Locke Street shop helps Hamilton embrace its witchy side
The Witch’s Fix has everything you need to inject magic in your everyday and explore mystical and enchanted spirituality, just in time for Halloween Samhain.
Whether you are a seasoned practitioner of witchcraft or simply curious to know more, The Witch’s Fix has the spells, potions, remedies and other magical essentials you’ll need for a wiccan life.
Maria Cavero and Gaby Rosas, owners of the Locke Street South shop felt drawn to buy the business after embarking on their own spiritual journeys. They are now on a mission to inject witchcraft into the everyday.
Friends since high school in Oakville, they found the stop in Hess Village didn’t have the space to host events, circle rituals and workshops without having to rearrange the store each time.
So when a large former bikini shop on Locke became free, the two jumped at the chance. They opened in January there after putting in months of elbow grease into the new space, pulling up laminate to reveal good hardwood floors, painting dark colours on the walls, applying wallpaper and visiting used bookstores and thrift shops to decorate. In the high-ceilinged garage out back that serves as their event space, they added insulation, built floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and cut open a doorway to the shop.
It's hidden behind a bookshelf, adding a touch of magic to bookings that include bachelorette parties, showers, kids birthdays and spiritual readings each Saturday, featuring oracles, mediums, psychics, astrologists and readers of tarot cards, tea leaves, and birth charts.
The Witch’s Fix also hosts spell nights for those who want to practise, and recent events include mad scientist DIY potions for kids and a summoning spirits tea party for adults.
Rosas and Cavero, both 31, often talked about launching a business together but then they took different career paths after university. But when The Witch’s Fix came up for sale, Cavero called Rosas.
“I said, Hey, Gaby, I really think we should do this.”
It felt like a gift, says Rosas, who was working at a bank at the time but has a marketing background.
“It was the right time, right place. But it was a huge jump. It's so scary to switch your nine to five and start a business.”
At first, Rosas held on to her job but as the business started to do well, she happily gave up the bank.
Cavero comes from office administration and bookkeeping and those skills have definitely come in handy.
“We both really have a very strong spiritual background, and I feel like that this has just called us so much more than being in our other jobs. We saw the potential of making it the community space that we have now, creating a coven with everyone that wants to join.”
Rosas agrees.
“We didn’t find the witch, it found us,” says Rosas with a laugh.
A couple of years before they took over the The Witch’s Fix, Cavero started holding moon rituals in the forest with her friends
“Every full moon, we started gathering, and I would come up with ideas about what we would talk about and we would all do a burning, a letting go. So I started kind of channeling my witchy side in that, and doing more research on it. And it really called me.”
She had grown up Catholic but as she let that go “this new spirituality within me kind of got awoken.”
Rosas was one of those friends in the forest. Also Catholic, she began to embrace witchcraft, too.
Suspected witches – any woman daring to be outspoken or independent or those seen as odd or non-conforming – were persecuted as heretics for centuries. The negative depiction, witches as craggy, evil old women, was reinforced in fairy tales and popular culture right through to Disney.
“We are challenging the narrative of what other people believe to be witchcraft,” says Cavero. “So I don't think you have to necessarily label yourself as a witch but I think we are using that as an empowering term now as well and reclaiming that.”
Witchcraft centres the female, unlike many religions in which women symbolize the temptation of evil.
“We run plots against the patriarchy here,” says Rosas. “One of the events that we run is where we just come to share our experience within our patriarchal society, and how we can break free from it.”
For Cavero, witchcraft is about nature and energy and how everything and everyone is interconnected.
For Rosas, witchcraft has allowed her to trust her intuition and to take pleasure in everyday rituals like picking herbs and making remedies or potions.
The shop sells a range of teas, bath salts, and crystals, as well as candles that Cavero makes herself. Spell kits are also made in-house and can be combined with an associated crystal and herb and come with instructions.
There are also oracle and tarot decks, plenty of books, and simmer mixes and burning bundles to cleanse spaces. Much of the jewellery is locally made.
“There is real curation around the products we bring in,” says Cavero, who moved to Hamilton about seven years ago.
“I love Hamilton. I've never seen people that are so diehard for the city and I love that. And I feel that, too, now that I live here. It's so beautiful.”
The history and spooky spots and tales of Hamilton is a big draw, too. And now The Witch’s Fix is a destination for people who come from the U.S., Toronto and across southern Ontario. There is a dedicated core group of followers within a growing community, which includes more than 20,000 followers on Instagram.
While the workload of being a small business owner is relentless, it’s more fulfilling. And it’s a family affair. Cavero’s three young children spend lots of time in the store and her older two kids will take crystals to school depending on how they’re feeling. It makes them more attuned to their emotions and able to control them better, she says.
The Witch’s Fix is a place for everyone interested in the spirituality of witchcraft. And men are welcome too, though the majority of regulars identify as female.
“We want people to walk through the door and feel like this is a sacred space for them, an attachment that makes them feel connected and that we bring magic into their lives,” says Cavero. “And I think that's a really good place for them to meet other people that feel the same way. So we're watching that community grow over time, definitely.”
The Witch’s Fix has partnered with Sonic Unyon on the In the Shadows Night Market, which is coming to Bridgeworks on Oct. 24, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. The free event will feature handcrafted cocktails, spiritual readers, and magical vendors.
That leads into the most important time of year for witches. The wiccan festival of Samhain Eve on Oct. 31 is the origin of Halloween.
Samhain, translating to “end of summer,” is a time of remembrance of those who’ve died and a celebration of summer’s death and winter’s birth.
Samhain Eve sees the veil between worlds at its thinnest, facilitating communication between ancestors and departed loved ones.
The ritual of Samhain have morphed into what is familiar as Halloween. Leaving offerings doorsteps for the dead became trick-or-treating door to door, while hollowing out and carving turnips to look like protective spirits transitioned to the modern practise of carving jack-o-lanterns. Disguises to hide from spirits became the costumes we wear today.
Rosas and Cavero will spend Samhain at a local orchard with a bonfire, witches rituals and a medium to help guide spirits. The event is sold out.
They love to help guide and empower people to discover their own spirituality and what that leads to in their lives.
“I'm much more in tune with nature and respecting nature, and I feel like I'm in control of my life now with witchcraft,” says Cavero. “I feel like I don't have to answer to others. I answer to myself, and I have this inner power now, within myself.”
Embracing witchcraft changed everything, says Rosas, who is newly married and lives in Milton.
“Being able to say this is who I am. I'm in tune with my body and I can trust my intuition, and that makes me feel really good about myself. I guess it amplified the trust in my own decisions.”
