In Witchcraft Goes Mainstream, author Brooks Alexander takes careful note of this pagan resurgence. "The state of the Neo-pagan movement is healthy, confident, and growing more so every day," Alexander reports. "The first generation of elders has begun passing its paganism onto the next generation of offspring. This means that what was once a band of religious oddballs has become a functioning religious community. It has become an active, self-sustaining alternative culture, a fact that has enormous implications for the future of our society--and for the place of Christianity within it. The Neo-pagans are on a roll and they know it. They sense that the Christian culture is in full retreat, and they are advancing energetically as it recedes."

According to historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, organized witchcraft more or less died out in the early 1700s. As Russell explains, a naturalistic worldview largely eliminated the role of witches, demons, and evil spirits from the popular imagination.

How was this reversed? Though various Neo-pagan impulses can be traced back to the early years of the twentieth century--including the revival of Nordic paganism by the Nazi Party in Germany--the organized resurgence of witchcraft can be traced to the influence of Gerald Gardner.

Gardner "rediscovered" witchcraft and repackaged it as "Wicca," focusing the movement on a return to nature worship, harvest cycles, female reproductive energy, and other themes.

Largely due to its rejection of Christianity and its focus upon feminine power, Wicca attracted interest in the emerging feminist movement. By the 1990s, thousands of radical feminists had identified themselves as Wiccans, and Neo-pagan rites and practices had been incorporated into several streams of feminist thought.

By the late 1990s, witchcraft was being repackaged for the young. In Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation by author Silver Ravenwolf (a witchcraft name), young girls are introduced to witchcraft for adolescents. As the book promises, girls age eleven and up are invited to become "pentacle-wearing, spell-casting, completely authentic" witches. Among the spells offered to young girls is an "Un-Ground Me" spell, intended to negate parental energy.

As Brooks Alexander reports, "Rejecting Christianity has been a basic part of Neo-paganism from the beginning. It is one of the several ways the movement has traditionally expressed its rejection of the main society. But today, in a fascinating historical irony, it is also one of the ways the movement finds itself increasingly in harmony with the main society, which is in hot pursuit of its own Christ-rejecting agendas."

The idea that Wicca and Neo-paganism represent a way for individuals to oppose the dominant society is thoroughly documented by author Sabina Magliocco, a professor of anthropology at California State University at Northridge. According to Magliocco, herself a participant in pagan rituals, "Witches and Pagans construct their identity in contrast to that of the dominant American culture. Oppositionality is part of the process of identity creation; it operates in the lives of individuals as well as in larger groups and polities. At its most basic level, it involves adopting an identity antithetical to that of some other individual or group in order to differentiate self from other."