Discovering a witch’s craft

Witchcraft is an art and a responsibility, says the folk witch behind Kitchen Toad

Fringe ArtsFeatureIndia Das-Brown — Published January 28, 2025 7 minutes

Candles flicker in every corner, lighting shrines dedicated to different spirits—some of which, I learn, are very private, and I cannot ask questions about. The air is rich and warm with soft ambrosial incense. I set a pack of cigarettes on a table nearby, an offering I’ve brought for the spirits of Saint-Pierre’s flat. Jars and jars of unlabelled oils, dried plants and herbs are crowded on and around a multi-tiered shelf, at the top of which is a small shrine dedicated to the Greek Goddess Hekate.

“Hekate is there in the corner because she just needs to be here for… reasons,” Saint-Pierre says, laughing.

The mysteriousness is something I will get used to throughout our conversation.

Saint-Pierre is the face behind Kitchen Toad, the storefront that has amassed 34,000 followers on Instagram retailing fine sorcerous goods, spellwork and divination “for the Magician and Fool alike.” They have been practicing witchcraft professionally for almost five years. Born “one foot in the grave,” as their medicine woman godmother would say, Saint-Pierre has been interacting with the spirit world since they were a child. The beginning is nebulous.

“It was kind of just always a thing,” they tell me about getting into witchcraft.

That nebulous beginning, though, was not all sunshine, roses and magical herbs. Saint-Pierre describes being afflicted by what they call “spirit sickness”—a condition that essentially strongarms you into becoming a witch. In their case, it was through intense apparitions and dreams.

“It's something that you'll see a lot in Indigenous cultures,” says Saint-Pierre, who is French-Canadian and Indigenous, and spent four years of their childhood on a reserve in northern Quebec. “​​You kind of get picked, but it's not a nice thing.”

Saint-Pierre and I sit cross-legged on the floor, their preferred way to sit and chat. Their cat, Spooky—who is rather more adorable than spooky—watches from the couch. Saint-Pierre describes the kinds of things spirits ask for: tobacco, liquor, and food, like cream, butter and chicken blood.

According to Saint-Pierre, it can get more complicated when spirits ask you to buy a certain piece of property and arrange it to their liking, or when they dictate where a house is built, where their shrine is put, what needs to be buried there and what needs to be arranged. Without discernment, the demands can snowball towards “bad things.” 

“You’ll kind of be like an errand boy for a little while until you step into the responsibility of it,” Saint-Pierre says. “The goal for anyone is to become able enough that you're not at the mercy of the spirits.”

Saint-Pierre has developed the ability to work with spirits advantageously. They have spirits who bring the folk witch and their clients love, money and career opportunities.

“You can bargain with them, you can argue, you can tell them no,” Saint-Pierre says. “You can also be like, ‘That's gonna cost a lot of money. I need twice that amount,’ and then you'll get it, you know?”

What separates pagans and witches, according to them, is that pagans worship Gods, while witches are deeply practical in their practice.

Susan J. Palmer, affiliate professor in the department of religions and cultures at Concordia University and member of the religious studies faculty at McGill University, echoes the sentiment of witchcraft as a practical exercise.

“It’s not pie in the sky,” she tells me. “The concern in magic is the world right here and now, and survival and prosperity and health, and to control your life and your environment.”

However, according to Palmer, Wicca—under the umbrella of paganism—is a movement that emerged from a witch revival of ancient witchcraft, credited to Gerald Gardner in Britain in the 1940s.

“Witchcraft is an ancient phenomenon, of course,” says Palmer, who has taught the Witchcraft, Magic and Religion course thrice at Concordia. “I mean, you can trace it back to the ancient world where priests and priestesses and people, hunters, would use magical techniques for material ends.”

The word “pagan,” says Palmer, was used by the Romans to refer to “people who weren’t Christians yet.”

Saint-Pierre, however, is Catholic, and grew up in a Catholic family that was also very folk-magical. In this way, they are “dual-faith”—a concept they’ve borrowed from anthropological texts.

“We don't really have priests, so it was old sailors and housewives that did sermons,” they say, describing “weird folk charms” like putting baby shoes in flour bags and having roses grow into arches for protection. 

“Where I'm from, we believe in the saints, and we believe in Jesus and God and all of that stuff, but we also believe in fairies, and we believe in trolls, and we believe in mermaids,” Saint-Pierre says, smiling. “It gets interesting in practice because sometimes you're praying to a spirit, but then you're using Catholic prayers, and then that gets kind of funky.”

The folk witch did not initially embrace Catholicism. It was ancestor work—the spiritual practice of connecting with and honouring one's ancestors as a source of guidance, protection and wisdom—that compelled them.

“Getting into ancestor work, you kind of have to pull on the language that they understand,” Saint-Pierre explains. “When I started doing very in-depth ancestor work, I started incorporating, you know, Our Fathers, Hail Marys and Rosaries, and all of that kind of stuff.”

I ask them about the rows of beads around their neck, one of them with a cross. They can’t tell me anything about them, they laugh. I am not permitted to photograph the shrines of Christian Saints Expeditus and Peter, of hoodoo spirit High John the Conqueror or of Saint-Pierre's ancestors. The spirits seem to protect Saint-Pierre just as much as Saint-Pierre protects them, a mutual guardianship that appears to be deeply caring.

“I’m not trapped with them, they’re trapped with me,” Saint-Pierre chuckles. “It’s not just like I’m subservient to anything.”

Beyond the practicality, for Saint-Pierre, art is intrinsic to witchcraft.

“It’s called witchcraft,” they say emphatically. “You always end up picking up, like, a hundred hobbies because you'll have a spirit that wants a specific type of cloth that hasn't been produced in ages, so then you have to learn how to weave. Painting is big for depicting spirits and icons.” 

For Crowley Balint, a Montreal-based witch who has been reading tarot for 10 years and practicing spellwork since 2019, witchcraft and tarot are deeply symbolic.

“Symbolism is very, very, very important in tarot because each little thing on the card means something else. There's a reason why tarot handbooks are this thick,” says Balint, holding their fingers several inches apart.

Beyond its art and utility, witchcraft has traditionally had a reputation as a dark facility meant to summon evil spirits and demons to inflict misfortune on others. As a witch, Saint-Pierre turns down most curses and megalomanic requests from clients because, in their words, it’s “a pain in the ass.”

“We are open to performing all types of work, from positive workings to maleficia, although the latter is considered with much scrutiny, and comes at its cost,” writes Saint-Pierre on their website.

That cost is something they touch on with me, describing the “monkey’s paw effect,” where irresponsible wishes have a price.

“Most of the time, if you do magic for a very, very large sum [of money] and you don't state that you don't want to harm someone, the only way that can come to you is by someone dying, and that will happen very often,” they say.

According to Saint-Pierre, the age-old saying that everything has a price is very true; sometimes, they explain, it's a price that you don't notice until you pay it. They don't believe in “dabbling” in witchcraft. If you want to dabble, they advise you to hire somebody experienced, because you'll save yourself “a lot of trouble and a lot of money.”

“Be prepared to feel very out of the loop with the world around you, but also incredibly contextualized by it in a way that other people aren't,” Saint-Pierre says. “I always say, if witchcraft presents itself to you, then you should pursue it. But if it's something that you're seeking out for some reason, you should probably leave it alone.”

This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 8, published January 28, 2025.