Typically, after getting my fabric cut, I bolt off and do my best to jump into the cash register line only to find that it's been snaked through a maze of cheap merchandise in tall racks.
Two lines are open with 12 people in line in front of me.
If I kept my cool in the cutting line, I no longer have it while in the register line.
Why must a "quick" trip in take no less than an hour?
As my friend Mandi likes to say, any line that long better end in a Disneyland ride.
I've tried shopping you at various times throughout the day in hopes that I will find that sweet spot. The possibility of walking in, getting my fabric cut and walking back out in a timely manner has been like an elusive creature I've been trying to capture for the past six months.
Because your clientele of crafters is mostly upper middle age women with nothing but time on their hands, there is no secret hour that I have found to shop.
Your shoppers come out of the woodwork at all hours.
They are waiting when the doors open, they are clogging the lines on their lunch breaks, and they are shopping after work or to fill their evenings.
I've come to one conclusion,
Joann's, you are the store that I love to hate.
And because I'm tired of being a hater, I'm breaking up with you.
I will hardly know what I will do with all the time I will be saving while shopping at those other craft stores.
Thankfully, I have many at my disposal, but for those who don't, please take a moment and read this letter with an open mind for change.
Adios old friend,

Why Witchcraft Is on the Rise

Americans’ interest in spell-casting tends to wax as instability rises and trust in establishment ideas plummets.

J 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.

The Most Enchanting Modern Witch Boutique in Panama City, Florida

In the heart of Historic Downtown Panama City, Florida, you’ll find Baywitch, a local modern witch boutique. Borne from the friendship of two witchy women and their love for all things magical and wondrous, Baywitch is a charming space for modern witches to gather, conjure, and flow together.

Encounters with the Wendigo are said to bring about extreme cold, blizzards, and other unexplained phenomena. It is believed that the curse of the Wendigo can only be broken by killing the possessed individual or driving the evil spirit from their body through shamanic rituals. The curse of the Wendigo serves as a cautionary tale, warning against the dangers of selfishness, greed, and indulgence. It is said to be a reminder of the consequences of succumbing to the darkest and most destructive desires within us. Many chilling stories and sightings of the Wendigo have been passed down through generations. These tales serve as a reminder of the importance of respecting nature, living harmoniously with the environment, and resisting the temptations that may lead us astray. The curse of the Wendigo continues to haunt the imaginations of those who hear its story, serving as a chilling reminder of the darkness that can lurk within the human soul. It is a cautionary tale that warns against the dangers of giving in to our darkest desires and urges us to strive for balance, harmony, and compassion in our lives..

Reviews for "The Psychological Effects of the Wendigo Curse on Its Victims"

1. John - 2/5 stars: I found "The Curse of the Wendgo" to be quite disappointing. The storyline was predictable, and the characters lacked depth. The scares were minimal, and the special effects failed to impress. I expected more from a horror film, and unfortunately, this one fell short of my expectations.

2. Sarah - 1/5 stars: I regret watching "The Curse of the Wendgo". It was an absolute waste of my time. The acting was wooden, and the dialogue was cringe-worthy. The plot was disjointed and made little sense. The jump scares were cheap and ineffective. Overall, I found the movie to be poorly executed and not worth recommending.

3. Mike - 2/5 stars: "The Curse of the Wendgo" was just average, in my opinion. The story had potential, but it failed to deliver anything truly engaging. The pacing was uneven, and the film struggled to maintain my interest. While there were a few moments of suspense, they were overshadowed by the lackluster plot. I can't say I would watch this movie again or recommend it to others.

4. Emily - 2/5 stars: I didn't enjoy "The Curse of the Wendgo" as much as I had hoped. The scares felt forced and lacked originality. The characters were underdeveloped, and their actions often felt illogical. The ending was unsatisfying and left many loose ends. Overall, I found the film to be forgettable and not worth the hype.

Wendigo Legends Around the World: Similarities and Differences in Mythology