NEW YORK — Forget what you think you know about witches: despised crones bent over bubbling cauldrons, casting spells with a pinch of wolfsbane and eye of newt in a deep, dark forest.

Witches today are young influencers with popular social media accounts, where they host podcasts and post astrological divinations from their downtown dwellings.

Picture this: Two young women in floor-length dresses and pointed hats light nearly 50 candles that form a circle on a floor, brightening the dark space. Elaborate, converged spheres are painted on the surface in the middle, adorned with a large multi-pointed crystal.

This is the TikTok account of “Stella, Witch of the Moon.” She’s an artist whose Instagram bio describes her online space as “The Witch’s Cottage for like-minded witches, creatives, artisans, healers & magick weavers.”

She’s merely one of the #witchesoftiktok, who rack up hundreds of thousands of views and likes each day.

The demand for witchcraft content is certainly there — in real life and online — as modern women grow more disinterested in formalized, religious spirituality and seek looser, similarly historical forms. Leda Beluche, a self-described “energy theologist,” says it’s not a sinister inclination. It’s simply borne out of feminine interest in self-knowledge.

“Women have been in pain since the beginning of time, even if you go back to Salem and how the witches were, you know, prosecuted, and all this stuff,” Ms. Beluche said. “Women … have always [been] just so powerful, and they want to understand that.”

One way to understand the self is through astrological charts, she says. Indeed, “What’s your star sign?” has become a common query among friends, family, and total strangers alike. Ms. Beluche routinely asks it of her clients when they come into her small Upper East Side shop in New York, called Haus of Healing.

“If we go back 30 years, people would be like, ‘Oh, that’s garbage. That’s the placebo effect.’ Nobody cared. But now, especially with TikTok world, people are addicted to astrology, and it’s mostly because the human mind now knows that a chart can literally define who they are when they were born,” she told The Washington Times.

“We saw this pick up in practice during the pandemic,” professor Helen A. Berger, a scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, said in an interview with Brandeis Stories. “For centuries, women have been told to focus on families. Focusing on the self is a radical act. It’s empowering.”

Indeed, astrology’s influence is growing, especially among younger Americans. According to YouGov’s 2022 poll, more than 1 in 4 Americans says the stars influence their lives, including 37% of adults under 30. The astrology market, in particular, has seen significant growth, increasing from a $2.2 billion value in 2018 to $12.8 billion in 2021. By 2031, it’s expected to reach $22.8 billion, according to Allied Market Research.

Women, too, are more likely to buy in, with 30% of women and 25% of men citing their earnest belief, reports YouGov. According to those who work within the spirituality space, however, women are much more likely to use it openly — and as a means of connecting with others, often using astrological charts as a rubric for predicting social behavior.

And a recent survey from Pew Research Center explores the details of this growing interest in “spirituality.” According to the 2023 survey, 42% of adults think the dead can communicate after they’ve passed. Nearly half believe the dead can lend the living a helping hand. What’s more, 45% of respondents say they have experienced a profound sense of wonder about the universe and a deep “spiritual peace.”

That peace, according to Kelsey Zazanis, is what women are after. The 27-year-old self-described astrologer in San Luis Obispo, California, said women are suffering from a too-sterile form of medical diagnosis in response to their emotional pains. She believes women are especially eager to be treated as though their depression and malaise aren’t simply conditions in need of medical treatment, but instead real hurts.

If mental anguish can’t be seen sympathetically by society, she says, then it will be by the heavens.

“I just see a lot of women who have gone through some sort of intense life experience, and the aftermath of that gets labeled as some sort of like mental illness and so … people can call you crazy for … talking about other realms of perception that are not accepted by the Western rationalist viewpoint,” she told The Times.

Ms. Beluche confirmed that her customers are often seeking some form of spiritual guidance or relief in their lives. That’s why she offers clients the opportunity to go deeper in their practice: with spiritual healings, energy clearings with sage, hypnosis techniques, and past life regressions that encourage people to access their former selves.

With a broad smile and a serious tone, Ms. Beluche says she was a witch in Salem, Massachusetts in a previous life. “I healed the Earth, the plants, herbs, people and animals, you know — I had a devotion,” she said.

And Ms. Beluche insists her methods aren’t just magical: They’re scientific. She describes herself as a “researcher,” adding that she’s debated many an academic and scientist over the realities of magic. She said they seek her out for conversation.

But Ms. Beluche told The Times that the difference between her identity as a healer “of light” and those witches commonly understood as part of the occult is her religious faith and desire for goodness.

“We don’t cast hexes or dabble in dark magic. We just don’t mess with that,” she said, adding that she believes in God.

That doesn’t mean all modern witches are shying away from the dark arts. On Reddit groups like “WitchesvsPatriarchy,” they even share politically charged hexes. One user recently described a “freezer spell” aimed at Donald Trump and Project 2025, with plans to symbolically “freeze” their influence by sealing names in bottles under the waning moon.

With nearly 1,500 upvotes and comments brimming with support — like one user’s daily “Blue Wave Spell” ritual — these digital covens continue to attempt to stir cosmic political energy. “WitchesvsPatriarchy” boasts more than 750 thousand active members.

But for other “light” witches, hexing and other dark practices just aren’t in the cards. After all, they don’t want to displease God.

And their belief in a higher power has no bearing on their spiritual practices. In fact, they say they believe spiritualism and religion are part and parcel of the same thing.

Denise Passarelli, who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, is a practicing Christian who says she attends church every Sunday — but she still clears evil energy out of her kids’ rooms with sage.

“I don’t really see them as different. I just see it as a continuation of something, even though it’s probably not like ‘in the Bible’ what I’m doing, but I feel like it’s the same thing. We’re either cleansing ourselves, or we take communion, but, I don’t know, it isn’t different to me,” Ms. Passarelli said.

For Ayda, a 21-year-old Muslim in Paris, the whole of spiritual witchcraft doesn’t have to be in her practice to believe in its power — whether as a magical practice or a communal ethos. But Ayda says she limits her spiritual practice to meditation, in keeping with her religious beliefs, though she agrees that faith and “spirituality” are part of the same worldview. For her, though, God is the first step.

“You know, we don’t have that in Islam, because it’s supposed to be that God has, like, all the power. So if you … need help with something, or whatever, you should ask him first,” she said, noting the tight restrictions Islam places on practicing witchcraft. Ayda mostly enjoys the female community surrounding spirituality. “[They’re] all the same thing, though.”

The concept of “God,” to some of these women, takes a different form than the Abrahamic understanding that animates Christianity, Judaism and Islam. For many spiritualists, “God” has a far more universal meaning. Ms. Beluche added that, to her and several of her clients, the understanding of the phrase “God is love” is literal — and magical.

“We are God … when I say that, [I mean] we’re carrying his light within us. But to me, at the end of the day, God has a final decision, right? And that’s why I believe in faith,” she said.

The ’precarity of American culture’

Of course, that’s not the definition of “God” to religious people who fear the occult and believe in its darker power. Erika Ahern, a Catholic woman who writes at The Loop by Catholic Vote, told The Times she believes the rise is directly related to the number of women with cultural trauma — namely abortion and sexual abuse.

“They say those who embrace it do so … to fill some kind of void in their life, or there’s a wound there. People of faith will talk to you about a spiritual woundedness through which the evil spirits, Satan, whatever you want to term it, you know bad, bad angels — they capitalize on that,” Ms. Ahern said.

She added that many priests she’s spoken with on her podcast “The LOOPCast” point to the rise of abortion regret as the reason women are becoming more interested in occult practices.

“[One of the priests] spoke of abortion — actually abortion and sexual abuse — he said, as an exorcist, he believes the occult is kind of gripping women in particular for [those reasons],” Ms. Ahern said. “As abortion has become more and more — I think it’s one in four women in my demographic at this point have had an abortion — I see that the rise of that instance has correlated with the rise of the occult.”

But Jessica Calarco, sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net,” says the reasoning behind the interest in these practices is far more face value. A lack of security in America, she argues, is the reason women in particular feel pulled toward transcendent belief.

“All of [spirituality] is essentially designed to help people avoid things, whether it’s physical harm or precarity or kind of economic harm, but that’s often what those kinds of investments are designed to do in the U.S.,” Ms. Calarco told The Times.

Ms. Calarco argues the “precarity of American culture” drives people — especially women — to look for ways to have a sense of control, to feel they can manage the risks they face in their lives.

“We’re supposed to take responsibility for caring for ourselves, for caring for our loved ones in ways that folks elsewhere have more support with. Whether it’s, you know, helping to care for elderly loved ones who are in a time where they need high levels of physical care, for example, or sick loved ones, or young children,” she said.

But to Ms. Zazanis, the California astrologist, control is the opposite of the point.

“My worldview is completely centered around it, but almost as a passive observer,” she said. Divination, and particularly astrology, is not a magic to be forced but something far more academic — it’s a study of time, she said.

Ms. Zazanis isn’t interested in changing her life with divination, but, rather, it provides a lens through which to study life. It’s a psychology of sorts — or a method of avoiding dealing with issues in a more harmful way.

“To me, it’s often traumatic things that kind of crack you open to a deeper realm of perception,” she said. “And sometimes, if you don’t have the ability to really carry that and integrate that … then Western culture automatically would kind of funnel that into the psychiatric realm or, like, pathologize it.”

Even so, Ms. Zazanis isn’t relegating her beliefs to a form of coping with her emotional pain. “There are simply a lot of experiences I’ve had in life that cannot be explained through any sort of scientific paradigm,” she said.

She’s not alone. In 2020, Amy Tripp, an astrology influencer with nearly 150,000 followers on X, predicted Ms. Harris would run for president in 2024, citing her upcoming Saturn return. And on July 11, 2024, she pinpointed July 21 as the date Mr. Biden would step aside. When her old tweets resurfaced, fans rejoiced. One proudly declared on X: “Astrology girls remain undefeated.”

It’s these sorts of events and predictions that keep fans of spirituality invested, Ms. Zazanis said. But for her, the real investment belongs to what she sees reflected in the beliefs she espouses. And the proximity to the “dark arts” doesn’t scare her, either.

“Misfortune can lead people to be an atheist. But then, for me, I was like, ‘Oh, I need to know the answers behind this terrible s—-,” she said.” I originally came to it from like, a place of needing answers. And I didn’t think anything could scare me more than the stuff I was, like, seeking answers for.

But as long as Ms. Zazanis’s birth chart astrology outlines her fate — and the rich symbolism she sees within her charts makes sense to her — she says she’ll persist in her belief.

“There are some scary things there,” she said. “But ultimately, the way I see it is this: It’s reflecting life itself.”

• Emma Ayers can be reached at eayers@washingtontimes.com.