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…
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