The occultists of yesteryear gathered in covert covens or at ley lines where the veil between natural and supernatural is rumored to run thin. Today, they gather at the local Marriott. 

On the last weekend in April, the Satanic Temple hosted SatanCon in one of the franchise’s Boston hotels. Over 800 people attended what organizers called the “largest Satanic gathering in history.” The convention’s programming included lectures about deconstructing religious upbringing, reclaiming the trans body through “a/theistic” strategies, reimagining Lilith as an archetype for abortion, and understanding the BIPOC experience in Satanism.

To participate in the convention, attendees had to provide proof of COVID vaccination and wear an N-95, KN-95, or disposable surgical mask. These Satanists trust the science. In fact, the Satanic Temple was founded on that very principle. “Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world—never the reverse,” the Satanic Temple website claims. 

The Satanic Temple believes in science more than they believe in Satan himself. Reminiscent of the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ in Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood, the Satanic Temple proclaims that “to embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions.” 

The beliefs of these Satanists align neatly with progressive cultural hegemony, but their purported disbelief in Satan doesn’t make him any less real. Clearly, there is something beyond mere reason at the heart of their “Hail Satan!” chants and their parodies of Christian liturgy. It’s impossible to view the antics of SatanCon without sensing that Satan delights in their childish disbelief in both God and the Father of Lies.

“The kinds of occultism that are popular now are based on worldviews which, if you look back historically, emerge parallel with Enlightenment rationalism and secularism,” Esmé Partridge, a British writer and scholar, told me during a phone interview. Partridge, who researches Enlightenment theories of religion and wrote an award-winning dissertation about spirituality in a digital age, called occultism “the ideal liberal spirituality” because it seeks to conform reality to individual desire. 

SatanCon is not a flash in the pan. Rather, it is part of a years-long rise in cultural interest in the occult. As religious belief declines and young people search for a sense of control, occultism has become increasingly faddish. The young people who have rejected old-time religion are particularly susceptible to religion of a different kind, one that seeks to conform reality to the individual will.

All this speak of the devil has apparently drawn him out. Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, an exorcist and author of A Diary of an American Exorcist: Demons, Possession, and the Modern-Day Battle Against Ancient Evil, told me that exorcists throughout the country are seeing “a sharp rise in requests for exorcisms.” 

The numbers reported by another exorcist, Fr. Vince Lampert, confirm Rossetti’s assessment. Fr. Lampert said that, prior to 2020, he received around 2,000 inquiries each year. Since then, that number has nearly doubled to about 3,500 inquiries per year. 

Opening the door to the supernatural is easier than one might think. Fr. Lampert, who wrote Exorcism: The Battle Against Satan and His Demons, explained that demons can enter a person’s life through various means.

“Demons are very legalistic,” he explained. “If somebody gives a demon a right over them, then the demon is going to take advantage of that. It doesn’t matter whether the person has done that directly or indirectly.” Occult paraphernalia like tarot cards, Ouija boards, horoscopes, or crystals sound harmless enough—and often they are—but they are not nearly as harmless as our culture would like to believe. Though there are no predictable outcomes, these objects can serve as introductions to the supernatural world. Even when engaged in unseriously, silly games can become the devil’s playground.

Lampert credits rising engagement with the occult, both light and serious, to the nation’s declining faith. “People still want to fill the void or the need in their life for the supernatural,” he said. 

This natural attraction to the supernatural was what intrigued Dr. Abigail Favale about the occult before she converted to Catholicism. Favale, a writer and professor in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, was raised Evangelical but wandered through modern skepticism and postmodern feminism as a young woman. When she was in graduate school, Favale worked at an occult shop that sold crystals—“in other words, rocks,” she quipped—tarot cards, angel cards, and other occult materials. 

“I just thought it was kind of fun and diverting. I didn’t take it super seriously,” she told me. “I [had] settled into the default skepticism that most moderns have.” 

Years later, after Favale had entered the Catholic Church, she started to notice doors opening inexplicably in her house. She knew that she wasn’t imagining things, so she went to a priest. He gave Favale blessed salt, which has been used by the Church for protection and exorcism since the time of Christ. That night, she took the salt throughout her home and prayed an ancient prayer of exorcism. “The next morning, both our front door and our back door were wide open when I woke up. Again, there was no good explanation,” she said.

Favale began to wonder if the inexplicable phenomena could be tied to something that was inside the house—something desperately trying to get out, rather than something attempting to break in. Then she found an old souvenir from working at the occult shop: a deck of tarot cards hidden away in the attic. “It was weird. When I found it, I knew that this was what I needed to get rid of. And so I did,” she said. “I burned them.”

“I was at a point in my life where I was very much on the precipice of a much deeper conversion and a real purging of sin. And there was this intense spiritual pushback to that,” Favale reminisced. “I can’t rationally explain those experiences that I’ve had except through the presence of something supernatural going on,” she said. “It showed me that I had brought something into my life just by being open to that [occult] environment…. Just playing around opens doors.” 

Now Favale is beginning to consider the relationship between our world of screens and the darker powers. “I do wonder about the way we are now so immersed in technology as being a tool for the demonic in a way that maybe magic used to be,” she said. “This is our magic now, and so there are similar dangers and temptations about how we use technology that can be manipulated by the enemy of human nature.” 

The digital world has proven particularly amenable for those seeking to explore or manifest their darker desires. Intrigued by the rising prominence of occult-related content on TikTok, Partridge conducted extensive research on the social media platform to determine whether digital subcultures like WitchTok, a group of social media influencers that pushes occult content, reflect the disenchantment of secular modernity or whether they instead indicate a revival of religious sentiment. She found that the content shared by self-professed witches and magicians overwhelmingly mirrors the individualism, skepticism, and rationalism of modern liberalism. 

The digital mediums that have contributed to rising interest in the dark side of the supernatural have also turned the occult into a lifestyle aesthetic. Some people still read palms, but algorithms have become the contemporary crystal ball, closely attuned to the user and his desires. TikTok, it turns out, will show just what you want to see.

“You can never really tell how serious people are,” Partridge said. Some creators merely jump on and off of trends, but others find themselves enmeshed in the dire realities of dabbling in the dark arts. They report conversations with Satan, lingering tinnitus in the wake of “magick” rituals, and unwelcome paranormal activity. 

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“There is certainly an overlap between WitchTok and, generally speaking, leftist politics,” Partridge said. “There is an irony in a lot of these young people trying to seek something alternative in so-called alternative spiritualities when those are really based on almost identical premises to secular liberal modernity.”

Heresies recur throughout history, but today’s occultists have chosen a particularly modern heresy—one that rejects God in favor of the individual will, exchanges religion for secular orthodoxies, and glorifies a “freedom” that is little more than slavery. In their pride, these occultists seek to forge a new, enlightened path, but they lack the wherewithal to notice that they tread a well-worn walk.

Pride in man’s power to reshape reality quickly bumps up against the limits of human creativity. Man cannot live irreligiously, and he is liable to substitute a false theology for the truth and call it free thinking. But whether you call it progressivism, occultism, or “Libertarian Gothic” pastiche, the rejection of religion just leads to a different kind of zealotry.