The long tail of witch websites from the 2000s

First post: internet relics & 2000s witchy vibes

‘The internet does not exist’, wrote Hito Steyerl. ‘It has no shape. It has no face, just this name that describes everything and nothing at the same time.’ And yet we are endlessly on the internet, in the nothingness. Everything is on the internet. I never imagined The Void to be this crowded and this full of scammers.

I am in my early thirties so I still remember a time when ‘the internet’ was a collection of websites rather than content mediated through Instagram, Facebook, Google, but barely. Sometimes my peers will talk about the glory days of forums, before there was Reddit or Discord, where you could share your writing or swap ideas without incentivised conflict or a fear of being wrong and called out. Tech writer and sometimes NFT creator (?) Joan Westenberg writes in ‘I miss the internet’:

The internet felt like a vast frontier ... You didn’t so much surf the web as explore it, encountering unknown territories and unexpected gems. Websites were less about utility and more about passion.

Sites for specific things. The nicheness meant things were perhaps more intense but discussion was fostered. It wasn’t a competition to highlight and accentuate a flaw, and be praised for it. In this world of the internet, it was a pleasure to include newcomers, who were often just as invested in a topic as you were.

I wasn’t on these forums in the 2000s. I was watching pirated Lord of the Rings for the fourteenth time. But I feel nostalgia for this kind of internet because it seemed like it was a weirder place, designed for and by weirdos, and the web design was way, way more purple.

I'm hunting for witches on the internet

Witches are everywhere on the internet once you start looking. My definition of ‘witch’ is anyone who does witchcraft or identifies as one. There are a lot of different ways to identify as someone in touch with magic(k). I won’t be taking questions on this.

Instagram is where the witch shops are – consumerism is an important first step for baby witches I guess – and TikTok is where you get to show how the interior of your suburban American home is the same as the interior of everyone else’s suburban American home. In 2021, Twitter was for exposing occultists as neo-Nazis. Who knows what happens there now.

I’m being disparaging but I truly love the witchy content. I’m just mad because when you are looking for a subculture on social media, you almost exclusively come across people who are trying to sell you something. The most prominent people you find are influencers because that’s their job. But it’s frustrating because I’m just a regular human and find it weird consuming influencer content. And TikTok ruins my precious attention span that I must conserve if I want to continue being an editor.

I went looking for the history of Australian witchcraft outside the apps. Knowing me, I was looking for the notes of Wicca meetings where people were allocated who’d bring biscuits to the next meeting. I wanted something a bit mundane.

I first looked at Trove. Perhaps I thought I’d find classified ads? This was naive; when have witches advertised their services in mainstream newspapers? Instead I found many creepy poems by children about witches that were published in Australian regional newspapers in the last century. Here’s one from The Mail (Adelaide) in 1950:

Blackened cloak around her flies

As she goes along,

Telling all the nasty lies,

Singing an awful song.

Lightning flashes—on she goes

Cackling with all her might,

Down she swoops amongst the trees,

Such a horrible sight.

Children, parents, hurry-scurry

To their homes do run

All with frightened hearts abeat

As if their life was done.

At least if you thought Nyerie Bungey (11) was being rude about your awful singing, the newspaper provided their address so you could hide out in a tree and cackle loudly to scare them.

When I searched elsewhere I found websites with beige backgrounds and blue hyperlinks that were dead. I found astrological predictions for 2011 and advertisements for Bali retreats with text overlapping images. I found blogs that ran out of steam in 2009. I found journals that have stopped publishing.

Finding this much digital decay is spooky. I imagine the detritus of all the abandoned websites that people stopped tending to because there was no-one to visit them stretching out on a graph of website traffic that looks like an extended wind sock – with Google at the largest point. I thought this was the theory of ‘the long tail’ of the internet but turns out I misunderstood a reading in my media studies class and that theory is actually about business specialisation. It’s kind of an evocative image anyway.

The best thing I found was The Australian Witchcraft Magazine, last issue Nov-Dec 2005 with a still-active website.

The website has a lovely Dreamweaver page design with much italic purple text and capitalisations for Emphasis. The background is a pale purple with a repeated pattern of an angel vector all over it. Some of the images are pixelated. The website is published by The Realm Of White Magic. It’s glorious.

There were forty-six issues of the print magazine, as well as diaries and calendars for sale. The magazine, when it existed, included articles on friendship and love spells, charms, lotions and potions and hard-hitting topics like ‘Pagan Persecution’, ‘Witchcraft For a New Millennium’, ‘Supermarket Witch’ and ‘Caught in the Web’. A review of WitchCrafter DVD - Wish On A Spell by Australian actress turned witchcraft writer Deborah Gray features in its third issue. No offering of Australian witchcraft literature would be complete without Fiona Horne. She was on the cover of issue 13.

Here’s some of their magazine covers to marvel at. The models look like they were deeply inspired by The Craft and Faith from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I emailed The Australian Witchcraft Magazine and didn’t get a response. Their phone number was disconnected. This isn’t real journalism, I haven’t actually got a story. These are just cool internet relics.

Nostalgia, spells, reverse phone calls

Is it true that you can only have nostalgia for something if you weren’t there?

In the early 2000s my three best friends and I thought we were witches. I thought I could use my mind to stop tazos spinning on the playground asphalt, but I’d probably just been watching Matilda.

Discovering witchcraft as a teen or pre-teen is a fairly common origin story – and then you lose touch with it as you enter the peer-pressure years but find it again as you come into yourself, often in your twenties or thirties. It’s also true that witchcraft was more prominent in popular culture in the ’90s with The Craft and Practical Magic, and had a resurgence after American Horror Story: Coven in 2013.

It was 2003. I found a nice twig in the garden for a wand and painted it with super glue so it was shiny. I chopped an A4 notebook in half horizontally and covered the outside with purple cellophane and called it my Book of Spells. I stored it in a corner of the wine rack that was improbably in my childhood bedroom. (When I was twenty-three and living overseas, my mum found the Book of Spells in my room and thought it was cute and innovative for child me. I felt like someone was reading my journal but I think it was blank apart from the title.)

My three friends and I, we were in primary school and we knew we were witches. We needed to tell someone. We found a copy of The White Pages, the business directory, and looked at the listings for witches. We decided to call one. We didn’t have mobile phones because it was 2003 and we were twelve; we also didn’t have coins for a payphone. The landline was a highly monitored item at this time, and this didn’t feel like a call we could make from the kitchen bench. One of my friends suggested she could use a reverse call charge from a payphone. A payphone call cost 40c, a reverse call was much more expensive – and the receiver was charged. After making the call, there was one second to say your name, which the reverse call robot would record and repeat to the receiver, who could then choose to accept the call.

My friend was going to make the call on a weekend but when the time came, she didn’t know what to say so called my house instead. When the reverse call robot asked who was calling, she panicked and said my last name. I guess so I’d take the call? It worked and my mum accepted the call. When she found out it was one of my friends calling to talk to me she was not happy – these were expensive calls and she’d only accepted it because she thought something had happened to a family member. So she gave my friend a talking-to and then put me on.

My friend was asking “What should I say? What should I tell them?” and I was trying to respond while my mum was standing next to me, indicating strongly that I should get off the phone. So I said “anything … anything,” trying to twist away from Mum but it wasn’t a cordless phone, I couldn’t leave to go somewhere more private. I knew vividly that I shouldn’t say in front of my mum: “Tell her you and your three twelve-year-old besties are witches. And ask her what to do about it.”

Obviously it didn’t go well. We never spoke to the witch. It was decades before I made another Book of Spells. It was definitely after 2013.

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