Why Modern Feminism Keeps Turning to Witchcraft

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Why does a pop album about female power sounds so much like witchcraft?

[00:00:05]Guys, we got to talk about Florence and the Machine's latest album, Everybody Scream. Now, I know liking Florence Machine, I've been told it's kind of like Gen Y or Millennial, but just Google her, look her up on Apple Music.

[00:00:19]I'm sure you've seen her music in movies and on the radio if you still listen to the radio. But this is the deal. Why does this album about female empowerment come up so flat? Because what I think when you listen to it, it will show you that feminism's real promises about how we can control our own bodies and how bodily autonomy and empowerment are the pinnacle of success and how we find happiness. It's all lies. The album was inspired or maybe compelled by Florence's decision to step back from constant touring to pursue a family in her late 30s. But that longing ended in the loss of her child in a terrifying near-death experience with an ectopic pregnancy. When we look at the album's lyrics, we find a very specific spiritual worldview. There are songs on this album with names like sympathy magic, witch dance, the old religion, and my personal favorite, You Can Have It All, which is a huge lie. Florence reveals a spirituality that's rooted in ritual and selfdefin.

[00:01:29]And the songs are actually revealing a woman desperate for peace, but the spirituality that she turns to is chaotic. At one point she talks about reaching to the ancestral plane and the witches that she's communing with say, "How should we know?" as if they don't have any wisdom for her. It doesn't rely on the natural transcendence or the objective moral order of any kind. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Florence shared that she was looking for meaning regarding the loss of her child. She said, quote, "Everywhere I looked, I found stories of witchcraft. No one could tell me why this was happening when no one can tell you why. You're looking to find meaning.

[00:02:12]You're looking to find a way to understand it and also some kind of control. Florence Welsh became famous in a world that told women they could have everything. The career, the freedom, the money, the self- definitionf, the whole you go girl package. Florence has talked about turning to the occult and witchcraft practices in her larger search for meaning and to process grief and to have some control. She even said she got quote a literal cauldron. You see this dark spirituality places the self at the center of the universe like a god. It's a spirituality that believes we can define reality through the sheer power of our own will. This framework is no accident. It follows a pattern identified by author Carrie Gres in her latest work, Something Wicked.

[00:03:01]Lawrence's album is a perfect case study about how this shadow religion uses pop culture to spread. It's a framework where autonomy, ritual, and self-exression become the new sacraments used to navigate a world without traditional faith. Modern women who are often raised in secular families largely lack a framework to grapple with their deepest questions about life, death, and suffering. Many of them are following their feminist foremothers from history into the occult, seeking to fill the void. Young women aren't just looking for aesthetics. They're looking for a way to hold their life together. And right now, their greatest hope is in a pop/rock concert that's posing as a satanic ritual that's literally being sponsored by my arch nemesis, Planned Parenthood, the greatest killer. are the largest killer of human life in the United States of America. The houses working for young women in this generation. Are they finding happiness?

[00:04:02]Are they finding peace in this occult like spirituality? I don't think so. I mean, look at every single statistic that comes out showing that young women have higher anxiety, depression, suicidal ideiation rates. It's overwhelming. But throughout this album, we see a raw competing desire breaking through almost every song. And it's the desire to be loved, chosen, pursued, and protected. The tension, the natural tension that is there between this ideal of the invincible woman, yet the longing of the human heart is impossible to ignore. And it's actually why this cultural moment matters so much right now. It reveals the cracks in the whole feminist promise that this bodily autonomy gives us happiness that it's enough for us as humans or as women.

[00:05:00]Ultimately, this music isn't just ideological. It's a cry of pain based on feminist cultural expectations. Florence Wells should be the pinnacle of female happiness. She rose to the top in a female dominated industry. She has the cultural power to shape the views of millions of young women, and her fame and success give her the freedom to decide what she wants her future to look like. Instead, though, her album exposes how modern culture celebrates freedom, productivity, and achievement, but often fails women when they're in the midst of grief and suffering. And we can't just blame men who want to use our bodies for pleasure, who want to profit off of our despair, because it was feminists who told us that achievement and productivity would lead to happiness, fulfillment, feeling powerful. Feminism promised us freedom and fulfillment, but instead it's left women across America and really across the world, feeling exhausted, feeling confused, feeling like they can't ever fill this longing in their heart. But freedom without meaning doesn't make you whole, doesn't heal your grief. It just leaves you searching, exhausted, confused, and empty. This album serves as a reminder that the language of power and autonomy can feel incredibly hollow when your body is breaking and your heart is mourning a loss that material success and productivity simply can't fix. This experience extends beyond the album and into the live tour, which functions as a kind of modern liturgy or congregation.

[00:06:48]On tour, it seems that Florence's fans don't simply view her as a popstick. To her audience, she is a performer, a priestess, and even a symbolic offering.

[00:06:59]The fans aren't just attending a concert. They're participating in a synchronized ritual. Some have said that there is a God-shaped hole in the heart of every human. For centuries, ritualistic lurggical worship of God provided spiritual release and filled that hole in hearts throughout Western civilization. Secularization may have stripped these acts of worship away from our civilization, but hearts haven't changed. They still search for ritual, liturgy, and worship. And if Florence Walsh is offering that to young women, they will come. To understand why this spiritual experimentation often feels so incomplete, we can apply Father Robert Spitzer's framework of the four levels of happiness. These are one pleasure, two ego, three love and contribution, and four transcendence. Because modern feminism places autonomy above all, it doesn't have a framework to move past the first two levels of happiness, pleasure and ego. Schwarz's album cycles intensely through pleasure and ego, and she reaches for love desperately. But because of her worldview and her work remain rooted in self-defin rather than the higher moral order, she can't quite get a hold of love and contribution. And she can never arrive at the fourth level of true lasting transcendence. In the end, we've been left with a pretty sobering truth.

[00:08:24]Autonomy alone cannot help us heal from grief. And self-expression can't make us feel whole.