Stealing a candle, a box of matches and the tiny schnauzer, I tiptoe back upstairs. I'm in my attic bedroom in tears because our family dog, Charlie, is mysteriously sick. On the other, witchcraft is no less irrational than any other religion and many of its practices are in fact a fairly reasonable response to the major challenges of our time.It's midnight, 12 years ago. On the one hand, it’s hard not to snort coffee through your nostrils when you read that water that has had rose quartz soaking in it can be given to soothe traumatised animals. I spend the weekend pondering all things witchy. It’s part of the reason we’re all such credulous suckers, still seduced by superstition at a time when we have the technology to make a space probe orbit Saturn. Our brains are built to leap to conclusions, to see what’s not really there – helpful if the twitching leaves might hold a crouching sabre-toothed tiger misleading in modernity. You go looking for a pattern, and you will find it, even in a pack of deeply non-mystic marine-animal cards bought to entertain a small child on a rainy holiday in France. I suspect a large part of the appeal of witchcraft today is the emphasis it places on slowing down, switching off from your phone and taking notice of the natural world.Īnd there we have it: confirmation bias. I don’t believe it offered me protection through the winter months, as the book claims I just like the feel of it. Turns out I was witchy all along, as some colleagues would probably attest: in my coat pocket I still have a perfect, hard conker that I found in October. Another edict is to appreciate the seasons, including picking up an acorn or pine cone in autumn and keeping it through winter. A frail yellow autumn leaf clinging by a thread a rubbery weed poking through a desert of gravel you get the picture. Tricky but not impossible if you’re schlepping to work on the tube easy where I live and instantly soothing. Ten quid! I am propelled out of the shop by unseen forces.įinally, some advice I can wholeheartedly embrace: five tips for making simple connections with nature, from touching leaves to noticing sights and sounds. I found myself uncannily drawn to something, after all. Will it be the pastel-pink rose quartz, with qualities of “love, peace and tenderness” apparently laced into its silicon and oxygen atoms or the “playful” inky-black bornite? I close my eyes, then open them.

I position myself in front of a stand of crystal bracelets.

The book informs me that I should allow myself to be drawn to the crystal that has meaning for me.

Last summer, Publishers Weekly noted that witchcraft was one of the strongest trends in the “mind-body-spirit” category, and the interest shows no sign of abating.Ĭrystal-shopping time: no self-respecting witch in this new age of Aquarius would be without these ubiquitous lumps of pretty rock. And its cousin in dogged resistance to logic, specifically witchcraft, is also having something of a moment, refitted for the age of self-care as a way for women to reconnect with themselves and the natural world. As the New Yorker magazine observed, “ astrology is currently enjoying a broad cultural acceptance that hasn’t been seen since the 1970s”. Namely, to turn myself into a witch.Īt this opening of a scary new decade, we’re in the midst of a resurgent interest in all things mystic, superstitious or more than a little bit woo. But these seemed too harsh for the drab days of January and besides, I had more ambitious plans for personal transformation. I could have given up booze and bacon, or embarked on a punishing new fitness regime.

A very tiny witch