The Witch is Back

When I was a witch I would have told you that a witch is an adherent to the Wiccan religion. Unless you were talking about a fictional character or a halloween costume, I would have told you a witch was someone like me.

In the beginning, being Wiccan meant that every six weeks or so I’d walk beyond the boundary of my small hometown in the south of England, through the suburbs, past the industrial estates and into the countryside. Between the farmer’s fields, behind an overgrown hawthorn or in a copse of trees I’d meet other witches, wearing Dr Martens and carrying rucksacks of supplies. At sunset, with ceremonial words and gestures, we would declare the chosen space sacred and in it worship, celebrate and make magic. These were the same spaces where we’d built forts, or practiced BMX jumps when we were younger. Now we tied ribbons to the trees and raised our voices to the old gods.

I was raised in a secular household. This was my first and only genuine participatory encounter with religion and it was one we built ourselves as teenagers in the spaces in between agricultural and commercial property. In the spaces no-one else noticed. We referred to dog-eared library books, a few words from elder witches and our intuition to create our own rituals. To build our own faith.

Of course Wicca is more than teens climbing over barbed wire and setting fires in the woods. But it’s a religion of practice more than belief. Most Wiccans would agree that like many forms of Judaism, Wicca is more concerned with orthopraxy (correct action) than orthodoxy (correct belief). This is why many Wiccans refer to their religion as The Craft: it’s not something you believe, it’s something you do.

Perhaps the most important belief I held as a witch didn’t feel like a belief at the time; it felt like history. I believed Wicca was a surviving remnant of the pre-Roman religion of the British Isles. When celebrating the Sabbats, I believed I was continuing a tradition that began with the aboriginal people of my land. These are the dark-skinned and small statured people remembered in legends of the fey-folk or, as some would call them, fairy tales.

It might not surprise you to learn I was a nerdy kid. I read the work of early 20th century folklorists and amateur historians, I found a copy of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum at a church book sale and I pieced together the same story many Wiccans did: that an ancient religion existed alongside Druidism and later Roman religions until Christianity swept across the country like a plague, sending the witch-cult underground for fear of torture and execution. Christians appropriated the ancient festivals and, either through misunderstanding or malice, painted our ancient Horned God as their fallen angel. By rebranding the old religion as satanic they justified murdering thousands of us. Luckily witches are good at hiding. Like hares, we bedded down and waited the Christian hysteria out. We passed our traditions on through oral history and secret books until in 1951 the last Witchcraft Act was repealed and one brave witch came out of the broom closet to revive the Old Religion. That witch was Gerald Gardner now known as the Father of Wicca.

This is what witches know as Wicca’s Sacred History, and it has everything. Fairies. Mystery. Ancient Rites. Persecution. Torture. Powerful Women. Evil Villains. Brave Heroes. Revenge. Magic. It’s a great story, but unfortunately it’s not historically accurate.

Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis, which became the basis for Wicca’s Sacred History, was always considered by experts a work of imaginative or fantastic scholarship. By the 1960s historians, archeologists and folklorists were pointing out the many factual errors and leaps of logic she made to support her theory. We don’t know what the ancient people of Britain believed or how they worshiped, but we do know that those persecuted in the witch trials were likely vulnerable outcasts or troublemakers and not members of a secret ancient religion. Any modern witch can debunk the story with reference to Wikipedia. But this was the 90s. I didn’t have access to the internet. The only fact-checking resource at my fingertips were the grown-up witches I met at the Mind Body Spirit Fayres where my step-mother worked — and they’d read the same books as me.

Gods and magic

Wicca has some undeniable religious characteristics. It has a calendar of eight seasonal festivals an origin story and a metaphysical aspect. And yet there’s some debate about whether or not it’s a religion. It depends on which witch you ask.

Wiccans generally worship two deities: The Goddess and her consort The Horned God. Many Wiccans subdivide these deities into smaller local gods, each with different concerns and powers. The Goddess becomes three: Maiden, Mother and Crone and Wiccans constantly add to their pantheon by embracing deities from other cultures or inventing them wholesale. This means sometimes Wicca is described as duotheistic, sometimes as polythesistic and sometimes pantheistic as many witches believe that all the deities are symbolic representations of nature. Our hero Gerald Gardner, believed they were manifestations of one incomprehensible prime mover but since Wicca is not too hung up on theology witches are not obliged to agree.

Like many witches raised atheist I could never get to grips with the idea of deities being, you know, real real. I preferred to see them as archetypes or symbols through which we could access deep currents of power in the universe and ourselves. I saw this power or energy as an invisible web that holds the universe together. Many witches consider this web to be a naturally occurring phenomena as yet unknown to science. Witches use rituals, symbols and tools, drawn from the traditions of Western occultism to access the web and pull threads to get what they want. Just as a farmer manipulates the growing cycles of their crops a witch cultivates energies to her advantage, with a little help from the Goddess, naturally.

Most witches just aren’t interested in how magic works. My conception of the energetic web is drawn from theory-heavy texts like Janet and Stewart Farrar’s A Witches Bible, which is not required Wiccan reading. It’s enough for most Wiccans to believe that magic works and leave the speculation as to why to nerd-witches like my former self.

The spells of Wicca are usually some form of sympathetic magic, which is perhaps one of the oldest forms of superstition. The method is simple and intuitive: an object is ritually manipulated in an effort to affect something or someone else with which it is thought to be connected. The most obvious example is a voodoo doll, which is connected to someone either by imitation (being made to look like a person), contagion (containing matter which once was in contact with the person) or symbolism (being linked imaginatively to a person) and for best results, all three.

Anthropologists think ancient people were practicing forms of sympathetic magic when they painted animals in the darkest recesses of caves attempting to bewitch them into giving up their lives at the next hunt. Wiccan spellcraft usually includes objects, ritual words and visualisation. Once a witch learns a few symbolic associations and poetic turns of phrase, they can throw away their spell books and start creating their own magic, like a chef improvising on culinary themes. Eventually, it is said, the props will no longer be necessary and the witch will be able to work magic by thought alone. In my ten years as a witch I never got that far.

The Efficacy of Effigies

Sympathetic magic is based on three deep, innate tendencies: apophenia (seeing patterns when there are none), suspicions of contagion and confirmation bias.

We are predisposed to spot patterns and connections between unrelated things. Our brains function as overactive pattern recognition devices. We evolved like this because intuiting patterns is useful. Suspecting a connection between a rustle in the bushes and a predator’s approach is vital to survival; and those of us who never made these sorts of connections fared worse than those who did. Intuiting more connections than are actually there doesn’t cost us much, whereas not spotting a connection could be fatal. Evolution has erred on the side of caution and we’ve been imagining patterns in nature ever since.

Our ancestors’ fear of contagion leads us to suspect links between objects or people who have been in physical contact. Those of us who did not constantly suspect food had been tainted by contact with, say, excrement were less likely to survive those of us who suspected every brush with a contaminate was deadly. We see connections everywhere and we are naturally suspicious that something that looks like, reminds us of, or once had a brush with something else might still carry some of it’s qualities. In this way sympathetic magic is one of the truly ancient features of Wicca; it’s born of the biases that got our species to where we are today.

This type of magic has been around a long time for a reason, because it works. If you cast a spell, say a prayer or clutch a lucky charm you will immediately start looking around for evidence that your efforts were successful, and you will find them. Confirmation bias is another ancient part of human psychology that leads us to notice and remember things that confirm our beliefs and ignore or disregard things that don’t. Confirmation bias perpetuated magic for our cave-painting ancestors and it works just as well for Wiccans today.

Of course there’s no evidence that magic works objectively. We have no reason to believe that we can actually alter the universe with ritual or prayer, but the desire to try and see the world objectively is a recent invention. Objectivity, reason and the careful analysis of evidence have given us amazing technologies and discoveries, but they haven’t penetrated the darkest recesses of our brains yet.

One of the weird things about being a skeptic is that I’m in a constant battle with my inner witch, who believes that everything happens for a reason and that wishing will make it so. I can’t let her win for fear of making a dangerous mistake… and I can’t banish her either. My belief in magic couldn’t withstand learning how our brains work or contemplating the lack of evidence for any successful spell under rigorous test conditions. So in my mid-twenties I packed up my altar and took all of my sacred books to an occult bookshop for which they offered me £70 or £100 in vouchers. I took the £70 and never called the circle again.

#wicca

When I first saw a picture of someone’s altar appear on my Instagram feed a few years ago, I was surprised. I didn’t expect Wicca to come back into fashion and I didn’t realise how much witch I had left in me. That remaining witch-part was aghast. Sharing photos of your altar seemed sacrilegious! Had they no respect for the secretive nature of The Craft? I pouted as the younger generation of Insta-witches popped up on my feed. They were reinventing my Old Religion and, despite knowing it wasn’t that old, despite my conclusion that magic was only a psychological illusion, I wanted to give these young ladies a good talking to.

After Gerald Gardner popularised Wicca, with a dubious story about being initiated into a secretive coven which historians of The Craft suspect never existed, the religion spread fast. It was empowering and romantic and Gardner was keen to initiate as many young, attractive, female want-to-be witches as he could. It was soon out of his hands, other people claimed to represent different strands of The Old Religion and were happy to teach or initiate new members.

By the time of his death in 1964 Wicca was well on it’s way to being established in America and many other English speaking countries. In the U.S. it was embraced by feminists who appreciated the possibility of worshipping a female deity, and through them Wicca became entwined with politically liberal and environmental values. When it bounced back to the U.K. it was permanently changed by these influences.

By the time I found my way to Wicca it was Gardner’s original occult, shamanistic, medieval creation baked in the Californian hippy sun and infused with the energy of political activism. Because Wicca has no central text, the religion is in constant flux. I don’t know why I expected it to stop evolving after I’d made my last trip to the occult bookstore.

Witchcraft Today

In the ten years since I’ve been cowan (‘not a witch’, originally meaning ‘not a freemason’ one of many debts to Gardner’s esoteric heritage) Wicca has continued to grow and change. Wiccans are still doing rituals and worshipping the Goddess, and yet they seem to have given up on Wicca’s Sacred History except perhaps as allegory or myth. The debate between those who saw Wicca as an occult tradition and those who saw it as a nature religion seemed to have settled in favour of the latter and many want to drop the ‘religion’ designation entirely — despite the work of politically-motivated witches to get pentagrams stamped on Wiccan soldiers’ dog tags.

Modern Wicca has incorporated spiritual self-help principles. Spell craft has come to resemble Law of Attraction-inspired vision boards and provides an excuse for some creative self-care. A bath with a few candles, essential oils and a quick incantation to the Goddess serves as relaxation, self expression and spiritual satiation and is highly Instagramable. This sort of ritual seems typical for a modern witch working by herself, for herself. When I was reading witchcraft books in the late nineties there were only a few aimed at solitary practitioners. Now it seems most witches are without coven, although they find community online.

My coven were like family to me. The feeling of belonging somewhere to someone was a primary reason why I was a witch. The reason we sought out the places we did to raise our circle was at least partly because we had nowhere else to go.

As a teenager my home life was chaotic, unstable and sometimes frightening. The vagaries of my parents romantic lives governed where and with whom I lived. Like a lot of young people I felt lost, not sure where I belonged and very aware that at any moment everything about my life could change whether I liked it or not. I think that’s why Wicca, instead of any other religion, attracted me. The Sacred History gave me a sense of belonging to a tradition that rooted me to the landscape I lived in and provided me with a sense of kinship with generations of witches stretching back to our most ancient ancestors.

A sense of home is important for a latchkey kid who carries their belongings on their back. I found that home in Wicca and in the sacred spaces we created with chanting, wands and incense. With the larger community of witches, with my coven and those who came before.

Wiccan profiling

People who grow up with unstable families often develop an almost obsessive desire for control, and for mastery over their own lives. What could be more appealing for a young control freak like me than the promise of magic? Wicca is a siren song for young, troubled slightly odd girls which calls: ‘you may not be able to control your family, but join us and you will control the wind’.

Researchers have studied the psychology of paranormal belief, looking for the underlying reasons why someone is drawn to the beliefs I was. They think a mix of factors are responsible. There are personality traits that correlate highly with paranormal belief. Some are flattering, others not so much.

Creativity and openness to new or unconventional ideas are common in this demographic and so are an intolerance of ambiguity, schizotypy and narcissism (the latter two sound much worse than they are).

When I started reading the literature on this subject it was like looking in a mirror. I know I’m a bit odd in both good ways and bad, and I’ve observed similar oddness in other witches, but I didn’t realise that this particular personality profile is thought to be almost a prerequisite for adopting unusual paranormal beliefs (more conventional paranormal beliefs such as transubstantiation are adopted by more conventional people).

The other factors psychologists think set the mental stage for paranormal beliefs is childhood abuse or instability. Studies show that people who experience a ‘perceived lack of control’ in childhood are much more likely to adopt paranormal beliefs. A certain type of person, in a certain type of situation is primed to embrace certain beliefs. Why this particular set? That’s where cultural norms and trends take over.

I was drawn to Wicca because it was British — the only extant British religion, in fact- which made me feel at home. It also focused on the natural world; something I’ve been interested in since long before my membership to the Young Ornithologists Club expired. And, let’s be honest, movies like The Craft (1997) made it seem cool. The fact that many Wiccans were openly hostile to Christians who they saw as their oppressors was a side benefit as was witches’ tendency to embrace radically liberal political values. Being part of a righteous struggle against a dominant force is the perfect distraction from commonplace teenage misery.

Magic, the Gathering

I see Wicca fulfilling many of the same functions for young witches today. Since they’ve dropped the Sacred History, perhaps the hostility to Christianity has waned. That said, anyone browsing Wiccan Instagram will notice a strong correlation between young people with tattoos, progressive politics and an interest in witchcraft. Wicca gives order, meaning and a sense of control in a chaotic universe. It allows you to express your uniqueness and rebellious spirit to anyone browsing your feed.

Life seems intimidating and unstable for most teenagers. Perhaps now, with thousands of opinion pieces thrust at us from every angle about the political apocalypse and maybe not enough about the anticipated environmental apocalypse, everyone is feeling overwhelmed, confused, like they can’t exert any control.

The witches involved in the #MagicResistance movement perform a spell every full moon to counter Donald Trump’s efforts “So that he may fail utterly/that he may do no harm.” One of the originators admits he doesn’t know if the spell will actually work, but it makes him feel better to do something.

I know the feeling.

I came to Wicca from a secular background that didn’t offer me any explicit moral or spiritual guidance, we muddled through, or didn’t, based on our intuition and common sense. I think I needed more, I needed a structure within which to organise and explore my thoughts and feelings about the world and myself.

Others in my coven came from religious families, and wanted to find a way to express their spirituality without the baggage of the Bible or the insidious homophobia. What we had in common was a yearning for something bigger than ourselves and a lens through which to interpret the world. Secular humanism or enlightenment philosophy might have done nicely, but it wasn’t on offer in our neck of the woods.

As more and more people become disenfranchised from, or disgusted by, organised religion it makes sense that they will start casting about for an alternative to fill that role in their lives. If people like me are brought up without religion or guidance and without the critical thinking skills they need to assess the truth claims behind compelling ideas like magic then perhaps it is inevitable that they will find themselves joining new religious movements like Wicca.

Why Now?

In 2019 when any would-be witch can go to Wikipedia and learn that the Sacred History of Wicca is a fabrication, how does a religion limp on without its origin myth? And why does it seem to be waxing in popularity right now? In a televised interview for Panorama in 1958, Gerald Gardner was accompanied by a recently initiated High Priestess. Despite the black veil she wore over her face, presumably to ensure anonymity, viewers could tell she was young, beautiful and well educated. When the interviewer turned to her and asked ‘why do you think people are becoming witches?’ she answered clearly and insightfully:

‘Well, it seems to me that we live in a very mechanised age in which people have lost their sense of belonging. Witchcraft brings us back to living in harmony with the rhythms and seasons of the earth.’

Historians of Wicca agree, arguing that industrialisation and the resultant romanticisation of the British countryside and ‘the old ways’ laid the ground for this new religion to take root in the 1950s. A witch asked the same question today may well answer in exactly the same way as their peers from sixty years ago.

We are all suffering from an onslaught of social media, news and demands funnelled to us by a device we carry everywhere, yet are anxious to be without for even a moment. Louis Bourne, the High Priestess quoted above, was referring to the post world war two industrialisation and ennui of Britain, she could have been commenting on our own technology saturated, philosophically unstable age.

The way people express their dissatisfaction with our current situation — digital detoxes, retreats, minimalist living — demonstrate a desire to create a simpler world. Wicca, with it’s promise of connecting to an older nature-based way of life, is the perfect religion for burnt out, disillusioned youth. The circle, whether drawn in the woods at dusk with friends or on your own around a candle lit bathtub, is a space outside the grasp of the digital world where you exist as a spiritual being stripped (often literally) of worldly concerns and experience yourself as part of nature rather than apart from it. Perhaps the circle has always been a kind of force field against the modern world as much as a portal to another realm.

We are bombarded with information every day and any idea or theory can be backed up with a selective Google search. People are either way too sure of themselves or don’t know what to believe and despair at the concept of objective truth. In this overwhelming situation, in the absence of any method for determining fact from fiction, it seems to make sense to ‘trust your gut’ it’s all you’ve got. So we find something satisfying, beautiful and inspiring that brings us comfort and say: ‘it’s true for me’.

Unfortunately our guts are not infallible, and they’re mostly not in our stomachs they’re in our heads. That same place where all those deep biases and the evolutionary instincts that once served us well, but now undermine us, live.

In my twenties I found myself ruled by my gut, researching a conspiracy theory about fluoride in the water supply. I was still a witch, though my practice had been disrupted by traveling to places where the seasons were all wrong (celebrating midwinter on the equator is surreal) and settling eventually in the hemisphere where Wiccans celebrate Samhain (Halloween) on the first of May. In digging for the truth about fluoride I discovered a set of tools for testing if conspiracy theories held up, or indeed if any claim about the world was likely to be true. I started training myself to think through ideas carefully and logically to check for flaws in my reasoning and prioritise evidence over intuition. I learned about how our brains work and the common mistakes in reasoning we all make and honed my research skills. I became a skeptic.

When I eventually turned my new method on the Old Religion I found it did not stand up to scrutiny. The Sacred History was fiction and there was no evidence of the existence of magic — let alone a plausible scientific theory of how it would work. I replayed all my successful magical endeavours and found most could be explained with psychology or happenstance. The few I couldn’t explain I realise were not sufficient proof of an unknown layer of reality: just because I can’t explain something doesn’t mean that everything I want to be true is. When I looked at my religion objectively without the seasonal festivals, without it’s history or gods or magic, I found there was nothing left.

A Witch-Shaped Hole

There’s something exhilarating and terrifying about letting go of a belief structure that has defined your place in the world, how you understood the universe, how you understood yourself. Skepticism, despite all the benefits of providing a method to help you get closer to the truth sometimes feels like a poor consolation. The beauty and the terror of skepticism is that it doesn’t tell you what to think, it just teaches you how to think… the rest is up to you.

And I guess that’s why I react the way I do when I see an altar pop up on my Instagram feed. I’m jealous. I still want all those things Wicca used to give me: a sense of place, purpose, community, connection, control. Figuring that shit out for yourself is hard and it never ends. Every time I think I’ve gotten to the bottom of something, it turns out there’s something else to be examined and overturned. Skepticism, like science, only offers provisional truths. It’s all up for revision as soon as a new discovery is made or a new test undergone. Religion offers certainty, truths passed down for eternity, skepticism offers acknowledgement of the terrifying truth- certainty is impossible. Okay, so what religions promise is a lie, but it’s much more appealing than reality.

Recently I’ve moved back to the British countryside. To a much more rural area than where I grew up. Here there are no streetlights. If I wanted to dance naked at the Sabbats on a clear night I would be able to see the stars, and no neighbours would notice or complain about the chanting. And you know what? I kind of want to. If I strip Wicca of it’s Sacred History, of it’s goddesses, gods and magic all that is left is a celebration of the changing seasons and the appreciation of a brief human life within a complex web-like ecosystem of ideas and matter we will never fully understand. I’m not sure that’s enough to call a religion, but maybe it’s enough to call myself a witch. Maybe the witch is back.