There’s never been a better time to be a witch.
Tarot pulls appear on the Instagram feeds of celebs including Jemima Kirke and Jonathan Anderson, while influencers like self-styled “hoodwitch” Bri Luna amass hundreds of thousands of followers and big-money brand deals with the likes of Coach, Refinery29 and Smashbox.
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Over on TikTok, “WitchTok” has ballooned into a parallel universe of readings, rituals and spellwork, where mega-creators like @chaoticwitchaunt and @oracleofthemoon preside over an endless scroll of content that’s racked up more than 69 billion views and counting. The witch-curious can attend autumn-equinox rituals organised by Airbnb, subscribe to monthly spell kits or commission an Etsy witch to manage their love life, from hexing an ex to guaranteeing good weather on their wedding day. Long viewed with suspicion and naked hostility, witchcraft has emerged from the shadows and entered the mainstream.
It’s taken us a while to get here. If we throw it back even a few decades, the witch was seen as old and ugly, hag-like, a fearsome outcast living on the edge of town. Early pop culture’s most famous witch took the form of one of these crookback crones: The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West appeared on screen in 1939, cutting a grotesque figure with her mottled green skin, warts, pointy black hat and repellent pitch. Decades later, The Witches, whose terror owed much to Anjelica Huston’s deliciously villainous Grand High Witch, doubled down on the figure of the child-hating wench, leaving a generation of kids wary of older women and the square toes we were convinced lurked beneath their shoes.
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The 90s marked a turning point. Ushering out the old hags of lore and leaning into Practical Magic’s suggestion that there was “a little witch in all of us”, we were suddenly given a plethora of relatable teenage girls stepping into an awareness of their own power. The Craft’s mantra of “we are the weirdos” coincided neatly with the decade’s embrace of individuality and otherness, while Sabrina the Teenage Witch positioned its suburban heroine as just like us. Charmed elevated sisterhood, recasting witches as heroes rather than threats, and Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger offered us a wholesome, booksmart witch on which to project our fantasies of a magical realm.
Today, women are looking to witchcraft as a grounded spiritual framework: inward-looking and pragmatic, rooted in intuition, meaning-making and self-knowledge – a container in which to thrive. Few articulate this more clearly than Jerico Mandybur, an author and therapist whose practice moves between tarot, creative coaching, spiritual writing and clinical work as a creative arts therapist. Being a witch means a lot of different things depending on who you ask; for Mandybur, who identifies as one herself, it’s a way of naming embodied knowledge and intuitive authority long used by marginalised communities to survive when institutional power proves unreliable.
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“For me, witchcraft is inclusive of any spiritual practice that values immanence over (or alongside) transcendence; those practices that revere nature, country, the animist, the body, and the senses,” she tells me. “I count anything ceremonial or ecstatic that privileges aesthetics, empowerment and the here-and-now as a form of magic, and therefore witchcraft.”
Historically, that kind of embodied power has rarely been met well. Five centuries before WitchTok hit our screens, 15th-century incel Heinrich Krämer wrote a book that would become a comprehensive manual for the medieval witch hunts that swept through Europe and America at the time. Malleus Maleficarum (or Hammer of the Witches) was a lasciviously batshit and deeply misogynistic tome that taught the West to hate the witch, becoming so popular that at one point it reportedly outsold the Bible. The Malleus was one of the main reasons that witchcraft stopped being seen as something harmless, recasting anyone suspected of partaking in magical rituals and conjuring spirits as heretics who must be punished. Between 1450 and 1750, an estimated 90,000–100,000 people across Europe and North America were accused, tortured and tried for witchcraft, with roughly half believed to have been executed. While accusations extended to men and children, the majority of those killed were women.
Open any page of Krämer’s book and you’ll find evidence of a man unhinged: wet dreams blamed on wayward women consorting with sperm-stealing demons; witches engaging in cannibalism, sleeping with Satan and causing impotence in men. If Krämer is to be believed – and depressingly, he was for centuries – even midwives are capable of unspeakable evil, offering up babies to the devil himself.
For Mandybur, the centuries-old obsession with rooting witches out can be read as a fear-based response, usually with a nasty man at the centre of it. “Men’s obsession with persecuting women as witches could be seen as a reaction to their fear of women as the creators of human life, as inherently powerful,” she says. That power has always bubbled just below the surface, even in the most oppressed contexts. It appears when a mother lifts a car to save her child, when women flood the streets in protest, or whenever attempts to suppress it start to fail. “If a witch, in the traditional European sense, is a woman with wisdom, control over her own body and financial independence,” she says, “then witches are becoming legion.”
It’s not a leap, she suggests, to see the current backlash to women’s autonomy reflected elsewhere. “I think the rise of ‘red pill’ alt right culture is a reaction to this feminine power becoming harder to socially contain than it used to be,” she says. “Women seem to have less fucks to give.”
Interest in the occult tends to wax when things feel unstable and faith in establishment ideas wobble. “There’s so much to be scared of right now,” Mandybur says. With climate anxiety, political instability and institutional mistrust, the background noise is relentless, and in moments like this, she argues, it’s natural to reach for the ineffable. “Mysticism and folk magic have always been used by oppressed groups to assert their sovereignty.” Developing intuition and self-knowledge becomes a way of narrowing focus to what remains within reach: your inner world, belief in a higher power, perspective. In that sense, she says, mysticism offers “both a salve to soothe us, and a kind of spiritual ammo to keep us fighting for what matters.”
Lillian Ahenkan, known to her hundreds of thousands of followers online as Flex Mami, has another theory as to the recent uptick in witchcraft online. A very public figure for more than a decade – across writing, podcasting and cultural commentary – Ahenkan has built a career around meaning-making, or, as she puts it, “providing language and framework for very common human experiences that people don’t know how to talk about”.
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“I’m going to be straight up right now. I don’t even think it’s a resonance people are feeling,” she says. What looks like a collective resonance with spirituality, in her view, is closer to aspirational mimicry. People are not so much discovering mysticism, she argues, as noticing that those who appear successful, visible, enviable – the memoirists, the YouTubers, the Instagram polymaths – all seem to believe in something more.
“I literally think that’s what it is,” she says. “People are turning to these practices because the people who represent them publicly are symbolic of an aspirational lifestyle they want in on.” If spirituality online weren’t bundled with being, as she puts it, “educated, well-travelled, cultured, worldly, charming, intelligent, intersectional, cool,” she doubts it would hold the same appeal. “I think people would relegate it to an inflammatory religious space.”
In an environment saturated with advice and algorithmic authority, a world in which we are increasingly handing over our brains to AI and donating our free time to social media, Ahenkan is wary of what gets lost when people mistake familiarity for knowledge. “A lot of people get stuck in the information stage,” she says of the normalising of magic online. Astrology placements, tarot cards, crystals charged under the moon – “all of this is information.” Knowledge, she argues, only arrives later. “You have to transmute that information into knowledge. And knowledge is when you start making different choices and changing your behaviour based on what you’re learning.”
That distinction matters because, for Ahenkan, spirituality without grounding is destabilising rather than liberating. “I’m not in the business of trying to crack people’s realities open and not ground them,” she says. “That’s what a lot of this mainstream-ification is lacking: true grounding.”
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Mandybur also cautions against outsourcing meaning to tools themselves. “I love tarot reading as a form of divination,” she says. “But I learned that approaching the cards as nothing more than fortune telling isn’t the most empowering use for them, as it can lead to people feeling a lack of agency, like their fate is fixed and their future is not their own.” What she advocates instead is a practice that keeps the person at the centre: “a form of therapeutic self-reflection; more like a self-care and journalling tool.”
That philosophy is what led her to create Neo Tarot, which reframes tarot for a contemporary audience. “I wanted to offer a deck that emphasised freedom of choice, introspection and inquiry, and encouraged a conversation with oneself as well as the divine,” she says. “I’ve found a lot of emotional healing through the tarot and I think in these times, we need that the most.”
Mandybur’s emphasis on empowerment finds a sharp counterpoint in Ahenkan’s concerns about how these tools circulate online. “I think people listen to one TikTok tarot reading and they’re ready to uproot their whole life,” Ahenkan says. “It’s like, you’re not anchored to anything and you don’t even know it yet.” In her view, many arrive at these practices during moments of grief or crisis, drawn in by the promise of meaning and validation, but without the ability to metabolise what they uncover. “They come to it after rock bottom,” she says, “and they’ve been given a lot of answers through these tools, but when you start to recognise that if you’re choosing alternative belief systems, you actually have to hold the alternative path with it, that’s where it gets challenging.”
That challenge, she argues, is often actively avoided. Instead, people linger in what she calls “the whirlpool of possibility.” One reader says this, another says that. The algorithm keeps feeding more interpretations, more outcomes, more hypotheticals. “Yes, those things are all amazing,” she acknowledges. “But when they land in your reality – the one that you experience from your body outwards – how does that information land? What are you going to do with it?”
This emphasis on embodiment and consequence runs through both her life and work. From an early age, she was “a sensing child, the kind of child who always saw more than she said.” Without language for what she was intuiting, she gravitated toward psychological frameworks. “I would make all of my friends do the Myers Briggs, the Enneagram, the Big Five,” she laughs. “I didn’t have the language then to express what I was experiencing or sensing or intuiting.”
Over time, her focus shifted from collecting systems to interrogating how people actually live with them. “I use divination tools like tarot to anchor me back into what is coherent for me,” she says. “Coherence is that my mind is thinking what my third eye is intuiting, what my eyes are seeing, what my mouth is saying, what my heart is hoping, what my gut is sensing – I’m constantly scanning my body for that sense of alignment.”
Ahenkan describes the practice as a kind of ongoing Socratic dialogue: setting an intention, reading symbolism, noticing emotional responses as they arise and questioning why certain messages provoke anxiety or attachment. ‘If the message is true, why is that making me feel anxious?’ she asks herself. ‘Why have I attached myself to this outcome?’ The work is learning to sit with what’s already there. “Unfortunately for a lot of people who want to dabble in the mainstreaming of it, they don't find the same efficacy because they're waiting for something external to align what can only be aligned internally,” she explains.
That line of questioning led her to write her latest book, Ask Yourself This, a shadow work journal for those willing to start where things are least comfortable – and to resist insulating themselves from self-interrogation through language.
“Finding the definition and creating the language feels like the work,” she says, “until you reach a point where you’re like, ‘Actually, I’m just as triggered as I was before.’” That moment of stasis is where the real work begins. “Shadow work is where you have to go deeper into the places you don’t want to touch. The room under the stairs. The place you never want to go because it’s gross and it brings up too much stuff.”
Underlying that is a more pragmatic concern: the way people arrive at a destination — success, visibility, self-knowledge — and assume fulfilment should follow automatically, only to realise they’ve skipped the harder task of integrating who they actually are into the life they’re living. Shadow work, for Ahenkan, is about closing that gap. Not borrowing someone else’s framework or aspirations, but asking a simpler, more confronting question: What are you doing in this life, and for what reason?
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The impulse to write the book came, in part, from the peculiar burden of being a public meaning-maker. “I couldn’t have a regular conversation without people assigning me the responsibility of making their life make sense for them – without any of the risk that I took to make my own life make sense for me,” she says. What she wanted instead was to push people back toward themselves. “If you really want to be about that life,” she adds, “you’ll start where it’s hardest.” Her work speaks to those who were never afforded the luxury of self-actualisation as a choice. “People are opting into it as a hobby,” she says. “It wasn’t survival for them. I’m talking to people who had to develop an identity for themselves, because the only one they were offered was not going to take them anywhere favourable.”
Mandybur shares this concern from another angle. While she sees genuine value in the democratisation of mysticism, she is clear-eyed about what gets lost when spiritual practices are untethered from ethics. “Anything that becomes mainstream or ‘trending’ becomes co-opted by capitalism,” she says. “There’s a lot of money to be made in the ‘new age’ industry, which means there’s a lot of bullshit too.” In recent years, she has watched as fear-mongering content has flourished online, often targeting the most vulnerable. “Charlatans abound, unfortunately! There was a world-wide Instagram scam ring that created fake accounts of tarot readers,” she says. “They would DM followers, offer them a free reading, tell them they were cursed, and ask for money to fix it.”
The consequences are not abstract for Mandybur, who herself was impersonated dozens of times, with followers being tricked into sending money. “The internet doesn’t guarantee ethical checks and balances,” she says. “So it can be the Wild West.” Like Ahenkan, she draws a firm boundary around responsibility. “I would never read tarot for someone in a mental health crisis,” she says. “I’d refer them to a mental health professional.” Not everyone does.
If the witch has gone mainstream, fashion has helped with the rollout. Gabriela Hearst, who has spoken openly about her tarot practice, built her Spring Summer 2026 collection around the Major Arcana. At Dior, mysticism has become part of the house vocabulary: the Spring Summer 2024 show was peppered with zodiac references, astrological charts and feminist invocations of female intuition, while earlier this year the brand hosted a tarot residency at Harrods, positioning divination as a counterpoint to a wellness culture fluent in metrics but vague on meaning. Elsewhere, Marine Serre’s lunar symbols nod to fate and futurity; Collina Strada leans into astrology and spell-like affirmations as a language of self-definition; and Alexander McQueen’s fascination with witchcraft, pagan ritual and feminine power still looms large over fashion’s collective imagination, echoed in everything from diaphanous silhouettes to references to covens, omens and transformation. Across collections and campaigns, the witch appears as a figure of intuition and interior life.
It’s easy to feel cynical about fashion’s embrace of witchcraft, particularly as mass retailers and beauty conglomerates rush to monetise mysticism. Still, Mandybur resists the urge to moralise. She sees the visual language of witchcraft – in fashion, media, beauty – as a legitimate entry point. “Fashion, decoration, and media representation of witchcraft is a very valid gateway drug into lived spiritual practice,” she says. “Everyone starts somewhere.” What matters is whether they choose to go deeper. “There’s usually a spiritual reason we’re drawn over and over again to certain imagery,” she says. “It’s up to the individual whether that leads to a lived practice.”
Both women return, in different ways, to the same question of agency. For Mandybur, witchcraft offers a means of reclaiming it, particularly for those historically excluded from institutional power. For Ahenkan, agency begins where external validation ends. “You can’t outsource your validation anymore,” she says. “Eventually, you’ll have to answer the questions yourself.”
So, where to start for the witch-curious? “Go back to your earliest memories of joy and inspiration,” Mandybur says. “What felt magical? What would you like to relive?” She suggests starting offline. Reading books. Going to the beach. Paying attention to what the body responds to. “Wherever you get your advice,” she adds, “remember that you make the rules.” And, most importantly: “stay off WitchTok.”
For those new to divination and those in need of a beautiful new deck, you can peruse RUSSH's favourite tarot card sets to shop, or our guide for how to use tarot. Or maybe you're looking to enlist the services of an Etsy Witch? Here's how they work and whether they can really solve all your problems.
