A spell to get your ex back costs £30. An obsession spell costs another £30. Buy the bundle, and you save a fiver.
That’s the offer at Spells By Mia, an independent online shop where customers can buy magical help with love, money, and personal magnetism. There’s even a discount code. Whatever else you believe about witchcraft, its practitioners have figured out online retail.
Etsy helped make that business possible for many sellers. We covered the rise of online magic for hire last year, when paid spells were attracting attention far beyond the usual occult circles. Now some practitioners are taking their spellwork elsewhere.
But leaving Etsy hardly means hanging up the broom. Online witchcraft has grown into a world of independent shops, shared rituals, political organizing, and arguments over who’s doing the actual magic. The witches even have to worry about being replaced by AI.
The Witches Haven’t Closed Up Shop
Florida spellcaster Hank Mason says an Etsy enforcement warning helped persuade his business, Crystal Conjure Magic, to leave. Vancouver practitioner James kept selling objects on Etsy while moving spells to his own website. Fees and difficulty appearing in searches added to his frustrations.
The ban itself dates to 2015. Etsy allows tarot readings delivered as text, photographs, or recordings, but prohibits spellcasting and promises of supernatural results. You can sell someone a reading about their love life. Promise to bring their ex back, and you’ve crossed the line.
Mia’s website now explicitly warns customers that she is no longer on Etsy. It also cautions against impersonators and offers faster casting for customers willing to pay for priority service.
Moving the checkout elsewhere is one answer. Deciding what to offer customers is a whole ’nother cauldron of fish.
Keep Your Witchcraft
Some shoppers would be happy to see the witches take flight.
In a September 2025 ConsumerAffairs review, "Dana from Dallas" said she would no longer be shopping at all on Etsy because the platform allowed spell sellers.
“Keep your witchcraft, I’ll stay with God,” she wrote.
Another reviewer, Stephanie from Miami, announced that she was deactivating her account, objecting to spells and hexes she thought were aimed at Christians.
Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey has also welcomed stricter enforcement. Her objection goes beyond customers wasting their money: she believes witchcraft can expose people to Satan.
“Christians know that demonic activity is real and that witchcraft is real because Satan is real,” she said during a discussion of Etsy spell sellers.
For a skeptical customer, the fear is that the spell won’t work. For Stuckey, the possibility that it might is part of the danger.
Can You Buy Someone’s Heart?
In a February interview, Mia described customers coming to her after breakups or during unhappy stretches in relationships. She stressed the importance of free will.
“Love should never be controlled or manipulated,” she told People.
Her current shop nevertheless offers an "Obsession Spell Ritual" designed to increase another person’s attention, desire, and attachment to the buyer. Customers provide names and birth dates, with a photograph accepted if the desired person’s details aren’t available. Mia describes the work as ethical, positive magic.
That leaves a fairly awkward question hanging over the shopping cart: how much can you encourage someone to become obsessed with you before you’re trying to control them?
Portland witch Julia Gates describes a more practical role for spellwork. Her shop sells protective “B**** Be Gone” powder, among other products, but she expects customers to make an effort themselves.
“You have to still put in work, and you have to go out there and put in effort,” she told Willamette Week.
Witches Have Bills, Too
Arguments over magical ethics also take place within Wicca, a modern Pagan religion practiced by many ULC ministers. Wiccans commonly honor nature and its cycles through seasonal celebrations, lunar observances, and ritual. Many honor a Goddess and God, though beliefs vary across traditions. Some worship in covens, groups that practice together; others practice alone. Wicca and witchcraft aren’t interchangeable, and an online spell seller isn’t necessarily Wiccan.
Witch and author Jason Mankey tackled the money question in a 2015 essay. He opposed charging people to teach the Craft but defended selling spellwork.
“Magick has long had a price tag attached to it,” he wrote. “Why does that seem to bother so many people today?”
He pointed to old England’s cunning folk, practitioners who charged for help with illness, lost property, and romance. Many were Christian. They would hardly have recognized an online storefront, but the customer asking for a better marriage would have been all too familiar.
In 1492, while Columbus was busy “discovering” the “New World,” London widow Margaret Geffrey was on a treasure hunt of her own. She wanted a wealthy husband to help support her family. A neighbor claimed he could arrange magical assistance, and she handed over two valuable drinking bowls.
No husband appeared.
This was long before anyone could leave a one-star review, but Geffrey still wanted her money back.
According to historian Tabitha Stanmore’s account in Cunning Folk, she sued and won an order requiring the neighbor to return the bowls or their value. There was a catch: Geffrey also had to perform public penance as punishment for seeking magical help in the first place.
An expensive disappointment, followed by a public apology. Guess the old saying that "magic always comes with a price" has some truth to it.
A Coven With a Download Button
Online witches aren’t only trying to change people’s romantic prospects. Some have considerably larger targets.
Just recently, ahead of the November 2026 midterms, occult author Michael M. Hughes circulated his Blue Wave Ritual 3.0, inviting participants to direct their spiritual efforts toward Democratic victories. The instructions called for blue and red candles, a Justice tarot card, and a printable map of the United States.
Participants were to color the country blue, visualize the desired result, and break a red candle representing the opposing political party.
“Make splashy water noises. Get into it!” Hughes instructed.
He scheduled a coordinated ritual for October 26 and encouraged repetitions through Election Day. Participants could adapt the language to their own beliefs or perform it together using call and response. Voting was part of the assignment, too.
Hughes’s Facebook group had more than 6,500 members by November 2020. His latest ritual welcomed people of any faith or none, giving participants a shared practice without requiring them to gather in the same room or join a local coven.
Christian critics took the effort seriously enough to organize a spiritual response of their own. Intercessors for America urged group prayer against the election spells, asking Jesus to render them ineffective. Its appeal sought Christian revival in place of the proposed Democratic wave.
The disagreement wasn’t simply over whether spiritual intervention was possible... both sides were asking for it.
Has Your Witch Been Replaced by AI?
Back in the commercial world, customers face a more mundane mystery: who made the thing they just bought?
Online witchcraft practitioners interviewed by Religion News Service complained about AI-generated imagery and rapidly produced content filling up Etsy searches. Elisabeth, who sells readings and spellwork, described customers seeking human attention amid what she called a “sea of AI rubbish.”
The concern is particularly awkward when the purchased service arrives as a message, a picture, or a written account of a ritual. A convincing illustration of a hand lighting some candles could easily fool an unwitting customer who thought they were purchasing the performance of an actual rite.
Etsy, for its part, has at least acknowledged the wider problem. In its October 22 announcement on AI, the company said buyers’ difficulty identifying generated content had become one of the top three barriers to shopping more often on the site. It announced stronger image requirements and said listings generated entirely by bots without human involvement were prohibited.
Those measures may address AI deception across the marketplace. They don’t, however, resolve the much older problem of proving that somebody who says they cast the spell you requested actually did the deed.
The practitioner described earlier, Mia, tries to counteract this fear by going so far as to send a video of her casting the requested spell. Other practitioners sell handmade supplies so customers can perform rituals themselves. Either approach gives the buyer a person or a physical object to connect with, beyond an impressive-sounding promise.
What About a Prayer?
Shoppers hoping for a boost from the beyond can find much more than witches selling spells.
JerusalemGraceGifts advertises an olive-wood Saint Benedict rosary starting at $39.95, with an optional blessing at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The seller promises photographic proof of the blessing taking place, with the buyer’s name or a loved one’s name included.
Christian prayer has long accompanied hopes for tangible help, from recovery after illness to rain for struggling farms. But Catholic teaching draws a firm distinction between asking God for help and attempting to command supernatural powers. It also warns against treating religious acts as automatically effective.
God isn’t obliged to deliver just because someone has paid up.
The Church condemns simony, the buying or selling of spiritual things, while allowing financial support for ministers. Paying for wooden beads and craftsmanship is ordinary commerce. Selling divine favor is another matter entirely.
Etsy’s prohibition on metaphysical services includes prayers as well as spells. The rosary listing remains available, but its presence doesn’t establish that Etsy has reviewed or approved the blessing offer.
Still Open for Magic
For some customers, uncertainty about the supernatural is baked into the purchase.
Former corporate recruiter Chon Azzopardi-Brown paid around £60 for a career spell while trying to change jobs. She supplied her goals and received a PDF describing the ritual that was performed and what she should expect. A month later, she reported new professional connections, while acknowledging that coincidence might explain them.
“Whether or not the magic behind it is real, it’s given me a bit of hope, and I’ll cling onto that,” she told Fast Company.
Would you pay a witch to help change your luck?
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