The 90s Occult Revival: I Was There. You Have No Idea.
It wasn't all velvet chokers and Fairuza Balk. Mostly, it was bad information and even worse music.
Alright, here’s the next one. Pour yourself something strong. You might need it.
If you were alive and vaguely alternative in the 1990s, you remember the vibe.
It permeated everything, a thin film of moody, supernatural cool. It was in the music, the fashion, the movies. We were all swimming in it.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on TV, making monster-of-the-week battles feel like a legit metaphor for high school. The X-Files had us all believing the truth was out there, wrapped in layers of government conspiracy and alien biology.
And then there was The Craft.
Let’s talk about The Craft.
That movie was a cultural ground zero. It took four archetypal high school outsiders, dressed them in the Hot Topic fall collection, gave them a killer alternative rock soundtrack, and unleashed them on an unsuspecting suburbia. They levitated. They cast glamours. They changed their hair color with a whisper. They walked in slow motion through the school hallways while a cover of "How Soon Is Now?" played. It was, for a generation of kids, the ultimate power fantasy.
It made magic look cool.
I was there for all of it. I was noob, freshly saddled with this cosmic janitorial gig, trying to figure out the rules of a game I never asked to play. And from my perspective, watching the 90s occult revival unfold was like watching a group of toddlers play with a loaded gun they thought was a water pistol.
You remember the funhouse mirror version.
The cool, edgy, empowering story sold to you between commercials. I was the guy behind the mirror, sweeping up the broken glass and dealing with the distorted, pathetic, and occasionally dangerous reality that was spilling out the sides.
You have no idea.
The Rise of the Bookstore Witch
Before the internet completely took over, the revolution began in a much more sacred space: the mall.
Specifically, the chain bookstores. Waldenbooks, Borders, Barnes & Noble. Suddenly, nestled between the Stephen King paperbacks and the self-help section, a new area began to expand: “Mind, Body, Spirit.”
And its flagship product was the paperback witch.
You know the books I’m talking about. The Llewellyn publications with their iconic purple spines. Titles like Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner or To Ride a Silver Broomstick. They were entry-level, Wicca 101 texts that broke down a complex, syncretic new religious movement into a series of digestible, easy-to-follow steps.
They were, in essence, Magic for Dummies.
On one hand, I got it. This was America. You package it, you brand it, you sell it. These books took concepts that had been gatekept for centuries—the elements, lunar cycles, the idea of a divine feminine, the power of focused will—and made them accessible. They gave a language to kids who felt powerless and out of place. It was a net positive, in the same way that giving a kid a plastic toy toolset is a net positive. It lets them mimic the shape of the work without any real danger of them cutting their own fingers off.
The problem, of course, is that some people can’t tell the difference between a toy and a tool.
I started seeing them pop up in the wild.
Small groups of teenagers, huddled in public parks or sneaking into cemeteries after dark. They’d have a brand-new athame they bought from a head shop, a copy of a Scott Cunningham book with the spine barely cracked, and a fistful of candles they probably shoplifted from a Yankee Candle.
I remember one night, around ‘98. I was dealing with a minor issue near a suburban park—something to do with a ley line getting tangled up with a new sewer main, causing all the garden gnomes in a two-block radius to slowly turn to face a specific cul-de-sac. It was a boring, plumbing-related problem. As I was leaving, I saw them. A self-styled coven of four, maybe sixteen years old. They were trying to “draw down the moon.”
They were getting it spectacularly wrong.
Their circle was misshapen, they were mispronouncing everything, and their “Goddess” invocation sounded more like they were nervously trying to order a pizza.
The result wasn't a grand visitation from a lunar deity.
They had, however, managed to attract every stray cat in the neighborhood, who were now sitting just outside their wobbly circle, staring with unnerving intensity.
They had also, I noted with a sigh, managed to stir up a small, localized pocket of psychic residue. It wasn't a demon. It was more of an "elemental of profound suburban ennui." A pathetic little thought-form that fed on teenage boredom and disappointment. It was now sort of oozing around their ankles like invisible, sad Jell-O.
It was harmless, but it was a mess. I had to wait until they got bored and left, then spend twenty minutes shooing away the cats and convincing the ennui-elemental that the local DMV was a far richer feeding ground.
This was the reality of the bookstore witch.
It wasn't dangerous, not really. It was just… messy. And kind of sad. It was kids using a framework for empowerment to mostly just amplify their own insecurities.
The Glamour and the Damage Done
If the bookstore witch was the theory, The Craft was the application. And that movie was a masterclass in one of the most fundamental, and most misunderstood, forms of magic: the glamour.
A glamour isn’t a specific spell. It’s a principle.
It’s the art of making something appear more powerful, more beautiful, more frightening, or more significant than it actually is. It’s a trick of the light. A psychic filter. You don’t change the object; you change the perception of the object. The entire 90s occult boom was one massive, unintentional, pop-culture glamour cast over the real thing.
The Craft made magic look like a supernatural makeover montage. Nancy downs a thimbleful of magical Kool-Aid and suddenly she’s walking on water and tossing bigots through glass windows. It was intoxicating. It was also a lie.
Power like that—the real stuff—doesn’t come from a one-off invocation to a made-up deity named "Manon." (Not that your made-up deity won’t work, mind you, but if instant gratification is what you want I suggest masturbation.)
It comes from years of grinding, disciplined work. It comes from changing yourself, fundamentally, on a level most people can’t even perceive. It’s a slow, painful, internal process. It’s not an external shopping spree for revenge fantasies.
After that movie, my “caseload” of petty magical vandalism skyrocketed. It was like a psychic graffiti spree. Every teenager who got dumped was trying to cast a love spell they got from a Geocities site. Every kid who got bullied was trying to hex their tormentor.
I wasn’t fighting ancient evils. I was dealing with the metaphysical fallout. A love spell gone wrong doesn't usually make the person fall in love with you. More often, it just festers. It creates a sticky, obsessive psychic connection that feels like having a piece of spiritual flypaper stuck to you. Both parties end up miserable, plagued by intrusive thoughts and weirdly specific cravings for the other person’s favorite brand of potato chips.
The hexes were even dumber. You can't just point your finger and ruin someone's life. That's not how it works. What you can do is throw a big glob of unfocused, angry, chaotic energy at them. It’s the magical equivalent of throwing a rock at a wasp nest. You might not hit your target, but you’re definitely going to piss something off, and it’s probably going to come after you.
I spent a good chunk of 1996 through 1999 dealing with the backlash. Cleaning up the psychic sewage. Untangling the obsessive loops. Calming down the minor chaotic spirits that had been provoked by a sixteen-year-old’s unfocused rage. It was the least glamorous work imaginable.
The Analog Grind
The other thing you have to understand is how primitive everything was.
This was the dial-up era. There was no Google. There was no Wikipedia. There was no magical TikTok where some influencer could give you a thirty-second, wildly inaccurate summary of the Goetia.
Information was a commodity, and it was work to get it.
My research tools were archaic.
I had Usenet. Newsgroups like alt.magic or alt.pagan. These were raw, unmoderated forums filled with a chaotic mix of genuine seekers, academic occultists, LARPers, and complete lunatics. Sifting through the mountains of garbage to find one useful nugget of information was an exercise in extreme patience.
I had zines. Photocopied, stapled-together pamphlets I’d get through mail order or at shady little bookstores. They were full of typos, personal rants, and occasionally, a brilliant, terrifyingly practical piece of insight you couldn’t find anywhere else.
And I had my old stomping grounds: the library. Specifically, inter-library loan. The pre-internet internet. I’d spend weeks waiting for a rare book to arrive from a university on the other side of the country, only to find it was a terrible translation or the one chapter I needed had been razored out by some previous, equally desperate researcher.
This was the grind. There were no shortcuts. You couldn’t just look up a demon’s sigil. You had to find it. You had to cross-reference it. You had to read the footnotes and pray that the 18th-century monk who transcribed it wasn’t drunk or deliberately trying to mislead you. Every piece of functional knowledge I gained was earned through hours of tedious, frustrating, analog labor. It built a discipline in me that the instant-gratification culture of the modern internet has all but destroyed.
It taught me to value information because I knew, intimately, how much it cost to acquire.
The Real Weirdness
So while the mainstream was playing with its new occult toys, what was actually happening in the shadows? What was keeping me busy?
It wasn't epic battles with CGI monsters. The real stuff was always stranger, more insidious, and far more modern than you’d think.
Let me give you an example from the height of the dot-com bubble, around ‘99. There was a tech startup in Silicon Valley. They were hemorrhaging money, like everyone else, but they had a killer brand. Their logo was sleek, memorable, and minimalist. They were putting it on everything.
The problem was, the freelance graphic designer they’d hired was a chaos magician. Not a particularly good one, but an ambitious one. He’d "charged" the logo with a sigil of his own design, meant to promote virality and success. He’d built a memetic engine right into their corporate identity.
And it kind of worked. The brand got buzz. But his design was flawed. He’d created a closed loop. The sigil didn't just promote success; it fed on the intellectual and creative energy of the company's employees and funneled it back into itself.
The result?
The company became a psychic pressure cooker. Employees started having shared, recurring nightmares about endless white corridors and the sound of a dial-up modem connecting.
The office coffee always tasted faintly of static.
Productivity flatlined because everyone was burned out and perpetually anxious for reasons they couldn't articulate. They thought it was just "startup culture."
I got called in—metaphysically speaking—when the looping energy started to bore a weak spot into the local reality.
The problem wasn’t a demon.
It was a psychic virus, a self-replicating bit of bad code, created by a combination of ambition, arrogance, and Adobe Illustrator.
My job was to perform a "spiritual systems update." I had to "debug" their logo. It involved me sitting in my basement with a printout of their brand guidelines, a lot of coffee, and a very specific, very boring ritual designed to unwind the memetic loop without bankrupting the company.
That was the real magic of the 90s. It wasn't about good versus evil. It was about systems, information, chaos, and the unintended consequences of smart people doing stupid things.
The Echo of the Echo
The 90s revival eventually faded, as all trends do. The velvet chokers were retired. The nu-metal arrived. Everyone moved on.
But it never really went away. It just went dormant, waiting. Now, it’s back. But what we’re seeing today on social media isn't a new revival. It’s the echo of the 90s revival. A copy of a copy. Every idea is a little more diluted, every warning label a little more faded.
I’m not writing this out of some misplaced nostalgia for the days of dial-up and Doc Martens. I’m writing it because you need to understand the lineage of the ideas you’re playing with. You’re playing with the echo of a funhouse mirror reflection of a truth that was already complex and dangerous to begin with.
The mistakes are the same. The hubris is the same. The only difference is that now, the bad information travels at the speed of light. And my job gets that much harder.
So, next time you see a post that makes magic look easy, cool, and effortless, just remember. I was there when the original glamour of was cast. And I’m still here, cleaning up the mess it left behind.
Until next time…
~ V