From Wands to Wealth: What Witchcraft Can Teach Us About Economics
As a multibillion-dollar industry, digital witchcraft isn’t immune from corruption and exploitation. It’s time we utilized it to shift our thinking about the economy in general.
In the United States, the market for magic is worth some $2.2 billion. Companies like Urban Outfitters and Sephora sell smudge sticks, healing crystals, and $42 witch starter packs while online trends like #witchtok have received upwards of 38 billion views. Coupled with the fact that the “witch is having a moment”, monetized social media accounts are making significant fiscal gains from occult chic content. But the commodification of magic raises ethical concerns, especially when it attempts to replace authentic cultural practices with hollow and superficial performance.
Historically, the occult was often used as a tool for the marginalized. Many people turned to spiritual practice to cope with being ostracized—others to make self and collective improvement. Eventually, these practitioners (mostly women) were easily targeted for daring to transgress social conventions, speaking out against injustice, and refusing conformity. What started as a practice soon became an identity. Over time, witchcraft got caught up in the logic of capitalism, genocide, and empire building to become what we today loosely associate with occult practice. But its monetization is relatively new, and deserves scrutiny beyond the present.
Commodified magic, or magic that can be “packaged and sold” typically online, is the most recent example of this. Today, this magic can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and cultural appropriation by parodying, white washing, and generally profiting from a legacy of trauma while risking the erasure of original practices in favor of a commercialized façade. Given this, it’s important to question witchcraft as an aesthetic versus a practice. Doing so ensures that you avoid replicating the same colonization and theft visited on communities that turn to the practice in the first place. But drawing connections between online and historical witchcraft is also tricky since most of those historically persecuted weren’t actual witches and were instead falsely accused of a completely made-up crime.
The point is that forcing magic practice into the contemporary marketplace distracts from the occult’s true power and potential as a mechanism of self-discovery. The monetization of any identity is inherently damaging, largely because it forces one to transact in the marketplace of objects—which as some suggest, is always oppressive, especially for women—rather than that of ideas. How can we be free if we must consume products to access the self-understanding that witchcraft promises?
What’s more, most of the companies that fiscally capitalize on the occult are still largely run by white men. In this light, the occult has become another way for the powerful to subordinate and control. This argument isn’t immune from the formula that commodification plus appropriation equals financial colonialism, where the occult is often marketed as edgy and therefore trendy, suggesting a rise and fall in popularity based on social pressure rather than authenticity. That Sephora starter pack was eventually pulled from shelves after accusations of cultural appropriation.
But capitalism hasn’t destroyed magical practice either. Where ethically sourced, that same $2.2 billion industry also supports the livelihoods of its creators, and can provide lucrative work for occult practitioners, content creators, counterculturalists, and other nonconformist communities around the world. Romanian witches contended with this in 2011, when their government instituted an income tax on occult practice. While some witches criticized the move as exploitative, others viewed it as a way to legitimize their community and gain access to the market. This allowed them to build wealth based on their long-silenced identity and ultimately establish a foothold in the economy.
How, then, can we reconcile the need to make a living with the acknowledgement that magical practice may be working to further disenfranchisement? Is this possible in any marketplace much less one built by technoutopianists who have only their own interests in mind? And what about the notion that the occult should free rather than restrict us?
The main problem here has to do with the marketplace itself, a space that was never designed to facilitate equity. As Rayne-Fisher Quann points out, “The phrase ‘no ethical consumption under capitalism’, once a call to abolish the systems that oppress workers worldwide and trap us all in an unending cycle of exploitation and suffering, has become something more like a rallying cry for apathy—an anthem for shrugging your shoulders and adding-to-cart.” What, then, should we do?
Moving towards an ethical creation and consumption of magic requires us to divest of commercialized practice entirely, and build a collective, non-profit bound enterprise that is entirely self-sufficient. And maybe that’s why it’s so terrifying. As Clint Jones suggests, “Capitalism is afraid of the word witch because it implies self-sufficiency. How could capitalism work if everyone became self-sufficient?”
But herein lies the witch’s power, too. Its capacity to eke out new markets (both fiscal and supernatural) also suggests that it can transcend them entirely, moving toward a truly communal vision of the occult as a means toward self-discovery and collective metamorphosis rather than corporatization.
To begin, we need to shift our economic worldview away from the individual and toward the collective. This means reframing how we value things like economic growth, efficiency, productivity, and most powerfully, individualism. While these features of capitalism are often sanctified under free enterprise, they often cause more harm than good.
The idea of a post-growth economy, or a worldview that “sees society operating better without the demand of constant economic growth” may help here. This model forces us to reframe how we think about the aspirational qualities of economic development. Rather than privileging the profit motive and its subsequent exploitation of the worker, post-growth envisions “widespread economic justice, social wellbeing and ecological regeneration”. It responds to two main problems that most nations face: their total debt is always increasing and remains unpayable, and their ecological footprint is always expanding and setting them up for eventual collapse. In his manifesto Degrowth, the ecological economist Giorgos Kallis puts this more fittingly: “There is no way to both have your cake and eat it, here. If humanity is not to destroy the planet’s life support systems, the global economy should slow down.”
Coupled with the idea of a steady-state economy, the notion of post-growth makes it possible for us to reorient systems of power and privilege by defining a worldview based on self-actualization and liberation rather than accumulation and constriction. I’m not interested in convincing you that this reality is possible, much less feasible. Because it contradicts the logic of the American Dream and our collective obsession with commodity fetishism and GDP, the United States may not even be the right place for the economic experiment required to make post-growth a reality—and that’s okay. Rather, I want to consider how traditional occult practice is founded on similar principles, and can help us reframe our hesitancy to engage in post-growth rhetoric, which will move us toward a space of critical conversation where a reality like this is more likely to be explored, customized, and perhaps realized.
One of the main features of the occult is the idea that all things are interconnected, and that we should take a holistic approach to better understand the world. Inside the post-growth paradigm, responsibility for human success and flourishing is shared among the collective rather than the individual. Witchcraft enables this to happen by empowering people to place faith in something outside the self, and to dramatically reorient their anxieties and desires in directions that reveal greater vulnerability and eventually, greater self-knowledge.
This type of self-knowledge has always been subversive because it challenges dominant narratives about established ways of life. The fact that we’ve lost something deeply human in the pursuit of economic optimism and efficiency (a code word for exploitation) should encourage us to imagine what a sustainable world could look like. The answer to Jag Bhalla’s recent question “Can we go on allowing efficiency aficionados to paint ‘morally objectionable’ moves as economically rational?” is decidedly no, but at least in most individualist nations, we’ll do so anyways!
Perhaps this is why capitalism has always feared magic as well. Described as an “obstacle to the rationalization of the work process” and a threat to “individual responsibility”, magic corrodes the logic of free enterprise—getting what you want without punching a clock just doesn’t seem fair. This is exactly what makes it so dangerous, and so powerful. The Marxist feminist Silvia Federici maintains that the persecution of witches in the early-modern period was intimately connected to the development of economic stratification and class warfare. Given the moment of extreme economic inequality today, there has never been a better time to capitalize on the impulse for change and take action.
Building a future where this becomes a reality will require a profound shift in consciousness—a transformation of the self that can lead to greater awareness of our shortcomings and our capabilities. To begin, we should reject the idea that tangible accumulation (either for hoarding or consumption) is a respectable marker of success. We also need to change our relationship with objects, status, power, and ultimately wealth, which is unsettling to say the least.
Doing this won’t be easy. In 1974, the Oxford economist Wilfred Beckerman painted a stark picture of what could happen if we embraced post-growth, “If growth were to be abandoned as an objective of policy, democracy too would have to be abandoned.” In 1974, one read that as news of impending apocalypse. Today, it describes reality, or at the very least, a rallying cry to what’s left of a civilization of plenty for some and privation for others. To borrow Beckerman’s phrase, it’s not that we have abandoned democracy—for marginalized communities, democracy has abandoned you.
The fact that capitalism is designed to keep us perpetually anxious makes these ideas uncomfortable to even think about. But renewing our emphasis on communities of mutual aid will force us to reorient even our most selfish beliefs. In the same way that the occult has always spoken truth to power, those serious about embracing a more humane future—whether one that capitalizes on post-growth or something else entirely—must understand that the work of upsetting ecosystems of power and privilege has never been comfortable, certain, or safe. The pale-male ethos sustaining the early-modern witch trials was responsible for upwards of 60,000 deaths all in the name of greed, efficiency, paranoia, and anxiety. The belief that these witches were out doing the devil’s work was consuming but ultimately invisible. At the risk of co-opting the same rhetoric in support of this argument, it bears noting that ridding the world of witches only called attention to their identities and legacies.
This conversation should force us to reframe how we envision human success—not as growth or stasis, but as decision making marked by an understanding of our collective power. If, after all, the metrics for growth are invented and invisible, who’s to say we can’t reject them in favor of more authentic, visible ones? Just as academic study of witchcraft doesn’t aim to prove the validity of one’s magical beliefs, we must recognize the potential in magical ethos to create a future that doesn’t leave anyone behind.
As humans, we tend to deny our powerlessness inside a system that’s so good at elevating profit over people; as a result, we often frame critiques of capitalism as aspirational at best and utopian at worst. But harnessing the truths within witchcraft promises us the power to fight back in support of what we’ve always held as sacred: community, solidarity, and justice.
My research centers around economic and political theories of the occult in Eastern Europe, focusing on marginalized groups who voluntarily adopt the identity of the witch. Read more in Performing the Roma Witch: Stereotype, Mythology, and Profit.