David Quinn: WitchTok and the rise of DIY weddings – how Irish people are saying ‘I do’ to a new sort of spirituality
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Last year, only around a third of the weddings that took place in Ireland were Catholic
More and more Irish couples are breaking with tradition. Photo: Getty
It’s very unlikely that you have ever heard of a social media phenomenon called “WitchTok”. I had never heard of it until a few years ago when I stumbled across a reference to it in the Financial Times of all places. “WitchTok” is the collective name given to the social media practice of people posting videos of themselves online “casting” spells, making charms, performing hexes and divination.
You might imagine that this is a pursuit of so tiny a minority as to be almost invisible, but the combined number of views using the hashtag “WitchTok” numbers in the tens of billions. That is not a typo. When the aforementioned Financial Times article was written in 2021, they had racked up 11 billion views, two billion more than Joe Biden, who had just been elected president of the US.
