America's Vice President says the Antichrist may be walking among us. Witchcraft and the occult are ever more fashionable. In our godless era, renowned historian A.N. WILSON asks: Are we plunging into a new dark age?

When I was a child, we made very little of Halloween, but now the shops fill up with masks, witchy outfits, pumpkins and fake skeletons weeks in advance.

The younger children go round from house to house demanding ‘trick or treat’ – but what is really weird, in the past decade especially, is that it is not just children who are celebrating.

Men and women in their twenties and even thirties prepare for tonight’s festivities weeks in advance, making or buying costumes, kitting themselves out as vampires or Frankenstein’s monsters.

What’s going on? The word Halloween is a contraction of ‘All Hallows’ Eve’, which is to say the day before All Saints’ Day, November 1.

That was the day, it was supposed, when all the saints were venerated, and the ghosts and the witches and the followers of darkness fled or were in abeyance.

Of course, there was always an element of irony to this belief, and it belonged to folklore as much as to religion. But at least it was based on something solid, namely the 2,000-year history of Christianity. Of course there is an obvious commercial element to the modern craze for Halloween, but look beneath that.

I suspect that part of the reason so many of all ages are increasingly welcome to it is the strange and growing phenomenon of the occult, of belief in the supernatural and the paranormal, in witchcraft and wizardry: an alternative religion that is growing in popularity and strength.

And about this, I have fears.

There is a strange and growing phenomenon of the occult, of belief in the supernatural and the paranormal, in witchcraft and wizardry, writes A.N. Wilson

Vice President J.D. Vance, one of the most powerful men in the world, mused on a podcast recently that he would not be surprised if we were all living in the End of Days

J.D. Vance, one of the most powerful men in the world, mused on a podcast recently that he would not be surprised if we were all living in the End of Days and that the Antichrist was walking among us. Cynics reflected that he was probably in a good position to know if this were true, since he spends so much time with Donald Trump.

But it was strange to hear such stuff being aired as part of the public discourse. We expect the Americans to be typically more religious than us Europeans, but we do not expect the Vice President to herald the apocalypse.

We are comforted, in other words, by the sight of the Royal Family attending morning service at Sandringham, but would be troubled if our Cabinet ministers began conducting public-prayer meetings on prime-time TV; and we’d be even more worried if any of our politicians turned out to be witches or wizards. Yet where do we draw the line?

There are many indications at the moment that extreme superstitions are gathering wide followings among large numbers of people, even in the cool, sceptical cities of modern Britain.

Twenty years ago, you might have guessed that we had seen the last of anything approaching superstition. Churchgoing had plummeted and the numbers of British people getting their babies baptised or wanting Christian funerals had likewise fallen dramatically.

Yet the decline of organised religion, and the whittling away of faith among huge swathes of the population here and across Europe, has not – as one might have been expected – ushered in an age of reason.

G.K. Chesterton, the great Catholic wit and inventor of Father Brown, is reputed –probably incorrectly – to have quipped that when people lose their faith in God, they don’t believe in nothing: they believe in anything. The churches have emptied, but we have not seen a corresponding surge in philosophical societies and scientific clubs. On the contrary, especially in the past decade or so, there has been a dramatic rise in totally irrational customs, beliefs and practices: mostly harmless, but some very much not.

Few of the hippyish sun-worshippers who gather at Stonehenge for the Summer Solstice are presumably tempted to partake – as their Druidic predecessors did in pre-Roman England – in a gory bloodbath of human sacrifice. Nevertheless, it is worrying that, after nearly 160 years of compulsory education in Britain, more and more young people today are adopting belief systems that spill over into the sinister.

I spend quite a lot of time in Cornwall, the furthest tip of the peninsula, where there are many old standing stones, holy wells and megalithic relics of our pre-Christian past.

On my walks in these regions, I frequently come across traces not of prehistoric paganism, but of our pagan present. Corn dollies woven from the final stalks of cereals, said to symbolise the resting place for the retreating Corn Spirit after the summer harvest. Ribbons tied to ‘holy’ trees near sacred wells. Votive offerings laid down near the menhirs.

Recently, in the old town of Penzance, they have instituted ‘Montol’, a great ceremony for the Winter Solstice. The participants march in a torchlit procession and wear ingeniously constructed costumes of giant crows and dragons, before repairing to the pubs.

And this part of the world has always attracted adepts of mumbo-jumbo. The occultist Aleister Crowley, who practised witchcraft, celebrated Satanic ‘Black Masses’ and dubbed himself the ‘Wickedest Man in the World’, lived in Cornwall in the years before the Second World War. He is one of the models for J.K. Rowling’s Lord Voldemort – and maybe Rowling herself, with the popularisation of Hogwarts, bears her own responsibility for the extraordinary growth of superstition among young people. Not everyone takes Montol seriously. But it is telling that it should have been invented now – and accepted so rapidly and enthusiastically. And when I watch the parade and see the excited, sweaty faces reflecting the flares, why do I sometimes think of the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies, whose torchlit processions were their climax?

There is a serious point here: Nazism, for all its perverted embrace of modern technology, was at heart deeply cultish and superstitious. Just read the babbling nonsense, including weird imprecations to Wagnerian Nordic gods, that were part of Heinrich Himmler’s initiation ceremonies for young SS officers, with their skull-and-crossbones badges and medals.

In 1941, in one of the weirdest moments of the Second World War, Rudolf Hess flew solo to Scotland, hoping to conduct peace negotiations. Hess was the man, back in 1923, who had written out Mein Kampf to Hitler’s dictation, and he had remained one of Adolf’s closest chums.

What was the British government to do? Here the brilliant young intelligence officer Ian Fleming (destined of course to be famous as the author of the James Bond thrillers) immediately instituted a search for Aleister Crowley, all the way down in Cornwall.

Fleming was bright enough to grasp that Nazism was not really a normal political creed at all but a superstitious pagan death cult – and that a man like Crowley would understand the warped thinking of a man like Hess.

Crowley was in the event too ill with asthma and too zonked on heroin to leave his Torquay hotel – but the point remains. The Second World War was as much a struggle between what Churchill, in his Battle of Britain speech, called ‘Christian civilisation’ – and the sinister, cultish forces running the Third Reich. Yet now a Crowleyite fondness for similar mumbo-jumbo is booming. In his excellent recent book The New Dark Ages, the writer James Marriott argues that the decline in literacy among young people – mainly thanks to the torrent of short-form videos on social media – has led to a corresponding decline in their capacity to think rationally.

Marriott writes that, as a teenager, he was enthused by Richard Dawkins and the wave of so-called ‘New Atheists’.

He thought that these oh-so clever men were essentially conducting a mopping-up operation after the Enlightenment of the 18th century, when Reason appeared to have made intelligent people think scientifically, rather than religiously.

The youthful Marriott convinced himself that the late Christopher Hitchens (whose mega-selling book, published soon after 9/11 and 7/7, was cheekily called God Is Not Great), Dawkins (The God Delusion) and others would finally kill off irrational beliefs – and we would all at last become sensible, scientific people.

Well, Marriott is now 30, and in his adult lifetime, he has seen his contemporaries – and especially those younger than him – not becoming more rational, but instead reverting to what he calls a New Dark Age.

There is a huge surge in popularity for paganism and other nonsense. The hashtag WitchesOfInstagram has more than ten million hits. ‘WitchTok’ on TikTok has at least nine million. On the online marketplace Etsy, there are 36,000 sellers offering the clobber needed for karmic rituals, digital divinations and voodoo dolls. Gen Z girls buy ‘spells’ for £30 a time or more on the platform, casting ‘hexes’ on their enemies, love-rivals and hated colleagues.

The census in 2011 asked everyone how they identified in the religious sphere – and found that about 70,000 people in Britain then regarded themselves as Wiccan (witches). By the 2021 census this had leapt to 89,000 – almost a 30 per cent increase.

A YouGov poll conducted this summer found that fully one in five people believe that witches possess magical powers.

Not all witchy stuff is just a bit of fun. In the past decade, 14,000 cases of abuse, noted by social-work assessments, have been linked to households or individuals in Britain who believe in ‘spirit possession’, demons and the like. Often but not always, this is linked to the African diaspora. In 2000, I sat through the trial of Marie Therese Kouao and her boyfriend Carl John Manning. Kouao was the great-aunt of a little girl called Victoria Climbie who had been brought to Britain by her family aged 8 from her native Cote d’Ivoire. Kouao and Manning became convinced this child was possessed by evil spirits and that only harsh treatment would drive the devils out. Victoria underwent horrific tortures and died on February 25, 2000.

Recently, in the old town of Penzance, they have instituted the ‘Montol’ festival, a great ceremony for the Winter Solstice

Participants in Penzance march in a torchlit procession and wear ingeniously constructed costumes of giant crows and dragons, before repairing to the pubs

In September 2001, the torso of a Nigerian boy was fished out of the Thames and named ‘Adam’. Someone had believed that this five-year-old was possessed by demons and after various primitive and painful voodoo rituals his headless and mutilated torso was dumped in the river. Despite excellent detective work by the Daily Mail’s David Jones, Adam’s killers have never been convicted.

Comparable horrors are by no means restricted to immigrant families. Some 5,000 people in Britain now call themselves Satanists, and they’re not pretending.

Earlier this year, a 48-year-old devil-worshipper called Benjamin Lewis, from the New Forest, pleaded guilty to stealing lambs and leaving their mutilated carcasses along with occult symbols at churches.

The Suffolk town of Bungay is the Satanist capital of Britain, with 100 times more adherents than the national average. To this day, Bungay’s emblem is a black dog riding a lightning bolt – a monstrous canine called Black Shuck that terrorised the town in 1577, killing several people, clawing at the church door, and said to have been the Devil himself.

Saint Augustine wrote that ‘our hearts are restless until they find rest in God’. Contrary to what Dawkins and his ilk might think, we are first and foremost spiritual beings. Every one of us, at some point in our lives, has had feelings that cannot be satisfied by rational explanation. These might be a sense of being at one with nature, or, as we look at the starry night sky, being overcome by the sublime. It might be a profound inner certainty of right and wrong.

Few Christians, probably not even the Pope himself, have absolute certainty, all the time, about the truth of Christian doctrines. But the Christian religion satisfies our intrinsic spiritual hunger not merely by ritual or scripture, but also by being linked (unlike the modern, invented pagan cults) to a fixed moral code of values.

If our churches, and especially the Church of England, did their job properly, young people would find in churchgoing what they are really looking for in all the witchy, occultish nonsense which, truth to tell, gives me the creeps.

This problem may now be urgent. Crowley and Fleming recognised that Hitler was more than a dictator: he was a kind of wizard who had cast a spell over his people. And since human beings are so easily bewitched, who knows, in the troubled times to come, what political magician is now biding his time to beguile the millions of young people drinking up all this online poison in our new and darkening age?