Classics of Pagan Cinema: The Craft

The Craft is one of the only movies that shows, not in montage or in dream sequence, not in hints or in glimpses through a not-quite-closed-door, how Witches cast a circle, consecrate their spaces, and bring one another into the space between worlds.

Column: an Essay in Five Hammers

Pagan Perspectives

Hammer the First
She hands me a tiny white box. I look at it, the gold lettering of the logo for Pathways, our local metaphysical shop, glimmering in the candlelight. It is the night of my first-degree initiation into my family’s coven, and now that the ritual is over, we are gathered around the coffee table altar in the living room of the house where I grew up exchanging presents. I slide the top off the box. Inside, resting on a pillow of spun fibers, is a silver sigil attached to a slim black cord.