Witchcrafting A Spiritual Guide to Making Magic by Phyllis Curott Broadway Books, 304 pp., $25 BROWSE IN ANY bookstore’s “spirituality” section and you’ll find dozens of books about Wicca and the world of modern-day witchcraft. Pink and purple covers promising “girl power” fill the teenagers’ shelves, and the women’s section is crammed with volumes advising women on how to look better, feel great, and have more self-esteem by finding the “goddess within.” One of the latest of these is Phyllis Curott’s “Witchcrafting: A Spiritual Guide to Making Magic.” This is the second try for Curott, a self-styled “Wiccan high priestess” and activist. Her first book, “The Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman’s Journey into the Wisdom of Witchcraft and the Magic of the Goddess,” was an attempt to explain why she, a Brown University graduate and attorney in New York, would bother with it all. Now, with “Witchcrafting,” she’s written a how-to guide devoted to showing practitioners the techniques whereby they can master the craft. Chapters cover such topics as divination, spell casting, magic, the goddess, the god, potions, and tools. Curott claims Wicca is the fastest growing religion in America, with fifty thousand followers. The numbers do not admit confirmation, but the majority involved are women who, the author insists, have finally found a religion that honors and empowers them–because Wiccans worship a female deity, the goddess. “This vibrant and authentic religion,” Curott explains, is an amalgamation of Freemasonry, mythology, folk practices, nineteenth-century American pantheism, transcendentalism, feminism, Spiritualism, Buddhism, the ancient pantheon, and shamanism. The absence of scholarly and analytical skills is probably a prerequisite for calling this jumble an “authentic religion,” but Curott is singularly lacking in anything approaching critical power. What’s worse, however, is that she ends up promoting–in the name of empowering women–something that is far more likely to injure women, both individually and in the culture. Unlike some of her peers, Curott at least acknowledges that what passes for modern witchcraft, which arrived in the United States during the 1960s, bears only the remotest resemblance to ancient paganism. It derives mostly from an Englishman, Gerald Gardner, who in the late 1930s appropriated various rituals and customs, including nudity, from a local coven of witches, Indian folklore, the Masons, and the bizarre British sex practitioner Aleister Crowley. Gardner wrote several books about witchcraft and even adopted the Anglo-Saxon word for wizard, wicca, which he mistranslated to mean “wise one.” Throughout her book, Curott roundly condemns Judaism and Christianity as “patriarchal” and “oppressive.” Wicca, by contrast, provides a real spiritual home for women. In the traditional revealed religions “you need rules–a Bible, and the Ten Commandments, a Torah and a Koran–that come down from some transcendent, supernatural (masculine) source,” she writes. “You need saints to intercede on your behalf and because God is not present to consult with you. You need a church or a temple or a mosque.” As it turns out, she has a sneaking admiration for Jesus Christ, because he possessed the “feminine qualities” of tolerance, compassion, and gentleness. But Christ fails to gain her ultimate acceptance, because he was not sexually active and was “without humor.” Curott says the Wiccan god, by contrast, dances. The theodicy by which there can be a male god in the female universe is not what one would call theologically coherent, but in his male mode, the Wiccan god is erotic and can be found in nature or worshipped as Dionysius, Hermes, Zeus, Mars, or any of innumerable other pagan gods. The sexual theme appears in her chapter on Sabbats, the Wiccan holidays. Curott instructs readers to not only dance “skyclad,” but to “make love with someone you love” after returning from the maypole celebration celebrated the first day of May. “And don’t forget to practice safe sex!” she cheerily adds. You’d think that the “spirituality” of Wicca would be vitiated by the fact that even its practitioners admit that they’ve made it all up. But the problem here is finally not that this is all silly and incoherent. It’s rather that those who practice it do so because they like toying with an evil they don’t actually believe exists, which gives them the frisson of doing something wicked while promising they’ll be safe doing it. Of course, that leaves the question of whether the rest of us are safe from them. The real impossibility of Wicca as a religion is that it asks nothing lofty of its believers. There is no mention of obeying the law or loving your neighbor. After most Wiccan rituals, women are encouraged to turn to one another and inculcate self-worship by saying, “Thou Art Goddess.” History suggests that beliefs rooted in narcissism and hedonism tend to issue in nasty consequences. Don’t go dancing naked around the maypole with these women. It starts silly, and it ends cruel. A writer in Washington, D.C., Catherine Sanders is a Phillips Foundation journalism fellow. November 26, 2001 – Volume 7, Number 11
