Magical practices have become more accessible and individualistic in recent decades, with practitioners increasingly incorporating elements from popular culture into their rituals. The immersive visual aspects of popular culture, reaching wide audiences, have influenced new schools like Chaos Magick, which provides a fertile ground for such innovations. This paper examines the mutual interaction between occult knowledge represented visually in popular culture and the actual magical practice of modern mages.
Popular culture frequently depicts occult activities in spaces such as basements, forests, cemeteries, hospitals, and schools, and these depictions share common visual features. Some creators draw on historical occultism, but often they amplify certain features for aesthetic appeal. This aesthetic influence extends into real-world occult practice, particularly in Chaos Magick, where the boundary between fiction and reality is deliberately blurred. The chapter categorizes ritual spaces in popular culture and compares them with those used by contemporary occultists, analyzing their mutual influence.