How Aesthetic Envy Kills Your Craft

Let’s be honest: nothing torpedoes a perfectly good working faster than opening your phone and seeing someone else’s altar that looks like it was styled by a team of Renaissance art historians on ketamine.

You’ve just finished a decent working, the incense wafted correctly, your circle didn’t collapse, and your invocation didn’t accidentally call in your ex… but then you log on, and BAM… there’s some ethereal priestess surrounded by crystal skulls, six live snakes, and a golden goblet blessed by thirteen bloodlines. She’s glowing. She’s levitating. Her caption includes seven languages and a reference to a text you think you saw mentioned in a footnote once.

Suddenly, your spell feels like it was written in crayon. On a napkin. In a Waffle House.

Welcome to the Comparison Curse, a modern plague that feeds on your attention, confidence, and magical momentum. Let’s rip off the velvet glove and expose how aesthetic envy and curated magical lifestyles can turn powerful witches and magicians into insecure, paralyzed dabblers.

Let’s break this down, remove it at the root, and get your flow back.

The Digital Scrying Mirror of Doom

We’ll start where it hits hardest: the scroll.

You don’t even have to be trying to compare yourself. You just open Instagram, Pinterest, or WitchTok for a little inspiration and, oops, you’ve just involuntarily summoned the spirit of inadequacy. It’s wearing rings from Etsy, has a custom wand carved from a fallen oak in a Druid grove, and it wants to talk to you about your lack of aesthetic cohesion. Social media is a performance space. It’s a stage, not a reflection. You’re not seeing magic. You’re seeing branding. Curation isn’t authenticity. Filters aren’t devotion. Perfectly arranged altars with expensive tools are often more about image than invocation.

Aesthetic Is Not Authority

Repeat after me: pretty doesn’t equal powerful.

Having a color-coordinated altar doesn’t make your spirit contact more legit. Your magic isn’t stronger because your robe matches the cover of your moon phase journal. And no, that $500 obsidian sphere won’t suddenly download divine truth into your chakras.

There’s nothing wrong with beauty. Beauty can be sacred. But… when you conflate visual appeal with magical efficacy, you set yourself up for permanent insecurity. There’s always someone prettier, wealthier, and better at Lightroom presets.

Magical power comes from practice, presence, and will, not from looking like a sponsored post.

The Myth of the Perfect Practitioner

You ever see someone online and think, “Wow, they really have it all figured out”? Yeah. They don’t. The illusion of the flawless witch or omniscient mage is a collective hallucination. Nobody’s posting their ritual misfires, their moments of doubt, their “I just cried in the tub because Mercury retrograde ruined everything” days.

We buy the image. We internalize it. We think, “They’re doing real magic. I’m just playing dress-up.”

Here’s your counterspell: The perfect practitioner doesn’t exist. We are all winging it. The deeper the magician, the more aware they are of how much they don’t know. Humility is the sign of someone who’s actually doing the work.

How Envy Destroys Engagement

Comparison doesn’t just make you feel bad, it actively dismantles your magical practice. You stop casting because your tools don’t look “good enough.” You stop journaling because your Book of Shadows isn’t a hand-illuminated grimoire with gilded edges and pressed rose petals. You stop meditating because you don’t have the right singing bowl.

The Comparison Curse says: “If it’s not perfect, it’s not worth doing.”

That is poison. Magic isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence. It’s about doing the damn thing with what you’ve got, where you are, asyou are.

The Capitalist Colonization of the Craft

Let’s drag the real demon into the circle: capitalism.

Much of what you see online is marketing, even if it doesn’t look like it. Influencers are selling courses, books, candles, aesthetics, affiliate links, and themselves as a brand. And they’re doing it in a system that equates worth with wealth. When you feel like crap because your altar looks like a garage sale and theirs looks like the Met Gala of witchcraft, remember: it’s not about power. It’s about profit.

You are not less magical because you’re not rich. You are not less spiritual because you don’t look like a moonlit vampire sorceress. You are not broken because you don’t perform your practice for public consumption. Your craft is not content.

Real Magic Is Gritty

The most powerful rituals I’ve ever seen?

Done in basements.

Surrounded by clutter.

Performed by exhausted people with messy hair and zero aesthetic sense.

And you know what? The spirits showed up. The power was real. The transformation happened. Magick responds to sincerity, not set design. Your kitchen witchery with discount herbs and a Bic lighter? That’s valid. Your muttered incantation in a hoodie with last night’s pizza box on the table? That counts. Real magic is scrappy. It shows up in the cracks, the imperfections, the places you thought were too mundane to matter.

Turning the Curse Into a Catalyst

Envy isn’t inherently evil. It’s a signal. It’s saying: “I want that.” So listen. What specifically do you want? If you’re admiring someone’s altar, is it the objects? Or the sense of devotion? If you envy someone’s lifestyle, is it their wealth, or their discipline? Their focus? Their sense of connection?

Use that. Let it inform your practice. Let it inspire action, not paralysis. Turn jealousy into journaling. Turn aesthetic envy into altar-building with what you do have. Turn doubt into drive. Your magic is between you and the Mystery. It doesn’t need to be pretty. It needs to be done.

There is no award ceremony at the end of this path. No spiritual gold stars. The gods don’t care how your practice looks. They care whether you show up.

Close the app. Light the candle. Say the words. Let the energy move. Trust yourself.

You are already enough. You are already magick. You are already real.

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Monthly Mindfulness

~ From the Walking With the Gods icon deck ~ Coming to Kickstarter Spring 2026 ~

Nuit

As the divine feminine principle, Nuit is the mother of all things and the field in which all existence unfolds. In Liber AL vel Legis she declares, “Every man and every woman is a star,” affirming that each soul is a unique expression of divine will, destined to shine in its own orbit. She is not a distant deity, but the very space in which life occurs. She is the totality of being, the sacred void, and the infinite womb from which all arises. Nuit invites worship through love, joy, and the ecstatic realization of one’s True Will. She is the mystery of the night sky, the promise of limitless becoming, and the divine embrace that holds all existence.

She is the sacred void that births every spark; each soul a star, each star a hymn of will. When she appears in a pull it is to remind us that joy is worship. That endless night is not emptiness; it is possibility.