Mike Rugnetta: 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.
Georgia Hampton: What do you think people who are going to
Etsy for curses are looking for?
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: Basically, something that sounds scary, but
doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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
Mike Rugnetta: fought my legions in hell.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
TikTokker: I paid three Etsy witches to draw my soul mate,
tonight, we're gonna find out if they actually drew the same
person.
TikTokker: 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.
TikTokker: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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?
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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?
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Alex Frampton: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Alex Frampton: So, you know, all of these things are very
cartoonish. It's very cartoonish depictions.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Alex Frampton: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Alex Frampton: 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?
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Alex Frampton: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: Mhmm.
Georgia Hampton: How?
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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.
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mahigan St. Pierre: There's something to be said about, you
know, this work very much being part of the demi monde.
Georgia Hampton: What do you mean by that?
Mahigan St. Pierre: 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?
Georgia Hampton: 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.
Mike Rugnetta: 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
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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.