Whether it's an AI filter that can turn anyone with an iPhone into a ghost hunter, alleged sightings of giants, or the apparently mystical powers of a bathroom mirror, an increasing number of people on TikTok appear to — or profess to — believe in magic. These videos belong to a nebulous, rapidly expanding genre in the “spiritual” and “magic” community. Some popular videos negotiate living in the “Matrix,” mirror divination, ghosts, Bigfoot and other cryptids, and “switching” or “glitching” between different universes or realities. Other viral videos present user footage of everyday phenomena that the creator endows with mysticism by narrating a magical explanation for what they just filmed.
In a video captioned “Glitch in the Matrix? Lemon emoji,” a woman narrates a CCTV clip of herself at work in a restaurant kitchen, chopping a lemon. She cuts it in half, then into quarters, and walks away to grab a plastic bag in which to store it. When she returns to her station, she finds that, despite cutting it, one half of the lemon remains fully intact. “I recut the lemon because the lemon wasn’t cut anymore!” she proclaims. “I’m freaking out!”
In another viral example, a user asks how, when presented with an object behind a piece of paper placed up against a mirror, the mirror “knows” that an object is there. The video spurred a microtrend of users trying to “hide” objects behind a piece of paper to discern if the mirror really could “see” it, while they film their shock and conjecture about how that could possibly be. Well, it must be magic. This is counterintuitive, unless you happen to know, or remember, principles from high school physics.
Neither of these instances were “glitches.” That lemon did not appear to be cut all the way through, and got stuck together, explains a creator named Mitch in one of his own videos. Content begets content, and Mitch’s entire project is debunking viral magic videos with rationality. As for the mirror, viewers are seeing what they think is an optical illusion created by the object’s reflection.
But these rational explanations do not always desacralize the object for trend participants. For some, it appears to still be imbued with a fantastical, thrilling, otherworldly quality whether you didn’t watch the debunking video or you did and just don’t care.
Magic videos on #spirittok accrue hundreds or thousands of comments evaluating the veracity of the content, sharing experiences, and everything in between. The popularity of this content also speaks to the material realities of the offline world. In America, many members of Gen Z are downwardly mobile, compared with their parents and grandparents. Videos that claim to help people access, cast spells for, or manifest money are proliferating. More than one third of this generation is also religiously unaffiliated, but many Gen Z'ers are open to spiritual practices like tarot.
Joseph R. Lee, a Jungian analyst in private practice and cohost of the podcast This Jungian Life with Deborah C. Stewart and Lisa Marchiano, tells Teen Vogue that “any phenomenon like this is so complicated. We'd like to boil it down and make it simple, of course, but I don't know that it is.”
One theory is that we have a tendency as human beings to seek patterns and explanations, despite logical evidence. The pattern-making part of the psyche allows us to function, yet it makes us vulnerable to magical thinking.
Fans of magic videos who speak with Teen Vogue say that TikTok has helped them discover and broaden their interest in magic and spirituality. Rachel L., who asked that her last name not be used, says via email that she’s able to encounter people sharing their “path and workings” from areas that are unavailable to her for cultural reasons or “aren’t as well-known/well-covered as the ‘mainstream’ spiritual practices.”
“I’m able to gather information and UPG (unverified personal gnosis) that I wouldn’t necessarily have access to otherwise," she explains, "either due to financial constraints (books are expensive when you’re not 100% sure a path is ‘yours’) or a lack of in-person practitioners accessible to me.”
Jenna LaMere is a TikTok creator who goes by the handle “The Synchronicity Fairy.” She describes herself as a spiritual mentor and emotional healer. LaMere creates videos in which she shares a word, symbol, or sign for viewers to look out for, so that when they see it, they can feel a “zing” of recognition or connectedness. Examples include the words “cushion” or “swirl.” In her videos, she also acknowledges that it’s simply good fun.
The component of fun and entertainment — through collective myth-making and myth-telling — is a principle function of many of the videos, according to Becca, a TikToker who describes herself as a medium and tarot reader. “The myths and the folklore — that's probably my favorite part. I love telling stories and just sharing information,” she says. “I think it's kind of a beautiful history and magic combination together.” Becca's videos about fairies and cryptids in Appalachia speak to regional folklore.
Given the sheer popularity and range of videos on #spirittok, it's impossible to fully interrogate or deduce a robust conclusion about the fanbase. Many viewers, it seems, just want to be entertained.
One can look to the TikTok and podcast enterprise Jumpers Jump, hosted by Carlos Juico and Gavin Ruta, with 10.9 million TikTok followers, as a case study for market demand with this type of content versus other popular topics. Their videos feature commentary on magic, ghosts, and conspiracy theories. In one of their popular videos, with 6.8 million likes, the hosts claim, “There’s a TikToker that went missing after posting about seeing a giant in the wild.”
“At first I started it to promote my streetwear brand,” Juico tells Teen Vogue. “Because I was paying influencers to promote my streetwear brand. And eventually I'm like, 'Why don't I just try to become an influencer?'”
From there, he says, the evolution of the content was “natural.” “I started talking about ghost stories and conspiracy theories. It's just because that's what my likes were," he explains. "Eventually, those moments of the podcast became the most popular, and the ones gravitated towards the most. But we still talk about those other things of entrepreneurship and streetwear.”
The line between magic videos and conspiracy videos is murky, multiple creators have noted. Karen Douglas, professor of social psychology at the University of Kent and an expert on the psychology of conspiracy theories, says via email that “conspiracy theorizing is correlated with magical thinking and superstitious belief.”
In a viral tweet from April, quote-tweeting the “mirror glitch” video that spurred on the trend, a user wrote: "the average American basically believes in magic at this point. it's not because of tiktok, it's because the education system has been gutted. tiktok just makes this painfully visible."
On the more serious side, sometimes magical thinking can veer into harmful, politically motivated conspiratorial territory, as we’ve seen with the QAnon phenomenon. Some educational policy experts have made the connection between the privatization of public education in America and the rise in conspiracy beliefs.
In The Alienation of Fact: Digital Educational Privatization, AI, and the False Promise of Bodies and Numbers, author Kenneth Saltman, a professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, details the interrelation between neoliberal educational privatization, technology, and the contemporary crises of truth and agency.
In describing the “educational conditions for conspiracy theories,” Saltman proposes that “conspiracy theories are a form of social theory (albeit bad social theory) that has to be taught and learned in place of better social theories that comprehend experience in terms of broader social forces, systems, and structures.”
Says Becca, engaging with magic videos can also just be a way of “escaping” for limited periods of time. One can choose their own adventure — to a point. “There are a lot of people who can not only lean into it as escapism, but go so far that they will put themselves into a psychosis,” she notes. “And that's something that’s been on TikTok before. You can see people going through this process. It's a very scary thing.”
While “spiritual psychosis” doesn't appear to be an official diagnosis, it is an awfully popular hashtag on TikTok. These videos — some terribly sad stories, others forewarning viewers to stay grounded — exist on the periphery of this amorphous genre, marking the limits people will push themselves to and how this stuff “works” or serves a person’s goals.
The past few years have brought dramatic change, including the coronavirus pandemic and earth-shattering Supreme Court decisions. Some people may be struggling with a lack of access to mental health resources. Others may think Western psychology or mainstream media have failed to recognize and name complex, dark, and moving experiences they’ve gone through. Others may just want a quick, fun release from the heaviness that surrounds us. In our unpredictable, chaotic world, people are searching for answers wherever they can find them.
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