EYE OF NEWT, PHONE OF FROG

Sousa Jamba meets the

High Priestess of Buckinghamshire amid her totemic statues

BRITAIN'S first school of witchcraft was opened on 8 May in Milton Keynes. Its owner and principal teacher is Mrs Dot Griffiths, who is described as the Grand Wicca Mother of the United Kingdom and High Priestess of Buckinghamshire.

I went to the school's opening to find out whether British witchcraft bore any simi- larities to African witchcraft. The school of Wicca (modern witchcraft) is in a commun- ity hall beside a church in New Bradwell near Milton Keynes. As I was too early for the opening, I wandered into the local pub called the Cuba. (I was told this is so named because it had originally been built in the 19th century with money made from a sugar-cane plantation in Cuba.) The man in the Cuba thought very little of Mrs Griffiths; he said repeatedly that he was a Christian. He told me that local people had recently called in the police to order Mrs Griffiths to stop gathering the children in the neighbourhood to tell them fairy tales.

There were about 12 students, of which three were men. Their professions were diverse — a bulldozer driver, a computer student at the Open University, a psychoanalyst, an artist.

The introduction to the course was made by Reg, Mrs Griffiths' third husband, a tall, bearded man who looked like Sig- mund Freud. Reg, an electronic engineer, said his scientific background had helped him understand witchcraft better.

Then Mrs Griffiths, a tall, corpulent woman with long, curly, black hair and a

• husky voice, began to speak. She said that we in Britain were behind the. times; in Canada and France people had progressed and took witchcraft more seriously. She said there were people who were opposed to her right to practise witchcraft. She had therefore written to the United Nations who had sent her a letter and a little blue pamphlet — which she held aloft — stating that anyone had the right to practise the religion of his or her own choice.

The lesson began. Mrs Griffiths said witchcraft was the true religion of mother earth, and dismissed the theory of creation in Genesis. Witchcraft, she said, could be traced to the beginning of the ice age. She also lamented the death of the nine million people who had been killed for practising witchcraft. As for the course, she said there would be a lot of bookwork and that people. with UB4Os (the unemployed) would have a special discount.

The school's inauguration was to have been a big media event; but this turned out not to be so because the journalists from the BBC were on strike. There was Ro- land, a student doing a post-graduate degree at City University, and Renata Libal, a Swiss journalist who suspected that one of the possible reasons the British were drawn to witchcraft was the miserable weather. Midway through the lesson, a journalist and a photographer from the Daily Star came. During the coffee break the photographer made Mrs Griffiths pose with her paraphernalia — sword, chalice, ropes, broom. I wondered whether Mrs Griffiths' art was not for the sake of the spectacular and had little substance to it. As I later discovered, this was not so.

After the lesson Mrs Griffiths invited us to her home. It was indeed like that of an African witchdoctor: there were little sta- tues all over the place, many of green frogs, Mrs Griffiths' totem. Even the tele- phone is a porcelain frog that croaks when the caller gets through. The 52-year-old Mrs Griffiths, a cockney, told me that she had been taught to be a witch by her grandmother. She had left home at 15 and gone to Manchester where she had worked as a circus dancer.

What had motivated her to form the school? With tears in her eyes Mrs Grif- fiths said: 'There is going to be a holocaust worse than Hiroshima. It will start in November. The Jewish race because of its commercialism is going to feed the war. The Ayatollah and Gaddafi are going to annihilate the British people. I have read that in my cards. I foretold Zeebrugge, Lockerbie and Hillsborough, but the media had not taken me seriously. It is going to be horrendous.'

She added that only people who knew witchcraft would be able to survive the aftermath of the holocaust, for they would be able to identify the appropriate herbs needed for survival. At this point she went to the kitchen to make us sandwiches. The telephone kept croaking and people kept coming. We who were left in the sitting- room began to talk about Nostradamus who, I was told, had predicted the first and second world wars.

By now I had begun to take Mrs Griffiths more seriously. I asked how much she knew about African witchcraft. I was soon shown some East African dolls used for a ritual. Everyone must have noticed that I had suddenly begun to feel uneasy as I refused to touch the dolls and kept looking at them as though I was looking at some dangerous snakes. This seemed to please Mrs Griffiths.

I asked whether Mrs Griffiths would be able to treat an African. Yes, many Afri- cans did indeed come to her with different problems. I was told about a West African woman who was having a problem with her boyfriend. She wanted to get rid of him, but he just wouldn't go. So she went to Mrs Griffiths who devised a special ritual. She made her husband Reg swallow raw meat and thus transformed him symbolically into the African woman's boyfriend. She then ordered the woman's boyfriend to keep away from her. And indeed this worked; the West African woman paid a loaf of bread as a fee.

As we talked on, I discovered that Mrs Griffiths was conversant not only with West African but also with Haitian witch- craft. She called her house the United Nations. Church leaders, however, are up in arms against her. This seems to have fortified her resolve to keep fighting for her beliefs. She told me that recently in Paisley, Scotland, a group of Christians had gathered to protest against her. 'I told them to pedal off,' Mrs Griffiths said defiantly. Christians, she said repeatedly, had no right to rule Britain, because their religion had been introduced during the Roman invasion.