It seems like fundamentalist Christians are trying to foment sAtaNic paNiC 2.0 (or 3.0 if you count the Puritans). There were large numbers of posts on Threads recently claiming that “hALLoweeN is sAtaNic”. There have also been rumblings about this from the MAGA crowd.
We don’t throw anyone under the bus
One thing we learned from the satanic panic in the late 1980s: we do not throw the Satanists under the bus.
We can point out many things:
- Pagans & Wiccans don’t worship Satan,
- That they are a much smaller group than Pagans,
but we can also point that there at least are three different types of Satanist:
- worshippers of Set from the Egyptian pantheon;
- atheist & anarchist satanists;
- people who worship the Christian devil.
These groups all have different beliefs and values. I met some satanists a few years ago who were promoting kindness and compassion. Similarly the Satanic Temple in the US are feeding people whose SNAP benefits have been taken away.
And we don’t throw folkloric witches under the bus. Some of them worship the folkloric Devil, who promotes joy, pleasure, and resisting authority. (Check out the novel Lolly Willowes for more on this version of the devil.)
Why wouldn’t people in the past have felt tempted to worship the devil when the church was so violently oppressive?
That means that other parts of the community should not be tempted to throw Wiccans (either eclectic or initiated) under the bus, either. Or whoever the next target of suspicion is likely to be.
I also think that people should stop talking publicly about hexing and cursing. The reason that witches are currently tolerated is because most people don’t believe that magic is real. If they thought it was real, things might be very different.
The people who were most harmed by the satanic panic of the 1980s were not actually white middle class Pagans at all; instead it was working class people who were targeted by social workers who thought they had found “satanic ritual abuse”. The same pattern occurred in the witch hunts of the 1600s: poor and marginalized people who didn’t have any allies were persecuted.
We are all on the same bus
We may be travelling to different destinations but we are all on the same bus, and we need to take care of our fellow passengers.
Interfaith dialogue
Another thing is that it’s important to engage in interfaith dialogue with people from other religions, to counter disinformation and build alliances with people of good will.
Interfaith is not an attempt to convert anyone; it’s an attempt by different religions to find common ground and build community.
Dialogue between different groups within the Pagan and magical community is also very important. We have grown much larger and more diverse, and that means we need to work at understanding each other.
There’s a big trend of Wicca-bashing among other types of witches at the moment. It’s not a good time for members of the wider witchy community to be attacking people within the community, if there’s going to be another satanic panic. Please learn about the different types of Wicca and stop talking nonsense about us. Read a well-researched book about it (e.g. by Ronald Hutton or Philip Heselton) instead of watching TikTok videos.
Solidarity and community
Solidarity is key, both within our community, and with other groups that are currently being targeted by the rising tide of fascism: Black people, Indigenous people, Latine people, trans people, disabled people, and poor people. That means organizing together, resisting, taking care of each other. I know there are witches who are doing exactly that, but there seem to be a lot who are just ignoring the whole situation.
Community is key: building common ground and alliances with people who are not like us. We can work together with them on areas where we agree. That doesn’t mean we ignore the areas where we disagree; we continue to advocate for the causes we care about. But everyone is in danger from the twin evils of capitalism and fascism, so we work together to try to defeat them, like the people of the Netherlands just did.
Magical intervention
By all means engage in magical intervention, but if you can organize and resist in other ways, do that too. Mat Auryn recently wrote about both magical and physical ways to help, and about how hope is a powerful thing.
Like a lot of people, the more overwhelmed I feel by everything that’s happening in the world, the harder it is to do magic, but our spiritual lives are what sustains us in the face of everything that is happening.
And if you’re currently lucky enough to live somewhere that does not seem to be as affected by climate change and the rising tide of fascism as other places: start resisting and organizing where you are.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
~ Martin Luther King, Letter from Birmingham Jail, 16 April, 1963
Dowsing for Divinity 
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