It’s October – we all know what that means. Several of us at The Wild Hunt have been contacted with requests for interviews about the recent growth of Witchcraft. It is an annual obsession in mainstream media.
A quick review of the news today shows the headlines are replete with witchery, including interviews with Witches and a wide number of stories about our collective fascination with Witchcraft.
The mainstream media exploits every angle of Halloween: Hogwarts, Hocus Pocus, The Craft, cupcake decorations, and sometimes even a little history. “People accused of witchcraft were burned at the stake during the 1692 Salem witch trials in New England,” is a false statement, or so Snopes told us last week. Atlas Obscura reminds us of the re-branded “witch cakes” that were previously called “urine cakes.” These are “spiky” pieces of circular bread, reminiscent, as one writer puts it, of “spiky bagels,” created in early April and hung on lintels to ward off witchcraft.
Must be the season of the Witch. [Alexas_Fotos, Pixabay]
If our readers need to know what kind of Witch they are, Cosmopolitan has a list with examples. Tor, the science fiction publisher, has released a list of their 10 best literary witches, and ScreenRant offers their ranked list of Disney’s 10 best witches.
In the midst of these quotidian October pieces, occasionally we see something more illuminating. Dr. Britta Ager, a classics professor at Arizona State University, did just one of these, writing about the scent of Witchcraft in The Conversation. The same site also shares an article on “How do you spot a witch?” that covers the infamous Malleus Maleficarum and its use to perpetuate misogyny and execute thousands of women.
The New York Times covered the exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, titled “Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming.” The exhibition introduces patrons to the events of the Salem Witch Trials and then brings them to modern representations of Witchcraft, including photographer Frances F. Denny’s “Major Arcana: Portraits of Witches in America,” which “documents those who are reclaiming ‘witch’ from its use as a weapon to punish otherness.”
All of this helps. But sometimes education must be tackled head-on. Authors like Byron Ballard have worked to demystify who Witches are. “I felt and still feel it is important for those outside our spiritual communities to see ordinary people – neighbors, family, the bank teller, the grocery store clerk – who claim the word “witch” as part of their identities and lives,” Ballard says. “Every year there are a few more posts and a few more beautiful, regular faces. It’s been astounding this year to see all the posts across so many social media platforms all bearing the hashtag #whatwitcheslooklike2021.”
The #WitchesOfInstagram and #WitchTok hastags have sparked an interest in Witchcraft among many, especially among young people. They are educating the public about Witchcraft and empowering many to explore Nature and a spiritual path that awakens resilience, resistance, and healing.
They are also doing exactly what Witches do: breaking norms, tackling the patriarchy, and challenging unnecessary gatekeeping structures.
Still, there remains a constant drone of apologies and clarification: “Witches aren’t evil and don’t worship the devil,” “Witches don’t sacrifice animals or children,” “Witches aren’t cannibals,” “Satan has nothing to do with Witchcraft,” “tarot is just a tool,” “Wicca is a valid religion.” This defensive posture goes on and on; our readers know it all too well. It is also not new.
Groups like Covenant of the Goddess and Circle Sanctuary began in the mid-1970s to educate the public and combat stereotypes against Witches, Wiccans, and Pagans.
On October 18, 1980, United Press International circulated an article with this headline: “Evangelists denounced the ‘forces of darkness’ and ‘satanism,'” which was published in multiple outlets. The story was about a witches’ convention in Amarillo, Texas that was sponsored by the Church of Wicca and disrupted by a bomb threat. A man was quoted in the article claiming that witches killed his brother, while the organizers of the seminar felt the need to deny that Wiccans were devil worshipers. (“Wicca literature states witches do not believe in the existence of the devil or hell,” the article claimed, “or that Christ was the son of [the Christian god.]”
The Miami Herald published an obituary for Sybil Leek in October, 1982. It included a line from her son, Julian, who claimed most did not understand what his mother meant by witchcraft. “It’s not devil worship,” he said. “It’s not people running around naked. It’s not sacrificing things. It is a scientific religion.”
Similarly, in October 1988, Nicole Everett did multiple national radio spots in which she noted Wicca’s harmlessness again and again. “Wicca is a religion that worships nature,” she said. “We wouldn’t hurt any living thing. And in terms of brooms, I don’t know of any witch who is willing or able to ride a broom.”
In October of ’85, the San Diego Union-Tribune published “Witches aren’t flying very high in today’s culture,” written by the late columnist and editor Lulu Steiger, whom I was blessed to meet when I was interviewed about Witchcraft at that time.
The article estimated about 600 practitioners of Witchcraft in San Diego County. Seiger quoted sociologist Dr. R. George Kirkpatrick of San Diego State University who noted that “for every public witch, there are about five secret witches.”
“Witchcraft is a goddess-oriented religion, the worship of a goddess and female deities,” Kirkpatrick continued. “There are some all-female groups, but a lot have men in them. Witchcraft is matriarchal, with predominantly female priestesses. Periodically, there are revivals of witchcraft in the English-speaking world, in Canada, Australia. There was a revival in the 1830s, again in the Victorian era, and in the 1930s in this country.”
Kirkpatrick further noted that he found most Witches to be “highly intelligent, educated, scholarly and well-read, trying to get in harmony with earth and nature.”
There has always been pressure to keep any hint of Satanism at arm’s length in these October pieces. In 1989, the Herald-Journal of Spartanburg, South Carolina, interviewed Lady Sabrina, high priestess and founder of Our Lady of Enchantment, in Nashua, N.H., who said that “Satan is a concept designed by the early Christian church to frighten the masses into submission.”
“People fear what they don’t understand,” Lady Sabrina said. “We get linked to Satanism. It’s guilt by association. It’s not the philosophy that’s creating the problem. It’s the people that misrepresent it that are creating the problem.”
In 1989 – this time on Christmas Eve, rather than Halloween – the Orlando Sentinel published the straightforward statement that “what Wiccans do not do is worship the devil, cast evil spells or sacrifice animals.”
I am certain that readers remember many of these events and even took part in some of the ones referenced. There are elders who were performing advocacy and education that would require time to go to microfiche storage to find the articles.
The San Diego Union-Tribune article prophesized that Witchcraft was on a decline. By anecdotal accounts and attention, it is not. We reported almost two years about the rise of religious “others” and a decline in Christian identity.
A Google Trends analysis suggests that, despite a rise in “Others” from one data source, there are indeed fewer searches for Wicca and Witchcraft since 2004, the earliest point when such data were available. The graph suggests a despite a divergence in recent years: “Wicca” seems to be declining, but “Witchcraft” is holding steady and recently has started ticking up again.
Witchcraft (red) and Wicca searches since 2004 from Google Trends
Yet, it still seems like we have to explain ourselves every year. That in itself makes me cautious about who should know about Witchcraft as a personal practice.
“A lot of people were keenly aware that when those accusations were targeted towards them, it was the end.” said Lydia Gordon, a co-curator of an exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum, to the New York Times. “These accusations were grounded in fear. They were grounded in jealousy and land disputes and money. And it may look different, but this fear, and this needing to control mostly women, or people that fall outside of a heteronormative society? Well, we see this still today.”
Being vanguards for change brings attention – some very much unwanted.
Those of us who write about Witchcraft, for example, are easy targets for hate mail. Personally, I get a daily dose of some version of either “you’re going to hell” or “all witches must die.”
Just last week, Rachel Hamm, a GOP candidate for secretary of state in California, bragged that, when she feared that someone would attack her at home, she prayed for Jesus to intervene – which, in her telling, led to the murder of her neighbor instead. Her neighbor, Hamm claims, was a witch.
Rachel Hamm, a GOP candidate for secretary of state in California, claims that she had a dream that someone was going to break into her house and murder her. She brags that she prayed it away and instead her neighbor, who was a witch, was murdered. pic.twitter.com/Q6mB3xmLmD
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) October 21, 2021
I’m probably more anxious about this than others. That anxiety may stem from The Wild Hunt’s work to watch the news and report what we find. Nevertheless, I suspect more of the same is on the way. There is an observable rise of “prophethood” on social media right next to #WitchTok. A simple search shows a few more prophets of Jesus out there, many interested in rooting out their perception of evil.
While it has become rare in many parts of the world, individuals are still killed today because of “witch hunts,” and some even don the mantle of witch hunters.
I remain hopeful that the public is becoming more familiar and accepting of Paganism and Witchcraft, owing to the work of community elders and the continuing work of Witches in social media. The rise of the internet has certainly helped.
But I think as we honor ancestors this time of year, we might also honor the work that has come before and recognize the work yet to do. #WitchOn.
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