There is a world that blends ancient arcane arts and algorithm-powered short form video content. That world is "Witch Tok," the community of self-described witches and other supposed wielders of magic who discuss the secrets of their craft on Tik Tok. Liv dives into Witch Tok to reveal how 21st century witches are leveraging social media to swap spells, hawk merch, and engage in occasional infighting. We also discover how christian media is reacting the popularity of online witches and continuing the centuries-old feud between protestants and those they accuse of being occultist devil worshippers.
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Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 225 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Witch Talk episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Liv Acar, and Travis View.
Magical spells.
Archaic cabinets filled with obscure mystical ingredients.
Broomsticks imbued with special powers.
Cauldrons filled with murky substances made for a nefarious purpose.
These things are all stereotypical images related to witchcraft that we're all surely familiar with through their presentation in things like books, television, and movies.
But what if I were to tell you that it was all real?
Well, at least according to some people.
And by people, I don't just mean 17th century New Englanders paranoid about devil worship in their colony.
It turns out there is a surprisingly large community of people on TikTok who believe they possess many of the same magical abilities that witches have as seen in popular culture.
This subgroup that calls itself WitchTok Now, this is very interesting to me.
billion video views of witchy related content on the online video sharing site
filled with expert and novice spellcasters alike who share the skills
and expertise required to, according to them, cast magical spells using a variety
of obscure ingredients. Now this is very interesting to me I wonder if there's
something about the short form video social media platform that lends itself
more to the arcane arts more so than say YouTube or Twitter.
Exactly.
Yeah, I definitely feel like spells work better on a medium that's, you know, 30 seconds to a minute long.
Yeah, you don't want to think about it for too long.
It's like, here's the little bit of how to do it and what it does, and that's about it.
Yeah, they cut like right as the tip of the wand is sort of lighting up.
Not enough time for you to think about it for too long.
Because on YouTube, if you do that, it's a little suspicious.
You know, you want to get to the 10 minute mark for ads.
But, but Witch Talk has its own, own monetary motivations we'll get into later.
But if you're casting spells for 10 minutes, that gives you enough time to think, am I wasting my time right now?
Yeah, that's enough time for the Ministry of Magic to step in and, you know, take away your wand, discipline you.
You really don't want any of that happening.
Today's episode will be all about this dedicated and surprisingly large community of self-proclaimed witches.
What they believe, why they believe it, the history of self-proclaimed witchcraft, and how those outside of the community have reacted to this group's confidence surrounding their supposed spellcasting abilities.
Now I started my journey onto WitchTalk in a similar way I started my TikTok Spiritualist Rabbit Hole episode from a year or so ago, which basically entails making a new TikTok account, finding a couple videos from the target community, playing them on loop a bunch of times, and then only viewing videos suggested to my For You page related to this community.
If you aren't aware, TikTok is a video-based social media site that runs almost entirely through the use of a suggestion algorithm, through the For You page, or FYP for short.
It takes note of the sort of stuff you view and gives you content that other people that also view it tend to like.
So you start viewing witchy stuff, it's like, okay, here's only witchy stuff.
You can scroll on for hours and hours and hours.
Different types of spells and cauldrons and potions and all that.
And this journey felt a whole lot like my deep dive into New Age Spiritualism TikTok, as there's a great deal of crossover within these two communities.
Some of the creators my feed gave me were actually people I recognized from that deep dive, whose faces have now seemingly been etched into my brain permanently.
These are people who think that vibes and vibe-based practices have a real effect on the world.
That there's some underlying spiritualist structure to the universe that they can tap into to manipulate.
While in the New Age community, there's more of an emphasis on, for instance, manifesting things in your head, for those in witch talk, there are very specific magical procedures required to unleash one's mental vibes-based energies in the proper manner.
So it's a lot more kind of structured, you know.
You know, leviosa, not leviosa, sort of stuff.
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
Here's an example of the text from a TikTok detailing a user's journey from New Age spiritualism into witchcraft.
The video reads, How my spiritual journey accidentally turned into witchcraft.
Meditation.
Starts collecting crystals and learning about them.
Becoming obsessed with incense and how to cleanse.
Learning how to read tarot cards.
Doing shadow work and writing manifestations in a normal journal to a leather journal.
Wait a minute, wait a minute.
So there's a significance in the materials that make up the binding of one's journal?
Yeah, it's a lot about like how it makes you feel but there's kind of an implication and sometimes explicitly that like how it makes you feel is like structured and also relate to the vibes of the universe.
So like this thing tends to make people feel this way and as a result they can do extra magical powers in this sort of way.
So have you started getting, like, targeted ads for, um, like, the Necronomicon and, you know, journals that, uh, you know, have faces carved into them?
That would be, I wish it was, like, it went kind of the Evil Dead angle.
I think that there should be more explicit, like, dark magic spellcraft.
I think that would be much cooler.
You know what's fucked up?
Like, I don't even look at this witch talk stuff, and I'm already getting ads for, like, this wand that you can put a little piece of snap paper into, and it shoots fireballs out of it.
I mean, and that's for somebody who, you know, who hasn't even really folded witch talk into their algorithm.
Is this like real tech, like it lights it on fire or something?
Yeah, it's like, I imagine that it's kind of the same technology as, you remember those little boxes that you would get around 4th of July?
There are those little kind of twisted up white pieces of paper and you throw them on the ground and they pop and snap.
I feel like it's the sort of the same science behind it, except you're shooting it out of a wand somehow.
It's like a combination between that and a rubber band gun.
Honestly, that sounds more real than the witch stuff.
Like, at least there's like a fire thing with that.
Like, that's cool.
Oh yeah.
Oh, it looks cool.
It looks cool.
No, a lot of the witch spells are more vibes based.
You can change how people perceive you and how people feel about you, how you feel about situations, this sort of thing.
There's no like, I cast magic missile on you.
So there's no, there's no like AI voice being like, watch as I turn my boyfriend into a frog.
How to saw someone in half and still have their legs move.
It sounds a lot like just like practical psychology, how to affect your own mood and sense of self and how to influence others.
I mean, that's that's not just magic.
That's just sort of like a kind of like a life skill to navigate the social systems.
Yeah, and you can see like with what this lady was saying about like doing shadow work writing manifestations in your journal, it's like journaling stuff can actually have a positive effect on your kind of emotional investment in the world, the self awareness of what's going on.
It's just that like, for a lot of people, they have to couch that in like magical language, like The shadow self stuff is just like confronting kind of your fears and anxieties and and working through them but for them it's like there is this version of you that's like in a darker realm that's all the negative version and you're like actually telepathically communicating with them essentially and reconciling with like a real spiritual entity.
You see like the it is like a normal kind of healthy psychological you know clinical psychological practice but just like made into this language that makes it seem more powerful.
All right.
And in the video, it shows that when she changes to the special journal, it's kind of this edgy leather-bound journal with a pentagram in the middle, which of course is like, you know, a Satanism thing, but it's also the five different elements of matter within like modern neo-pagan Wiccan stuff, which we'll also get into later because that's rather important.
But the TikTok continues.
Swapping regular candles for spell candles.
Being drawn to books about witchcraft.
Learning about herbs and their properties.
Using herbs for protection.
Making an altar and casting spells.
Well, now this is a jump, you know?
Swapping the regular candles for spell candles, okay, no problem.
And you're drawn to books, that makes sense, and learning about herbs and, you know, the properties.
And then, like, making an altar and casting spells, it just feels like sort of an escalation from the other listed sort of things.
Yeah, really off the deep end when you hear it foot like this.
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