For less than the price of a flat white, you can hire someone on the internet to change your life. Or so they claim. The popular crafting platform Etsy returns more than 1,000 results when you search for witches and spells, offering everything from revenge karma hexes to obsession love charms. The starting price, in some cases, is under three dollars.
Brisbane writer Neesha Sinnya, who describes herself as "a bit woo-woo" and tracks multiple zodiac signs, decided to put the market to a modest test. Booked in for the Story Bridge sunset climb, she paid $11.58 to an Etsy seller for a good-weather spell. The seller, who went by Serena, requested only her name, date of birth, and a description of the desired conditions. Within hours, photographic proof of the ritual arrived in her inbox.
Serena's message described rose petals used to "invite beauty into the experience" and two candles lit to visualise clearing skies. The wax, she noted, melted smoothly, which she interpreted as a sign of unresisted energy. The morning of the climb was overcast and threatening. By 6pm, the sky had opened into a picture-perfect sunset. The guide remarked that the Glasshouse Mountains were visible, which he said was rare.
It is, of course, impossible to draw any causal link between burning candles in an unknown location and meteorological outcomes over Brisbane. Sinnya acknowledges as much, describing the experience as feeling like magic rather than being magic. But the story she recounts, reported originally by the Sydney Morning Herald, captures something genuinely interesting about the way Australians are spending money on belief.
A marketplace built on hope
The commercial side of Etsy witchcraft spans an extraordinary price range. At the affordable end, basic spells and rituals can be had for a few dollars. Further up the scale, a "make them suffer" hex with karmic justice promises costs $209.75, and users can add a booster spell for another $332. At the extreme end sits an "immortality blessing" listed at $2,976, though it was available at time of writing for a discounted $1,041. The listing had one review, posted in early 2025, from a user claiming her body had become "very youthful and glowing".
Philip Almond, an Emeritus Professor with decades of research into witchcraft, demonology, and New Age movements, offers a characteristically dry assessment. "People are either doing this stuff because they genuinely believe in it," he told the Herald, "or people are just exploiting a sort of quasi-religious movement to make a buck." He does not believe the spells work, but sees little cause for alarm at the low-cost end. "I think 99 times out of 100 it is not going to do any harm," he said. "I say that because it's not going to do any good either."
Jake Blatchly, a member of the Ipswich Spiritual Community Facebook group, is more direct about the risks. "There are a lot of charlatans, scam artists and con artists out there willing to take advantage of people's hopes and fears to line their own pockets," he said. His analogy is pointed: paying an Etsy witch to intercede on your behalf, he argues, is no different from paying a televangelist to ask God for a favour. The tools, he believes, are available to anyone willing to learn them.
The deeper current beneath the commerce
Dismissing Etsy witchcraft as pure grift, however, risks missing the more substantial social shift it reflects. Almond situates modern witchcraft within the broader tradition of neopaganism, a movement that centres nature worship, lunar cycles, crystals, and herbs. "So modern witchcraft, or Wicca, is really a revival of that kind of neopagan idea, which is focused primarily on the worship of nature," he explained.
The timing aligns with well-documented changes in Australian religious life. According to the 2021 Census conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of Australians identifying as Christian fell by more than one million compared to 2016, while ten million people reported no religion at all. Almond argues that the retreat from organised religion has not extinguished the human appetite for meaning, ritual, and a personalised spiritual framework. Witchcraft, for some, fills that gap.
Rachel Johnson, who owns Spellbound Society in West End, Brisbane, has operated the store for five years. She began writing and illustrating an oracle deck before opening the shop as a way to share her artwork and her practice. "Witchcraft is all about tapping into our own magical power and crafting the life of our dreams," she said, pushing back on the popular assumption that the craft is primarily about hexes and harm.
Belief, commerce, and the question of harm
The Etsy witchcraft market sits at an awkward intersection. On one side, there are genuine practitioners of neopagan traditions with their own internal logic and community standards. On the other, there is a largely unregulated digital marketplace where bad actors can monetise vulnerability at scale. Consumer protection frameworks in Australia, administered by bodies such as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, do theoretically cover misleading claims in trade, though enforcement in this space is understandably patchy.
The harder question is where personal autonomy ends and exploitation begins. Spending $12 on a weather spell before a bridge climb is, at worst, a harmless indulgence. Spending $3,000 on an immortality blessing occupies different ethical territory entirely, particularly if the buyer is in distress or holds sincere belief in the product's efficacy. Reasonable people can hold very different views about where to draw that line, and those views will inevitably reflect broader attitudes toward consumer paternalism, religious freedom, and the proper limits of commercial regulation.
The sunset over Brisbane that evening was, by all accounts, genuinely beautiful. Whether Serena's candles had anything to do with it is a question science cannot answer in the way that matters to the people asking it. That ambiguity is probably the point.