During the following centuries cultural, social, economic, and technological developments resulted in the modern secular worldview in which belief in witchcraft has no place but instead appears as sheer superstition. Yet modern societies, too, have been beset by mass obsessions that in many respects resemble the witch manias of earlier times; the equivalent of satanic power and evil is sometimes ascribed to political and social deviants who are publicly accused, condemned, and suppressed. Moreover, reports of witchcraft practices and beliefs in the traditional sense still occur today in Western societies.

The term witchcraft is currently applied to two types of phenomena in modern societies, correctly to one but erroneously to the other. The authentic use of the term refers to cases in which persons believed to have harmed others by witchcraft are physically attacked or perhaps even lynched. Such cases usually occur in peasant communities in which old traditions are preserved and in which social mobility is slight; hence they resemble instances of witchcraft in nonliterate societies. In such communities people are living in close association with kinsmen and neighbours and cannot easily escape from the social networks that hold them; consequently, interpersonal tensions build up until the flash point of an accusation is reached. The incorrect use of the term refers to persons claiming to be witches and reported to belong to covens, who assemble on appropriate calendrical occasions for sabbaths at which they perform rituals according to a tradition that the coven leaders claim descends from earlier witches. This kind of "witchcraft," judging by the way in which its participants freely acknowledge their adherence, seems highly respectable compared with the activities of the despised and hated miscreants of earlier periods in our own society or of contemporary nonliterate or peasant communities. These so-called witches claim to be adherents of an ancient religion, the one to which Christianity is regarded as a counter-religion, and in this way they seek to secure public recognition of their eccentric activities by appealing to the cherished modern value of religious toleration.

These practitioners usually turn out to be entirely sincere but misguided people who have been directly or indirectly influenced by Margaret Murray's article "Witchcraft," published in the 14th edition of Encyclopędia Britannica (1929), which put forth in its most popular form her theory that the witches of western Europe were the lingering adherents of a once general pagan religion that has been displaced, though not completely, by Christianity. This highly imaginative but now discredited theory gave a new respectability to witchcraft and, along with the more practical influence of such modern practitioners as Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner, contributed to the emergence of self-styled witches that are sometimes featured in the sensationalist press.