21ST CENTURY MAGIC We
investigate why tarot, spirituality and the arcane continue to bewitch and beguile the modern world
Midsummer’s night – when the skies over Britain’s highlands and islands have scarcely deepened to black, before they begin to blush with daybreak – falls on 21 June this year. To mark the summer solstice, women across the country will make the pilgrimage to Stonehenge to observe pagan traditions, from reciting poems to laying down a sprig of meadowsweet. I am amazed to find that, for the first time, I am preparing to join them. This comes as a surprise: I suffer neither fools nor faeries gladly – but then, the cynic in me has always happily rubbed along with a permanent sense of curiosity. Since I have tentatively started exploring magic, it has become clear I am not alone: these days, alternative rituals, spells and symbols can be found in most walks of modern life – and are often hiding in plain sight.
The artistically inclined seem – as we might expect – naturally drawn to the arcane, from the musician Florence Welch, who started a coven as a schoolgirl and has been bringing occult words and motifs to her audience ever since, to the fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, who celebrated mystic rituals in her recent exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries. Similarly, the anarchic nature of paganism appeals to politically radical women: Vivienne Westwood presented her latest collection with the rallying cry of ‘Politicians are criminals and I am a witch,’ while a coven in New York placed a hex on Brett Kavanaugh last year.
Why now? One reason may be that there has never been so much choice, personally and professionally, for us: how to live, where to work, who to love. Politically, all bets are off, and the situation feels out of our control. Pursuits such as tarot reading are, perhaps, a way of finding order amid confusion. Certainly, history suggests that a sense of loss or uncertainty can manifest itself in a longing for the esoteric; the fatalities of war and disease in 19th-century Britain led to the Victorians’ desire to communicate with the dead, which gave rise to spiritualism and the wildly popular séances.
Seen this way, parallels between mindfulness and magical thinking reveal themselves. Both facilitate the concept of training the mind to see the same reality from a fresh perspective; both champion the power of positive thinking. The inspiring affirmations that appear daily on Instagram are akin to incantations: pithy, invigorating or comforting one-liners that life coaches encourage clients to chant like a mantra.
Clearly, witchery has come a long way since it was deemed synonymous with devil-worship, and its adherents punished with ostracism or death. Even the Oxford English Dictionary has been changing its definitions: in editions published between 2000 and this year, these have ranged from ‘sorceress, woman supposed to have dealings with the Devil or evil spirits’ to ‘old hag’, ‘fascinating girl or woman’ and ‘person who follows or practises modern witchcraft’.
Only the final definition chimes with the witches I have met, who have been fighting to reclaim the word for years. Christina Oakley Harrington, the founder of Treadwell’s, an occult bookshop in Bloomsbury, lived separate lives for 11 years, as a witch and as a
history professor at the University of Surrey, before ‘coming out’. ‘I’d have lost my job if the university had found out, because until the late Eighties, the term was still heavily associated with satanism,’ she says. Things began to change when an enlightened female professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, Jean La Fontaine, took up the cause of witches who were, at the time, being wrongly accused of all manner of crimes in the tabloid press. La Fontaine collaborated with the government to author a 1994 paper that disproved the stories and brought an end to the worst of the allegations; still, it is only in the past six years that the taboo around the term has truly been lifted. ‘A beautiful thing has happened, whereby women are using “witch” as a metaphor, almost,’ Oakley Harrington observes. ‘They wear the word like a cloak of strength.’
Creative industries and pop culture have been quick to react to the increased appetite for witchcraft. Netflix has revived the cult television show Sabrina the Teenage Witch; the Ashmolean Museum recently held an exhibition examining the subject, entitled ‘Spellbound’; and to celebrate its 50th anniversary, the Scottish National Ballet is reimagining The Crucible via dance. Over at the avantgarde end of British fashion, this season’s collections include Ashley Williams’ accessories bearing the slogan ‘Witch’, and Stephen Jones’ Wizard of Ozinspired pastelpink and rubyred pointy hats, which accompany Ryan Lo’s ethereal designs.
Indeed, fashion has a long and intriguing history of linking arms with the occult, particularly tarot – perhaps explained by its focus on storytelling and beguiling designs. Christian Dior famously used to have his cards read whenever he was faced with important decisions, and Maria Grazia Chiuri shares his interest. When designing her 2018 Cruise collection, she came across the Motherpeace Tarot, a colourful deck of cards created by a feminist Californian duo. Some of their most moving, optimistic symbols, such as the Five of Swords (a caution against panic) and the Priestess of Wands (powerful female leadership), found their way onto Chiuri’s pieces. Dior has since collaborated with Selfridges’ inhouse fortunetellers, the Psychic Sisters, and commissioned a card deck designed by the British illustrator Naomi Howorth. Chiuri has brought the tarot motifs into the 2020 Cruise collection, too. ‘If for Christian Dior the tarots and their symbols were amulets, which he used to get in touch with a magical dimension, for me they are keys to get in touch with the ancestral and profound part of each of us – to tell stories and act on the imagination,’ she says. ‘Everyone can interpret them differently.’
For bookish types, there is Litwitchure, a slick, Londonbased ‘literary tarot cabaret and consultancy’, cofounded last year by Fiona Lensvelt, a former Times books editor, and Jennifer Cownie, a creative strategist. They amazed a rapt audience at Port Eliot last summer with their onstage card reading for the writer Nina Stibbe, when the cards revealed accurately that she was secretly getting married the following weekend. Cownie is currently also working with the editor, writer and astrologer Jessica Adams, who has noticed the steep rise in interest in the cosmic and mystic: traffic to her interactive online Tarot Tuesday series has hit the millions in the past year, mostly universityeducated women, according to Google Analytics, and her last card reading, auctioned off by the Red Cross in aid of Grenfell Tower victims, went for £1,000. Her latest book, Secret Star Language, is out next year. ‘Tarot has come such a long way,’ she observes. ‘The professionalism and quality of tarot readers have skyrocketed, as women juggle their lives and look for answers.’
It is a notion supported by her friend, the writer Daisy Waugh who, like her father Auberon and grandfather Evelyn, has a strong streak of cynicism, and initially thought the practice was ‘half ludicrous, half slightly scary’. After enrolling on a course as research for a novel, she became unexpectedly hooked, and now gives readings from her London garden office. Tarot reading is not the same as fortunetelling, Waugh explains; instead, it throws up questions and opens pathways that won’t have occurred to a client before. ‘We all have this magical superawareness in us, but mostly choose not to acknowledge, or consciously listen to it,’ she says. This may sound like a progressive perspective, but it was a hundred years ago that Yeats remarked, ‘The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.’ For both, the point is that something ‘other’ has always been in our minds and in reality. In the same way that dreams take us to foreign places, people and scenarios without lifting our head from the pillow at home, witchcraft shows us our lives anew, without the physical situation ever changing.
When Waugh first started tarot, mention of her new ‘hobby’ was met with sneers; she is amazed by how much attitudes have changed in the six years since. ‘It is hard to pinpoint why. Possibly people are looking for hope and alternatives to the current chaos of reality,’ she muses. ‘For me, it makes me feel less alone in the universe – without the strictures of religion.’ Indeed, in a country where Christianity is steadily in decline and conflicts around faith continue all over the world, a ‘magical realm’ provides a place outside any belief system for atheists to send hopes, requests, dreams and apologies. The spellcasting I have witnessed is similar to prayers in church, but each person has their own private idea of where their thoughts are going.
If talk of the transcendental disagrees with pragmatists and sceptics, it is worth noticing how, today, even scientists are exploring the potential of magical thinking to change people’s health or minds. The final section of the Wellcome Collection’s current exhibition ‘Smoke and Mirrors: the Psychology of Magic’ demonstrates the proven results of experimental research conducted by Jay Olson, a magicianturnedneuroscientist based at McGill University in Montreal. Participants felt that their moods had lifted, and that specific thoughts had been slotted into their minds during a session in what they were told was a psychic machine, but was in fact simply a defunct MRI scanner.
Changing someone’s mind without chemical or physical intervention does appear to be a type of magic – although it seems an incongruous word to hear in a sterile medical unit in an academic setting. ‘With this treatment, although we are deploying “fake magic” – in the sense that the machine is not actually psychic – it produces a real magical effect,’ Olson says. ‘And I say magical, because it is outwardly inexplicable.’
It is a sign of the times that the highest echelons of academia are taking ‘occult’ ideas seriously. In fact, there has possibly never been a more interesting time to do so. The magic revolution appears to be a peaceful one: not aggressively subverting or overthrowing received wisdom, but opening ourselves up to the alternatives. Personally, I like the magical thinking of Marian Leatherby, the magnificent, charmingly recalcitrant 92yearold protagonist of Leonora Carrington’s 1976 surrealist novel The Hearing Trumpet, whose outlook seems made for today’s world. She defies society’s depressing expectations of her, cheerfully ignores the patriarchy, and, like her chosen new friends in the novel, lives by her own radical sense of reality, with kindness and a sharp sense of humour. Modern witches are similar such heroines: sisters of outsiders, slow to judge and quick to act, they see ‘pagan’ as a byword for liberal. They are creative, curious and definitely do not ride on broomsticks. You are probably sitting next to one right now.