Secret lives of the TikTok WITCHES reviving Ireland's ancient magical traditions - and why their spell-binding influence with ordinary women is growing at an astonishing rate

Published: 15:26, 11 August 2026 | Updated: 15:27, 11 August 2026 Forget the pointy hat. The modern Irish witch is more likely to be stirring her coffee clockwise for good luck than hunched over a cauldron – and she’s got the following to prove it. Across the country, women are lighting candles, reading tarot cards, casting spells and marking the old pagan festivals, then filming the whole thing for an audience of thousands.  Scroll through Irish TikTok or Instagram and you’ll find spell jars sitting next to Sunday roasts, moon rituals slotted between school runs and manifestation coaches with more followers than most local radio stations. Witchcraft didn’t die out with the last woman burned for it, it just went quiet for a few centuries – now it’s back, filmed in portrait mode with a ring light and lipstick. So what’s actually going on here? A genuine spiritual revival, a canny bit of wellness industry rebranding or a very Irish reckoning with Catholicism, patriarchy and the things our mothers weren’t allowed to say out loud? Stacy Walsh from Cork says being a witch is less about spellbooks and more about self-belief Stacy Walsh, 39, from Cork, is a self- described witch, tarot reader and ‘spell weaver’, whose following grew from an anonymous diary. For Ms Walsh, being a witch is less about spellbooks and more about self-belief. ‘It’s almost like a declaration, a reclaiming of my otherness, my power, my authority over myself,’ she says. Raised as an altar girl, she grew up with the idea that ‘everything is in God’s hands’. Witchcraft offered a different possibility – that she had a say in shaping her own life. She is careful to distinguish reverence from worship – working with lunar cycles is not praying to the moon, but what she calls ‘co-creation’. There is deep personal experience behind her practice. Ms Walsh built her community during a period of profound grief, including four miscarriages and secondary infertility.  When she needed support herself, women responded in their dozens and eventually hundreds, lighting candles, offering prayers and sending messages of solidarity. ‘The most beautiful network,’ she says – not a guru and her followers, but a circle of women connected through shared experience. For Ms Walsh, that active participation is part of witchcraft’s appeal to women raised in the shadow of Catholic Ireland.  She admires Christ as someone who took action – ‘he sat with the lepers, the unfortunate’– but feels organised religion often removed that sense of personal agency. Spellwork, by contrast, is practical – crystals, ingredients and rituals tied to the seasons. It gives people a role in creating change rather than simply waiting for it.  She does not sell spells – she teaches people to create their own. ‘If you came to me looking for a spell, I would teach you how to do it because nobody is going to want the outcome stronger than you,’ she says. A request for a love spell often becomes a conversation about self-worth, boundaries and whether someone is truly ready for what they are asking for.  She has been described as a ‘spiritual therapist’ but rejects the idea of being a guru. She is also aware of the dangers of an unregulated industry, warning that some people are ‘there to make money off you’. When she created her tarot course, the first lesson was not about cards, but about ethics. Lynne Berry has never charged for her services If Ms Walsh’s practice is personal and intimate, Lynne Berry’s is broader in scale.  The Offaly woman behind Raven’s Flight Manor has built a following of 80,000 teaching Celtic paganism and seasonal rituals – and, unusually, has never charged for it. In 2020, after running a single Witchcraft 101 workshop just before lockdown, she decided the knowledge was something to be shared freely rather than sold. Her connection to paganism began in childhood, listening to her mother’s stories of being sent to a Magdalene laundry aged 15 and pregnant. ‘I think I probably started kind of whistleblowing on the Catholic Church within my own home as a small child – I couldn’t consolidate how they could do these things to women,’ she says. Celtic paganism became a way of honouring ancestry rather than following a single deity. What attracted her was not doctrine, but structure – the Wheel of the Year, seasonal celebrations and communal rituals where families carry a flame home to keep their own hearths burning. She believes the rise of paganism reflects a desire for a different kind of society. ‘I think we got it wrong in terms of how we organise society, and the undercurrent of that is very patriarchal,’ she says. She describes paganism as a circle rather than a hierarchy, and says older women are often pushed aside when they should be valued as sources of wisdom. ‘I think we’re losing our sages.’ Ms Berry, who describes herself as autistic, has taken ravens as her personal symbol. A pair nest near her home, and one visits so often that her husband had two ravens tattooed on his arm ‘for me and you’.  She sees herself in the birds – connected to her community, but also observing from the edges. Asked whether magic works, Ms Berry does not claim certainty. ‘The worst thing about any of this is that none of it’s true,’ she says. ‘But we could say that about any type of religion or belief system.’ What she believes in is the power of ritual itself – creating focus, gratitude and connection. When she bakes bread for the harvest festival of Lúnasa, she thinks about the farmer, the rain and the sun. ‘You become very grateful overnight,’ she says. That, she says, is the magic – whether you call it spirituality, psychology or simply paying attention to the world around you and the people who came before you. The third woman I speak to arrived at witchcraft from an entirely different direction – not faith, but illness. Dani McCabe works as a channeler under the name The Feral Priestess Dani McCabe, 34, from Dublin, works as a channeler under the name The Feral Priestess, and admits the label wasn’t an aesthetic choice. ‘I accidentally came to witchcraft, hurting, wanting somewhere to belong, wanting somewhere to heal,’ she says. She spent 20 years with depression, including time as an inpatient, and had tried nearly everything conventional before anything spiritual entered the picture. ‘I resisted my spiritual gift so hard in my 20s, even though I had concrete proof,’ she says. While Ms Walsh works with cards and Ms Berry with the turning wheel of the year, McCabe works through her body – what she calls clairsentience, reading a client’s unspoken grief as physical sensation, a tightening throat, an ache in a shoulder, before she’s said a word. She frames it as trained intuition rather than mysticism, and isn’t above invoking hard science alongside it. She name-checks Schumann resonance, the earth’s measurable electromagnetic pulse, as a frequency she says her nervous system tracks – the closest witchcraft gets to a weather forecast. It’s when the conversation turns to the wider scene that Ms McCabe stops sounding like an advocate and starts sounding like a critic from inside the tent. She’s scathing about the ‘law of attraction’ culture flooding witchcraft’s corner of social media, particularly among younger creators telling followers that a bad day is what’s blocking their desires. ‘It’s really just emotional avoidance, dressed up as spirituality,’ she says. She’s equally unimpressed by influencers urging audiences to switch off the news to ‘protect their peace’ – a kind of spiritual bypassing dressed up as maturity. ‘Teach people to sit with reality, not to numb themselves out of it,’ she says. Her sharpest warning is reserved for the twin-flame phenomenon, the belief that a person has one cosmically destined soul-match.  She describes a young creator who built an entire public identity around a supposed twin-flame connection, only to unravel publicly months later – a case study, for Ms McCabe, in people handing their autonomy to an idea, a deity or a reader instead of doing the harder work themselves. ‘If a practitioner or a spirituality asks you to hand over your power to them, that’s not spirituality, that’s escapism,’ she says. Even reading for the bereaved, she holds a hard boundary against letting a client become dependent on her for messages from the dead. ‘My whole purpose is to help people find their own intuition, not to keep them coming back to me for it,’ she says. It’s a notably different note from Ms Walsh’s warm circle of candle- lighters, and from Ms Berry’s free-of-charge folk tradition – Ms McCabe’s witchcraft is less about belonging to something and more about learning, sometimes painfully, to trust yourself instead of anyone outside you. ‘Spirituality helps me understand myself, because spirituality helps me trust myself,’ she says. Courtney Carey is a lifelong fan of Charmed, which she watched with her mother Courtney Carey, 29, from Clondalkin and now based in Trim, Co Meath, came to witchcraft through tarot – and television.  A lifelong fan of Charmed, which she watched with her mother, she later explored paganism before discovering tarot almost by accident. After pulling cards for herself and finding the readings ‘a little bit too on the nose’, she began reading for friends and family, who told her she had a gift. What started as free readings has become her full-time career, with private sittings, video calls and TikTok live sessions, during which viewers send gifts and wait hours for a reading. Ms Carey’s practice centres on what she calls glamour magic – rituals focused on self-image and confidence.  She works with two Celtic deities: Cernunnos, the horned god associated with wildness and abundance, for prosperity, and Clíodhna, goddess of the sea and, in her tradition, queen of the banshees – inspiring her online name, Banshee. Her altar to Clíodhna sits beside her skincare, turning her daily make-up routine into a ritual of affirmation: ‘I’m beautiful, I’m confident, and I’m worthy, regardless of any external factor.’ She acknowledges that the practice can also be understood through a secular lens. ‘It is also just kind of neuroscience, remapping your brain to get into the right mindset,’ she says. As for the rise of modern witchcraft, she believes it reflects both the reclaiming of the word ‘witch’ and the arrival of an online world – ‘WitchTok’ – that has given a new generation a community her predecessors never had. Penny - real name Isabella Ferrari - built her following during lockdown The fifth practitioner operates on a different scale. Penny – real name Isabella Ferrari, 29, originally from Italy and now based in England – built her following during lockdown, when she had time to develop a practice she had already been exploring. It has since grown into sell-out retreats across Ireland, Scotland and Italy, combining witchcraft with the somatic healing she studied for three years in a Buddhist monastery. Ireland was a natural choice for her as a base.  ‘Everyone who is passionate about witchcraft feels a connection with Ireland, because so much of this comes from here,’ she says. Unlike in Italy where witchcraft can still carry stigma, Irish attendees are more comfortable with the idea, shaped by the country’s folklore and traditions.  Her retreats take place at Lisnavagh, a venue with its own pagan connections, and demand has been strong, with December’s retreat selling out ahead of the next one in February. Her guests are typically women in their 40s and 50s, often mothers who have spent years caring for others and are looking for something for themselves. At around €1,800 for a four-day retreat, including meals and workshops, it is a luxury experience. Penny says she is not interested in persuading sceptics. ‘I don’t like to convince people,’ she says. ‘I let them experience it themselves.’ Across every conversation, the theme is less about the supernatural than about reclaiming something personal – confidence, community, intuition and a sense of self.  Ms Walsh’s followers lighting candles during her darkest weeks, Ms Berry carrying a flame from another woman’s hearth, Ms McCabe discovering her own power, Ms Carey turning a daily beauty routine into ritual, Ms Ferrari watching women leave a Carlow castle feeling changed. Five different practices, but one shared impulse – to bring private beliefs into the open and find connection in community.  The old stories never disappeared, they simply waited for a new generation to tell them again. Sorry we are not currently accepting comments on this article.