It’s a bit tricky finding me,” says Jamie the Witch when I call to arrange a meeting. “My house has two addresses.” A vast and vaguely uncomfortable silence ensues as I mull over that statement. A house occupying two points in space simultaneously. Some sort of black magic?
No, some sort of mix-up with the local zoning department, Jamie assures me. Don’t bother using MapQuest, either, she warns. You’ll get lost.
Of course I don’t heed her advice. I place my fate, as usual, squarely in the hands of our modern and supposedly benevolent god: technology. As it so often does, though, this god disappoints. The house with two addresses befuddles my GPS, which promptly recalculates itself into a highly agitated state. In an act of mercy, I switch it off, and follow Jamie’s directions.
We approach all religions with preconceptions. Say the word “Muslim” or “Buddhist” or “Rastafarian” and certain images instantly materialize. Few religions, though, arrive as fully loaded as witchcraft. The word “witch” evokes all sorts of associations, none especially positive: spells, hexes, cauldrons, fire. Even my five-year-old daughter was intrigued when I told her I was traveling to the Seattle area in order to hang out with a few witches. “Do they ride on broomsticks?” she asked. The modern witch bristles at such cartoonish depictions yet, owing to the playful nature of her faith, also derives a certain degree of pleasure from them.
A good witch is able to laugh at herself and, Jamie assures me, she is a good witch. She does not worship Satan (Satan being a Christian device), she does not sacrifice anybody or anything, other than her time, which she does often and with a reckless generosity. She does not turn people into toads, though she has met her share of toad-like people, and even married one once. In her spare time, she writes a blog called Witchful Thinking. It’s an advice column. Like Dear Abby, she says, only with a pointy hat.
That default question when investigating a new faith—What do you believe?—was of little help with the Buddhists and Taoists. It gets me absolutely nowhere with witches. They’re hard to pin down. “I dare you to find out what Wiccans believe,” my friend Alan Cooperman, a former religion reporter for a major newspaper, told me over a sushi lunch in Washington, DC. “I dare you. It can’t be done,” he said, practically spitting raw fish at me, so adamant was he.
I love nothing more than a good dare, but that temptation alone doesn’t explain my interest in witchcraft, a subset of Wicca and, more broadly, neo-paganism, a loose category that includes Druids and Heathens, among others. My time in China did wonders for my chi, and there is much wisdom in its philosophy of effortless action, but Taoism makes no room for God, only the mysterious and ineffable Tao, the Way. Try praying to that when storm clouds gather. Wicca, on the other hand, dangles not one God before me but hundreds. It is a very new religion, and also very old. Largely unfettered by hierarchy or dogma, it promises a world of nature and magic—and just enough danger to keep things interesting.
I arrive at a gravel parking lot. Is this it? I spot a rusting washing machine marooned out front, like an artifact from some now extinct civilization. No signs of life. I must be lost, and not in the Taoist sense. I’m about to pull away when I notice the “No Trespassing” sign that Jamie the Witch said I would see. And there are the rickety wooden steps leading to a tired-looking shack, “not the nicest of houses,” just as she warned. I knock, and there is Jamie Lewis. No pointy hat. No broomstick. Just a young woman with a kind face and the zaftig figure of an Anatolian goddess.
Around her neck dangles a pentagram, a five-pointed star, the Wiccan symbol. Posters depicting phases of the moon adorn the wall of her bedroom. Otherwise, it is not the nicest of houses inside, either; the walls look like they’re made of cardboard, and the entire structure feels like it might collapse at any moment. Jamie’s boyfriend is planted on the couch and looks like he’s been there since the Clinton administration.
Rather than disturb the boyfriend, Jamie and I drive to a local eatery. It’s a content place, unburdened by ambitions to be anything other than what it is: a hole-in-the-wall diner with tuna melts for five dollars and waitresses who will cheerfully refill your coffee until you float away. We order, then slow-dance our way into conversation. Jamie seems incredibly normal, which, of course, disappoints me. I was expecting someone a little witchier.
How, I wonder, does one become a witch? I assume witches are made, not born, and that turns out to be the case with Jamie. She grew up in a secular household—her family attended church maybe once a year—but from an early age she displayed spiritual proclivities. At age eleven, she studied Zen Buddhism. She dabbled in Mormonism. She was a Muslim for a day. (She bought a Koran, delighting in the subversiveness of it, but her interest in Islam never took root.)
Why such feverish God shopping?
“I had questions,” Jamie says.
I know that is an understatement. Jamie strikes me as one of those people who desires more, always more. These are greedy people, in the best sense of the word, and their greed takes on a religious nature.
In high school she fell in with the Dungeons & Dragons crowd. At the time, she didn’t know why but now, looking back, she realizes they were all wounded souls, broken. Like her. Ever since age sixteen, when a close friend committed suicide. After the funeral, Jamie left candy at her grave. They both liked candy.
Jamie blamed herself for her friend’s death. A few days before the suicide, Jamie had seen her friend on the lunch line. “Hey, how’s it going, Jamie?” the friend asked. But Jamie, more interested in the color and texture of her french fries, sloughed off her friend. Why didn’t she stop and talk to her? Maybe it would have made a difference. Maybe she could have stopped her from going through with it. Racked with guilt, Jamie slipped into a deep depression.
Then one day, while attending a counseling seminar at school, talking to some guy who was saying nothing especially interesting, Jamie saw her.
“Saw who?”
“My friend. As clear as day, standing next to this guy.”
“Your dead friend? You saw your dead friend?”
“Yes.”
Then her friend, her dead friend, says to Jamie: “It wasn’t your fault. I was going to do it anyway. Thanks for the candy.” Jamie began crying uncontrollably and ran out of the room.
I nearly choke on my tuna melt. “What did she look like?”
“She looked like herself, except she seemed healthy and happy. And kind of transparent.”
I don’t know what to think. Jamie doesn’t strike me as crazy, though I may not be the best judge of sanity. The obvious question—was the ghost real or not?—doesn’t seem to concern Jamie. Real or not, the ghost was helpful. It permitted Jamie to stop blaming herself for her friend’s death and move on with her life. Truth is what works, as William James said.
A piece was still missing, though, a big piece. Jamie needed a mechanism, a theology (though she wouldn’t have put it that way) that enabled her to make sense of the ghost experience, to incorporate it into her evolving worldview. This proved difficult. Traditional religion didn’t offer much help in the ghost department. Then one day she stumbled across a book. It was called Teen Witch. An embarrassing book, Jamie says, but one that, like the ghost, proved useful. Teen Witch is where Jamie first encountered the goddess—not a particular goddess, but the idea that deities come in genders other than male. Jamie was intrigued. Growing up fatherless, she never could relate to God as the Cosmic Male Parent. In Jamie’s small, fatherless world, her mother was god. The goddess.
Not long after, Jamie was Christmas shopping with her grandmother. “Get whatever you want,” her grandmother said, so Jamie bought a book on witchcraft and a deck of Tarot cards. The book depicted all sorts of rituals: ritual nudity, ritual sex, ritual whipping. No explanations, just these bizarre rituals. Jamie already had plenty of bizarre in her life. She didn’t need this. So she checked out. She stopped shopping for gods or goddesses or any other deities that might be lurking out there and busied herself with schoolwork and boyfriends.
Then came college and that old Wiccan itch surfaced again. Again, a book was the proximate cause. This particular book, Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, resonated with Jamie. As the title suggests, it prescribed a do-it-yourself faith. This appealed to Jamie, who was never much of a joiner.
“And so one day I was self-initiating in my bedroom, in the nude. Of course my roommate walked in.”
“I hate when that happens.”
“Yeah, so there I am with a knife in the air, naked, and I’m like, ‘Um, can you knock next time?’”
Nudity and knives. This does not sound like any ritual I’m familiar with—except one in which I was an unwilling participant at eight days old, but I’ve blocked that from my memory. I’m curious about the mechanics of this ritual Jamie was performing in the nude, but it sounds awfully personal, so I don’t inquire further. Suffice to say, she dispatched her roommate and resumed her self-initiation, officially achieving witch-hood. That was a decade ago. She hasn’t looked back since. She found fellow witches, joined a coven, but still finds her solitary practice the most rewarding. Wiccans, perhaps even more than mystics, cut out the middle man. “It’s between you and the gods,” she says.
“Okay, but what do Wiccans believe?”
“We don’t believe anything,” she replies, and I can hear Alan Cooperman’s self-satisfied voice: See, I told you. Impossible. “We experience. The only thing you can trust is your experience,” says Jamie, sounding very much like Sandie the Taoist.
Jamie considers herself “a logical witch” and has no patience for “these kids who want to be Wiccan but don’t want to do the work.” Wicca is not a fad or a free-for-all, she tells me. It is a religion, and “absolutely valid.” Wicca tackles the big questions. It helps people understand where they are in the universe and what happens when they die. Questions don’t get any bigger than that.
I wonder, though, if it’s a religion for the indecisive, like me. There are hundreds of gods from which to choose: ancient Greek gods, Egyptian gods, Druid gods, Norse gods. Why so many gods? I wonder. What’s wrong with the One? I, like most people raised in a monotheistic tradition, reflexively view polytheism as inferior, atavistic, a throwback to the days when Man (and Woman) worshipped idols and thought leeches and bloodletting were covered under their HMO. That is not how pagans see it. To them, monotheism is, as the Tibetan lama said of my search for God, “a bit limited.” Dangerous, even. As any economist knows, one-crop economies don’t fare well over the long term. Pagans choose not to put all of their spiritual eggs in one theistic basket. They have a diversified portfolio, in a way that, say, Jews don’t. If Hashem tanks, has a bad year, Jews have no recourse. We’re screwed. Not so with Wiccans. There is always another god.
It’s not simply that Wiccans are hedging their bets. Polytheism also renders God more accessible. This is how Jamie sees it: God, singular, is like a big diamond. Too big and incomprehensible for “our puny monkey brains” to comprehend. So Wicca breaks down the diamond into facets. These parts—God, plural—are easier to grasp than the unfathomable whole. Polytheists worship a tapas God, small platefuls of distinct appetizers that, together, make for a satisfying meal.
Wicca, as Jamie sees it, is a very democratic religion. You choose the gods and goddesses you wish to worship, choose which part of the diamond to look at, and nobody is offended by your choice. No jealous gods here. The best part, Jamie says, is “if a god isn’t working for you, you can fire him or her.”
“You can fire a god?”
“Sure.”
Part of me loves the idea of multiple, disposable deities—The Apprentice meets Big Love—but another part of me is offended. To my Judeo-Christian ears, this sounds blasphemous. Fire Hashem? Sack the Almighty? How is this possible? I mean, without inviting some serious, biblical repercussions. Jamie has an answer for that. “It’s just like having a friend you always play poker with. That doesn’t negate the friendship you have with someone else you always play bridge with; each person brings a richness to your life.” In other words, Wicca is the perfect faith for people with commitment issues. If it doesn’t work out with one god, you can always hook up with another. Jamie, for instance, flirted with the Celtic gods for a while. She thought they might hit it off. After all, she loved Irish dance and culture, music. But no sparks flew. She didn’t understand their cosmology and, as she recounts, “When I talked to them they weren’t that interested in me.” So she dumped the Celtic gods and moved on. No hard feelings.
Another surprising aspect of paganism: The gods are not perfect. They possess human frailties, and Jamie isn’t beyond critiquing these lesser gods. Aphrodite, for instance, can be “bossy.” How, I ask, can you worship an imperfect, lowercase god? I always thought that was why God existed in the first place: to be better than us, to give us something to aspire to. Otherwise, I might as well worship the guy down the road with a gut the size of a small refrigerator and a propensity for scratching his ass.
Jamie has an answer for this too. “We’re perfect in our imperfection, and so are the gods. Zeus, for example, was a pedophile, adulterer, and tyrant, but we aren’t expected to act like him.” The pagan gods exist not as perfect beings but as object lessons. Thou shalt not make a royal mess of things like we did.
Jamie, as I said, dabbled in Buddhism but it didn’t resonate with her. The problem, as she sees it, is that Buddhists aim to extinguish the ego. Jamie didn’t want to kill her ego; she wanted to heal it. Also, the newness of Wicca appealed to her. Unlike more established religions, Wicca is a work in progress, just like Jamie. She felt she could actually shape the faith in a way that is much less likely with, say, Catholicism.
Witchcraft is often cast in opposition to Christianity, but the two faiths share some common ground. Both emphasize kindness and consideration to others. Both adhere to the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Wiccans perform rituals and pray, just like Christians. The difference, Jamie says, is that Christian worshippers are more or less passive. The priest or minister does all of the work. Not so in Wicca.
“The thing that bothers me about Christian prayer is that it is, ‘Please, God, I beg You, I am so pitiful. I can’t do anything by myself. Can You please do this for me? Because You are so almighty and wonderful and I can’t do shit.’ And for paganism it is, ‘I am powerful. I can change my life.’”
On this point, Christianity and paganism are irreconcilable faiths. One says, I can do anything. The other says, I can do nothing without You. One advocates a radical dependency, the other an equally radical independency. Is there no middle ground? I wonder. A radical interdependency, perhaps?
Wicca is the perfect faith for anarchists and nonconformists. While there are covens and a few Wiccan churches, these are loosely organized. There is no governing Wiccan body, no Wiccan pope or Wiccan rule book to follow. There is simply the Wiccan Rede: “A’in it harm none, do what thou wilt.” Or, in more contemporary English: Do what you wish as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. (It sounds wonderfully simple, but it is not. How do you define harm? Does squashing an insect count as harm? What if I apply for a job and get it; haven’t I harmed the applicants who did not get the job?) Witches take a nonjudgmental, almost libertarian, approach to life.
Stripped of all pretense, pagans stand naked before their gods. Sometimes, literally. They call it “sky clad,” which sounds considerably more noble than “buck naked.” Jamie has performed more than her share of sky-clad rituals. Women, like herself, not size 6, nowhere near size 6, standing in the woods naked. “When you get to see nudity in our culture it is pornography or it is in a film with movie stars. Well, most of us don’t look like that. You don’t really get an opportunity to see what regular people look like. And so there is this curiosity.”
No, Jamie, there is not this curiosity. I have no desire to see what regular people look like naked. I haven’t fully recovered from my close encounter with the Raëlians, who, while not exactly regular, were quite naked. I am, though, intrigued by Wicca. Like Buddhism and the mystical paths, it emphasizes experience over doctrine. In Wicca, there is no such thing as sin, original or otherwise. It is mildly subversive.
A retired British civil servant named Gerald Gardner is widely credited with inventing modern Wicca. Gardner was an amateur anthropologist, folklorist, and nudist who spent much of his career in Asia. In 1936, he returned to England, where he joined an occultist group called The Fellowship of Crotona and, as legend has it, in 1939 was taken to the house of a wealthy woman named Dorothy Clutterbuck, “Old Dorothy,” and initiated into “The Craft.” Gardner, a natural promoter, wrote several books on witchcraft that attracted a lot of attention. He called his new religion Wicca, an Old English word for witchcraft. In Drawing Down the Moon, her classic account of neo-paganism, Margot Adler says the word “derives from the Indo-European roots ‘wic’ and ‘weik’ meaning to bend or turn. According to this view, a witch would be a woman (or man) skilled in the craft of shaping, bending and changing reality.”
In other words, magic. And now we have stumbled across probably the most controversial aspect of this controversial faith. We’re not talking about pulling rabbits out of hats. So what is Wiccan magic? Many Wiccans like to cite Aleister Crowley’s famous definition: “The Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will.” Is that change supernatural? No, witches tell me. But it sure seems that way to me. I hear tales of money that is needed for, say, college tuition, suddenly arriving, right on cue, or the skies all of a sudden clearing in time for the big festival. In my experience, such propitious happenings are not natural at all. I make a note to find out more about magic.
To this day, some Wiccans go to great lengths to “prove” that theirs is not some newfangled faith concocted by a retired British civil servant with a vivid imagination but, rather, part of an ancient, unbroken chain. That is a highly dubious claim. “The Wiccans know this. They’re not stupid,” says Alan Cooperman. “They know it’s bullshit.” Which is not to say that Wicca is not a valid and meaningful path to God, plural. Again, the value of a religion does not depend on the veracity of its creation myth—or, to put it another way: Bullshit is no deal breaker.
It’s been said that you’re not really a Wiccan until you do something Wiccan. So when Jamie invites me to a coven, a gathering of fellow witches, I eagerly accept.
I pick her up at the house with two addresses and we head east toward the small town of Index, Washington. As we drive, we discuss the split in the witch community. On one side are those who believe The Craft, as Wiccans sometimes call their faith, should remain secretive, and on the other side are people like Jamie, who believe that it’s time to come out of the broom closet. The way Jamie sees it, her religion has made great strides from the days when Wiccan books were stashed behind counters and witches hid their beliefs. Today estimates of the number of Wiccans and other neo-pagans in the United States vary from one to three million, and the religion is recognized by, among others, the Pentagon. Wiccan service members killed in the line of duty can have their faith’s symbol, the pentagram, engraved on their tombstone at Arlington National Cemetery.
Soon the strip malls fade, and then so do the drive-up espresso stands, replaced by mini churches, similar in appearance and purpose: small, squat buildings selling a quick hit of salvation to fellow travelers. We pass a reptile museum, and then…nothing. Jamie announces that we’ve officially reached the end of civilization.
The conversation turns to ritual. All religions practice ritual, even those that are atheistic, like Buddhism. Children seem to naturally understand the importance of ritual. My daughter derives great pleasure from the few Jewish rituals we sporadically engage in, the lighting of the Sabbath candles, for instance. Are we hardwired for ritual? Researchers have found that the part of the brain where religious thinking is located is the same part where children play with ideas and express creativity.
Wiccans certainly know how to express. They approach ritual the way a musician approaches jazz, improvising, riffing, and simply making it up as they go along. They see no shame in that. Ritual is especially important to them, perhaps because they have so little liturgy and so few temples. (“The forest is our temple,” they are fond of saying.) All ritual may be simply “myth enacted,” as Joseph Campbell says, but Wiccans believe that not all ritual is created equal. “There’s a lot of bad ritual out there,” Jamie says, sounding like a guy at Woodstock warning about “some bad acid out there.”
Bad ritual? What can that possibly mean? At church or synagogue, I suppose flubbing a line of prayer or expecting communion when one is not Catholic, or perhaps forgetting to stand (or sit) on cue might constitute bad ritual. But, no, Jamie is speaking of something else entirely. Bad ritual is not bad form but bad content. “The energy isn’t grounded or people invoke a bunny or something. I mean, what is the point of that?” Good ritual elevates us; bad ritual diminishes us. By their fruit you shall know them.
For Wiccans, ritual is not some heirloom they dust off on special occasions. It is fluid, malleable. Alive. Wiccans are constantly inventing ritual. Which sounds blasphemous at first, but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense: The religious impulse is, at its heart, a creative one, and like all creative enterprises demands a high tolerance for failure. “You can try rituals and they can be total flops. That’s okay,” says Jamie. Wicca is the perfect faith for imperfectionists, experimenters, and people willing to make total asses of themselves. I just may have found my God.
Then again, maybe not. As we turn off the main road, Jamie warns me that the church is experiencing “a bit of a public-relations crisis.” I’m thinking, Oh, some problem with their finances probably. The IRS can be so picky.
“What sort of crisis?” I ask.
“One of our members murdered another, chopped up her body, and burned it.” I nearly swerve off the road. “Say what?”
Jamie explains how this guy who went to the church occasionally—everybody thought he was strange—got jealous and one day murdered his girlfriend, who was also a member of the church. He told the police he killed her because she had violated a “Wiccan blood oath.” There is no such thing as a Wiccan blood oath, Jamie assures me. The guy was clearly deranged.
I believe her, I do, but I’d be lying if I didn’t confess I’m just a bit concerned driving out to this end-of-civilization town for a pagan ritual with a witch I just met. We turn down a dirt road then see a small sign that reads “ATC” and beside it, a pentagram. We’ve arrived at the Aquarian Tabernacle Church, which looks more like a budget ski lodge than a house of worship. We walk inside to a large eat-in kitchen area. I meet Chris, a former navy sailor—with the tattoos to prove it—and others, all of whom seem remarkably normal. These are office managers, school counselors, graphic designers. These are witches with mortgages. Former Catholics are, again, disproportionately represented here. “Ritual junkies,” they call themselves.
We sit around for a while, sipping coffee and making small talk—the usual stuff, someone’s daughter just got married in Vegas; someone was promoted at work—when suddenly I hear a voice announce, with a Shakespearean timbre, “Time to cast the circle.”
As we walk down a narrow wooded path lined with candles, Jamie tells me it is a good night for ritual. Drizzly. Brisk, but not too cold.
We are about to enter the sacred circle; Wiccans are big on circles, which are said to exist “between two worlds.” Once you enter the circle you can’t leave, Jamie tells me. “They need to maintain the integrity of the border. You can’t just walk out, the energy will fall out. It’s like popping a balloon.”
A bell rings, then I hear that deep Shakespearean voice say: “The temple is about to be erected. Let all who enter do so of their own free will. Pray be silent while the temple is purified.”
We enter the circle, one by one, and when it’s my turn a woman, dressed in a white robe, says “Welcome, thou art God.” Whoa. Did I hear that correctly? I am God? Now I definitely know this is not a Catholic or Jewish ritual. At those services, there is only one God and thou art not it. It may sound like blasphemy, but this sentiment—that we are God—is not without precedent. Tat tvam asi, the Vedas say. “Thou art that.”
We’re all standing inside this little clearing now, in a circle, when the woman, the one who so astutely pegged me as God, speaks: “Children of the gods, come into this circle with open heart and open eyes, anoint your head, your heart, and your loins with these cleansing waters.” So I do. I anoint my head, my heart, splashing water on them. I leave my loins out of it, at least for now.
Next, we bless the elements: air, water, fire, earth. Then the warder, the “keeper of the gate,” says, “Do not break the circle.” I can tell he means it, too. A bell rings again, then the warder draws a large sword and begins thrusting it about, with large melodramatic gestures.
They are using the sword to carve out a sacred space, Jamie whispers in my ear. They are creating a temple, with pure intentions. More than that, says Jamie, they are creating a mini universe. Everything inside the circle is sacred, special; everything outside the circle is ordinary. It is a sharp delineation—no porous borders here—and it is the warder’s task to maintain the integrity of the border. There is no leaving now, not even, Jamie informs, for bathroom breaks, which strikes me as odd given how much Wiccans normally honor Mother Nature.
In the center of the circle is a large stone. The sky is dark, and it is cold. Everyone chants, in unison: “Ancient Queen of Sundown, Hecate, Hecate, the old one, come to us.”
Then a woman wearing a long robe appears, as if from nowhere. Hecate, I presume. She speaks with the resonance and projection of a classical actor. “Oh my children, rise up,” Hecate says, and we obey. “Look at you, just look at you. You are so beautiful. Oh, a little rough around the edges, but so beautiful. And you invite me, your patron. It is an honor for me.”
The atmosphere is pure theater, with a pinch of magic. Macbeth meets Harry Potter. Something else about the ritual strikes me as surprisingly familiar—the candles, the incense, the theatrical quality. Where have I seen this before? Then it dawns on me: the Franciscans. Of course. Catholicism and paganism cross-pollinated centuries ago, even though the Catholic Church did eventually abolish paganism; they would not be the first victor to “borrow” from their vanquished. How different this ritual is, though, from the carefully scripted services of the Catholic mass, or Jewish ceremonies where, as Abraham Heschel observed, “the services are prim, the voice is dry, the temple clean and tidy, and the soul of prayer lies in agony. You know no one will scream, no one will cry, the words will be stillborn.”
No stillborn words here. They are spoken with passion and, though the service is clearly scripted, it is a script that is fresh, written not thousands of years ago but six months ago. This, I think, is what Jewish, Christian, Muslim rituals must have been like at one time, before they grew stale and rigid.
Hecate continues. “I am the lady of the crossroads. I will not choose for you, I cannot, I will not advise you on which path to take, for that is your work. But I will hold you fully accountable for the consequences of that choice. Yes, the gods have indeed given you a great gift: free will. The will to dream. The will to know. The will to choose. And the will to act for yourself. There is a price for this gift that the gods and you as mortals must pay: accountability. Some see me as a harsh mistress. No, I say, you will receive from me exactly what you are willing to give. Do you keep your wits about you at all times? Do you strategize ahead for mishaps? Or do you just expect others to come and save you in a pinch? Are you aiming for your goals or are you wandering, confused, like a lamb ripe for slaughter?”
Everyone laughs, a knowing laugh. Except me—I don’t know what we’re laughing at. We pass some bread around. “No nuts but beware, there are raisins.” More laughter. I am struck by the amount of frivolity manifest inside that circle. I can’t remember anyone ever laughing at my childhood synagogue or any of the church services I attended. The Bible contains only four references to God laughing and in every case it is Jehovah laughing over the fate of the wicked.
A few more gods make appearances—Pan, the mischievous Greek god and companion of nymphs, is a big hit—then we all say in unison: “May the ground preserve the gods.” The warder announces that “the circle is closed but never broken.” Then we retire to the kitchen for brownies. I sit down with the gods, now disrobed and utterly mortal. “Hecate,” who works in human resources, tells me, “The point of that ritual was for everybody to leave and remember a little bit how to play. When you were a child you looked around and everything was just wow. The point of the ritual was for everyone to stop and look at themselves and say, ‘Yeah, stop being your jaded selves, stop worrying that your iPhone is too slow.’”
I’m reminded of something Alan Cooperman had told me: “Wicca is a great religion for five-year-olds.” I don’t think he meant that as an insult. Wicca retains a playful, whimsical quality long ago drained from most religions. It stokes wonder and awe. You get to dress up in funny outfits, run around outside, and laugh whenever you feel like it. What’s not to like?
It’s time to return to civilization. We have a long drive ahead of us. The roads are dark, illuminated only by the perfect half-moon dangling in the sky like a hanger in someone’s wardrobe. It’s cold outside, but warm inside my rented Subaru, which is equipped with seat warmers, perhaps the greatest single invention since the steam engine. Our butts warming up nicely, Jamie and I deconstruct the evening’s activities. She is wearing a ski hat with little cat ears. It makes her look young, which she is, and for the first time I can see her as a wounded child, growing up with no father and many questions.
For Jamie, the takeaway was this: “Just take a moment before you make a decision and think about it. Take a look around. What are you missing when you are rushing around? Take a moment.” She calls it “the cosmic two-by-four.” I bet it makes a loud thwack when it hits you upside the head.
That sound probably sums up 90 percent of all religious and spiritual practices. Saying grace before a meal. Watching our breath. Repeating the ninety-nine names of Allah. Whirling like a dervish. Prayer. They all have one objective: to get us to pause just long enough to realize that life, your life, is a freaking miracle. The least you can do is pay attention.
It seems so obvious now, and helps explain my melancholy. Depression makes it more difficult to concentrate, to pay attention, which makes you more depressed, which, in turn, makes it more difficult to pay attention, and on it goes. I realize that Jamie has confessed so much, and I so little. I start to tell Jamie about my troubles, but the dark roads require all the attention I can muster. Only later, safely back home, thousands of miles away, do I tell her about my depression. (I do this by e-mail, my preferred method of confessing my dark side.) And why not ask her? For starters, Jamie swears that Wicca has helped her navigate some treacherous waters. She was in an abusive relationship and wanted to get better but, as she puts it, she “didn’t know what better looked like.” Besides, I’ve tried talk therapy, various drugs and herbal remedies, countless self-help books. Spiritually, I’ve done—well, almost done—so much. I’ve almost meditated, nearly confessed, practically changed gender. Why not ask a witch—especially a logical one like Jamie? With all those gods and goddesses at her disposal, surely there is one that specializes in depression. A happiness god, perhaps. Or maybe she can invoke Paxilia, the ancient Greek goddess of mood enhancement and unpleasant side effects. I figure I have nothing to lose.
Jamie replies to my query, as she always does: epically. (Brevity, apparently, is not a pagan virtue.) It takes me several days to digest her missive. Here is the gist: Like many spiritual people, Jamie sees depression not as a pathology but as an SOS, a flare gun fired by my subconscious, signaling that “something is not right there.” I’m not suffering from depression, not that only, but from a “spiritual emergency,” a term I find simultaneously frightening and uplifting. Jamie is not alone in this armchair diagnosis. Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor and therefore a man who knew a thing or two about suffering, puts it this way: “A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.” I like that. Existential distress sounds so much more noble, more European, than depression or, worse, mental illness. Existential distress sounds like something that can be cured by smoking little cigars and reading Sartre.
By paragraph three, Jamie has shifted into tough-love mode. “Feeling depressed? Then fucking do something about it! Get counseling. Get meds if you need them. Move around. Eat better. Face your demons.” I was afraid of this. Jamie is expressing an old Wiccan belief in personal responsibility, something I have steadfastly avoided and am loath to embrace at this stage of my life. Wiccans believe in a version of karma called the Threefold Law. Whatever you do—good or bad—comes back to you three times over. It’s karma adjusted for inflation.
Pagan responsibility comes with another twist. “We hold each other accountable because we believe in change,” says Jamie, “and the power of the self to cause magical transformation.” Magical transformation! In other words, we do the work but then this mysterious force—call it the gods, the subconscious, whatever—kicks in and matches our efforts. It’s like a divine version of a matching 401(k). Our employer—in this case God, plural—matches our efforts. Only a fool or masochist would turn down an offer like that. Which of those two categories, I wonder, do I fall into? Both, possibly, depending on the time of day.
Different gods, like different therapists, approach depression from different perspectives, Jamie explains. Aphrodite might suggest I suffer from a lack of love. Pan would suggest I need to have more fun. Celtic gods understand depression as grief, and therefore the cure is “keening and questing.” (I had to look up “keening” in the dictionary; it means “to make a loud and long cry of sorrow.”) Shinto gods would describe it as shame, and therefore the cure is “appropriate apologetic rituals.” For a bit of much-needed levity, Jamie suggests I turn to Baubo, an ancient goddess with a penchant for sacred hilarity. (“Nothing banishes depression like laughter!”) Jamie suggests I consult the gods with whom I have a good working relationship. Sound advice. One slight problem, though: I don’t have a good working relationship, or any other kind of relationship, with the gods. I suspect this is a problem.
Magic. The most beguiling, and controversial, aspect of Wicca. Magic is what draws many people to this path. I admit I’m curious, especially given my own history with magic, albeit of the more mundane variety. Somewhere around age ten, I was bitten by the magic bug. I can still recall the texture and heft of the catalog from the Louis Tannen Company of New York. It wasn’t so much a catalog as a book, hardcover, too, and beautifully illustrated. I’d order a trick—the sponge balls or square circle or floating zombie—and wait impatiently for its arrival. When it finally came, I greedily opened the box, read the instructions, and spent the next few days mastering the art of its deception. My repertoire grew, and eventually I was good enough to perform at neighborhood birthday parties.
I loved magic. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the burgeoning showman in me asserting himself, or the delicious thrill of initiation into a secret society. Or maybe I figured that, if I worked hard enough, honed my skills, I could make my parents’ unseemly divorce disappear, and we would be a family again. This is what I think of when I hear the word “magic” but it is not the kind of magic Wiccans practice.
Jamie suggests I meet her friend Black Cat. He is a master magician. As his name suggests, Black Cat is a shadowy figure but, Jamie assures me, a gentle spirit, “not scary at all.” He’ll need some convincing to meet with me, though. Jamie suggests I express a willingness to join one of his sky-clad rituals. That will show him I’m serious, not some dilettante. I tell Jamie I’ll think about it.
Can I do this? Can I get naked in front of a witch named Black Cat? Yes, I can. In fact, I already have devised a plan, one that involves two pinches of Valium and one large notebook. I leave phone messages (“Hello, Black Cat, this is Eric”) that make me uncomfortable and are not returned. I persist and, finally, a deep, slightly gruff voice answers.
“Black Cat?”
“Yes.”
“This is Eric. Jamie Lewis suggested I call. I’d like to, um, meet with you and I want you to know that, um, I’m willing to…to…get naked.”
Silence, then: “That’s nice to hear, Eric. Actually, we don’t work in the nude anymore. But if you want to get naked, feel free.”
After he stops laughing, we agree to meet, fully clothed, at a café in Seattle.
Black Cat is in his early forties, stout and muscular, with a chiseled goatee. He is more intense than Jamie, more overtly witch-y. We order some beers as he unspools his story. Growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, he recognized early on he was different. Unlike other children, he was never afraid of the dark. Werewolf posters adorned his room. He loved Dracula movies. Sometimes, he would just sit in the forest and feel this ineffable live-ness all around him. Most of all, he believed that if he just wished for something hard enough and long enough it would materialize, a belief that extended well beyond the usual childhood fantasies.
“You mean magic?” I ask. “What is it exactly?”
“Magic to me is bringing about change in the world through directed intention, usually in a way that seems to defy scientific measure.”
Black Cat surely knows what I’m thinking: Bewitched. The TV show we both grew up with where Samantha crinkled her nose like a rabbit, and all sorts of crazy things happened to Darrin. Magic isn’t like that, he tells me. It’s more subtle, so subtle that to others it looks like coincidence. But it’s not coincidence, he assures me, reading my mind, or maybe just preempting a question he probably gets all the time.
He invites me to his house to see his basement altar. It’s a short walk through a leafy, normal-looking Seattle neighborhood. Black Cat, like most witches, has a day job. He works at the headquarters of a Major Coffee Corporation known for its overpriced Grande Lattes and comfy chairs and which shall remain nameless.
It’s a nice house, which he shares with his daughter and Jim, his partner.
Jim pours us some wine and we all walk downstairs to the basement, and the home altar. I like the idea of a home altar. Many Hindus have them too. Having a home altar is like having a home gym; it saves time and expense and you’re more likely to use it. Black Cat tells me I’m fortunate to be in his basement. Not many people are permitted here. The Wiccans have an expression: “Guard the mysteries well, reveal them often.”
Black Cat’s altar looks less like a holy place and more like a yard sale gone horribly awry. It is chockablock with stuff: candles, statues of various deities, a wooden snake, a large athame, or ritual sword, a whip. I ask about the whip.
“It’s for scourging.”
“Scourging? What’s that?”
“You know, to scourge someone. It’s from the Old Testament. Scourging is whipping.”
I’m hearing voices again. This time from religious scholar Martin Forward: “Religion is about wild and dark and uncontrollable forces, not just about goodness, moderation and thoughtfulness.” Yes, Martin, but whipping?
It’s not anything extreme, Black Cat assures me. “We scourge lightly as a way of directing blood flow.” How exactly does this work? I ask. It turns out that you are scourged—that is, whipped—as you circle round and round. This raises the energy, literally whips it up. “It’s a purification ritual,” says Black Cat.
Now, I’ve never been a masochist, not intentionally at least, but I have to confess this scourging thing appeals to me. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to be hurt, too much. But just as no medical procedure is entirely efficacious without the patient experiencing at least some pain, I suspect my depression will not lift until I too experience some genuine pain, as opposed to the synthetic variety I have indulged in for so many years now. I’m tempted to ask Black Cat to scourge me right then and there. He’d probably do it. I mean, he’s named Black Cat, after all, and I’ve had just enough wine to provide a nice soft anesthetic cushion. But I chicken out, as I always do, and instead steer the conversation in another direction. I ask about all the pagan paraphernalia. What does he see in it?
They are only props, he tells me. They only possess as much power as we give them.
“But how can stuff have power?” I ask.
“Let me see your notebook,” says Black Cat, and I hand over my small black Moleskine. “Is it sacred?”
“Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s definitely important to me.”
“Is it worth the $10.99 you paid for it?”
“No, more, much more. It contains all of my notes and observations. It’s been to Turkey and Las Vegas. It’s worth a lot more than $10.99.”
“Right. The more energy you put into it, the more important it is.”
With that, the three of us toast to energy, our wineglasses clinking, the sound reverberating off the hard concrete walls.
Jim tells how he once wanted to keep someone away from him. So he performed a sort of Wiccan restraining order. He put the person’s photo in a block of ice, wrapped it in tinfoil, then slid it deep into his freezer. It worked. The person stayed away.
“Why? I was changing my interaction with that person. I was not answering their text messages. I was putting out some kind of vibe that they were not supposed to contact me or be part of my life.”
Okay, I wonder silently, but why was this magic? Why not just ignore the person’s text messages without putting their picture in a block of ice in the freezer? Because, I think, Jim needed a physical expression of his intention. Magic may be a form of self-delusion, but it is a necessary one. It is a way of jump-starting the subconscious. We all engage in these private rituals—by getting dressed before an important tennis match in a very specific manner (shirt then shorts, left sock before right, except on Thursdays) or burning photos of someone who broke our heart. We don’t call it magic, but the dynamic is the same: altering our interior climate through external actions. Witches, though, take it a step further. They believe that not only can these actions shape our thoughts, but our thoughts, our intentions, can also shape reality. They can make people stay away from us. Or money suddenly appear.
Black Cat tells me how he needed five thousand dollars so he cast a spell and, sure enough, a few days later his boss at the Major Coffee Corporation called him into his office and said he wanted him to participate in a national contest that would lead to a reward. How much was the reward worth? Yes, $5,000. Not $7,500, or $4,500 or $4,995, but $5,000.
I point out that a scientist, or any rationally inclined person, would call this a coincidence—a highly unlikely coincidence but a coincidence nonetheless.
“I love those kinds of coincidences,” replies Black Cat, a wry smile forming on his lips. “I can tell you story after story like that. Did every single spell I ever cast come out that spectacularly? No. Sometimes I miss the basket, but I can tell you that most of them come out like that.”
Is Black Cat deluding himself? Is he, as I suspect, paying attention only to the spells that work and calling those magic while ignoring the ones that don’t pan out and calling those “magic that didn’t quite work out”? But maybe there is something else going on.
Intention, more than anything else, Black Cat says, explains pagan magic. Magic is a form of visualization, or at least visualization is an important component of magic. Stand on the free-throw line, visualize making the shot, and chances are you will. It’s that old Buddhist notion of faking it until you’re making it. Magic works in much the same way, except there is an added element of mystery, an unseen hand helping you make that shot. It works, Black Cat assures me. This very house came about as a result of magic, as did his job. “Now, was magic the only factor? No, it was not. You still have to do the work. You want a job? Fill out a job application.” It strikes me as a new witch-y twist to the old saw about God helping those who help themselves. When I suggest to Black Cat that he could drop the magic and simply work hard to make things happen, he laughs. It is a confident, though not smug laugh.
“Why are you laughing?”
“This is me. There is no me without the magic. This is my art. This is who I am. I am a magician. I always have been and I always will be.” Mixing with Black Cat’s voice is another. This one, with an elite, though not arrogant, Bostonian accent is talking to me through the centuries. “Truth is what works,” said old William James.
Is Wicca for me? Have I found my God and is He a They? There is a lot to like. I like the way Wiccans create fresh ritual. I like the way they eschew temples and doctrine in favor of a forest and liturgy penned on the fly. I like the idea of a world infused with magic. I like the idea of a religion with no sin. Heschel believes that “indifference to the sublime wonder of living” is at the root of all sin. Wiccans are many things—wacky, rebellious, frequently kind, occasionally naked. They are not indifferent. They engage in wonder and awe on a regular basis. If that’s not religion at its best, I don’t know what is.
In the end, though, Wicca is not for me. For starters, there are too many choices. With all those gods and goddesses, I’m afraid I’d freeze in a futile attempt to find the perfect one for me. Another problem with polytheism is that it is, in effect, divinity by committee, and therefore suffers from the classic committee problem: Stuff can fall through the cracks. In this case, though, the “stuff” is my soul. This worries me, as it did William James. “Unless there be one all inclusive God, our guarantee of security is left imperfect.” I wonder if this phenomenon explains my depression. Might I be the victim of some sort of theistic snafu? I thought you were taking care of Eric’s mental health. No, I thought you were. Oh shit.
As for Wiccan magic, I tend to agree with those who find it lacking, though not for the reasons we normally think. Evelyn Underhill, in her classic Mysticism, writes: “Magic even at its best extends rather than escapes the boundaries of the phenomenal world. It stands, where genuine, for that form of transcendentalism which does abnormal things, but does not lead anywhere.” In other words, the problem with magicians like Black Cat is not that they are too out there but, rather, that they are too “in here.” They are materialists in extremis, manipulating reality (often for their own ends) rather than transcending it. They are so busy pulling rabbits out of hats that they never stop to look carefully at the rabbit, or the hat for that matter, and contemplate the miracle that is its existence.
The real problem, though, is that nagging, old-fashioned one of belief. I simply can’t imagine any of these lowercase gods talking to me, or intervening on my behalf. The cold fact is I don’t believe any of these gods or goddesses actually exist—not the way my left pinkie or my notebook exists—and I can’t suspend my disbelief long enough to conjure them in my mind. Maybe that makes me more sane than Jamie and her fellow witches. Maybe it just makes me more depressed.