The aestethic witch

There is a new character on social media. You will recognize them the moment you see them, because you have seen them a thousand times even if you have never searched for anything remotely spiritual.

Candles burning. A decorative skull. Incense rising in a perfect spiral toward the lens. Crystals arranged with the eye of an interior designer. And somewhere in the frame, almost by accident, the iPhone. The gaze: mysterious, deep, calibrated to the millimeter. The nail polish: flawless. The aesthetic: deliberate. The perfume: you cannot smell it, but almost. Those setups where the only thing truly «aligned» is the ring light with the edge of the table.

Welcome to the Aesthetic Witch’s altar of likes.

We live in a moment where speed is almost everything. The faster, the better. The more visual, the more credible. If it looks good and it is designed with taste, it must be good.

This is not exclusive to the spiritual world. You find it in finance, real estate, medical advice given by people who are not doctors, sports, nutrition, everything that falls under coaching and personal development…

In all of those fields there is always someone who looks the part long before they prove anything. But in the spiritual world the phenomenon has a particular quality: nobody can easily verify whether what is being shown is real. And that difficulty has become a business opportunity.

She is in her early twenties. She talks like an expert in practices that require decades of work. Three times a week she publishes rituals she has never tried, protocols she has never followed, traditions she knows secondhand.

How do I know she has never tried them? Because she has not had the time.

The ritual is in the video. The altar is the set. The incense is not burning for anything in particular: it burns for the frame. What is being taught is not a practice, it is content. And the content works. The numbers are there.

Three hundred thousand followers do not lie, right?

Turns out they do. Three hundred thousand followers say one thing: that three hundred thousand people have decided this person knows what they are doing. Not that they have proved it. Only that they look like it. Likes have replaced judgment, and in that vacuum, the algorithm has decided who knows what.

This is where it stops being funny.

Whoever watches takes note of the ingredients, buys the candles, sets everything up according to the instructions and does it. What can happen?

The most common outcome: NOTHING. And the content creator always has an answer: you were not in the right state, you did not truly believe, you did it at the wrong moment, in a past life you were a witch who was burned and that is blocking you. The infinite excuse game. The method never fails, the user always does.

The second outcome: the person becomes destabilized. They placed all their trust in that process. They are desperate to get what they need. They did everything right and nothing comes. That leaves a mark. Maybe a small one, but a mark.

The third outcome is more serious. Something happens, but not what was expected. Every time you combine materials, light something and put intention into a process, something real is activated, whether you want it to or not. Without knowledge of how that works, without adequate practice behind you, that movement can go in any direction. Including the opposite of what you wanted. And it attracts things you would rather not attract.

The fourth outcome, and perhaps the worst: they sell it too. With their personal touches. This ingredient does not feel right, let me swap it. This way it looks prettier. And so the disaster perpetuates itself: what was already wrong reaches the next person with one more layer of improvisation on top, and the consequences, if there are any, are theirs to deal with.

The problem is not the image itself. There are people who know what they are doing, publish regularly and take care of how they present their work. But among so many cardboard altars, they go unnoticed. The «expert» in magical content does not just take up space: they fill all of it. And when there is that much volume of the same thing, what is genuinely different, even if it looks similar on the surface, gets buried.

The problem is that the person watching has no tools to tell them apart.

They do not have those tools because nobody has taught them, because this knowledge is not available in any organized form online, and because there is so much content that distinguishing something of real value has become very difficult. The one who publishes most, gains most. The one with the best lighting, gets the most credibility. The one who speaks with the most confidence, gets the most authority.

And there is something else worth saying. Many of the people who find this content do not come looking for a trend. They come because they genuinely need help and do not know where to find it. The screen is always available, never judges and has an answer for everything. As my mother used to say: It must be true, they said so on TV! Now they say it with three hundred thousand likes, which amounts to the same thing.

That is the philosophy of incompetence: delegating your judgment to whoever speaks loudest, or looks best.

The nail polish is flawless. The iPhone case is divine. And the Pinterest ritual is ready to post.

The altar of likes exists because there is demand for the spiritual without the real cost that the spiritual demands: time, study, practice, mistakes, correction, more practice. I want it now, like an app.

The question that remains is simple: if you cannot tell what is real from what looks real, how do you decide who to listen to?