- The Washington Times - Tuesday, October 29, 2024

NEW YORK — Forget what you think you know about witches: despised crones bent over bubbling cauldrons, casting spells with a pinch of wolfsbane and eye of newt in a deep, dark forest.

Today’s witches are young influencers with popular social media accounts. They host podcasts and post astrological divinations from their downtown dwellings.

Picture this: Two young women in floor-length dresses and pointed hats light nearly 50 candles that form a circle on the floor, brightening the dark space. Elaborate, converged spheres are painted on the surface in the middle, adorned by a large multipointed crystal.

This is the TikTok account of Stella, Witch of the Moon. She is an artist whose Instagram bio describes her online space as “The Witch’s Cottage for like-minded witches, creatives, artisans, healers & magick weavers.”

She is among the #witchesoftiktok who rack up hundreds of thousands of views and likes daily.

Witchcraft content is in demand in real life and online as modern women grow uninterested in formalized religious spirituality and seek looser, similarly historical forms. Leda Beluche, a self-described “energy theologist,” said the inclination is not sinister. It is borne out of feminine interest in self-knowledge.

“Women have been in pain since the beginning of time, even if you go back to Salem and how the witches were, you know, prosecuted, and all this stuff,” Ms. Beluche said. “Women … have always [been] just so powerful, and they want to understand that.”

She said astrological charts are one way to understand oneself. Indeed, “What’s your star sign?” has become a common query among friends, family and strangers. Ms. Beluche routinely asks this of her clients when they enter her small Upper East Side shop in New York called Haus of Healing.

“If we go back 30 years, people would be like, ‘Oh, that’s garbage. That’s the placebo effect.’ Nobody cared. But now, especially with TikTok world, people are addicted to astrology, and it’s mostly because the human mind now knows that a chart can literally define who they are when they were born,” she told The Washington Times.

“We saw this pick up in practice during the pandemic,” professor Helen A. Berger, a scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center, said in an interview with Brandeis Stories. “For centuries, women have been told to focus on families. Focusing on the self is a radical act. It’s empowering.”

Indeed, astrology’s influence is growing, especially among younger Americans. According to YouGov’s 2022 poll, more than 1 in 4 Americans say the stars influence their lives. That includes 37% of adults younger than 30. The astrology market, in particular, has grown significantly from $2.2 billion in value in 2018 to $12.8 billion in 2021. By 2031, it is expected to reach $22.8 billion, Allied Market Research said.

Women are more likely to buy in. YouGov reported that 30% of women and 25% of men cited their earnest belief. Those who work within the spirituality space say women are much more likely to use it openly and as a means of connecting with others, often using astrological charts as a rubric for predicting social behavior.

A 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center explores details of this growing interest in “spirituality.” It said 42% of adults believe the dead can communicate. Nearly half of respondents said they believe the dead can lend the living a helping hand, and 45% said they had experienced a profound sense of wonder about the universe and a deep “spiritual peace.”

Kelsey Zazanis said women are after that peace. The 27-year-old self-described astrologer in San Luis Obispo, California, said women suffer from sterile forms of medical diagnoses in response to emotional pains. She said women are especially eager to be treated as if their depression and malaise aren’t simply conditions in need of medical treatment but real hurts.

If mental anguish can’t be seen sympathetically by society, she said, then it will be by the heavens.

“I just see a lot of women who have gone through some sort of intense life experience, and the aftermath of that gets labeled as some sort of like mental illness, and so … people can call you crazy for … talking about other realms of perception that are not accepted by the Western rationalist viewpoint,” she told The Times.

Ms. Beluche also said her customers often seek spiritual guidance or relief. She allows clients to go deeper in their practice with spiritual healings, energy clearings with sage, hypnosis techniques, and past-life regressions, encouraging people to access their former selves.

With a broad smile and a serious tone, Ms. Beluche said she was a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, in a previous life. “I healed the earth, the plants, herbs, people and animals, you know — I had a devotion,” she said.

Ms. Beluche insists her methods are scientific. She describes herself as a “researcher” who has debated academics and scientists over the realities of magic. She said they seek her out for conversation.

Ms. Beluche told The Times that the difference between her identity as a healer “of light” and the witches commonly understood as part of the occult is her religious faith and desire for goodness.

“We don’t cast hexes or dabble in dark magic. We just don’t mess with that,” she said, adding that she believes in God.

Other modern witches don’t shy away from the dark arts. On Reddit, groups such as WitchesvsPatriarchy even share politically charged hexes. One user recently described a “freezer spell” aimed at Donald Trump and Project 2025, with plans to symbolically “freeze” their influence by sealing names in bottles under the waning moon.

With nearly 1,500 upvotes and comments brimming with support, such as one user’s daily “Blue Wave Spell” ritual, these digital covens attempt to stir cosmic political energy. “WitchesvsPatriarchy” has more than 750,000 active members.

For other “light” witches, hexing and other dark practices aren’t in the cards. After all, they don’t want to displease God.

Their belief in a higher power does not affect their spiritual practices. They say they believe spiritualism and religion are part and parcel of the same thing.

Denise Passarelli, who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, is a practicing Christian who said she attends church every Sunday but clears evil energy out of her children’s rooms with sage.

“I don’t really see them as different. I just see it as a continuation of something, even though it’s probably not like ‘in the Bible’ what I’m doing, but I feel like it’s the same thing. We’re either cleansing ourselves, or we take communion, but I don’t know. It isn’t different to me,” Ms. Passarelli said.

For Ayda, a 21-year-old Muslim in Paris, the whole of spiritual witchcraft doesn’t have to be in her practice to believe in its power — whether as a magical practice or a communal ethos. She said she limits her spiritual practice to meditation, in keeping with her religious beliefs, though she agrees that faith and “spirituality” are part of the same worldview. For her, though, God is the first step.

“You know, we don’t have that in Islam because it’s supposed to be that God has, like, all the power. So if you … need help with something, or whatever, you should ask him first,” she said, noting the tight restrictions Islam places on practicing witchcraft. Ayda mostly enjoys the female community surrounding spirituality. “[They’re] all the same thing, though.”

The concept of God, to some of these women, takes a different form than the Abrahamic understanding that animates Christianity, Judaism and Islam. For many spiritualists, “God” has a far more universal meaning. Ms. Beluche said the understanding of the phrase “God is love” is literal and magical.

“We are God. … When I say that, [I mean] we’re carrying his light within us. But to me, at the end of the day, God has a final decision, right? And that’s why I believe in faith,” she said.

The ‘precarity of American culture’

That’s not the definition of “God” to religious people who fear the occult and believe in its darker power. Erika Ahern, who writes for Catholic Vote and The Loop, told The Times she believes the rise is directly related to the number of women with cultural trauma — namely abortion and sexual abuse.

“They say those who embrace it do so … to fill some kind of void in their life, or there’s a wound there. People of faith will talk to you about a spiritual woundedness through which the evil spirits, Satan, whatever you want to term it, you know bad, bad angels — they capitalize on that,” Ms. Ahern said.

She said many priests on her podcast “The LOOPCast” say the rise of abortion regret is the reason women are becoming more interested in occult practices.

“[One of the priests] spoke of abortion — actually abortion and sexual abuse. He said, as an exorcist, he believes the occult is kind of gripping women in particular for [those reasons],” Ms. Ahern said. “As abortion has become more and more — I think it’s 1 in 4 women in my demographic at this point have had an abortion — I see that the rise of that instance has correlated with the rise of the occult.”

Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net,” said the reasoning behind the interest in these practices is far more than face value. A lack of security in America, she said, is the reason women, in particular, feel pulled toward transcendent belief.

“All of [spirituality] is essentially designed to help people avoid things, whether it’s physical harm or precarity or kind of economic harm, but that’s often what those kinds of investments are designed to do in the U.S.,” Ms. Calarco told The Times.

Ms. Calarco said the “precarity of American culture” drives people, especially women, to look for ways to have a sense of control and feel they can manage their risks.

“We’re supposed to take responsibility for caring for ourselves, for caring for our loved ones in ways that folks elsewhere have more support with. Whether it’s, you know, helping to care for elderly loved ones who are in a time where they need high levels of physical care, for example, or sick loved ones, or young children,” she said.

To Ms. Zazanis, the California astrologist, control is the opposite of the point.

“My worldview is completely centered around it, but almost as a passive observer,” she said. Divination, and particularly astrology, is not a magic to be forced but something far more academic — it’s a study of time, she said.

Ms. Zazanis isn’t interested in changing her life with divination. Instead, it provides a lens through which to study life. It’s a psychology of sorts — or a method of avoiding dealing with issues in a more harmful way.

“To me, it’s often traumatic things that kind of crack you open to a deeper realm of perception,” she said. “And sometimes, if you don’t have the ability to really carry that and integrate that … then Western culture automatically would kind of funnel that into the psychiatric realm or, like, pathologize it.”

Ms. Zazanis isn’t relegating her beliefs to a form of coping with her emotional pain. “There are simply a lot of experiences I’ve had in life that cannot be explained through any sort of scientific paradigm,” she said.

She is not alone. In 2020, Amy Tripp, an astrology influencer with nearly 150,000 followers on X, predicted that Kamala Harris would run for president this year, citing her upcoming Saturn return. On July 11, she pinpointed July 21 as the date President Biden would step aside. When her old tweets resurfaced, fans rejoiced. One proudly declared on X: “Astrology girls remain undefeated.”

Ms. Zazanis said these sorts of events and predictions keep spirituality fans invested. For her, the real investment belongs to what she sees reflected in her beliefs. Proximity to the “dark arts” doesn’t scare her either.

“Misfortune can lead people to be an atheist. But then, for me, I was like, ‘Oh, I need to know the answers behind this terrible s—-,” she said.” I originally came to it from like, a place of needing answers. And I didn’t think anything could scare me more than the stuff I was, like, seeking answers for.

Ms. Zazanis said she would persist in her belief as long as her birth chart astrology outlines her fate and the rich symbolism she sees within her charts makes sense to her.

“There are some scary things there,” she said. “But ultimately, the way I see it is this: It’s reflecting life itself.”

• Emma Ayers can be reached at eayers@washingtontimes.com.

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