Witchcraft Near Me Witchcraft has long been a subject of fascination and intrigue. It is often associated with magic, spellcasting, and supernatural powers. Many people believe that witches possess the ability to manipulate and control events and people through the use of rituals and incantations. Despite being commonly misunderstood or vilified, witchcraft has a rich history and diverse practices that continue to exist in various forms today. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in witchcraft, especially among young people. This has led to the emergence of communities and groups dedicated to the study and practice of witchcraft.
Diaz told me my intention should be specific, one I hadn’t already made in the past 30 days, and couldn’t be to make someone fall in love with me. I settled on a classic intention: money. Specifically, I was hoping to get paid for an outstanding invoice and get a friend to return money I’d lent her a year before.
John Hopewell, Variety , 31 May 2023 Indeed, even in the early, less commercial days of witchcraft there were always objects that were bought at a shop, such as candles, incense, fabric to make ritual robes or covers for the altars. 2023 Countries with weak governance and strong conformism are more prone to belief in witchcraft , but such beliefs cannot be predicted by exposure to past misfortunes.
This has led to the emergence of communities and groups dedicated to the study and practice of witchcraft. These communities often come together to share knowledge, perform rituals, and support each other in their spiritual journeys. Social media platforms and online forums have also become popular spaces for witches to connect and exchange ideas.
Why Witchcraft Is on the Rise
Americans’ interest in spell-casting tends to wax as instability rises and trust in establishment ideas plummets.
ShareJ uliet Diaz said she was having trouble not listening to my thoughts. “Sorry, I kind of read into your head a little bit,” she told me when, for the third time that August afternoon, she answered one of my (admittedly not unpredictable) questions about her witchcraft seconds before I’d had a chance to ask it. She was drinking a homemade “grounding” tea in her apartment in a converted Victorian home in Jersey City, New Jersey, under a dream catcher and within sight of what appeared to be a human skull. We were surrounded by nearly 400 houseplants, the earthy smell of incense, and, according to Diaz, several of my ancestral spirit guides, who had followed me in. “You actually have a nun,” Diaz informed me. “I don’t know where she comes from, and I’m not going to ask her.”
Diaz describes herself as a seer capable of reading auras and connecting with “the other side”; a plant whisperer who can communicate with her succulents; and one in a long line of healers in her family, which traces its roots to Cuba and the indigenous Taíno people, who settled in parts of the Caribbean. She is also a professional witch: Diaz sells anointing oils and “intention infused” body products in her online store, instructs more than 8,900 witches enrolled in her online school, and leads witchy workshops that promise to leave attendees “feeling magical af!” In 2018, Diaz, the author of the best-selling book Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within, earned more than half a million dollars from her magic work and was named Best Witch—yes, there are rankings—by Spirit Guides Magazine.
Now 38 years old, Diaz remembers that when she was growing up, her family’s spellwork felt taboo. But over the past few years, witchcraft, long viewed with suspicion and even hostility, has transmuted into a mainstream phenomenon. The coven is the new squad: There are sea witches, city witches, cottage witches, kitchen witches, and influencer witches, who share recipes for moon water or dreamy photos of altars bathed in candlelight. There are witches living in Winnipeg and Indiana, San Francisco and Dubai; hosting moon rituals in Manhattan’s public parks and selling $11.99 hangover cures that “adjust the vibration of alcohol so that it doesn’t add extra density and energetic ‘weight’ to your aura.” A 2014 Pew Research Center report suggested that the United States’ adult population of pagans and Wiccans was about 730,000—on par with the number of Unitarians. But Wicca represents just one among many approaches to witchery, and not all witches consider themselves pagan or Wiccan. These days, Diaz told me, “everyone calls themselves witches.”
What exactly they mean by that can vary from witch to witch. According to the anthropologist Rodney Needham’s 1978 book, Primordial Characters, scholars’ working definition of a witch was, at that time, “someone who causes harm to others by mystical means.” To Diaz, a witch is “an embodiment of her truth in all its power”; among other magic practitioners, witch might embody a religious affiliation, political act, wellness regimen, “hot new lewk,” or some combination of the above. “I’m doing magic when I march in the streets for causes I believe in,” Pam Grossman, a witch and an author, wrote in a New York Times op-ed.
Casting spells and assembling altars have become quite lucrative. You can attend a fall-equinox ritual organized by Airbnb, sign up for subscription witch boxes offering the equivalent of Blue Apron for magic-making, and buy aura cleanses on Etsy. Instagram’s reigning witch influencer, Bri Luna, has more than 450,000 followers and has collaborated with Coach, Refinery29, and Smashbox, for which she recently introduced a line of cosmetics “inspired by the transformative quality of crystals.”
Many professional witches, including Diaz, can also be hired to do magic on your behalf. Diaz’s most popular offering is her Ancestral Candle Service, a $45 ritual for manifesting intentions that I’d come to her apartment to try. (“Last month we had 4 pregnancies, 33 job promotions, 12 business startups, 12 wedding proposals! and 4 court wins,” claimed a promotional email.) Diaz—who grew up on food stamps, was homeless for parts of college, and, as an adult, sometimes skipped lunch to save up for rent—said she has “manifested an entirely new life” from her candle work. Features of that new life include her book deal, its best-seller status, her store, and a stronger relationship with her husband. She performs up to 100 candle services each month, and said she usually sells out within a day.
Good luck tracing the history of witches. While the idea of witches is exceptionally old—Horace’s Satires, already embracing the negative stereotype circa 35 b.c. , describes witches with wigs and false teeth howling over dead animals—the day-to-day business of being a witch has continuously evolved, which complicates attempts to reconstruct a tidy family tree. The history of witchcraft has also long suffered from unreliable narrators. The Salem witch trials loom outsize in the American imagination, yet no official court records exist, and the accounts of the trials that did survive are, per the historian Stacy Schiff, “maddeningly inconsistent.”
More recent historians haven’t fared much better: The Wicca faith grew out of the writings of Gerald Gardner, a former customs officer whose 1954 book, Witchcraft Today, recounted his experience in a coven whose tenets were allegedly passed down from the Middle Ages. But scholars later concluded that they were at least in part Gardner’s invention.
And then, no culture can claim a monopoly on witches. “There is little doubt that in every inhabited continent of the world, the majority of recorded human societies have believed in, and feared, an ability by some individuals to cause misfortune and injury to others by non-physical and uncanny (‘magical’) means,” writes the historian Ronald Hutton, who has studied attitudes toward witches in more than 300 communities, in places such as sub-Saharan Africa and Greenland. The belief in witchcraft is so widespread and so enduring that one historian speculates it’s innate to being human.
In the U.S., mainstream interest in witches has occasionally waned but mostly waxed, usually in tandem with the rise of feminism and the plummeting of trust in establishment ideas. In the 19th century, as transcendentalism and the women’s-suffrage movement took hold, witches enjoyed the beginnings of a rebranding—from wicked devil-worshippers to intuitive wisewomen. Woodstock and second-wave feminism were a boon for witches, whose popularity spiked again following the Anita Hill hearings in the ’90s, and again after Donald Trump’s election and alongside the #MeToo movement.
“Whenever there are events that really shake the foundations of society, people absolutely turn towards the occult.”
The latest witch renaissance coincides with a growing fascination with astrology, crystals, and tarot, which, like magic, practitioners consider ways to tap into unseen, unconventional sources of power—and which can be especially appealing for people who feel disenfranchised or who have grown weary of trying to enact change by working within the system. (Modern witchcraft has drawn more women than men, as well as many people of color and queer or transgender individuals; a “witch” can be any gender.) “The more frustrated people get, they do often turn to witchcraft, because they’re like, ‘Well, the usual channels are just not working, so let’s see what else is out there,’ ” Grossman told me. “Whenever there are events that really shake the foundations of society”—the American Civil War, turmoil in prerevolutionary Russia, the rise of Weimar Germany, England’s postwar reconstruction—“people absolutely turn towards the occult.” Trump must contend not only with the #Resistance but with the #MagicResistance, which shares guides to hexing corporations, spells to protect reproductive rights, and opportunities to join the 4,900 members of the #BindTrump Facebook group in casting spells to curb the president’s power.
Throughout history, attempts to control women have masqueraded as crackdowns on witchcraft, and for some people, simply self-identifying as a witch—a symbol of strong female power, especially in the face of the violent, misogynistic backlash that can greet it—is a form of activism. “Witchcraft is feminism, it’s inherently political,” Gabriela Herstik, a witch and an author, told Sabat magazine. “It’s always been about the outsider, about the woman who doesn’t do what the church or patriarchy wants.”
Diaz’s own history of witchcraft long predates the 2016 election. She said that she had her first vision at age 5, was taught by her mother to make potions to cure her nightmares in elementary school, and quietly used her gifts as a seer while working in crime-scene forensics after college. Ten years ago, following what she says was guidance from her ancestors’ spirits, she quit her job, divorced her first husband, and threw herself full-time into working as a witch.
Diaz, a self-described “plant witch,” draws extensively on Taíno traditions and herbs, jars of which occupy almost an entire room of her apartment. But the fact that there are no set criteria for being a witch is, for many, precisely the appeal. Witchcraft beckons with the promise of a spirituality that is self-determined, antipatriarchal, and flexible enough to incorporate varied cultural traditions.
Which is not to say anything goes. Although Diaz has emerged as a leading voice for an inclusive, no-wrong-answers form of witchery, she and others prickle at the creeping tendency to claim the witch label without actually practicing magic. “A lot of girls, young girls, they post pictures of their house with their room with upside-down crosses, Goth clothes, with their potions. They don’t even practice witchcraft, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m a witch,’ ” Diaz told me. “It takes away from the sacredness of the word.” Diaz also says she’s troubled by what she sees as the commodification of witchcraft—though, of course, she’s benefited from its commercial appeal—and the cultural appropriation that’s come with it, such as white witches borrowing from indigenous or African-diasporic traditions. Palo Santo, a wood that is traditionally burned by shamans and is now a staple of yoga studios everywhere, can be purchased from Urban Outfitters, Bloomingdale’s, Madewell, Anthropologie, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Crate and Barrel’s CB2, and, once it’s back in stock there, Goop. (In her own store, Diaz aims to source from indigenous people and sell only products she develops herself.)
Despite all this, calling oneself a witch can still be risky. Grossman told me she’s received letters from numerous people who fear that if they openly embraced magic, they “would be either fired from their jobs, or have their kids taken away, or be kicked out of their families.” The stakes are even higher in other parts of the world, where, per a 2009 United Nations report, being labeled a witch remains “tantamount to receiving a death sentence.” Amid a rise in witchcraft-related abuse—including the case of an 8-year-old who was tortured to death in 2000—London established a police team dedicated to reducing violence targeting accused witches; by contrast, officials in Saudi Arabia established an antiwitchery unit that trains police to “scientifically battle witchcraft,” which is punishable by beheading.
On a brocaded ottoman beside her couch, Diaz set out a tray containing the ingredients necessary for her candle ritual, which included a vial of straw-thin mouse bones (“for speed”), a snake carcass suspended in milky liquid (“for protection”), and frankincense oil (for “opening up a portal for the candle and sending a message into the roots of the wax”). She lit a stick of Palo Santo wood and wafted its smoke over each item, carefully encircling a tall candle that she said she would “fix” with my intention, then burn later in the sacred area she maintains in her basement.
Diaz told me my intention should be specific, one I hadn’t already made in the past 30 days, and couldn’t be to make someone fall in love with me. I settled on a classic intention: money. Specifically, I was hoping to get paid for an outstanding invoice and get a friend to return money I’d lent her a year before.
Diaz describes herself as a seer capable of reading auras and connecting with “the other side”; a plant whisperer who can communicate with her succulents; and one in a long line of healers in her family, which traces its roots to Cuba and the indigenous Taíno people, who settled in parts of the Caribbean. She is also a professional witch: Diaz sells anointing oils and “intention infused” body products in her online store, instructs more than 8,900 witches enrolled in her online school, and leads witchy workshops that promise to leave attendees “feeling magical af!” In 2018, Diaz, the author of the best-selling book Witchery: Embrace the Witch Within, earned more than half a million dollars from her magic work and was named Best Witch—yes, there are rankings—by Spirit Guides Magazine.
In terms of geographical location, there are no specific places where witchcraft is exclusively practiced. The belief and practice of witchcraft can be found in different cultures and countries worldwide. However, certain locations have gained a reputation for their association with witchcraft. Salem, Massachusetts, in the United States, is famously known for the Salem witch trials of 1692, where several people were accused and executed on charges of witchcraft. Despite the misconceptions and stereotypes that surround witchcraft, it is essential to recognize that there is no singular definition or interpretation of what it means to be a witch. Each individual or group may have their own beliefs and practices, making witchcraft a highly diverse and personal experience. It is crucial to approach this topic with an open mind and respect for the beliefs and practices of others. For those who are interested in exploring witchcraft, it is important to seek reliable sources of information and guidance. Books, online resources, and reputable teachers can provide valuable insights into the history, traditions, and practices of witchcraft. It is also crucial to approach the practice of witchcraft responsibly and ethically, ensuring that no harm is done to oneself or others. In conclusion, witchcraft remains a captivating and complex subject that continues to intrigue people around the world. Whether one is looking for information, community, or personal spiritual exploration, the study and practice of witchcraft can provide a fascinating journey of self-discovery and connection to the mystical realms..
Reviews for "Witchcraft and Folklore: Examining Local Tales and Legends"
1. Sarah - 2 stars - "Witchcraft near me was a disappointment for me. The storyline was weak and predictable, and the characters lacked depth. The acting felt forced, and I couldn't connect with any of the characters. The special effects were also subpar, making it difficult to suspend disbelief. Overall, I found the movie unengaging and forgettable."
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3. Emily - 2.5 stars - "Witchcraft near me had potential, but it failed to live up to it. The concept was intriguing, but it quickly became clichéd and predictable. The characters were one-dimensional and lacked any real development. The scares were scarce, and the suspense felt forced. The movie seemed to rely more on jump scares rather than crafting a genuinely eerie atmosphere. Overall, it was a forgettable watch that failed to leave a lasting impression."