“Magic of chaos.” Trend hunters on either side of the Atlantic are in any case making them their target. Paradoxically, magic appears as a pragmatic recourse, a vital jolt, a way of anchoring oneself in the world and in one’s life at a time when everything seems to unite to make you feel unsteady and weaken you.” Like the #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc movements, witchcraft would therefore be a way for women to free themselves while finding inner peace, presenting a real escape in a troubled world. Should we now be talking about a third wave created by the prevalence of witches on social networks? This is Chollet’s theory: “Those who practice witchcraft grew up with ‘Harry Potter,’ but also with the series ‘Charmed’ - whose heroines are three witch sisters - and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ - in which Willow, at first a shy high school student, becomes a powerful witch - which may have played a part. In particular, TV series contributed to changing the image by depicting independent women who wielded a certain amount of power over men as witches. In the 1990s, the second witchcraft wave, the witch became sexy. In the era of hippies, the Witches International Craft Association organized its first world congress of witchcraft in Central Park, while in France the writer Xavière Gauthier launched the magazine Sorcières in 1975. A new kind of worship has been born on social media, where magical recipes, purification rituals and mystical videos are shared. This is reflected in the keywords #witchesofinstagram, which garners more than 3 million posts, #witch or #witchy, which have 9.3 million and 2 million hits, respectively. Not counting the blogs and e-commerce sites dedicated to them, it’s mainly on Instagram that Witches 2.0 are found.

“Today, witches do their shopping on the internet.” “In any case, fewer and fewer of them are coming in,” laments the owner. Anyone looking for a book on witches may be disappointed, there’s nothing like that in this curious bazaar (if you are a real witch, what is the need to meditate on your own condition?). Pendulums, esoteric books, tarot cards, magic stones… Since its opening fifteen years ago, La Librairie du bonheur, long praised by the witches of the Paris, offers more or less the same occult and divinatory objects it always has. At 8 rue Bréa, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, time seems to have stopped.

Sorcières mona chollet english