. No sirree, said pop culture.
In some circles, witches have morphed into symbols of female empowerment, something that Agatha All Along offers a nod to. As Agatha tries to form her coven to conquer the magical challenge of “The Road,” Teen tells us that covens are the “truest form of sisterhood.”
But despite society’s best efforts, you can’t divorce pop-culture witchery from witchcraft’s spiritual underpinnings. And that darkness is being acknowledged more and more.
Get Out the Brooms
Agatha from Agatha All Along is explicitly tied to Salem, and the show’s title sequence is awash in not just pop-culture witches (Bewitched even gets a nod) but in pentagrams and tarot cards and artwork taken from witch trials centuries earlier. The otherwise silly witches of Disney’s Hocus Pocus movies explicitly worship Satan, even bowing down to a guy in a devil costume by mistake.
And in some ways, you could say that even the themes of Satanism itself are being treated more lightly these days. In Peacock’s new show Hysteria!, a high school heavy metal band decides to “embrace” devil worship as part of their stage act, just as their small town is wringing their hands over the reputed ritualistic murder of another high schooler.
“None of us is remotely into Satanism,” one band member says, arguing about their turn to the literal dark side.
“That never stopped Ozzy [Osbourne] from using the devil to sell records,” the leader counters.
“Satanism is in,” the band member says. And even though the show takes place in the late 1980s, the same just might be said today.
In our increasingly secular culture, where just 58% of Americans say they believe in the devil (according to a 2023 Gallup poll), witchcraft and Satanism apparently feel ripe for light, pop-culture treatment.
That’s a big issue for many Christian families. And it’ll likely only grow in the Octobers to come.
Not all pop-culture witches are created equal. Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger is cut from a different cloth than Hocus Pocus’ Winifred Sanderson. Sabrina Spellman (as portrayed by Melissa Joan Hart in Sabrina the Teenage Witch) would likely balk at the character’s Satanic ancestry in Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. But we should always approach this subject with a great deal of care—if we approach it at all.
The Bible offers plenty of warnings concerning witchcraft and sorcery. And as our pop-culture witches grow darker, parents should be mindful with that sort of entertainment.
Does your family give it all a hard, firm no? It’s not a bad idea. But even if you do wade into entertainment’s witchy waters, remember to talk through these issues with your kids. Ask them to consider where the witches get their magic: Is it Harry Potter-style genetics, or does it come from a darker source, such as Supernatural’s demon-summoning witches? Remind them that real magic is nothing to play around with—perhaps quoting Leviticus 20:6, 1 Samuel 15:23 or any of the many other verses that deal with witchcraft.
And, of course, always remember to point back to God, the source of all power and the home of our hope. Leaning on anything else, including witchcraft, is worthless.
