Ashley Ryan is a witch. But in her Hollywood Hills apartment, there are no bubbling cauldrons, black pointy hats or magic wands.
In her living room, a wooden bookshelf houses rows of occult titles — The Book of Candle Magic, Planetary Magick, The Book of Seances — many of them dog-eared and notated. And facing that bookshelf is a five-foot-tall at-home studio light, signaling her recording space.
Welcome to her setup for #WitchTok, the niche corner of TikTok where users post witchcraft content. It’s where Ryan, aka @PythianPriestess, films videos on everything from how to build spell jars to debunking misconceptions about satanism. She’s earned 406k followers and nearly 10 million likes from viewers. It’s all a far cry from 17 Century Salem.
In the age of internet eclecticism, where you can find a digital community for just about anything, there are Facebook groups for beginner witches, TikTok accounts devoted to spreading magical knowledge and Reddit “coven finders,” so witches can gather and join groups of like-minded people. On TikTok, the hashtag #WitchTok has nearly 37 billion views.
In our digital era, witches have come out of hiding as they build a growing market for their services — especially after interest in online witchcraft surged during the pandemic.
When she got into witchcraft in middle school in the 1990s, Ryan says she hid it from her Catholic family.
“I really thought I was just going to be the weird hermit forever,” Ryan explains. “And this would just be my secret that I did in my free time … I never thought it would be my career.”
Now, she’s got a podcast (@theoccultunveiled), an Etsy shop where she sells spellwork for customers and an agent repping her occult book on spiritual sex.
As influencers and entrepreneurs like Ryan have found their online niches, the taboo has faded. Once isolated witches are connecting in digital spaces, inspiring others to come out of the broom closet.
Ryan has an alter space for Lucifer, although she said she does not activeley tend to it because she is not yet ready.
The Pythian Priestess
@pythianpriestess You are magick✨ not the tools. Create a sacred space with your hands and energy. #babywitchesoftiktok #babywitchestips #babywitchtips101 #beginnerwitch #beginnerwitchtipsandtricks ♬ original sound - Pythian Priestess 🧿 LA
Two years ago, a 60-year-old woman from Myanmar and her godson discovered Ashley Ryan on TikTok and reached out for help because a “big black cloud was following them like a darkness.”
Ryan consulted the Chicago-based family over Zoom and concluded a curse had been placed on the family when the woman’s great, great, great grandfather had murdered another member of their tribe. Ryan, who identifies both as an occultist and witch, says she spent two and a half weeks removing the curse from the woman’s “energetic body.” The process involved astral projection, in which Ryan entered a form of trance to “go up into the astral plane [to] call and summon forth her spirit with protection of certain entities, usually kinds of angels.”
This digital healing process would have been impossible just a decade earlier — and is just one example of how Ryan’s work is inextricably linked to social media, new technologies and a high-profile acceptance of the otherworldly.
Lisa Bitel, a professor of religion and history at the University of Southern California, said the practice of witchcraft has undergone tremendous changes recently, with practitioners embracing an open and public business model.
“Whereas before, even in the 19th and early 20th century, you would have to find someone and go quietly to wherever she was,” Bitel said. “And I’m sure there’s still practitioners like that, too. It depends on what culture you’re talking about.”
Now, as a full-time witch for hire, Ryan’s work is definitely public — clients from all over, from Australia to Japan, are finding her through Instagram and TikTok. She does keep certain details of her spellwork under wraps, as she was taught them by a secret society she declines to name. She said this society deemed her a Priestess.
Ashley Ryan speaks on her apprehensions about WitchTok and why she no longer teaches students how to work with Lucifer (photo courtesy of Ashley Ryan).
Her entire livelihood centers around her public-facing magical identity. She even has a personal manager who keeps her brand image of Pythian Priestess alive — and represents her in Hollywood, where she’s trying to sell scripts. She holds a Master’s degree in Writing and Producing for TV.
Her entrepreneurial efforts keep her busy. Wednesdays are typically her busiest days, she said. She’s up at 8:30 a.m., doing hair and makeup for her podcast. She films and records two or three episodes by 4 p.m., then switches to prep work for Pythian Mystery School, an online occult school she started during the pandemic (where memberships granting access to recorded video lessons and Zoom meetings cost $11 to $77 a month). In the evening, she teaches the lessons and rituals for her school, before responding to emails and working on book edits.
At 11 p.m., she does prayer work and winds down with an episode of Law & Order SVU.
While Ryan has not faced the sort of persecution over her practice that witches and accused witches in past centuries did, she has cut ties with former friends and faced skepticism of her work.
“The truth is that this kind of work, I’ve dedicated my entire life to it. I do not have time for a 9 to 5 job, I do not price gauge people,” she said. “In the modern era, it’s not unreasonable to ask for payment that sustains your life. I’m not living a crazy lifestyle with gold toilets or something like that, but I am living a lifestyle that allows me to do my work comfortably. The vow of poverty has already been given to us by capitalism, I don’t need to do that to myself.”
Meet Shadeh Ferris-Francis, a queer witch who left the Baptist church and found acceptance and belonging in witchcraft.
The Sea Witch
Shontel Anestasia speaks on her concerns with WitchTok, primarily the use of "short-cut" magic and the belief that anyone can be a witch (photo courtesy of Shontel Anestasia).
When Shontel Anestasia was a child, her grandmother would take her to Coney Island in Brooklyn each year. She didn’t go there for the ferris wheel or the hot dogs, but for the Atlantic Ocean — the same waters that border Guyana, the West Indies nation where her grandmother migrated from.
“She had me go in the ocean and she said ‘Just cleanse yourself with the sea, let it take everything away.’ And I thought that was normal,” Anestasia said. “I don’t know exactly all the things she was, but all the stuff I’m doing now, a lot came from her and her teachings.”
Now, living in Los Angeles, Anestasia is a sea witch who derives power from the ocean and a kitchen witch, meaning she gets magic from cooking. She brings clients to the sea to do spiritual cleansings — just like her grandmother guided her to do.
She also has an Afro-Caribbean spiritual shop and apothecary on Etsy called the Urban Gurvi Mama Shop, where she sells spiritual consultations, ancestor veneration classes and candle spells. Her TikTok videos on how to season food for blessings have helped bring the 32-year-old 290,000 followers.
“I decided to take [my grandmother’s] teachings and her practices to help people,” she said. “It’s empowering because I feel like I’m continuing the lineage in a respectful manner. I’m using it to help people. I can feel it, she’s super happy.”
Anestasia’s life now is far from that of her spiritual grandmother, which was one of secrecy. While Anestasia’s whole career is centered around her witchcraft and spirituality, her grandmother kept it discreet, simply using her practices to help herself along in her job selling cosmetics.
@shontel_anestasia Food seasoning avail on my Etsy Shop #Lukumi #africanspirituality #hoodoo ♬ original sound - Shontel Anestasia 🇬🇾🪬
For centuries or longer, witches had good reasons to practice quietly. From the 14th to 17th centuries, an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 suspected witches were burned at the stake or hung in Europe. Over 85% of those put to death were women. In 17th Century Massachusetts, 18 people were hung during the Salem Witch Trials.
Amy Torok, the co-author of Missing Witches: Recovering True Histories of Feminist Magic, said the ability for many women in the 21st century to be public about their practices amounts to something of a feminist breakthrough (although, she notes that witch hunts persist in some countries) .
“The witch is a global symbol of intersectional feminism. The powerful woman in every culture,” she said. “Now we can afford to be public about our own transgressive belief systems because we can survive without husbands and churches.”
For Anestasia, her beliefs aren’t secret — they’re crucial to how she navigates every aspect of her life, including how she makes a living. There was a time when, as an adult, she hid it more, while she worked bartending and sales jobs, but now that she’s professionally focused on her spiritual entrepreneurship, it’s been a relief.
“There was a time where I was two separate people. I was working my 9 to 5 and then going home and doing my spirituality. And it drove me crazy because I was being two different people — taking off the mask, putting it on, taking it off, putting it on. And I wasn’t being my true self,” she said. “I need to work for myself so I can be myself.”
The Creatrix
As a kid, Laura Wong didn’t tell her parents she was a witch, but they could’ve guessed it from the melted candle wax on her carpet, the scent of burning herbs trailing after her and the shoebox in her room filled with spellbooks and vials of crystal chips.
The first spell Wong ever cast was when she was five years old. She blew on a white, puffy dandelion, sending her wished intentions out into the universe to scatter and spread.
“Sometimes [spells] can be as small as that,” she said. “I’ve just always had a really strong awareness and connection to the magic of nature.”
Laura Wong speaks on how she benefitted from being disconnected from social media when she grew into her witch identity and her apprehensions on beginner witches learning from social media (photo courtesy of Laura Wong).
Wong didn’t label her witchiness until she was a preteen during the 90’s pop culture witch craze. That’s when there was a surge in flashy on-screen witchcraft depictions (think: Sabrina the Teenage Witch, The Craft, Charmed, Harry Potter ) and a surge in practitioners that followed, at least partly as a result.
In 1990, A Trinity College survey estimated 8,000 Wiccans in the United States. Nearly two decades later, the same survey estimated 342,000 practitioners. These numbers do not include other practitioners of magic — from independent unaffiliated witches like Wong to those who practice Hoodoo or other non-Pagan forms of magic.
“I ate that up, I was a teenager,” she said.
Laura continued down the witch path, navigating it privately — unaware of how many others like her existed outside of those flashy Hollywood depictions on screen. Now, she identifies as a witch aligned with Artemis energy and a Creatrix, which she described as someone deeply connected to themselves as a source of creative power.
But it wasn’t until 2017 when she started her shop Lady Moon Co. (@ladymoonco) that she realized how many other witches there were.
“I went on Instagram thinking no one’s gonna buy any of this shit, there’s no other witches. I had no idea how many other people there were that practiced witchcraft,” she said. “It’s grown over the years, but when I first popped on Instagram, it was pretty scarce. But soon enough, people started following me and buying things.”
The latest large-scale estimate, which again captures just Wiccans and Pagans, is 1.5 million practitioners, according to a 2014 Pew Research Survey — and that was nearly a decade ago.
There’s no way to know the exact number of witches in the U.S., but it’s clear the witchy aesthetic — whether it’s embraced by practitioners or not – is visibly rising in popularity. Crystals and tarot cards sell in malls at Urban Outfitters. Sephora even put out a “Starter Witch Kit” a few years back, although it was quickly pulled off the shelves after it was called out for appropriating both witchcraft and indigenous culture. ( That is a common critique of modern witchcraft. )
An example of a pun-ny pin in Wong's shop
Wong found her lane in “witchy” apparel when she started Lady Moon Co., but she said she tries not to give in to what she knows will sell. Her mission is to normalize witchcraft and give witches more options than the usual black and dark purple goth look — like cheeky lapel pins and tank tops with a “THE COLOR OF YOUR AURA IS SHIT” message scrawled across the chest.
“There are those of us who actually do practice witchcraft and are open about it and are trying to help the community, and there are some of us that don’t have any depth behind what we create,” she said. “It’s so popular right now. It’s everywhere. Even big brands are using it to commodify things … it may take away some of the authenticity.”
“But for as much as that happens, when something is trendy it also opens it up to new eyes and for people that may … realize they want to practice witchcraft and better their lives.”
Now that Wong has been able to wear her witchery with pride, she’s found a community online and is able to express her identity in her work. She’s got a podcast ( Third Eye Bind ), she’s writing a book on witchcraft and she’s unintentionally found herself a reluctant leader — someone people turn to for spiritual guidance. It’s a big leap from her bedroom shoebox days.
“I’m a very private person, but I also want to share and be a leader in my community,” she said. “There’s been times when the internet is the internet and I’ve just wanted to … not talk to anybody again and live in the woods and eat little children – I’m just kidding. But, you know, that’s not the world we live in.”
Wong is vehemently against telling any witch how to be a witch — it’s a personal journey, she said, so there’s no right or wrong. But when “baby” witches ask her how to get started, she advises them to turn off their phones and go outside. It’s what fortified her practices back when she was a child and spent hours gazing at the moon.
“The biggest thing I want to teach people is that focus, awareness and connection are essential to being a witch. You need to be able to sit down and take in information from the environment around you, or from deities or from elders or whoever,” she said. “And our phones aren't doing that for us. Our attention spans are shit. So being on WitchTok all the time, it's not for me, and it's not what I recommend people do.”
Scroll or click to see the full glossary
