Online retailer Etsy says searches for weather spells and witches have risen significantly this year. Searches for spells intended to ensure sunshine on a wedding day are up 206%, and general searches for wedding-related spells and witches are up 105%.
Ellecia Cahill, from Erskine in Scotland, describes herself as a mystic and has recorded more than 2,000 sales of readings, “channelled letters”, crystals and amulets. The 24-year-old says the most popular item is not what people expect: not love spells, but abundance spells — help attracting money, success and opportunity. She says one customer, a tech investor in Monaco, reported a significant increase in his net worth after buying an abundance talisman.
What the platform requires
Etsy’s rules say spells must be marketed for entertainment purposes only. That single clause is the whole commercial architecture of this market, and it is worth understanding.
A seller promising a specific outcome for money is making a claim that consumer-protection law can test. A seller offering entertainment is not. The rule therefore does not reduce what is sold; it relocates the risk, from the platform and the seller onto the buyer, who is purchasing something the listing itself declines to say will work.
Why it is the money spells that sell
Cahill’s own explanation is the honest part of the story. She says young people, though used to thinking logically, are looking to believe in something magical; that many feel lonely; and that she wants to offer a safe space and some comfort.
That reframes the transaction. If the leading product is abundance rather than love, the customer base is not people seeking romance but people under financial pressure in an economy where effort and reward have visibly come apart. A spell for money is, among other things, a very cheap way to feel that you have done something about an income you cannot otherwise change.
And the version of this in Bangladesh
Nothing here is foreign. The same demand runs through Facebook pages offering tabiz, ruqyah services, astrological rings and “business barakat” packages, often sold by direct message and paid through mobile financial services — and with none of Etsy’s entertainment-only disclaimer, because no platform is enforcing one.
Which produces a practical difference worth naming. On a marketplace with that rule, the worst case is wasted money on a declared novelty. In an unmoderated direct-message sale, the worst case is a specific promise, an escalating series of payments to remove an obstacle the seller has identified, and no record of any of it. The tell is identical in every language: a solution that needs a second payment was never a solution.
Why a marketplace allows it at all
Etsy is not indifferent here; it is making a specific trade. Banning the category outright would push the sellers to Instagram and direct messages, where the platform earns nothing and the buyer has no refund route. Allowing it with an entertainment-only label keeps the transaction inside a system with payment records, review histories and a complaints process.
Whether that is responsible or merely profitable is a fair argument, and it is the same argument every marketplace has about every category it would rather not examine closely. But the alternative is not that the trade stops. It is that it happens somewhere with no record of it.
