Smudge, Like, and Subscribe: The Occult's second life on social media

Curses, Inc | Tristan Elwell

Has anyone noticed that NZ stoner supplies mainstay, Cosmic Corner, has been taking a more witchy route as of late? Increasing its stores of tarot cards, smudge sticks, and crystals? The answer for why may lie in how magic and witchcraft have rapidly dominated TikTok, currently one of the world's most popular social media platforms.

If your use of social media includes platforms that lean more into exploring interests than connecting with family members, then you've likely come across some twee portmanteaus that describe (and this will sound contradictory) communities that are both niche and wildly popular. Depending on their preferred medium, book lovers can go to booktok and booktube to watch everything from book reviews to content creators rearranging their book shelves. If you love to study and want even more anxiety about your messy handwriting, Studyblr and its impeccable calligraphy still persists in the ashes of Tumblr. And boy, do MLMs love instagram.

It should come as a surprise to few that the practitioners of the occult have also found a home on these platforms in the form of witchblr, WitchTok, WitchTube, and inspiration boards-a-plenty on Instagram and Pinterest.

Pagans and occult devotees on the world wide web is by no means a new phenomenon. A 2021 Vice article places the creation of Bulletin Board System (BBS) networks like Magicknet and the Pagan and Occult Distribution Network (PODSnet) during internet prehistory of the 1980s. It was also the heyday of the satanic panic, and contributor Farrell McGovern noted that the creation of such spaces were important to safety when outing could lead to loss of job and family - even in less conservative communities and cities. BBS was just as rife with infighting and rumour mongering as today's social media, as well as the promotion of bad scholarship (specifically, Farrell notes, claims that 9 million witches were murdered by Christians over 4 centuries). From BBS, the older online magikal communities moved on to other, once popular, platforms like Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal, with some finally landing on Facebook.

With witches, magick, and supernatural themes remaining a perennial favourite in popular culture, crops of baby druids, wiccans, and pagans spring anew from high school sleepovers, university dorms, and postgrad flats and continually reinvigorate interest in occult matters on the platforms that they congregate.

In 2017, witchblr was the 11th largest community on Tumblr, and it was the first time witches charted on the rankings. This boom was attributed, in part, to an international online movement to cast a binding spell on Donald Trump, promoted by singer Lana Del Rey. The other part is the political rollercoaster that was the first year of Donald Trump's presidency, along with a sociopolitical culture that targeted isolated and marginalised communities. The correlation between political and cultural instability and increased interest in witchcraft and magick, both as a practitioner and as someone who fears it, is a trend that stretches far back through women's suffrage and the spiritualism movement to the witch hunts of the 16th century. Much like spiritualism, contemporary paganism offers women and other disenfranchised persons an identity that has power, agency, a means to seek justice, and a place to belong.

At the time, Witchblr-type posts could be reminiscent of chain mail that you'd see in primary school in the style of “Reblog a picture of this tarot card in 30 seconds for good luck”; it was not unusual for such a post to receive over 10,000 likes in a week. A savvier poster could turn their account into an upmarket product with high-quality photos and more expensive, purchasable products, and cross-market through interior design and cooking communities on the basics of aesthetics alone - with the allure of a positive-energy tea recipe mixed in.

When Tumblr crashed and burned after putting profits before porn in 2018, most Witchblrs went elsewhere, and their fans followed. Some made the complete transition to Instagram, but the predominant platform became TikTok, a short-form video sharing app which exploded in popularity globally during the COVID 19 pandemic. Witchcraft enthusiasts turned to their phone's rear-camera to share tarot card readings and anti-anxiety spells as a way to connect and make sense of lockdowns and the then-unknown future. At the same time, the increased profile given to these practices has initiated discussions about race and cultural appropriation. Popular media presents occult practitioners as whimsical, white, and american who utilise Hoodoo or indigenous rituals and tools that were suppressed for the communities they originated from. For example, white sage (as sold in NZ by Cosmic Corner) is used for smudging, which is an important purifying ritual practiced by many North American Indigenous groups. Much like the Tohunga Suppression Act 1907 in NZ, it was illegal for indigenous persons to practice their religion until 1978, and smudging sage fell under that ban. The contemporary commodifying of, and profiting from, smudging by non-indigenous practitioners is seen as insulting and hurtful when one's family members were jailed for self-use. The popularity of smudging also risks making it environmentally unsustainable. When traditionally harvested, the root is left behind, but it is the unlawfully harvested sage (in which little or none of the plant is left behind) that is likely making it onto store shelves.

Another problem is when the influencer commercialises their ingredients and instructions. For example:

Source | RebeccaArtemisa on Etsy

Some readers might be experiencing flashbacks to the 2018 fad of infused water, and the monstrosity that was crystal-infused water bottles. Rose Quartz, fortunately, is not a gemstone that will make your water toxic to drink; that is, if you are certain that your crystal isn't fake in the first place. At best, any benefits from ruining a good glass of water with a crystal is due to the placebo effect and, at worst, regardless of authenticity, repeated exposure to water can cause microfissures in the crystal that lead to breakage and ingestion of microparticles or even rust. Water can also strip the stone of any oils, additives, or dyes that are used to make a crystal shiny or pink in the case of a dyed quartz or synthetic crystals.

But I digress. The boundary between WitchTok and alternative medicine and pseudoscience can be nonexistent, posing real health dangers to those who don't do their due research diligence. WitchTok devotees have already unintentionally promoted the work of scammer and antisemite Grigory Grabovoy, who claimed to be the second coming of Jesus and be able to cure aids, and charged grieving mothers of the 2004 Belsan school siege $1,500 to resurrect their children. How? Through so-called ‘Grabovoy Codes'. These are strings of numbers that are seen by believers as a cheat-code to wealth building and manifesting one's best life without effort.

Until a new social media monolith emerges and interest in Witchcraft surges with the next social upheaval or recession, there will still be some occult practitioners doing things the old school way. Donald Trump is still being hexed on a monthly basis. But now he has the ignoble company of anyone who mobbed the capitol on January 6th being hexed simultaneously. Brett Kavanagh was hexed during his confirmation hearings (which didn't work) and Mitch McConnell was hexed to a smaller audience on TikTok.