Teenagers place faith in witchcraft

More and more teenagers are signing up as trainee witches

Spellbound … Rebecca Cox and Ryan Thornton cast a spell.

The Age | Sep 30, 2007

by Maxine Frith

Witchcraft was once treated lightly in sitcoms such as Sabrina, The Teenage Witch and Bewitched, or demonised in horror films, but it is becoming increasingly mainstream.

In the last census more than 9000 Australians listed their religion as Wicca, the witchcraft branch of paganism.

The number of Wiccans has increased fivefold in the past 15 years and paganism as a whole is one of the fastest-growing religions in the country – 0.13 per cent of the population are believers.

Wicca is a nature-based religion, which celebrates events such as full moons and spring cycles, but it does not have a core orthodoxy. Believers practise white magic – mixing herb potions and casting spells – and perform rituals celebrating a goddess.

Rebecca Cox, 18, from Sydney, joined a local coven just over a year ago and goes by the pagan name Malaika Skye. She performs rituals in a park and casts spells with her partner, Ryan Thornton, whose pagan name is Tempest Storm.

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Related

Satanism and the History of Wicca

Wicca is not “the Old Religion”, though it does draw inspiration from various old religions. Wicca as we now know it is derived from 19th-century occult philosophy — including literary Satanic philosophy, among others — projected onto a non-Christian Goddess and God, plus some de-Christianized Golden Dawn style ceremonial magick, plus assorted turn-of-the-century British folklore, more recently re-shaped by neo-Pagan scholarship and by modern feminist and ecological concerns. At least several different sides of Wicca’s convoluted family tree can be traced to 19th-century literary Satanism, some forms of which had more in common with present-day Wicca than with present-day Satanism.

Besides Murray, Leland, and other writers on witchcraft, another of Wicca’s main sources is Aleister Crowley. Many knowledgeable Wiccans (e.g. the Farrars and Doreen Valiente) do realize that Gardner’s rituals were heavily based on Crowley’s rituals, though they tend to overstate the “Crowley was not a Satanist” disclaimer.