Like many veteran reporters, I have a decent amount of experience in preparing obituaries while their subjects are still alive. When someone starts to go gray, there’s time to compile a nice write-up on their vital details and accomplishments so that when the bell tolls, all you have to do is cap it off with the latest and the last: a date of death. Then you let it R.I.P.
With that experience in mind, I’ve started to think about elegies for America and the things I loved best about her. One of the first things that came to mind was the 1990s surge in the interest and practice of Witchcraft, with the groundswell of Witchy media supporting it.
The circle could not have been cast at a better time for me, personally. I was a teenage girl in 1990s America. I was already deeply interested in the subject of Witchcraft, having been inoculated in childhood with the midcentury English variant of this fever. As a Doc-Martens-stomping nonconformist in a small Christian farm town, I entered high school prepared for baby’s first holy war.
Fairuza Balk as Nancy in Andrew Fleming’s “The Craft” (1996) [Columbia Pictures]
I was a freshman in 1996, the year that gave us The Craft and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” on television. But just like flared-bottom jeans and punky leather with plaid, Witchcraft in America was nothing new. The Craft and our national reaction to it go back into the colonial period. So why were the ‘90s such a fertile decade for calling the quarters, conjuring, and conical hats?
Movies and television were a part of it. With the premiere of “Charmed” in 1998, the trend was already deeply established, with The Witches, Hocus Pocus, and a tender adaptation of The Crucible starring Winona Rider having come before. These had grown out of the decade before, with offerings like Teen Witch, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, Willow, and Troll having defined the previous decade’s relationship to Witches. However, the sword-and-sorcery Witchcraft of 1970s and 1980s cinema was just that: fantasy magic. The Craft came from bloodlines, was executed by innate gesture, and was sometimes dependent on non-human creatures to exist. The shift in the 1990s was enabled by the relatively new mainstream conception of Witchcraft (sometimes Wicca, sometimes not) as a religion.
Where did this religion come from? Like most American things: we got it from our daddy.
Witchcraft, as it has been practiced in the United States, largely arises from Gardner in the 1950s fighting off archaic statutes against fortune-telling to legalize witchcraft. Coyly skirting the law and his oath, old GBG published much of what he hoped to propagate into the world under the guise of fiction in High Magic’s Aid in 1949. Gardner’s contemporary, Aleister Crowley, published that same year The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema, following up on his obscure 1908 Book of the Law. Together with Israel Regardie’s Golden Dawn, from the late 30s, these formed the nucleus of the magician’s library, fueling practitioners of Wicca, Thelema, and other forms of western magic through the first half of the 20th century.
WWW’s “historical” logo, created by Robert Cailliau in 1990. Made of three W using the Optima Bold font, according to Cailliau himself. [Wikimedia Commons CC 4.0]
Two things happened to push this quiet grass-roots weirdo movement into the mainstream just in time for me to seize upon it as a pubescent postulant. The first of these things was Llewellyn Worldwide, the Oregon-based publishing company that obtained the rights to these and other crucial early texts like Cunningham’s Witchcraft Today and Raymond Buckland’s Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft. Llewellyn gained a little popularity in New Age shops through the Reagan administration, but the real halcyon days awaited in the 1990s.
Remember when I said there were two things? The second thing to bring Witchcraft into the average American household in the decade of Bill Clinton and Queen Latifah was, of course, the internet.
As difficult as it is to begin to eulogize America, it’s even harder to explain to folks who weren’t there what the early internet (1989-1998) was like. Long before wrecker crews like Google and Facebook were working around the clock to make the whole place as flat and boring as an office park with no trees, the early ‘net was a damp, fecund forest of weirdness. Communities sprung up like mushrooms, made up primarily of people who had previously felt isolated for their interests. None of us were strangers to each other in those little groves of RPGs and furry porn traders. We were finally finding a way into the grooves of the Akashic record: the information superhighway was the Force, it was the oversoul, it was the spiritual mycelium that made the connections we’d always believed were possible real, and we paid for it by the minute.
One of the very first things I ever searched for, on Alta Vista, was Witchcraft.
I had learned early, at my local library, that computers could be connected to share records of where books were, and how many, how I could use a Dewey designation to track them down. As soon as the librarian turned her back, I typed in “book of shadows,” and found that my library had two copies of Lady Sheba, and the next library over had three. The copies were never on the shelf, however. That’s because before the internet, wannabes sometimes stole the books they believed they’d never see again. I only resented those folks for getting there first.
All over America, there were kids just like me who were old enough to know what we wanted. We were seeing hints of it on TV and at the movies, and it wasn’t just Samantha on a broomstick this time. Our thumbs had been pricked by the idea that Witchcraft was about something, that it represented not only power, but communion. It was a path in those dark internet woods that we knew could lead to a clearing where there would be a fire, and a new song to sing, and new people to sing it with. As much as we liked (and still like) to pretend it was something old, it was exciting to us kids in the ‘90s because it was truly something new. Something as new as 1979, as 1949, as new as the New World.
I knew, as my Alta Vista search results rolled up, that I was on that path toward something I wanted to add to myself in some essential way. I knew it wouldn’t be like The Craft, and that I wouldn’t become Willow or Winifred Sanderson or live in the Halliwell house. But those were signposts that I couldn’t fail to see, because I happened to be born at the right time for them to be erected fifty feet high on my own Main Street.
Witchcraft goes on the long list of things I enjoyed as a young American that I hope future generations will be able to access, too. But I’m keeping my obit.doc updated, because she’s not looking well these days.
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