Occult dramas from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina to Strange Angel are a theme of the new season’s TV. Is this a response to the uncertainty of contemporary politics?

Once an endangered species confined to blasted heaths and moonlit woods, today’s witches are flourishing and emerging blinking into the Golden Age of Television. And, this time, it’s political.

A Discovery of Witches, an adaptation of Deborah Harkness’s novel about a young witch who finds an ancient manuscript that brings her to the attention of vampires and demons, began on Sky One last week and is just one of a slew of current and upcoming dramas about the occult, including Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and CBS All Access’s Strange Angel.

Why now? With self-professed witches all over the internet and on Instagram, many believe this new wave is linked to the bubbling cauldron of contemporary politics. “I think when the world is turned upside down it’s natural for people to look at things differently,” says George Pendle, the British author of a biography of American rocket scientist Jack Parsons. Parsons also happened to be a ritual-performing disciple of notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley, and the subject of Strange Angel, a 10-part Ridley Scott-produced drama.

“If all your preconceptions about, say, the validity of the democratic political system are overturned, maybe you might also rid yourself of your previous notions about ‘magick’ – to use Crowley’s term - and start drawing pentagrams on the floor. It can’t make things much worse, right?

“There’s a trend towards more esoteric ways of thinking, not just in entertainment but throughout society. For instance, in medicine there’s been a huge revival in the use of psychedelics for medicinal and therapeutic purposes. People believe that the mind can’t always best be served by modern science. And that belief, for better or worse, is percolating through everything. Take Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop with its talk of ‘sex bark’ and ‘shamanic energy medicine’. It’s less a modern lifestyle brand than a medieval occult apothecary.” In other words, when society has reached the stage where some people believe that popping a jade egg into one’s vagina will promote gynaecological health or that a no-deal Brexit will provide a £1.1 trillion boost to the UK’s economy, then perhaps the occult starts to look positively reasonable.

Harkness agrees that witchcraft can offer a sense of control in a world that seems to be spiralling beyond our grasp. “When there is social, political and cultural turmoil and the world feels like a very unstable place, people want a sense of control and normalcy again,” she says.

Spellbound, an exhibition about witchcraft, opened last month at Oxford’s Ashmolean museum. Among the exhibits is The Discovery of Witches, a 1647 work by the notorious “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins, which inspired the title of Harkness’s novel.

The witch is an icon to help young women be strong in the face of the pushback they get every day Christina Oakley Harrington

Malcolm Gaskill, a historian of witchcraft and one of the exhibition’s curators, says: “Political turmoil makes people feel that truth and reality are being undermined. And, ironically, in an upside-down-world the supernatural can be a source of stability.

“Rational people indulge in all sorts of little fantasies, superstitions and rituals to get by. We’re all prone to anxiety caused by global affairs, as well as personal problems, and magical thinking can restore a sense of control, even if it’s just a comforting illusion.

“Of course, at a more prosaic level, people also just want escapism from depressing news, much as they turned to the cinema in the 1930s.”

Stephen Volk, who wrote the BBC’s celebrated Halloween “hoax” Ghostwatch and created the paranormal drama series Afterlife, agrees. “It’s easy to see the appeal of a world where you can learn spells to make things happen, rather than enduring the gruelling random unfairnesses of real life.”

The new productions promise escapism aplenty. October sees the start of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, described as a “dark coming-of-age story that traffics in horror, the occult and, of course, witchcraft”, and another Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House, based on the novel by Shirley Jackson, the American writer so fascinated by witches that she used to joke she was one. Suspiria, a remake of Dario Argento’s cult 1977 film about a ballet school that is the front for a witches’ coven, is released in November. And, in July, it was announced that Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the beloved show about the adventures of a valley girl van Helsing, is to return, presumably still featuring Buffy’s witch friend Willow.

Meanwhile, Volk’s forthcoming novel Netherwood features Crowley – known as The Great Beast, 666 – as a character. “Witchcraft and the occult can represent – and have always represented – a threat, too,” he says. “When I adapted Phil Rickman’s Midwinter of the Spirit, about an exorcist, for ITV, for me the key was using satanism as a metaphor for our fear of terrorism.”

But, for Christina Oakley Harrington, a practising witch and the founder of Treadwell’s, one of the UK’s leading occult bookshops, witchcraft is a feminist issue.

“These films are an answer to what is happening in society,” she says. “As the world of Instagram has shown, young women are speaking out with autonomy more than ever, embracing feminism.

“It makes perfect sense to find role models: none is more apt than the witch. The witch is the disobedient woman, the ‘bad’ woman. Her ethics are her own, not society’s and as a creature on the edges of society, she sees injustices that others don’t care about. I am struck by how much today’s teen witches are activists for not only feminism but for the ending of animal cruelty, racism, homelessness.

“When you break society’s conforming rules, as young women are, you are punished. The witch is an icon to help young women be strong in the face of the pushback they get every day. So for me, these new shows are heartening – yes, even the horror films.” Of course, believing in magic or “magick”, no matter how fervently, is no guarantee of its efficacy.

Last year, witches across America joined forces at the stroke of midnight on Friday 24 February to cast a mass “binding” spell against Donald Trump, aimed at preventing the president from doing harm. The success of that particular ritual is very much open to debate.