I was a teenage neopagan.
I experimented with candle and crystal magic, with herbs. I read a lot of books. I even tried a few simple love spells. But even then, I sensed something was off in claims that you could chant a few words, exert your will, and make the world comply — “as ye will it, so mote it be.” The world is complex and resistant to change, much as matter possesses inertia, and I could not unsee that. I grew out of magic and into Christianity, a faith in which you pray that God’s will be done and accept the answer even when it is not the one you wanted. You let go of the responsibility to be in control of everything, even things you cannot possibly control.
Anyway, that early skepticism gives me a particular vantage on the barely submerged world of online witchcraft: spell-sellers on Etsy and ceremonies broadcast on TikTok. Two days before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Jezebel published a piece in which a writer described buying hexes against him from Etsy witches; the story was quickly taken down. There have been repeated campaigns of spells aimed at President Donald Trump — illness, failure, even death. More recently, TikTok witches have posted “justice spells” for Lindsay Clancy, hoping to lighten the consequences of the murder of her three children.
What makes so many people, many of them educated and intelligent, so certain that by exerting their wills in this way they can change the world?
The ancient hunger for control
The hunger for control is ancient, rooted in life’s will to survive. Animals show a clear preference for agency over helplessness. Under operant conditioning or ordinary training, they readily develop superstitious-seeming behaviors — repeated head motions, lever pressing, ritualized sequences — that look purposeful even when they have no causal effect. (This is also why the internet is well supplied with funny animal videos.)
Humans share the same preference. What sets us apart is that we invent stories. A story creates an imaginary model of the world that may or may not track reality. Stories are especially useful for explaining things that in fact lie beyond our control: thunderstorms, floods, or the way Joe fell in love with Mary after she burned a pink sheet of paper covered with his name. Magic and storytelling grow from the same root, though magic is probably the older of the two. Both treat language, ritual, and intention as instruments that can close the gap between will and outcome.
But magic is only one way in which humans have tried to control an unbearably complex world. Conspiracy theories, communism, the dream of comprehensive central planning, and utopian schemes all draw on the same drive: the conviction that force of will, properly organized, can master the world around us.
The spell and the plan
Central planning, comprehensive climate management, and utopian political schemes are not sober alternatives to magical thinking. They often run on the same underlying mechanism. A complex, frightening, or frustrating reality is reduced to a story with an identifiable agent of harm. Once the media the person trusts, the political authorities she accepts, or the online subculture she inhabits name that agent, the will has a target. Ritual, ideology, or policy then becomes the technique for acting against it. Modern witchcraft is simply the most explicit and transparent version of the pattern. (Interestingly, this closely parallels Saul Alinsky’s famous Rule 13: Pick a target, personalize it, freeze it, polarize it.)
In the online witchcraft cases, the storytelling is unusually clear.
- Charlie Kirk, or Trump, or the justice system in the Clancy case, is presented by trusted sources as a primary source of danger or injustice.
- The practitioner accepts that framing.
- The spell is then aimed at the named target — illness, failure, exposure, a lighter sentence, whatever the desired correction may be.
- The ritual supplies the feeling of agency that the scale of the actual problem has denied her.
The same structure appears in the non-magical versions. Communism identifies the capitalist class or the market itself as the malicious force; the plan is the technique of control. Certain climate narratives identify industrial civilization or specific political opponents as the decisive agents of catastrophe; the policy suite becomes the preferred spell. Conspiracy theories perform the identical reduction: a diffuse threat is given a face and a name so that will and attention can be focused against it.
In every case, the world is first rewritten as a story in which the uncontrollable has an address. Once it has an address, the ancient drive for control knows where to aim.
When solutions do not scale
Part of the problem with these non-magical solutions is that individual remedies do not scale. The old saying is familiar: feed a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime. That is generally true, barring misfortune or sloth. Scale the same logic to a community or a nation, however, and the dynamics change. Feeding everyone through a bureaucracy does not produce gratitude; there is no face left to be grateful to. It produces dependence and entitlement instead. Teach an entire nation to fish, and you multiply the chances of misfortune and sloth, while also risking the collapse of the fishery or fishing resource itself.
The analogy is imperfect, but it points to something real. A small commune of sufficiently dedicated people can sometimes make shared arrangements work. Communism, as a scaled system, does not. Yet mankind, being simple-minded and prone to magical thinking, continues to try. We keep attempting central planning, comprehensive climate control, and dozens of other projects that treat complex adaptive systems as if they were merely large versions of a small, simple problem. Instead of reliably filling bellies, the scaled-up version often ends in secondary problems: anger, scarcity, and conflict.
The weight man cannot carry
When the power to transform reality is relocated from God to Man, the human subject is asked to carry a weight it cannot sustain. Knowledge remains partial. Motives remain mixed. Power remains limited and often self-defeating. The result is not liberation, but strain. The control drive, now without an external limit, intensifies. It demands that politics, technology, therapy, and culture deliver what only a transcendent source can provide.
This recognition of scale is one of the quiet functions of genuine faith. By locating ultimate transformative power outside the human will, it continually reminds us that we are small creatures in an enormous and sometimes unfriendly universe. Contingency, suffering, and death are not design flaws; they are permanent features of the condition, and perhaps features rather than bugs. When we lose that reminder, the human will and ego tend to inflate. We begin to treat our own projects as if they could close the gap between human desire and cosmic reality.
We are growing less grounded. Ironically, independence-minded nations such as America make the loss especially visible. Real competence in narrow, high-control domains — industrial capacity, medical advances, the Moon landing, sustained presence in space — naturally breeds a bias toward agency. Past victories become evidence that the limits are merely temporary. Humility is harder when you have a track record of bending some parts of reality to your will. The temptation is to treat all of reality as similarly bendable.
It is no accident that Christianity — and witchcraft — began among slaves and women, people thoroughly unable to control their own destinies. For those whose lives were defined by constraint, a message that did not require them to seize control of history, but instead located dignity and ultimate justice outside the reach of earthly masters, had immediate force. Humility came more easily when powerlessness was the daily condition and magic proved less than efficacious. In a high-agency culture, the same humility must be chosen, and the choice is costly.
We need that humility. We need God, even if only to balance out our other traits. Without some reliable check on the human will’s tendency to inflate, the same capacities that produce competence and ambition also produce overreach, narrative distortion, and the demand that reality conform to human preference. And it produces monsters: totalitarian leaders, well-meaning administrators with flawed agendas, scientists who catastrophically overreach. An external reference point that does not flatter the will is one of the few things that has repeatedly proven capable of restraining that tendency at scale. Without it, we keep mistaking comforting but fictional stories of control for control itself.
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