Witchcraft Growing In Popularity? No Big Surprise

It appears that growing numbers of young (Western) women are flocking to witchcraft to give meaning and purpose to their lives. Of course they are. The neo-pagan mindset of most everyone in today's Western society brings with it a recrudescence of those who drop all pretense and self-identify as pagan -- this is a difference of degree rather than of kind, a flash of spume atop the wave. The practice of witchcraft or other "dark arts" is tailor-made for a people who lack introspection and self-control, but rather yearn to bend reality to their sundry impulses.

But there's something different and degraded about the modern variant of paganism. It springs not from a genuine sense of life as developed through shared culture, but rather from the decay of a culture that unleashes everyone to declare himself his own god in a fit of narcissism and hubris. I stumbled on an insightful quote from C.S. Lewis hinting that a neo-pagan is of necessity worse than his forebears:

A post-Christian man is not a Pagan; you might as well think that a married woman recovers her virginity by divorce. The post-Christian is cut off from the Christian past and therefore doubly from the Pagan past . . . .