Meet the Witches of Los Angeles Who Want to Better Your Life

The modern “working witch” isn’t sitting around performing spells all day, she’s managing her social media presence, writing books and working as a healer who helps her clients through life’s struggles like career-related stress, misogyny and breakups.

Today’s witches want to help you live your best life, or, as the Oracle of L.A. told The Los Angeles Times: “My contribution is to … cultivate beauty and love in my clients and help them thrive.”

Witches don’t stick to a pre-made list of duties and no government entity oversees them or makes sure they pass any kind of education training — so buyer beware — but their known services include things like herbal workshops, love spells and communing with spirits. Each task comes with a hefty price, some that run up to $200 an hour.

One of the Oracle’s clients calls their sessions “part therapy, part religious ritual.”

“I would say she’s doing spiritual coaching,” comedian and writer Sara Benincasa told the Times. “You can go to see her the way you might see a rabbi or pastor.”

Witches and their followers aren’t few or far between, either. A Pew Research Center poll form 2017 found that 40 percent of respondents believe in psychics and another 40 percent believe that inanimate objects have spiritual energies. About a third believe in reincarnation and nearly another third believe in astrology.

“Interest in witchcraft waxes and wanes, but it is waxing, again, particularly among young women,” explained Helen Berger, a professor at Brandeis University who studies witches.

But not all interest in witches is positive, she explained.

“It makes people very nervous, the possibility that witches do have powers,” Berger said. “If witches have the power to heal you, do they also have the power to harm you?”

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