I’m sitting cross-legged in the “witch cave” of Wiccan high priestess Tree Carr. It doesn’t look that different to a regular home office — located on the first floor of Carr’s Margate house, there’s a desk and a chair and professional certificates on the wall. But there are also shelves stuffed with jars of dried herbs and twigs, hefty tomes on witchcraft, tarot and astrology, and an altar of black candles. The room is scented with the smoke of rose petals, blue lotus flower and olive leaves burning in the miniature cauldron in front of us, all ingredients of a spell Carr has cast over me. Around my head she is shaking a shamanic rattle and chanting incoherently. As I peek, I see she’s in some kind of trance, eyes shut, her arms almost blurred by their rapid movement.
With celebrity clients flying in from around the world for her spellcasting and tarot reading, Carr, 50, is something of a high priestess of the UK’s witchcraft revival. Of the clients she will mention — Edie Campbell, Lisa Moorish, British Vogue, Soho House and “Warhol superstars” (famous friends of the late pop artist) — Carr variously sees them in person here (£100 a session) or at east London’s spirituality emporium She’s Lost Control as its resident witch, or on Zoom, or even via voice note, sending tarot “guidance for the week”.
There can’t be a better connected witch in town: at February’s London Fashion Week, Carr walked for her friend Pam Hogg’s fashion show, They Burn Witches Don’t They. She’s also collaborated with the artist Christian Marclay, and in her days as a professional musician, supported Primal Scream. Having co-founded the now defunct cult video shop and film club Today is Boring in Shoreditch in 2002 with her filmmaker husband, Adam Carr, she’s very much part of the east London music/art/fashion scene. (Born to a Scottish mother and an American father, Carr moved to London in 1999, and to Margate in 2015, keeping her London flat until 2020.) She’s also authored five books on witchcraft, most recently A Spell a Day, out last month, and features in Netflix’s forthcoming documentary Lost Magic.
I’ve come to Margate to discover what a session with a witch might be like. If you saw Carr in the street, you’d be unlikely to think, “OMG, witch!” Yet somehow — with her rock-meets-artworld glamour and occulty motifs (a black serpent pendant, an evil eye) —you may well turn your head. Up close she seems, well, normal, grounded. I don’t generally subscribe to woo woo, but with her frequent scientific references, she somehow makes sense. She calls herself a rational mystic: “I keep myself in the real world. This is the world we’re in and we need to speak its language. But I do have one foot in the other world.”
I keep myself in the real world. We need to speak its language. But I have a foot in the other world
As is apparent during our session. Even when she is reading my tarot, she seems in another realm, tuned into the cards’ “messages”. When she mentions her “hundreds” of out-of-body experiences, and how she is “able to float and pass through walls” and encounter “other people’s thought forms”, and that she once sent a storm away with a spell, I find myself wanting a taste of her magic.
Our session is a seamless blend of wellness and witchcraft, and begins with a breath-focused meditation. There’s quite a lot of witchy ritual throughout — for protection, Carr burns rosemary and summons the “guardians of the north, east, south and west”. There’s also plenty of sensible advice. “If we were to listen to the [cards’] guidance,” she says, “we’d look at changing up how we make a decision, and making it through the heart rather than overthinking things. The heart knows but it takes a bit of bravery.” I sense that Carr is intuiting my past mistakes: the negative thought loops, the cowardice around potential relationships. As she speaks, she gestures as if moving energy around in some kind of augmented reality.
Mostly, people come to Carr for healing, she says, seeking help with, for example, grief, toxic situations, or a feeling of being “cursed”. It taps into a wider trend for women turning to witchcraft as a self-care practice, casting banishment spells against bullies, say, or “cord-cutting” spells to liberate themselves from unhealthy relationships. Jill Urwin, founder of She’s Lost Control, says: “Witchcraft has become an overriding label for alternative wellness”, adding that she’s seen “a huge growth” in interest in SLC’s witch-led workshops since the start of the pandemic. The movement is on the rise generally: in the 2021 England and Wales census, the number of people identifying as Wiccan — ie believing in a form of witchcraft — increased by 10.5 per cent to 13,000; meanwhile, #witchtok on TikTok has had 48 billion views.
Being raised in a Seventies American “Jesus-freak commune-slash-cult” until she was seven was “formative”, Carr says. “It was all signs and miracles, people speaking in tongues, transcendental experiences, dancing around and freaking out.” Although her parents left the cult after the Jonestown mass murder-suicide of 1978, Carr remained drawn to transcendence and mysticism, identifying as a witch in her teens. “It was my own private practice for decades — it didn’t fit into Christianity or Reagan American, so it wasn’t something I wanted to share with others.”
Carr’s powers came into their own with her intuition — she got that my greatest failing was my own self-care
All that changed with the arrival of Instagram when Carr was 40. “I was just taking photos of my esoteric objects —tarot cards, dream journal entries — and people were messaging me asking for readings and guidance.” Then came the book-writing and the “highly secretive” Wiccan high priestess initiation in 2021, for which she had to show she’d studied “astrology, herbs, tarot, the ancient mysteries”, and that she’d worked in “divination and liminal thresholds”. She also had to “do the work to ‘know thyself’”, she says. I wonder out loud if “the work” is what makes Carr so centred, so wise? “There have been times when I have felt really in my head,” she concurs, “but doing this work totally completely transformed all of that.”
What about my own transformation? Did Carr’s spell, designed to dissolve my resentment of an abusive ex, work its magic? The process itself — a body scan to pinpoint my feelings, writing and then burning a “sigil” (a magical code representing the negative energy), repeating Carr’s affirmations — could clearly work on a psychological level. My grudge proved pretty resistant, but where Carr’s powers came into their own was with her intuition — she somehow got that my greatest failing was my own self-care. I leave under her spell, but more knowing I have to focus on my own resolve, rather than thinking that magic could do all the work.
