- PARIS (AFP) - "Witches
don't proselytize", said Olivier Michaud, a 28-year-old male witch
from eastern France.
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- They do, however, get a load of publicity, in blockbuster
films and at Halloween balls, though the tricks, treats and TV images of
witchcraft are a far cry from the real thing.
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- Witchcraft today is nothing if not diverse, and perhaps
the main link between hundreds of thousands of male and female witches
is their participation in what some observers call one of the fastest growing
religions in the West.
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- A witch today is more likely to sport a tattoo than a
wart at the tip of the nose, more apt to champion the rights of an animal
than to boil it down to the bone in a bubbling cauldron.
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- A Wiccan - the name for a revived and popular form of
witchcraft - may also have more in common with TV star sensation "Buffy
the Vampire Slayer" than with a hag whose wrinkles alone would send
Hollywood denizens screaming in terror.
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- So goes the unmaking of an age-old tale, the folklore
of generations.
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- "It's very eclectic", said Michaud, alias Athenos,
who leads a coven in the city of Metz. "Wicca isn't just a bunch of
sorcerers. Bringing back our ties to nature is very important to us."
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- Like most new religions, "Traditional Wicca"
is crafted from different ancient beliefs, and shaped into structured tenets
by a modern founder. Gerald Gardner's post-war books are the modern witch's
canon, re-establishing the practice of coven groupings and initiations,
or the individual teaching of witchcraft, by priests and priestesses.
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- Deeply opposed to religious hierarchy and gender inequality,
Wicca ascribes divinity to both a God and Goddess -- but witches can also
believe in as many gods, local or universal, as they wish.
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- "You don't have to be Wiccan to be a witch. You
can be Buddhist! We have people in our community who are Jewish,"
Traci Laird, part of a 300-strong witches' group in Texas, said. "Witchcraft
is a mystical side of religion, of spirituality."
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- In the United States, 134,000 people identified themselves
as Wiccans for a respected religious survey undertaken by the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York in 2001.
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- With its decidedly 21st-century ethos and politics -
not to mention its dabbling in rites from Celts, Druids, Ancient Egyptians,
Paganism and Old Norse - Wicca sounds like a New Age mantra, but many witches
reject the association outright.
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- "It's a bunch of mish-mash," Michaud said.
"The French Wicca is much more realistic than that."
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- The Wiccan coven, he pointed out, is a forum for serious
teaching, describing the traditional three-step initiation from initiated
member, to priest, to high priest, as "a little like getting one's
driver's license."
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- After three years of study, with "very scientific,
very rational" instructors, Michaud has begun his own coven, which
in turn focuses most of its efforts on initiating newer witches into secret
rituals, including rites and spells that can heat up a love affair, or
clinch a coveted business deal.
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- His spellwork comes at a price -- set by the customer
-- since "we've got to stop kidding ourselves, these (spell materials)
cost money!"
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- Love spells are always popular. They can be as simple
as one rite that calls for a love seeker to braid three pastel-colored
strings together, then think strongly of the beloved tying a knot. A series
of seven knots are tied in succession, and the braid is worn until love
is found, when it must either be kept safe or burnt to ashes and scattered
in streams or the open seas.
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- The Book of Shadows, an individualized collection of
rites and spells for everything from divination to astrology and herbology,
is also shared among witches of a coven.
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- Key to the Wiccan creed is the Goddess, recentering a
female divinity in contrast with traditionally male-oriented Christianity,
Judaism and Islam.
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- "Women were always on the second rung (in monotheistic
religion)...on the periphery, oppressed" Michaud acknowledged. "In
Wicca, they have found a religion of their own."
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- For the women at the Tejas Web Witch Camp, who in this
week of Samhain (the pre-modern and newly re-used name for the Celtic New
Year) are riding the hills of central Texas on horses, not broomsticks,
the "reclaiming" of an identity as a witch is both political
and spiritual.
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- They are part of a larger Reclaiming movement, which
runs camps in Britain, Canada and Germany, rooted in a deep eco-feminism
aiming to reconnect humans with nature, and women to the divine.
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- Laird, one of the Tejas witch camp organizers, described
the transformative moment of becoming a Wiccan: "As I have embraced
the term 'witch' it has become an extremely empowering process. Reclaiming
a name for women which has been maligned and feared, I sense a stepping
into my own power, as a woman."
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- But for all their strength in numbers, their egalitarian
creed and the downright good sense of their one binding law -- inflict
no harm upon others -- witches are sorely in need of an image boost.
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- Some laymen still believe they work to do evil, and that
they use infamous "diabolic" texts like France's "The Secrets
of the Great Albert", a tome of practical folklore and spells dismissed
by French witches as "chock-full of errors" and a quaint homage
to a 13th-century Dominican scholar and dabbler in alchemy.
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- "Wicca is very little known in France," said
Michaud, even while acknowledging "those who know are adolescents
who watch 'Charmed' or 'Sabrina'," two other TV shows starring a couple
of comedy witches.
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- Buffy, her TV peers, and the wild worldwide popularity
of films like J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and the superficially
mystical "The Matrix" have sent thousands of teens to witch web
sites seeking kinship and answers.
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- They find both on the Internet and in the real world
of witches' "moots", held in local pubs and cafes, special meetings
for teen witches, across camp bonfires, and behind the masks of a Samhain
ball.
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- "Who ever said Wicca wasn't fun?" said Michaud.
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