NPR News / KJZZ Radio

As soon as I stepped into Elements of Spirit, a small candle- and crystal-filled shop just off Grand Avenue near Downtown Phoenix, I can tell things are going to get serious. Before I can ask for the proprietor, a small woman with gray hair and long red fingernails steps in from a side room and stops, looking at me.  “Uh, hi, my name is Amy and I’m from PHOENIX magazine,” I mumble, adding something about wanting to talk to her for a story about witchcraft.   “Hold on,” she says, and closes her eyes.   Opening them, she announces that the spirits have given their blessing and it’s OK to speak with me. She introduces herself as Gypsy Luna. 

A few days later, we sit across from one another in the side room, which contains an altar and shelves packed with all kinds of books about spirituality, including Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs.  Vicktoria Garcia grew up in Texas, and from the age of 3, she says, she had the ability to “see things.”  “I have the power of vision to be able to see before it comes, to know what people are thinking,” she says. “I can read them very easily.”  But it wasn’t until she was a young married woman that she really put her powers into action, she says, countering a spell cast by her mother-in-law, whom Garcia says didn’t like her. It worked. Garcia and her husband are still married. They moved to Phoenix 15 years ago.   Garcia didn’t find community here right away; she missed her “Witchiepoo friends” from Texas. “I used to attend a goddess fest every year, back in Austin,” she says. “They had a bunch of women who were all sorts of pagan, witches and all that. And we would literally dance naked in the forest around the fire.”  Eventually, she found her people – READ MORE....