🆕 Never Post! Practical Magic: A Witch’s Guide to Etsy Witches

Darlings! A quite seasonally appropriate Never Post for you this fine Wednesday! In this episode, Georgia talks with Mahigan St. Pierre about witches Etsy-and-not, and forensic psychologist Alex Frampton about the image of witches today. And also: videogame menu music, spooky edition!

–

• Call us at 651 615 5007 to leave a voicemail
• Drop us a voice memo via airtable
• Or email us at theneverpost at gmail dot com

–

Intro Links

• Too burned out to travel? This new app fakes your summer vacation photos for you
• Photography, Or The Writing Of Light by Jean Baudrillard
• X will start selling inactive usernames to paid users
• A digital dark age? The people rescuing forgotten knowledge trapped on old floppy disks
• Facebook suspends popular Chicago ICE-sightings group at Trump administration’s request
• 2025 Fiscal Year Among the Deadliest in ICE History for Detained Migrants
• Nearly two years after the “Chicago Rat Hole” became a viral sensation, scientists have weighed in on the debate over what type of critter made the splat.
• 'Chicago Rat Hole' was not made by a rat, say rodent researchers

Interstitial Music from the Trick or Beep Collection

• Elvira II - Jaws of Cerberus (Amiga version) - Breathing Life
• Beetlejuice (NES version) - Ghostly Graveyard
• Pinball Jam - Elvira and the Party Monsters
• Sweet Home - Encounter
• Noctropolis (MS-DOS version) - Desmond’s Lament
• Spear of Destiny - Evil Incarnate
• Rise of the Dragon (MS-DOS version) - Warehouse Entrance and Qwong’s House
• Monster Bash (MS-DOS version) - Bach Bash
• Thrill Kill - Seeds of Fear
• Castlevania - Boss (Poison Mind)
• Chakan - The Forever Man (Sega Genesis Version) - Earth Dimension
• Castlevania II - Simon’s Quest
• Gauntlet Dark Legacy  (Arcade Version) - Province (Haunted Cemetery)

The Business of Digitized Witchcraft

• Find Mahigan
  • Kitchen Toad
  • Their Patreon (where you can also find their podcast)
• Find Alex
  • “In The Broom Closet”

–

Never Post’s producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton and The Mysterious Dr. Firstname Lastname. Our senior producer is Hans Buetow. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholtzer. The show’s host is Mike Rugnetta.

We asked, what is this? It rustled. We dug a hole. What is
this, we asked, a nocturama? No, we agreed, the thing was
not a nocturama. A nocturama is when you cannot catcht
heir breath. We nodded. We dug a hole. Our white hair
warmed around the thing, we asked, is this a genesis? No, we
agreed, the thing was not a genesis. A genesis is when he sweeps across the water. We nodded. It rustled. We stood
closer to each other, we asked, what is this, a stillness?

Excerpt of The Experiments Lasted Through the Winter, by Sabrina Orah Mark

Never Post is a production of Charts & Leisure and is distributed by Radiotopia

Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike Ragnetta. This intro was written on Tuesday, 10/21/2025 at 09:32AM eastern, and we have a bubbling, swirling show for you this week. Georgia, and I mean, could it have been anyone else, talks to practitioner of the magical arts, Mahegan St. Pierre, about the rise and sudden spotlight on Etsy witches and how their approach compares to witchcraft as practiced for millennia.

Georgia speaks as well to PhD candidate in forensic psychology, Alex Frampton, about the role witchcraft may play for witches as a community. And also video game menu music Halloween edition. But right now, we're going to take a quick break, you're going to listen to some ads unless you're on the member feed, and when we return, we're going to talk about a few of the things that have happened since the last time you heard from us. From my laboratory in the Castle East to the master bedroom where the vampires feast, the ghouls all came from their humble abodes to get a jolt from my five stories this week. An endless summer for you inside your phone.

Product designer, Laurent Delray, of Meta's Super Intelligence Lab, launched an iPhone app that shares a name with the 1966 surfing documentary, which will generate pictures of you on the vacations you didn't or couldn't take. The app is powered by Google's Gemini Nano Banana image model. I love writing sentences twenty twenty five. Here you are exploring a beach town, writes TechCrunch, or overlooking a European city from your balcony. There you are out shopping, having dinner with friends, or at a social gathering, end quote.

Endless Summer will charge you $3.99 for 30 images past the trial, $17.99 for a 150, and $34.99 for 300, which is significantly cheaper than the all inclusive resort that's been advertising to you on Instagram. In a sense, Jean Baudrillard writes, the photographic image materially translates the absence of reality, which, quoting Borges, is so obvious and so easily accepted because we have already the feeling that nothing is real. Such a phenomenology of reality's absence is usually impossible to achieve. Endless Summer is free to download on the Apple App Store. X has reported that it will begin redistributing disused and inactive usernames via what the company is calling the handles marketplace available only to paid X subscribers.

Longer and alphanumeric handles will be reassigned for no additional cost, while shorter and more recognizable handles, those with higher demand for redistribution, will be sold with prices starting at $2,500 according to Mashable. What the x trust and safety team or whatever is left of it at this point will do to combat impersonation, fraud, and other chicanery as a result of this process is anyone's guess. The Cambridge University Library archives are home to countless letters, notebooks, photographs, scrolls, and now floppy disks. In 2021, the library received the Hawking archive donated by the family of the renowned theoretical physicist. In the 113 boxes of material, there were included a number of diskettes of various sizes and formats.

To preserve these records and others like them, the BBC reports that archivists have had to turn to eBay, for example, to acquire the appropriate technology. For archivists today, the BBC writes, that means dozens of separate machines are needed to read discs of various sizes from different systems, and it often takes significant searching to track down these ancient devices everywhere from house clearance auctions to collector marketplaces. This has created concerns among archivists, historians, and archaeologists, they write, that future generations may face a sort of digital dark age when they look back for material from the past fifty years or so. Meta removed a Facebook group used by nearly 80,000 people to track the presence of ICE, US immigration and customs enforcement, across Chicago during its now weeks long deportation blitz across the city. ICE, citing a Chicagoland, was used to, quote, warn neighbors that federal agents are near schools, grocery stores, and other community locations so they can take steps to protect themselves according to the Chicago Sun Times.

The US Department of Justice requested the page's removal days after its existence was noted by dog food connoisseur Laura Loomer. A Meta spokesperson said, this group was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm. It is unclear what harm is being referenced here. At the time of recording, the official Facebook pages for both ICE and DHS responsible for at least twenty one deaths in 2025, according to notice.org, remain accessible. And finally, in further Chicagoland news, the rat hole was likely no rat at all.

Nearly two years after the Chicago rat hole became a viral sensation, the Sun Times writes on Instagram, scientists have weighed in on the debate over what type of critter made the splat. The zoological mystery was solved by researchers at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who wrote there is a 98.67% likelihood that the Chicago rat hole was a squirrel. We'll put a link to the story in the show notes. You gotta go look for the diagrams alone. It is pure gold.

In show news this week, we're gonna do these real quick. We won silver in the signal awards technology category. That's nice. That's very fun. When you tell your friends to listen to the show, please be sure to mention that we are multi award winning.

Congrats also to our pals Close All Tabs, who were also silver medalists, and to Killswitch, who got the gold. Nice work. Never post T shirts are printed, and they look good as hell. Everyone did an amazing job, and they're gonna begin shipping early November. We'll have more news once they're out about what shirts we'll have in stock for you to buy if you missed the preorder, but it will be a very few.

A limited drop as the kids say. The Radiotopia fundraiser is starting in a week or so. We're gonna make a special upload just to explain what that is, how it works, and how it's different from the never post fundraiser that we just finished, but the long and short is it's a way to support every Radiotopia show all at once. Of it like a public media pledge Drive, but Avery Truffelman is there. Coming soon.

We have some upcoming livestreams on Monday, October 27 at 11:30AM eastern. Some of the staff are gonna take to Twitch to carve pumpkins. How festive. Grab a gourd to carve along if you are so inclined, or simply sit back and marvel at Georgia's claimed remarkable skill at this very specific task. Is anyone surprised?

Not at all. And then on Monday, November 10 at 11:30AM eastern, we're gonna be streaming an editorial meeting and carving up ideas. I want you to know that Hans added that line to the script. Come to hear pitches and help shape upcoming segments that you're gonna hear on Never Post. It's gonna be a lark.

Both will happen at twitch.tv forward /theneverpost. Follow us to get notified when we go live. And finally, hells bells pitches. We got so many. If you submitted a pitch for a segment, we got it.

We promise. We're working on getting back to everybody that we're interested in working with. If we don't get back to you, sorry, but please do not be discouraged. Please please please please please pitch us again the next time you come across a story and you think, oh, sounds like Neverpost. Okay.

That's the news I have for you this week. In this episode, Georgia talks with Mahegan Saint Pierre and Alex Frampton about witches online, offline, and the nature of the gulf between the two. But first, in our interstitials this week, dredged from the depths of archive.org, spooky video game menu music. Selections include Elvira, Castlevania, of course, Shaken, and Gauntlet. You can find a full list in the show notes.

What do you think people who are going to Etsy for curses are looking for?

God knows. God knows. Petty resolution maybe or desperation. I doubt it's desperation because usually desperation drives you to, like, dark alleys, not etsy.com.

That's Mehegan St. Pierre, a practicing witch who offers services online through their business Kitchen Toad. Not on Etsy, mind you. Astandardissue.com and a Patreon and a podcast.

For me specifically, the witch is someone who situates themselves within the world, within the cosmos as a person of agency who, you know, traffics with the living, the dead, and nature spirits all around us in any way, shape, form that might show up. The witch is someone who is an intercessor between the world of the living as well as the world of spirit. Right? The witch often takes on a role that is part priest, part community therapist, part healer, you know, part sorcerer.

What does that mean? Well, in simplified terms, the witch community exists to replace the social hierarchy that would otherwise reject them. A witch defines themselves for themselves. They have a spiritual practice that is grounded in the physical natural world. But what that practice looks like is also determined by each individual witch.

It can mean reading tarot or doing someone's birth chart. It can also mean calling upon spirits to protect yourself or others. And even if a witch's practice just focuses on themself, witches are an extremely community focused group. Historically, to be a witch is to be an other. To be othered.

The term implies ostracization, isolation from the broader community, and the promise of violence by that broader community. But like many terms meant to do harm, the label witch and the practice of witchcraft have also been co opted to be signals of empowerment. These terms have been redefined to suit a multitude of individual interests. This process has played out in witchcraft online over the last decade or so. I wanted to talk to McKeegan about witches generally, online witches specifically, and Etsy witches even more specifically after the whole Charlie Kirk thing.

Three days before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Jezebel posted an article with the headline, quote, we paid some Etsy witches to curse Charlie Kirk. The article has since been removed, but in it, the author described how easy it was to pick out a curse. She compared it to being as difficult as buying a phone charger. The curse was supposed to be a low level inconvenience, like getting a bad haircut. But, obviously, things turned out differently.

The witch responsible for the curse, named Priestess Lillian, denied her workings had anything to do with Charlie Kirk's death. Then she kind of took it back and said how her workings are effective and that curses can have unintended consequences. But it doesn't really matter what she said. People wanted to congratulate her and to hire her to go after more politicians. It also inspired, I mean, quite literally a witch hunt.

Priestess Leland received a barrage of death threats. Etsy banned her. In the denouement of all of this, I wanted to know what is it like being a witch? What is it like being a witch online? And maybe most intensely, I needed to know how does Internet witchcraft work in comparison to the non Internet kind?

If you read the newsletter or listened to our Halloween special last year, it should come as no surprise that I, producer Georgia, have a personal connection to this topic. I've practiced some kind of occult spirituality my whole life. I started reading my birth chart and collecting crystals in elementary school. I read my cards regularly and will do anyone's tarot if they ask me. If someone I know had a baby, I'll make the baby's birth chart for the parents.

I don't really do any kind of spell work apart from cleansing my apartment when it's called for, or maybe doing some full moon rituals. My practice is pretty private. But there's an entire world of witchcraft that is very much a business. If you're down on your luck and looking for a metaphysical solution to your woes, there are witches ready and able to help. Historically, the purchasing of sorceress services is something you had to go seek out.

By virtue of witchcraft being the work of the other, anyone who might be interested in purchasing spell work had to leave the comfort of more quote unquote polite society and go find it. Centuries ago, that might have meant going into the woods or walking down a dark alley that leads to another dark alley that leads to an unmarked door behind a brothel. Witches were harder to find, and that was often by design. But now, finding a witch is as easy as knowing the right search terms. If you go to etsy.com and look up the word curse, you get exactly 1,280 results.

Search the word spell, and you get the same number. I don't think this is some cosmic coincidence either. I think it's just the maximum number of searchable products that Etsy allows. There's hexes to financially ruin someone. There's love spells and spells to block love spells.

Etsy witches get around the intangibility of their services by listing spell work under the category of entertainment. Product names are outrageously long. Things like bring back stubborn x, return to me, come back casting, love obsession spell, love ritual for your stubborn target, bring him back love spell. Or 5 k to 10 k fast money spell casting, instant cash spell for quick results, powerful wealth ritual, immediate financial success, same hour or day. Etsy is the Timu of sorcery.

The prices are also pretty comparable to Timu. That stubborn ex spell would put you back $35. At Mahegan's shop, a sweetening ritual costs twice that amount. Where does Etsy exist as a platform for magic in the community? Is it reputable?

I don't

think so. I don't know that it is. I don't know anyone in my circles and who I consider peers, who I consider to be like leading voices in this community, you know, this broader community that does Etsy. To me, I've always conceptualized Etsy as this place where you buy like packed with the 49 legions of hell.

Basically, something that sounds scary, but doesn't necessarily mean anything.

That kind of thing rather than actually working with a practitioner directly. I think that the model of purchasing something through Etsy, getting like an automated email, and then like maybe a reading, maybe a picture. Who knows if it's the same if it's the same picture sent to everyone, you know what I mean? But it's extremely impersonal. And I think that by removing the person from the actual process of, you know, working services, you're no longer doing client work, you are churning out some bullshit.

Their shop, Kitchen Toad, offers a wide range of services. Things like cleansing rituals, handmade charms, and the option to book a reading or a consultation. All available online for any client who crosses the digital threshold. And this isn't just an add to cart hit purchase situation. It's very involved.

There's an intake form. You know, you give me your full name, your date of birth, a picture of yourself, what you need out of this. And then once I have that money's transferred, everything like that, then, you know, I usually get in touch with people, let them know when it's gonna be performed. And then depending on if they want divination performed afterwards or they wanted a recap, which is essentially a candle burning reading. Then at that point, once the working is performed, there's pictures sent to you and, you know, a description of what happened, what I did, any omens that came through, any sort of visions, anything like that, as well as the results of divination.

The relationship between Mahegan and their client is extremely intimate, and it's completely unique depending on the person. If the situation is more complicated, say, if you want a curse to be lifted off of you and there are lots of energies at play, then this process is also more nuanced. Maheegan caters to each person's needs. One client might need a talisman to help protect them. Others might not.

Sometimes during these consultations, Maheegan decides that spell work isn't even what a person needs at all.

After the holidays, there's usually an uptick in, like, cleansing work and then removal work and those kinds of things because people come away from the holidays feeling icky and feeling, like, spiritually drained and such. And so a lot of people will come and inquire whether or not they were cursed. And most of the time, it's just like, no, your relatives just suck. I'm gonna be so real with you. Mima Mima is not a great influence on you.

Through their online business, Mohegan is able to foster a community of clients, many of whom have been coming to them for years. And Mohegan's work is very emotionally taxing. In order to know what any given person needs, they need to know a lot about that person. Fears, traumas, resentments, insecurities. On Etsy, that client practitioner relationship is replaced with the promise of, as Mihigan said I

fought my legions in hell.

Galloping to take vengeance on your behalf. All fluff. Demonic fluff, sure, but no substance. But that kind of fluff sells online. It's outrageously popular, and it's the most common flavor of witchcraft that shows up on my feeds unsummoned.

I regularly see people posting videos about how they quote unquote hired an Etsy witch to, I don't know, make their ex boyfriend go bald. This mainstreamification of witchcraft is mostly about what kind of post you can make about it. The term Etsy witch has become kind of a meme, like the Charlie Kirk thing, like a lot of things.

I paid three Etsy witches to draw my soul mate, tonight, we're gonna find out if they actually drew the same person.

I paid, well, technically speaking, two Etsy witches. One for good luck, and then one for another thing that we're keeping off the Internet, and that's fine.

Yesterday morning at 8AM, I paid an Etsy witch. She casted four spells for me. Shout out to my Etsy witch. I wanna tell you guys about this until I thought it actually worked, but, bitch, it worked.

It's not entirely clear if the people who book workings from Etsy witches actually believe that curses and spells are real. Frankly, it might not really matter. The point is the post. The sharing of the fact that you did it. A kind of wink and a nod.

Like, we all know this is a joke. And as Maheegan explained to me, sharing this work is usually a pretty big no no.

There's this sort of like, this is hush-hush, you know? Yes, we are online doing things. It's a very strange thing to kind of compute. Because it's like you're public and you're saying, yes, hire me for these things. But at the same time, there's a level of respect that needs to be understood that it's like, but this isn't for other people to see necessarily.

Through Etsy, spell work isn't treated as a communal interpersonal exchange of energy that is best handled privately. You're buying a spell from the same place that you buy a cheap red sash that says, Huzzah, 'tis my birthday in old English typeface. Which like, that's fine. It's just something different.

They're going through something or they're hanging out with their friends or what have you. And like, you know, they're having fun and they're like, oh my god, what if we book a spell?

And that's exciting. Right? A little white wine, a little hex, just another night with the girls. On Etsy, witchcraft is presented in the way a sideshow at a carnival might present it. With skulls and big capital letters and the promise that this curse will drive someone to the brink of madness.

The product images are often AI imagery of the kind of stuff you'd expect. Women with glowing eyes and jet black hair staring intensely from behind a cauldron. If the listing mentions anything about demons, you'll be treated to the AI generated image of a dozen Snarling, frogging nast of terror. As if these very same creatures are waiting at the ready to torment your cheating ex. That is thrilling, but impersonal.

It's the contentification of witchcraft, making it a product you can pay for in four interest free installments with Klarna. Not something which encourages deeper spiritual inquiry, which, you know, if you're out here wishing baldness upon your ex, maybe that would be good for you.

The fact that it's impersonal also means that it's easy. And the fact that it's usually cheaper is also easy. Right? The fact that you don't have to actually confront your desire for why you're booking this work by talking to a professional about it, means that you can book it, set it, forget it, hope for the best, or even set it out of your mind.

Because it was $15. Who the fuck cares?

From this perspective, Etsy witches serve the same purpose as a Zoltar machine. One of those animatronic fortune tellers you see at arcades. Sure, you know that the fortune you're getting is one of a finite number of options randomly handed to you. But you still pay for it because, well, it's fun. And people love fun, which for witches is sort of a blessing and a curse.

Mahegan explained to me that being a witch online means maintaining a kind of public performance.

There's always a component when you're doing public spiritual and magical work of performance, of pageantry, of, selling a story, selling an experience, selling a feeling. In the same way that there's branding for, you know, skincare and perfume companies, it's the same thing. The pageantry is a necessary aspect of this to a certain extent because that is what draws people in. And the showing off is also a way to communicate competence.

Witchcraft has a long history of showmanship, and showing off your skills is a way to attract would be clients. And the Internet lends itself beautifully to pageantry. When your posts are shared more readily by an algorithm that favors bright colors, human faces, and striking visuals, then social media could be the perfect place to perform your spell work in front of a potentially endless crowd of would be clients. But as Mihigan told me, the kind of things that tend to attract the most people to a witch's online storefront aren't things like spell work or public displays of spiritual ability. It has nothing to do with skill at all.

It's whether or not you, quote, unquote, look or act like a witch. After the break, we learn more about what that means. When it comes to doing witchcraft online, being a skilled sorcerer matters less than looking like a witch. And Maheegan told me that this game of aesthetic telephone is a common thing for the more popular witchy influencers.

They remodeled their kitchen to look like practical magic. And, you know, they talked about folklore that they read in a book twenty years ago once or twice. And then they just created this aesthetic around themselves, and that's what that's what it is. Right? And they have hundreds of thousands of followers.

Hundreds of thousands of followers is achieved by mirroring the aesthetic of the expected, the inoffensive, the friendly, the ooky spooky, but not scary. Frankly, the caricature.

So we're talking about the pointed hat. We're talking about potentially the green face, depending on kind of how far back into Disney we're going. You know, the the grown laugh, the black hats, the frogs, the broomsticks, the big cauldron.

That's Alex Frampton, a PhD candidate of forensic psychology who co wrote a study in 2022 called In the Broom Closet, exploring the role of online communities in shaping the identities of contemporary witchcraft practitioners. In her study, she spoke to a group of 16 witches who found community through online groups. And as she explained to me, these groups can each have their own relationship to stereotypes of what witches are and what they look like.

So, you know, all of these things are very cartoonish. It's very cartoonish depictions.

Some of the witches that Alex spoke to did find community sometimes through these stereotypes. By either subverting them, joking about them, or even reflecting them in their own way. And to her point, the stereotypes are really for the witch to use or reject as they see fit. If you want to turn your kitchen into the practical magic house, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. If anything, it might do work to invite more witch curious people into the fold.

As the concept of the occult becomes more cartoonish, unless actually frightening, it becomes safe. And by being safe, for some, it can serve as an easier way into that world.

Sometimes it can be a gateway. You might be into the aesthetic and actually gain some real insights into your values and actually do develop a practice.

And one of the most potent examples of this is, well, practical magic. The green faced crone is transmogrified into Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, who are young and hot and cool and make it seem like we too could be a little witchy if we wanted to be. It's a deliciously inviting world of witchcraft to operate within. I wanna live in that world. And if I saw a witch online who was offering her services surrounded by the aesthetic signifiers of practical magic, I mean, it might work on me.

And again, that isn't necessarily bad. But there is tension here.

And that's because just looking the part isn't always the same as embodying it. What you do lose kind of if you kind of only went as far as the aesthetic is you do lose that connection to history and you do lose that connection to, okay, why do people practice witchcraft in the first place?

Witchcraft looks different for everyone who practices it. There's no bible, no unified spiritual leader. You get to define how your practice looks and who you choose to invite into it, if anyone at all. There's huge variations between practitioners of witchcraft. But Alex explained to me that from the people she spoke to in her study, there was one big overlapping factor.

They'd experienced some sort of exclusion in some capacity, some kind of social exclusion. So whether it was, you know, the the more kind of wider female experience of misogyny or it could be something like to do with their health, whether it was their mental health or their physical health. But in some way, they felt that society had been quite exclusionary. Any any kind of social exclusion, kind of finding witchcraft, it provided, you know, a place for them to to find their tribe, so to speak, or to be able to express parts of their identities that maybe would not be so accepted in mainstream society.

And for the intrepid witch who wants to find a community of like minded people who share in the same experiences, the Internet is great for that. But it's also great for, like I said, showmanship. And that's where the tension lies. Performance is part of the craft, especially if you're offering services online. But there does seem to be a limit to how much one should rely on that performance at the sake of ignoring that shared experience of marginalization.

Throughout history and traditionally speaking, where you're gonna find your conjurers, your witches, etcetera, is gonna be within the context of community. The act of sorcery, the act of enacting change through magic or through traffic with spirits is something that is really difficult to do outside of the context of community simply for the fact that if, you know, you're not engaging with community, engaging with people around you and you're not, you know, taking on other people's problems, there's only so much that you can really do for yourself. Right? And so you then steer away from sorcery to then just spirituality. Right?

And that's where the line kind of draws itself between devotion or worship versus actually working spirits.

It feels like online, the process breaks down like this. Showmanship gets attention. That attention might, at first, form a kind of community. But after a while, if you're not careful, that desire for showmanship can easily eat away at any real creation of interpersonal relationships. The old razzle dazzle does work at getting more people through the door.

But if that's the only thing you offer, then whatever community that once existed kind of falls away. And to a degree, I think that's kind of the tried and true story of the Internet as a marketplace for business. In a visually dominant digital world, attention is an undeniable currency. And if you're willing to sacrifice community for the sake of getting more attention and therefore more money in the bank, then the Internet is a flawless place for business. Witchcraft is not the only group that has had this kind of flattening happen to them online.

But it's a very good example of this perfect formula. The overvaluing of the aesthetic of a niche group, plus the use of that aesthetic to make money. But it's not really money that's the problem here. Witchcraft has always been a business. The trouble here is commercialization.

It's taking a centuries old practice of empowerment through agency and turning it into an AI image of a black haired witch glowering in front of The Internet should be a great place for witchcraft as an industry. And for Mehegan, it is. But it's also just a piece of the puzzle.

In terms of offering services, it's not for everyone. Right? Offering the services part is kind of a thing you might be drawn to or that you might not be drawn to depending on your own practice. But for me, there always needs to be a component whether or not you're charging for services of acting on behalf of the living towards the world of spirits and then on behalf of spirits towards the world of the living. So you're really like an agent of change and agent of relationship.

They're able to work with people who live all over the world towards these goals. And that's powerful. The Internet also gets their name out there to more people more quickly. But taking your business online and having it be successful is a multi headed beast. Building a community online is one of the heads of the Hydra.

But there's a second more troublesome one too. You said that doing this work online is kind of a pain in the ass.

Mhmm.

How?

I signed up to be a witch, not a social media manager. You know, spiritual people and witchcraft people and people with active magical practices often do not have the interest to delve into what it means to be an online personality. Right? That's not that's not what people signed up for. But unfortunately, it's the reality of things nowadays.

For someone like Maheegan, that might mean posting on Instagram on a schedule or fielding DMs. The net they're casting is ostensibly broad. Their website or podcast could, in theory, reach anyone. But they are not sacrificing their relationship to community for the sake of attracting the most amount of attention. But the internet makes it extremely easy to overvalue performance at the cost of building a real community.

Sacrificing that interpersonal connection at the altar of SEO. There's a fine line between marketing yourself and sanitizing the subculture you represent, of turning witchcraft into a carnival game. Something flashy, fun, and forgettable. And if you really wanted to lean into the Zoltar machine method of things, there is no better platform to do it than Etsy. You're not going to Etsy in search of curses to find a semblance of community.

You're going there to spend $12.74 on a hex removal spell. There's a reason that so many of the thumbnails I saw on that site were using AI imagery. It makes sense. It's honestly a perfect choice for what's being sold there. AI imagery has no soul, no human touch, no personality.

And while I am sure that there are some witches on the platform who use it very sincerely, Etsy lends itself to a kind of anonymous impersonal exchange. Etsy is, in many ways, the perfect example of how any niche community can be sanitized online through commercialization. There's no community. There's no interpersonal relations beyond clicking purchase. It trivializes witchcraft into its most mimetic form.

But the truth is no one is safe from the way that witchcraft has been defined historically. It makes me think of what Alex said earlier, how it can be dangerous to only think of the aesthetics of witchcraft and ignore the reasons why people turn to it in the first place. I think Etsy shows the consequences of that exact kind of thinking. Regardless of the intentions of any given practitioner on the site, the meme of the Etsy witch does turn the craft into something cheap and easy. Offering services like spell work becomes a funny way to spend $12.74.

Until it's not funny anymore. For the people buying these services, something like the Charlie Kirk debacle could be just another joke, another meme. Hell, it could drive more traffic to Etsy. But for the practitioners selling these services, it's very real. If you hex the wrong person in the wrong way, like Charlie Kirk, for example, you could get the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people.

Community is what acts as a protector for witches. And Etsy just doesn't enable the kind of personal, intimate exchange of energy that is so foundational to witchcraft. It will not encourage the community that has uplifted witchcraft as a practice for centuries. That's just not the business model. On Etsy, if you come back from the holidays thinking that Meemaw cast a curse on you and you wanna buy a hex removal spell, it takes two seconds.

Nobody's going to tell you no. But the craft is a little more complicated than just clicking add to cart, and that's sort of the point.

There's something to be said about, you know, this work very much being part of the demi monde.

What do you mean by that?

Without without getting too too rated rated 18, you know, sex workers and pimps and drug dealers and those kinds of things. All of the like sketchy business that goes on at night, magical work is kind of a part of. Right? Just because of the nature of the work that we do. I mean, you're breaking into cemeteries in the middle of the night, burying shit, you know, etcetera etcetera.

You might be hired to, you know, curse people or to, you know, do a bunch of different things like that. And so the moral compass needs to be developed and finely attuned for sure. Who do you go to when, you know, you need to get an edge on the competition even though you're in a high ranking position? You go to the people who are a little sketchy and who will do whatever needs to get done. And, you know, who do you go to when you're really down on your luck and you're at the bottom of the barrel?

Same story. You know?

A huge thank you to Alex Frampton and Mehegan St. Pierre who both offered such interesting and insightful perspectives on this topic. I'll include links to Alex's study and Mahegan's website in the show notes. If you're a witch or someone who is spiritually connected to witchy things, I'm curious how you've interacted with the craft as it exists online. And if you bought a curse or a spell on Etsy, I wanna hear from you too.

Why did you do it? What did you expect? The links for how to contact us in the show notes.

That is the show we have for you this week. We are gonna be back here in the main feed on Wednesday, November 5. Each episode of Never Post represents a couple 100 person hours of work by a team of six people, hand researched, handwritten, hand scored, hand sound design, hand spoken into a microphone, and then hand edited with a mouse on a computer. At two episodes a month, that means that our $4 a month membership gets you bespoke, ad free, human made, agonized over podcast episodes for $2 a pop. Was this episode that you just listened to $2 worth of entertainment to you?

If it was, please head on over to neverpo.st and become a member today. Support your favorite local indie internet pod so that we can keep telling you about which witch is a witch's witch. Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton, and the mysterious doctor first name, last name. Our senior producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason Oberholzer.

The show's host, that's me, is Mike Krugnetta. We asked, what is this? It rustled. We dug a hole. What is this?

We asked. Anocturama? No. We agreed. The thing was not anocturama.

Anocturama is when you cannot catch their breath. We nodded. We dug a hole. Our white hair warmed around the thing. We asked, is this a genesis?

No. We agreed. The thing was not a genesis. A genesis is when he sweeps across the water. We nodded.

It rustled. We stood closer to each other. We asked, what is this? A stillness? Excerpt of the experiments lasted through the winter by Sabrina Ora Mark.

Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and distributed by Radiotopia.