THE PAGAN ANSWER TO WOMEN PRIESTS
Sandra Barwick investigates
the fashionable allure of witchcraft particularly in suburbia
COMMERCIALISM has not yet quite overtaken the traditional celebrations of the season. In one small but significant sector they are still kept in archaic fashion. This yule, Vivianne Crowley, psychologist and management consultant, will switch off her laser printer and walk down to a suburban sitting-room decked with holly, mistletoe, and a prominent yule log. As the shortest day darkens to its close, she will take out an old-fashioned besom of twigs, ceremonially sweep the floor, and cast a circle for her west London witches' coven.
The greenery of Ms Crowley (who is not, she says, related to the monstrous Aleis- ter) is not the stuff of cosy Christmas cards, but of ancient cults, including the worship of trees. She is Secretary of the Pagan Society and her coven's December rituals celebrate the rebirth of the Sun King. Accountants and doctors, she says, make up a high proportion of his modern worshippers, though a puzzlingly high number of recent converts to witchcraft work as computer technicians.
`We perform our rituals in a consecrated circle,' she told me. I looked at her deep purple carpet and attempted to imagine the scene. 'Probably indoors because it's a cold time of the year,' she said. 'Some groups go sky-clad [witch-talk for naked], some wear robes. Our Finnish branch is very hardy. They do it outside in furs with a rag round the cauldron. People like, if possible, to have a fire. We invoke the Goddess. They'll make a circle carrying candles. There'll be singing and dancing and giving of gifts and feasting. It's tribal in a way, but in a modern context.'
There will be drumming at this suburban tribal rite — Ms Crowley says she and her husband deliberately bought a detached house for fear of objections from neigh- bours — but the feasting will involve no slices of turkey, for Ms Crowley, like many modern witches, is firmly vegetarian.
Risible as the whole notion of adults prancing round in circles throwing spells may sound, it has an allure for some. Com- mitted practitioners — coven members are probably few. Professor Tanya Luhrmann, who wrote a doctoral thesis on witchcraft while a fellow of Christ's Col- lege, Cambridge, says her estimate is about 2,000 active British witches at the most. But general interest in the subject is much larger than that. Books on witchcraft sell well. Ms Crowley's Wicca, The Old Religion in the New Age, with its learned- sounding details of initiation rituals and magic incantations, has sold 15,000 copies at £6.99 apiece. In America interest is even greater: The Spiral Dance, by a witch calling herself `Starhawle, sold 100,000 copies in its first edition in 41979: its tenth anniversary edition sold over 40,000 more.
Ms Crowley's vegetarianism may hold one clue to the appeal of modern witchcraft. Liz Puttick, senior editor at HarperCollins, which publishes books on witchcraft on its Aquarian list, says she thinks that the main reason for the growth of paganism is that 'it sees itself as a spiri- tual wing of the environmental movement: green religion.'
There are other reasons for its allure. The glamour of secrecy is clearly one. Novelty is probably another, for in its revived form witchcraft is effectively a new religion. Ms Crowley dates its revival back to 1951, when, with the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, it was possible to publish books on the subject openly. The late Six- ties, with their fashion for fantasy and free love, created a receptive audience for the ideas of witchcraft as well as Eastern mys- tics. Indeed, Wicca's indulgent moral code, 'An it harm none, do what you will', perfectly fitted its new age. Ms Crowley herself, with her hennaed hair, her amber and silver jewellery, joined in the early Seventies, shortly before she took her uni- `This button, Mr Gorbachev, now controls your TV set instead.' versity doctorate in psychology.
But the single most important strand in the new fashionability of witchcraft is prob- ably feminism or, at least, one brand of feminism. For witchcraft is a cult which worships not only the horned god, but a female deity of parallel importance, and it is therefore almost tailor-made for women who regard Christianity or Judaism as bul- lying male conspiracies.
`People are starved for the Goddess,' says Ms Crowley. 'Christian society has become very patriarchal. Society needs a contact with the earth and the inner femi- nine. I think it's really a big psychological need.'
Witchcraft, in a word, provides that fash- ionable commodity, the priestess. 'We find it interesting watching this debate about women priests,' Ms Crowley says. 'It's the slippery road to paganism, but they'd be better off being proper pagans. A lot of women come to Wicca because they're looking for the goddess. They're not satis- fied worshipping a male god. I see women in the Christian church referring to God as "she" and talking about women priests. But if you do that you are changing the nature of Christianity. I can understand why the Christian church finds it very threatening.'
This threat is not felt in all quarters of the Christian church. `Starhawle, the American witch and authoress, has flown over in the past to talk at that home of Anglican wackiness, St James's Church, Piccadilly. Vivianne Crowley says that she and her coven performed a ritual two years ago for the Anglican diocese of Canterbury as part of the Festival of Faith in the Envi- ronment. 'They wouldn't let us do it in the cathedral, so we asked if we could do it in the cloisters — we ended up doing it in the park. There were demonstrations about allowing Catholics in the cathedral, but luckily the demonstrators seemed to over- look us and we all lived ecumenically ever after.'
Witchcraft is probably still a little extreme for most conventional Christians, however ecumenical. Its rites of initiation, as described by Ms Crowley, involve going naked and bound and undergoing ritual scourging. Ritual sexual congress is kept for experienced practitioners. (`The Great Rite can be formed as an actual act of ritu- al sex, [but] . . . today in Wicca sexual union with the Goddess takes place only privately between couples,' Ms Crowley writes cosily.) It is texts like these which have kept the evangelical wing of the Anglican church staunch against witchcraft, suspecting it of the worship of evil at the least, and ritual child abuse at the worst. Ms Crowley says she has never heard of child abuse in her 20 years in the craft: initiates are carefully screened and must be over 18. But the sto- ries of ritual abuse, she says, have had one important effect. They have made witches with children very distrustful of social workers.
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