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From Xposé issue #61, November 2001
© Visual Imagination Limited 2001
London, UK
Real Wicca
By Gareth Wigmore
Want to levitate? Turn people into rats? Well, tough. Real Wicca isn't like that, as Gareth Wigmore finds out
In current telefantasy shows such as Charmed, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, perhaps most obviously, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, theres plenty of screen time devoted to the art of witchcraft, although it's more likely referred to as Wicca. It's a chicken-and-egg question as to whether the activities of the likes of the Halliwell sisters, Willow, Tara, Sabrina and so on reflect the rising popularity of Wicca in the world beyond television, or whether they are the responsibility for it alongside the cultural phenomenon of the Harry Potter books.
These series depictions of Wicca are fairly vague and sketchy, largely because the writers have no intention of showing us real magic or a loose religion rooted in Paganism. What the writers and producers want from witchcraft are comic mishaps, plot devices, the odd easy Macguffin and so forth. In Buffy, Willow has become a witch largely to facilitate get-out clauses to escape impossible situations, like the moment when she and Tara manage to make Glory disappear from the room where she is about to strike them, Buffy and the rest of the Scooby Gang dean, and reappear on the other side of town, hundreds of feet up in the air. Even more useful in terms of a plot device is her ability to mutter a couple of words of Latin and create fire or light or rain as circumstances require.
Real Wicca is rather different. If it were so easy to perform magic - and it is easy on TV, certainly in the world of Buffy and Angel, where anyone with the right incantations and ingredients can instantly conjure up all manner of complex results - we'd all be doing it, and the major religions would see their followers abscond and turn to a different faith. In the real world, Wicca exists only as a shadowy and, to the outsider, confusing series of Pagan beliefs that seem bolted together from various ancient sources.
It's fair to say that the archetypal image of witches and witchcraft, the one that springs to most people's minds despite Joss Whedon and JK Rowling, is that found in Shakespeare's Macbeth. The weird sisters, the wizened old crones, are as completely ingrained in the modern consciousness as they were in that of Elizabethan times, with their magic ingredients such as eye of newt and toe of frog, their cauldron and their blasted heath. The traditional paraphernalia of witches that we see hit the costume shops every year just before Halloween - the broomstick, the pointed hat, the black cat or other familiar - all belong to that same image of witches and witchcraft. Such witches are thought of as evil. They curse and poison, using their cauldrons to brew up foul potions either to harm their enemies, or sometimes just for the hell of it. That witches are bad is the accepted wisdom, to the extent that a special adjective - "white"- has to be applied to the word "witch" to suggest the possibility of goodness.
This image of witches is one based on several hundred years of history. All through Europe, common sense suggested for generations that when any mishap occurred, when fences blew down, sheep were taken by wolves or a child became ill, witches were responsible. This comes directly out of the idea of a loving God who protects His people. Why would God allow such misfortune? The obvious answer seemed to be that the Devil or his agents - demon and witches - occasionally succeeded in scoring the odd point against Him here and there by doing mischief on Earth. And so began centuries of persecution of those who were a little strange and somehow suspect. If you were an old spinster with skin problems and a big cooking pot, it was easy to be in trouble extremely quickly.
England, Scotland, Germany, France, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries all became terrifyingly overzealous in their persecution of witches in the 14th, 15th, and 16th Centuries. At some points in these times, certain cities in Germany killed up to 600 witches a year, burned at the stake confessing - under torture, naturally - to their compacts with the Devil. For it was believed that witches and wizards had made some sort of Faustian pact with the Devil, had renounced Christianity and given themselves over to evil to be done in his name, working in tandem with minor demons who acted in whatever wicked manner the witches commanded them to. Needless to say, modern people who describe themselves as witches have no such inclinations. Many modern witches do not see the term "witch" as necessarily a female one either; any visit to a psychic fair will show you large numbers of male witches, most of whom, if you believe the stereotype, will be middle-aged, bearded and paunchy.
In the 1950s, behind the scenes, British witchcraft started making a comeback. Despite laws that had been around for centuries banning witchcraft and making it punishable by death, some of the Pagan traditions around which modern Wicca is based had been passed down generation to generation among families and small, rural communities. This is called the hereditary, traditionalist or revivalist craft.
The rise in the popularity of Wicca is seen by those who practice it as a deliberate rejection of the traditional major religions, with their dogma and regulations. The person disenchanted with orthodox faith still believes that one deity created the world, but decided to look for answers to life's eternal questions - Why are we here? What is our place in creation? What does life mean? - in a more individual way, based on ancient Pagan beliefs.
Crucially, those beliefs and practices are only based on Paganism and are not the same as it. Real Paganism would entail sacrificing goats and inspecting their entrails, and such primitive aspects of the religion have long gone by the wayside, thankfully. Not all who practice Pagan religion call themselves witches, but those who are interested in the search for coming to terms with the Creator, the one deity, generally do. They believe that a nameless, formless source of creation exists, somewhere. We cannot come into real contact with it; indeed, it is not even aware of the existence of like on Earth and those looking for it. Unlike the Christian idea of God, it is not loving or good, but neutral, with a sensibility so different from our own that conventional ideas of morality mean nothing to it.
Witches believe that everything in our universe, our world, is based on some aspect of the creator. So both the male and female forms are based on it, and therefore they describe it as having both male and female aspects. The male one is associated with the sun, and is often referred to as the horned god. Of course, "the horned one" conjures up nothing so obviously as the Devil to most people, but the horns in this case refer to antlers like that of a stag, a powerful symbol or male strength and force, and a clue to the religion's primitive roots. The goddess is more associated with the Earth. She is the mother of all things, and is known as the Great Goddess. Within that structure, with the great male and female aspects of the Creator at the head, individual witches are largely free to anthropomorphize other aspects of it as they wish. Many utilize existing pantheons such as those of Egypt or Rome to try to find their own ways of imagining different aspects of the ultimate deity. Another aspect of the deity common among most witches is a triple goddess of maiden, mother and crone. The trio is familiar from any number of sources.
The followers of Wicca are keen to stress that theirs is a responsible and difficult faith. There is nothing preordained about a man's life; man makes his own destiny and decides for himself whether to tread a path of good or evil. The deity, being neutral and unaware, will and can do nothing to intervene. Witches have to think carefully about their actions in the knowledge that even minor deeds have consequences that could stretch far and wide and affect people and things that they have never met or intended to affect.
The Pagan year follows the agricultural cycle, which is based upon the movements of the Sun. There are eight festivals in the year, the first and most important of which is known to us as Halloween, though many pagans call it Samhain. It's a festival of the dead, as we know, marking the coming of winter and the death of the year's plants and crops. The purpose behind it, witches and Pagans are at pains to stress, is not to raise corpses or ghosts from the Earth, but to remember and celebrate friends and relatives who have dies, and to learn from their lives. Like Halloween, the other Pagan festivals have counterparts in the Christian calendar, except Beltane, which has various unclear sexual connotations that the early Church obviously frowned on. However, most modern witches are again keen to stress that there is nothing perverse in their manner of dress or ritual. Most do not perform ceremonies without clothes, although some do, saying that the removal of physical trappings means that they are better able to focus on the deity. The rituals are often centered on objects from nature.
But what of spells, of calling on Gods and Goddesses to do the witchs bidding? Yes, those who practice Wicca are imploring the deity to grant them some of its power or insight - but they claim this is no different from someone kneeling in a church to pray to God for help or guidance. And this, modern witches claim, is magic. Magic is a psychological trick that witches try to play on themselves. By asking for guidance on or a solution to a problem, they are merely trying to focus and concentrate on that problem alone and hope that they are inspired as a result. Whether that inspiration is divine or it comes from their own efforts is up the them to believe. The props and equipment that witches use in their rituals are, they claim, no more sinister or outlandish than any you might find in a church, mosque or synagogue, merely different.
Magic is, then, the power of the will, and has no shade or black or white in itself. Magic is made for good or evil depending on what the witch wishes for, and there are strong rules among witches suggesting that if what they wish for causes pain to others, that pain will be returned many times onto the person who magicked it in the first place. But Wicca is now a force for either good or evil. Like mother more formal religions, it is just a way in which people try to make sense of life and the questions it poses. Obviously there are people who abuse it, and who are attracted to Wicca for the wrong reasons, thinking it is something that it is not. But by and large it preaches religious tolerance to others, and is rooted in a desire for peace and compassion.
Which is all a long way from what Sabrina and the Halliwells get up to. The current fad for Wicca on television and in children's books probably gets many witches hot under the collar, even as it undoubtedly encourages young people to think that it's a cool thing to get into. Many "converts" will be turned off as soon as they realize that it's a little more complicated to conjure up the Goddess that Willow and company make out, but perhaps it's a good thing if some of them find a loose belief system that makes it easier for them to live their lives.
Incidentally, you've got to worry about Willow Rosenberg's religious beliefs. She was brought up a Jew, but now fights vampires with crucifixes and worships Pagan deities. No wonder she's a mixed-up kid.
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