Original Magic: The Rituals and Initiations of the Persian Magi - Michael M. Hughes 2018

Witches and Occultists versus Kings and Nazis

The history of magic being used against oppressive authorities and regimes could fill a series of books, so we will only be able to skim the surface and look at some of the more notable examples. It may be useful to first ask why marginalized and dispossessed people turn to magical means to resist their oppressors.

Magic has always been inherently transgressive—socially, sexually, spiritually, and ideologically—making witches, Druids, magicians, and cunning folk the bane of, and an easy target for, political and religious authoritarians. Magic in the hands of peasants subverts the rule of church and state, and witches and shamans living on the outskirts of villages occupy the borderlands between the comforts of “civilization” and raw nature. Magic is anarchic, wild, and antistructural. It is no wonder it has always terrified those in power, and easy to see why it has so often been employed by the powerless against the dominator culture.

But whether it’s the sixteenth-century Scottish witch Isobel Gowdie cursing her landlord, enslaved Africans using Vodou and Hoodoo to fuel their uprisings in Haiti and the United States, Gerald Gardner and his coven raising a cone of power to keep the Nazis from invading England, the acid-fueled Yippies exorcising and levitating the Pentagon in the late 1960s, or feminist witches staging an occupation against a nuclear power plant, magic has always been a tool of resistance.

Let us now gaze into our scrying mirror and relive some of the more intriguing instances of resistance magic through the ages.