I get out of the car, find a shopping cart (hopefully one without a squeaky, wobbly wheel), and walk into the grocery store with only one thing on my mind: magic! I know that sounds like a silly notion, but it really isn’t. A grocery store is a great place to find a wide variety of ingredients for powerful spells. Herbs, spices, oils, foods, and drinks are all gathered in one easily accessible place; no searching out expensive, odd ingredients in various occult shops or traipsing through the woods desperately trying to find the correct root, herb, or fungus. You have literally thousands of magical ingredients at your disposal without any of the hassle of trying to obtain them individually from various sources. Much has been written in the past about herb magic and some things have been written about food magic, but precious little has been written about how to work powerful magic with ingredients exclusively from the supermarket.
Magic, in order to continue to be relevant in our lives, must evolve and grow as we do, and also as our culture grows, changes, and expands. The supermarket, then, being our modern marketplace and (almost) apothecary, offers us a fantastic and ample supply of items to use in magic, to the exclusion of difficult-to-obtain and exotic ingredients. No longer should anyone feel forced to sift through endless mail-order, Internet, and catalog sources searching for just the right herb or oil when such a wealth of magical supplies exists so close to our own homes. The possibilities are practically limitless.
I spent some time toying with what to call this book. Some other possible title ideas were I Can’t Find Weird Ingredients, HELP!, I Live With People and I Don’t Want Them to Know I Do Magic, and I Can’t Afford All the Fancy Stuff, Help! Any of these names would be appropriate for this book because it covers a wide variety of ingredients, ideas, and spells you can perform at home after a quick trip to your local supermarket to pick up all the necessary items. These spells are modern and will require no complex preparation or ingredients, nor will there be any grand, overly involved rituals needed.
I prefer a simple approach in all I do. Witchcraft is drawn from the magic of the common folk; not the wealthy aristocracy. Most witches of the past were never able to afford brass hanging censers, copper pentacle platters, and ritual swords; they used what they had. In keeping with that spirit, we should use what we have available to us: a large variety of herbs, oils, candles, and foods at our local markets. Not that fancy or expensive tools and ingredients are bad, far from it; it’s just that they are sometimes difficult to find and of course they are expensive. When I was first starting out, I used a kitchen knife as an athame and pretty much only worked with herbs, oils, and candles I could buy at the supermarket. I lived in a small town where exotic herbs were impossible to get, and there weren’t any occult supply stores within at least fifty miles, so except for the few herbs I was able to mail-order, the local grocery store was my witch shop. A handmade wax pentacle, a chalice I was lucky to find at a thrift store, my kitchen athame, a stick for a wand, a clay cauldron-shaped pot my mother gave me, and ingredients from the supermarket made up my entire collection of witch supplies—and they worked very well. To this day, oregano is my favorite magical herb.
If you are already an experienced witch or magical practitioner, I hope this book will add to your practice, but if you have never cast a spell, chapters 2 and 3 focus on explaining all the basics of magic and spell casting, making this a complete volume of both theory and practice. The book is broken down by intention, and for each magical intention several options are given. This type of magic could be described as kitchen witchery since it is a rather “use what is available and what works” approach to casting spells. While it is worthwhile to invest your time in the acquisition of specific ingredients, and definitely worth the trouble of making candles or performing full scale rituals, it is not always possible to do so. In that case we need simple, effective spells that can be used whenever needed.