Spellcraft

Pop Culture Magick: Modern Myths and the Living Current

Pop culture magick isn’t about pretending you’re a Hogwarts student or cosplaying your way to power.

It’s about recognizing myth where it lives now, in the collective imagination, in symbols millions of minds are feeding every day, and in stories that carry emotional and archetypal weight, whether they’re ancient or streaming on Netflix.

What Is Pop Culture Magick?

Pop culture magick is the use of modern symbols, stories, characters, and worlds in magical practice.

At its best, it’s mythic hacking.
It’s working with what the collective subconscious is already charging.
It’s speaking in a language your inner child, your shadow, and your godself can all understand.

Why It Works (When It Does)

Pop culture magick works not because the fictional is real, but because:

  • Emotion charges energy. Stories that move you are already lit with power.
  • Belief creates patterns. Millions of people thinking about a character or concept creates a current.
  • Symbolism is alive. The archetypes in pop culture often mirror the oldest gods, dressed in modern skins.

Examples in Practice

  • Wanda Maximoff (Scarlet Witch) as a vessel for chaos, grief, feminine power, and reality-bending, paralleling Inanna, Apophis, and the Witch of the Wyrd.
  • Darth Vader as a shadow archetype, used in banishing work or inner confrontation rituals.
  • The TARDIS from Doctor Who as a portable astral temple or psychopomp symbol.
  • Pokémon for servitor design and energy-anchoring via familiar motifs.
  • Anime characters as thoughtform-based allies in confidence, courage, or transformation spells.

Cautions & Considerations

  • Don’t confuse symbol with reality. Pop culture magick is symbolic animism, not a religion unto itself (unless you intentionally build it that way).
  • Avoid cultural theft. Working with Black Panther as an ancestral guide is not the same as reverently connecting to African traditional religions.
  • Mind the licensing gods. If you’re invoking Mickey Mouse, understand Disney is a thoughtform of control. Use with caution, or jester energy.

Pop Culture and the Witch Today

A modern witch is a myth-maker.
Pop culture is one of the deepest wells of myth available to us now.

To reject it entirely is to miss the heartbeat of this generation’s sacred stories.
To embrace it without discernment is to risk shallow roots.

But to work with it skillfully?
That’s evolution. That’s enchantment in motion.
That’s magick that walks through the world wearing today’s face.

Case Study: The Charm of Making – Voice as Spellcraft

In the 1981 film Excalibur, the Charm of Making is uttered in Old Irish, a phrase woven with mystery, cadence, and power:

“Anál nathrach, orth’ bháis’s bethad, do chél dénmha.”
(Serpent’s breath, charm of death and life, thy omen of making.)

For many, it’s just a dramatic line.
But in the hands of a witch, it becomes living resonance.

Experimental Use: The Dragon Current

In our tradition, we already work with the dragon as the symbol of the Universal Is, the raw, primal power that underlies creation. The breath of the dragon is not just a metaphor. It is the current of making and unmaking.

The Charm of Making, when spoken with correct tone, vibration, and intent, taps directly into that current.

With training, you can get it to sing through your body.
The spine becomes a flute.
The lungs become bellows.
The dragon wakes.

Why It Works

  • Archetypal Alignment: The Charm mirrors core themes, creation, destruction, breath, serpent, life-death-life.
  • Phonetic Magick: The phrase carries a sonic architecture that vibrates the body like mantra or galdr.
  • Emotional Imprint: For those moved by the film, the phrase already holds emotional and mythic charge.
  • Symbolic Echo: Linking the spoken charm to your dragon work creates resonance across time, self, and story.

Try This:

  • Speak the charm aloud in ritual tone.
  • Breathe into each word from belly to crown.
  • Visualize your spine as the dragon’s body, coiling and rising.
  • Let it activate, not just as a quote, but as a trigger phrase for your power.

Your Turn

  • What characters live in your bones?
  • What stories set your will ablaze?
  • What myths do you live by, whether ancient, comic, or cinematic?

“Dancing with Apophis: Witchcraft in the Shadow of Mercury”

Lean into the Retrograde. Twist the signal. Cast in the static.

But what if the witch doesn’t cower from chaos?

We’ve all heard the warnings:
Don’t sign contracts.
Double-check your emails.
Brace for tech glitches and tangled words.
And above all, don’t cast spells in Mercury Retrograde.

What if we choose to slip into the spiraling signal,  to conjure within the static, to ride the tail of the Serpent of Unmaking himself and rewrite the rules from inside the glitch?

Because this isn’t just Mercury Retrograde; this is a summoning. A signal jam. A psychic hack.
And witches? We were born to speak in backwards tongues.

Shadow Magic Isn’t Passive

The retrograde shadow isn’t a rest stop. It’s the first echo of a storm, and we get to decide if we’re going to build sandbags… or ride the flood.

Yes, it’s a time when things break.
When the ghosts of old conversations knock on the door.
When truths slip between lines of code, and timelines twist like threads in a loom too ancient to name.

But instead of just “working out our shit”…
What if we used the shadow to cast some?

Apophis: The Serpent of the Void

Apophis is the force that challenges Ra each night.
He is entropy, breakdown, the refusal to comply with order.

But that’s not inherently evil. That’s opportunity.
When the structures that constrain are cracking, make something else.

Let Mercury scramble your enemies’ messages.
Let the misfires and missed calls twist around those who would silence truth.
Turn every garbled signal into a ward.
Let every glitch become a gate.

In the Age of Illusions & “Alternative Facts”

We are living in a world built on constructed realities. Misinformation, gaslighting, deep fakes, the entire media-sphere is a labyrinth spun from half-truths and curated chaos. The public is drowning in a sea of “alternative facts,” where the signal is buried in the static. And guess what? That is exactly the terrain Mercury Retrograde thrives on.

This is our playground.

While the masses scramble to fact-check and re-establish “truth,” witches can speak in the language of distortion and projection. Let the unseen sophistication of illusion become our conduit. Where reality is scrambled, magic can float in and reroute the current.

  • Harness the fog: When every feed is saturated in contradiction, layer your own spells in the swirl. Broadcast misdirection to entangle the deceivers’ own webs.
  • Mirror their nonsense: In a realm of gaslighting, mirror the confusion back at their feet. Use verbal sigils that thread contradiction into their messaging machine. Let their own lies immobilize them.
  • Manifest digital chaos: Amplify their nonsense signals by embedding strong witchcraft into viral content. A meme laced with intent travels faster than logic ever could.

Mercury’s retrograde shadow amplifies distortion and confusion, and in that lies opportunity. The more the world splinters in illusions, the more we can engineer our own fractures in systems of control. It’s not about illuminating truth, but weaponizing uncertainty.

Chaos as Spellcraft

For Inspiration:

  • Write a sigil to cause confusion in systems of oppression. Encrypt it in code, scatter it across the web, tuck it into hashtags.
  • Mirror curse: take their own words and twist them back. Mercury’s reversal makes this ripe.
  • Communication tangle jars: use tangled string, broken circuits, reversed speech to bind the mouths of liars.
  • Digital spell bombs: memes, phrases, videos that carry intent. Stealth magick inside the info-stream.

Spell-Weaving Through the Unseen

Try this:

  1. Gather a handful of printed headlines or social media screenshots of blatant alternative facts.
  2. Carve a reversed sigil of chaos into an obsidian mirror.
  3. Arrange your headlines in a spiral around the mirror, face down, source-side hidden.
  4. Chant:
    “Words untrue, fold back on you. Twist the lie into your own. Mirror shards, corruption spawn.”
  5. Breathe into the spiral, visualizing each bit of misinformation fusing into a knot in the mirror’s surface, trapping distorted words within its glass.
  6. Shatter the mirror safely once the chant ends. Let shards represent their tangled illusions splintered apart.

Retrograde is perfect for nonlinear, multidimensional craft.
Do it backward.
Do it in secret.
Do it through symbols and static.

Why This Works in Retrograde

Mercury Retrograde thrives on breakdowns in communication, lost emails, false signals, and scrambled truths. It is the age of illusion distilled. In this period, your reversal and redirection of falsity is amplified:

  • You channel the broken signal, twist it inward.
  • You refract lies into disarray, even lies themselves become traps in your mirror.
  • You reclaim illusion as sacred material, transforming chaos into a weapon.

The Witch as Disruptor

The witch was never meant to soothe the machine.
We are not here to play nicely with empire.

Mercury Retrograde doesn’t have to be feared.
It can be the time we become the signal jam.
The whisper in the wires.
The ghost in the code.

In this era of disinformation, the witch is no longer simply a truth-seeker. You are the architect of misdirection, the signal jammer. Let Mercury Retrograde heighten the world’s dissonance, and let your chaos be the next wave.

Lean in.
Break patterns.
Reverse spells.
Cast hexes that stutter and loop.

Let Apophis kiss your third eye.

This Mercury Retrograde… don’t just survive.
 Hack it.
 Curse it.
 Dance in it.
 And remember:
 Chaos is not your enemy.
 It is your native tongue.