hat is a Witch? Some people think of a Witch as Elizabeth Montgomery's Samantha Stevens or Melissa Joan Hart's Sabrina, a beautiful blonde sorceress who can magically make things happen with just a twitch of the nose or by pointing a finger. Other people think of a Witch as an ugly, evil old hag who flies around on a broomstick and hexes people. Many people believe a Witch is someone who has made a pact with the Devil and goes around doing evil things in service to Satan.
I am a Witch and I am none of those things.
The first two "Witches" I described are pure Hollywood. Samantha Stevens and Sabrina, while positive characters, are purely the figments of some writers' imaginations, as is the concept of being another, literally immortal species. The green, warty hag who flies through the air on a broomstick is an equally false concept, though quite popular on Halloween. As for the latter image I described, any sociopath can go around committing heinous acts and claim to be a Witch. The important thing is to learn the facts and differentiate between myth and the truth.
A Witch is a member of the religion called Wicca, also known as Witchcraft. Wicca is a neo-pagan religion, meaning that while many of its elements are recent developments (within the past few decades), its essentials have been re-constructed from the old nature religions. The practice of Witchcraft is an art and science of working within natural laws to shape the world around oneself.
The most common misconception about Witchcraft is that it is evil, it is Satanic, it is anti-Christian. To be anti-Christian, something would have to accept the Christian tenets and then deliberately bastardize them. Since Witchcraft pre-dates Christianity by a good 200,000 years, that is categorically impossible. Witchcraft is very different from Christianity, but so are Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, neither of which can be imagined as anti-Christian.
Christianity, on the other hand, has taken much from the Pagan religions and either bastardized them or claimed them as exclusively its own. Satan is a prime example. Most Pagans worship the Goddess and her consort, the God. To symbolize our connection to the animal world, the God is a horned god, sporting antlers and sometimes cloven hooves (ie: the Greek god Pan). When Christianity proclaimed itself the One True Religion, it became politically prudent for them to slander other religions in order to gain converts. Paganism, being the most different, received the most bad press. Christianity quickly invented a deity who embodied evil and made him look just like the Pagan horned God. This myth stuck, and it is little wonder why people today think Witches worship the Devil.
Witches celebrate eight holidays throughout the year, called Sabbats. These are not Black Masses or all-night wild orgies. Each of the Sabbats serve to attune us with the cycles of Nature. Between Spring and Summer are three fertility festivals which encourage the crops to grow abundantly. Between Autumn and Winter are three harvest festivals which celebrate the plenty the Earth has provided. The two other Sabbats are at Midsummer and Midwinter: the Solstices. The three most important Sabbats are:
People knowledgeable in the healing arts, the herbalists, were feared and despised. The Biblical edict, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" is really a misinterpretation/mistranslation of "Thou shalt not allow a poisoner to live amongst you." A poisoner was someone who used his or her knowledge of herbs to kill rather than heal. Since most herbalists were either women or Pagan (the Pagans being the Witches), the Christians decided not to make the distinction and now had a well-defined enemy.
The Witch Hunts, also known as the Burning Times and the Women's Holocaust, were an extension of this edict. By this time, the power of women had all but been erased from people's minds. The sacred and creative powers of sex became dirty and sinful, and women were now considered consorts of the Devil, their sexuality being rather difficult to hide what with their bulging breasts and bloody menstrual periods. Since heresy was a crime, the Church fathers prosecuted all non-Christians and specifically targeted Pagans by using trumped-up charges.
So how did a girl like me find herself involved in Witchcraft? Well, I wasn't always a Witch. At least, not consciously. I've talked to many people who were raised Christian or Jewish, who came into Witchcraft later in their lives, and they all said the same thing. Each of them said that it was less like converting to a new religion and more like finally finding a name for what they've believed all along. I suppose in that regard, I'm no different.
My family is Jewish, although not very religious. I do remember celebrating the holidays as a child, and although I was familiar with the stories, they never inspired in me any great sense of awe. I don't remember ever going to Shul, and I certainly never took any Hebrew classes or was Bat-Mitzvahed.
I'm not saying any of this was bad, or that it drove me away to seek out some exotic religion. All I'm saying is perhaps it was this lack of formal teaching that left me open to question and wonder more than I may have if I had been better grounded in Jewish theology or dogma.
Even as a child, I recognized in myself an apparent contradiction. I was unsure if I believed in God, but I most definitely did believe in what was labelled the "supernatural." This makes much more sense looking back on it now. Having been indoctrinated by society in general that there is only one (male) God who has decreed where Man may and may not tread, my instincts had no voice, no language of their own with which to form a cogent or even lucid argument. I was forced to adjust my perceptions to conform to the conceptual boundaries laid out by the culture in which I lived. In truth, what I intuited was not a contradiction but merely a different, as-yet-unnamed viewpoint, which coïncides well with the philosophy of Witchcraft.
Not knowing that there was more to what I felt than just an unconfirmed opinion, I grew up considering myself a very non-religious, though somewhat spiritual, person. This still left many questions unanswered and something inside of me unfulfilled. The mainstream view of God did nothing for me, and so I did not buy into it, but I didn't see any alternatives to turn to. Many of my friends had their own views of religion, and I always felt either awkward or left out whenever the conversation headed in that direction.
It wasn't until late in my college career that I realized God wasn't an all-or-nothing thing. This discovery came about in the most unusual way, and the messenger was someone I'd never have imagined.
I had been "addicted" to the internet for a few years and spent the bulk of my free time at school on the computers. I surfed the web. I browsed the newsgroups. I hung out on the chat channels. I filled up disc space by subscribing to a mailing list dedicated to the 1960s music group The Monkees. The great thing about that mailing list was the fun we had. 75% of the conversations were off-topic and nobody cared. It was an incredibly friendly free-for-all.
In the middle of all that chaos, I had the opportunity to befriend another girl who had been on the list for much longer than I had. At the time of my arrival, they were discussing turning the list into a virtual kingdom, with various members holding certain positions or appointments, all in the spirit of great fun. What piqued my curiosity was seeing the entry "Morgan (not her real name): Official Witch." Being new to the group, I thought it was one of their many in-jokes and started asking what it meant.
I soon received a private e-mail from Morgan explaining to me that the part about being a Witch was no joke. I was fascinated. "What do you mean when you say you're a Witch?" I asked her. "What do you do?" She told me that her religion was Wicca, that she was a Pagan. I had never heard of Wicca before and wasn't too familiar with Paganism. What she said intrigued me and I began to do some research on my own.
I had been using the internet as nothing more than a toy, something to have fun with, but I was quickly beginning to see its value in serious capacities such as research. Using the keywords "witch," "wicca," and "pagan," I found an entire community of people like myself who rejected not God but the impossibly paternalistic mainstream view of God. Here were web sites, newsgroups, chat rooms dedicated to discussions of Nature and Goddess religions. Even now I'm still learning just how big Paganism is in the United States.
Discretion was and still is an important element in my research. Even today there are people who don't understand Paganism and are quick to condemn those who would try to learn about it. Surfing the web is a fast and convenient way to find what's out there, and I was overwhelmed by the results I got with my first search. Everything was brand-new to me and every bit of information I found I printed out and studied carefully.
One of the first things I found was something called the Wiccan Rede. It's a medium-length poem that loosely describes certain rituals and defines the moral code. I didn't understand much of it then and there are some parts of it I still don't understand, but the explanation of the moral code really caught my attention. "Do what you will; harm none." No "thou shalts" or "thou shalt nots." I had never believed in the concept of sin, and any discussion of the Golden Rule left me wondering if it was OK to kick someone if you didn't mind getting kicked back.
"Harm none" seems much more open to me. It offers incredible freedom but at the same time demands incredible responsibility. "None" refers not just to other humans but to the whole world. It demands that the full consequences of one's actions be taken into consideration before acting. Short-term, long-term, people, animals, the environment, all are equally important and should be treated as such. Doing good is once again a social contract issue. There is no divine punishment for wrongdoing, there are simply consequences that everyone must live with. According to the Wiccan Rede, whatever energy you send out into the world returns to you threefold. Therefore, if you do something hurtful, you will feel three times the hurt. There is no afterlife to worry about.....this is "it." The Threefold Law (aka the Rule of Three aka the Law of Return) works in this lifetime. Instant karma, if you will. Some Witches do believe, however, that the general pattern of your life will determine how you fare in your next incarnation. This is very much like the Hindu belief.
It was an incredible feeling, finally seeing in someone else's words something I had felt deep inside for so long. I had begun to wonder if I was just not the type of person to belong to a religion, but here was a religion, a worldview, that fit perfectly with my existing mindset.
They say that rediscovering Paganism is like coming home. Learning about this Earth-based, Nature-worshipping Goddess religion certainly made me feel connected in a way I had never felt before. The concept of God-the-Father-somewhere-out-there never made much sense to me; indeed, trying to think too hard about it always left me confused and more deeply entrenched in agnosticism. The concept of God-the-Mother-right-here, on the other hand, makes much more sense to me. God doesn't control the forces of nature, She is the forces of nature.
My next question was about spells. Do Witches cast spells? What are spells? My imagination was reeling at the thought of real magick. "Magick," as I learned, is not a typo, but the archaic form of the word used to differentiate it from stage magic. Having been taught the Judeo-Christian ethic, I never thought much about magick being real. The very idea excited me. As I read more, I discovered that much of what is considered "supernatual" is acutally an integral part of the natural universe. Those who rejected Paganism and everything that went with it no longer understood this aspect of Nature and began to fear it. Out of fear they relegated it to secrecy, out of the realm of mainstream science, and built up all sorts of negative myths around it. "Occult," which means "secret" or "hidden," therefore does not deserve the negative connotation ascribed to it. In fact, the full meaning of "occult" is "that which is secret or hidden," with the added connotation that it is meant to be discovered and revealed for the purpose of enlightenment or other benefit. Again, this was something I'd always wondered about and was fascinated by.
An integral part of Witchcraft, magick is the art and science of working within natural laws to shape the world around oneself, preferably for the betterment of all. Casting a spell is using the laws of physics to create the desired effect. It really is little more than a very active, participatory form of praying, not at all the sensational hocus-pocus portrayed by Hollywood, but I was intrigued. According to everything I read, it was possible to tap into the energy flow of the universe for the purpose of spell-casting, divination and psychic insights.
I had always suspected that I had some mild psychic ability. At various times in my life, I conducted different experiments to test myself. Once, I handed my father a deck of cards which he shuffled, and sat down across the room from him. My purpose was to identify each card he picked up. The results were fascinating. I had almost no "hits," but an analysis of my misses revealed a startling trend. Very often, more so than could be accounted for by chance, I was either off by one value (ie: calling a 3 when it was a 4), off by suit (ie: calling hearts when it was diamonds, though never calling a red suit when it was black), or off by timing (the very card I called was either the next or previous card in line).
I've also had psychic experiences with dreams. Sometimes I would have a dream in which an event occurred, and a few days later I found that it came true. Once, I dreamed that I was paid a visit by a friend I had not seen in years. The next day, I received a phone call from that very person.
I had always treasured the family stories of psychic phenomena. Those incidences captured my imagination and really made me want to explore the occult further. One such story involves my grandmother and my aunt. My aunt had just moved out of the house and was living in her own apartment. It was late at night, and she was standing on a footstool, trying to reach the top shelf of a closet. She lost her balance, slipped, and twisted her ankle. At that instant, miles away, my grandmother jolted awake and informed my grandfather that his younger daughter had just injured herself. Another incident happened more recently. My grandfather was in the hospital for observation, and no one other than myself, my mother and my father knew of this. One night that week, some of my mother's friends were over and had brought a Ouija board. At one point, when I was asleep, my father not at home, and my mother out of the room for a moment, they asked the Ouija board where my grandfather was. Sure enough, the board spelled out I-N--T-H-E--H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L.
After I had gotten all that I could from the internet, I started searching my local library for relevant resources. I found some wonderful books on Witchcraft written by Witches from various traditions. I even found books on popular divination techniques such as the Tarot and Runes. Runes, as I learned, are characters of the ancient Norse alphabet, used in divination, as amulets (charms to attract good luck) and as talismans (charms to ward off bad luck).
I'm discovering more and more that the Goddess does indeed provide for you what you need at just the right time in your life. Without knowing anything of my involvement in Wicca or that I had been studying the Tarot, a friend of mine gave me a Tarot deck as a gift, and I absolutely treasure it. First, the timing could not have been more perfect. I truly believe it was a gift from the Goddess. Second, it is not at all based on the standard Rider-Waite deck, but it is a Native American-based deck called the Cards of Winds and Changes. The imagery is just gorgeous. Also, because it is so different from the decks I had been studying, I believe it is a sign that I should take the opportunity to expand my horizons, try to look at the world from different perspectives before I make up my mind what path I want to take.
About a week after I was given the cards, I had a dream whose full meaning I am still trying to analyze. I was holding a triangular block, on which was a design which combined the imagery of a rune and one of the Native American Tarot cards. The particular rune, Wynn, means "joy," and the card signifies rebirth and hope. I think that the dream was a message, portending a happy future for me. Other elements in my life have been coming together nicely, and the dream may be letting me know that if I do my part, I have happy endings and delightful beginnings to look forward to.
There is an occult bookshop not far from where I live, and although I have often passed by it, curious to go inside, I never had a real reason to. Recently, however, I decided that now was the perfect time to stop in. Not only did I have a marvelous opportunity to see what items were available, but here was my chance to talk to other Pagans face-to-face and compare my perceptions to theirs. Granted, I had been communicating with other Pagans regularly over the internet chat lines, but the experience is much more fulfilling when talking in peson.
I was quite impressed when I first walked in the door. The pleasant scent of incense welcomed me and a CD playing some beautiful chants invited me to come take a closer look. I could not believe how many books they had on Paganism. I had known that there were several Pagan traditions, but I had no idea of the volumes devoted to the subject. In addition to the books, I browsed their selection of herbs, oils, candles, incense, Pagan-themed music, Tarot cards and Runes. I was amazed, not just with the sheer volume of merchandise on display, but with the number of Pagans who lived in my community. If I chose, I could become part of a vast network. Another door was showing itself to me, waiting for me to open it. Due to my current domestic situation, I have not yet taken advantage of this, but it feels good to know that it will always be there, ready when I am.
Not long ago, I decided to put into practice what I had been studying. I had heard that an acquaintance of mine was seriously injured in a car accident, and his family and friends were praying for him. I thought I would pray for him as well, but in my own way: I cast a healing spell. The beauty of spells such as that is you don't need to know anything about how the healing process works. All that is necessary is to visualize the end result. In fact, since results can come from diverse and unimagined causes, it is best to visualize only the desired result and let the forces of Nature work out the details for themselves.
That night, I went into my room, shut the door and thought about my friend. I cast a circle, invoking the elements at the quarters (compass points):
I concentrated on my friend and remembered how he was each time I saw him. I imagined him up and about, healthy and happy and active. I took an amethyst (known for its healing properties) and held it to my heart, projecting love and healing out to him. Remembering the interconnectedness of everything, as well as the Threefold Law, I asked the Goddess (Mama) that if my friend were to heal, it would be the best outcome for the good of all. I concentrated on this for a while, then uncast the circle:
- Spirits of the North, Powers of the Earth! I call to you! Be here with me now.
- Spirits of the East, Powers of the Wind! I call to you! Be here with me now.
- Spirits of the South, Powers of Fire! I call to you! Be here with me now.
- Spirits of the West, Powers of Water! I call to you! Be here with me now.
- Spirits of the West, Powers of Water! I thank you for being here with me. Go now if you must; stay if you will.
- Spirits of the South, Powers of Fire! I thank you for being here with me. Go now if you must; stay if you will.
- Spirits of the East, Powers of the Wind! I thank you for being here with me. Go now if you must; stay if you will.
- Spirits of the North, Powers of the Earth! I thank you for being here with me. Go now if you must; stay if you will.
Last I heard, he was home from the hospital and recovering nicely.
The best thing that happened to me since this all began was a discovery I made last Samhain. A co-worker I've known and been friendly with since the previous September revealed to me that she's Wiccan. I don't remember how the conversation turned in that direction, but her statement really took me by surprise. Finally! A fellow Witch who I could talk to about our religion! It took me an entire week to recover from my zealous excitement. From that point on, our relationship jumped from friendly acquaintances to buddies. We talked about being Pagan in a Christian-dominated society and anything else on our minds. With all the subtle signs of support I've been getting as I walk further down this path, this has got to be a sign that I'm heading in the right direction for me.
For the first time in my life, I've found a religion that I'm comfortable with. I don't have to renounce anything or prostrate myself before a Great Judge. I've discovered that the Goddess loves me just as I am, flaws and all. I'm beginning to truly see the Goddess in everything: a flower, a bird, a gentle breeze on my face. I've become more active in taking care of the environment, because as the saying goes, "The Earth is our Mother. We must take care of Her." With any luck, I'll find a coven one day and be initiated into it. I can hardly wait to find out what it's like to be in such a supportive system. Until then, however, I'll be content to practice in my own solitary way, conducting my life with a newfound respect for Nature and everything in it. Blessed be!
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