More recent periods of renewed interest in magic occurred around the end of the nineteenth century, where Symbolism and other offshoots of Romanticism cultivated a renewed interest in exotic spiritualities. European colonialism, which put Westerners in contact with India and Egypt, re-introduced exotic beliefs to Europeans at this time. Hinduism and Egyptian mythology frequently feature in nineteenth century magical texts. The late 19th and early 20th centuries EV spawned a large number of magical organizations, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical Society, and specifically magical variants on Freemasonry including Ordo Templi Orientis. The Golden Dawn represented perhaps the peak of this wave of magic, attracting cultural celebrities like Aleister Crowley, William Butler Yeats, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen to its banner.

Magic in the twentieth century

A further revival of interest in magic was heralded by the repeal, in England, of the last Witchcraft Act in 1951 EV. This was the cue for Gerald Gardner, now recognised as the founder of Wicca, to publish his first non-fiction book Witchcraft Today, in which he claimed to reveal the existence of a witch-cult that dated back to pre-Christian Europe. Gardner's new religion combined magic and religion in a way that was later to cause people to question the Enlightenment's boundaries between the two subjects.

Gardner's new religion, and many imitators, took off in the atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s, when the counterculture of the hippies also spawned another period of renewed interest in magic, divination, and other occult practices. The various branches of neo-paganism and other new earth religions that have sprung up in Gardner's wake tend to follow his lead in combining the practice of magic and religion. The trend was continued by some heirs to the counterculture; feminists led the way when some launched an independent revival of goddess worship. This brought them into contact with the Gardnerian tradition of magical religion, and deeply influenced that tradition in return.