Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler

supernatural powers,” but revivalist Witches do not believe in a supernatural. “A witch,” you may be told, “is anyone who practices magic,” but revivalist Witches will tell you that Witchcraft is a religion, and some will tell you that magic is secondary. “A witch,” you may be told, “is a worker of evil,” but revivalist Witches will tell you that they promote the good. The historian Elliot Rose observed that the word witch is “free to wander, and does wander, among a bewildering variety of mental associations,” 2 and the occultist Isaac Bonewits has asked:
    Is a “witch” anyone who does magic or who reads fortunes? Is a “witch” someone who worships the Christian Devil? Is a Witch (capital letters this time) a member of a specific Pagan faith called “Wicca”? Is a “witch” someone who practices Voodoo, or Macumba, or Candomblé? Are the anthropologists correct when they define a “witch” as anyone doing magic (usually evil) outside an approved social structure? 3
    Bonewits does away with some of this confusion, as we shall see, by dividing Witches into many types, including Classical or cunning folk, Neodiabolic, Familial, Immigrant, Ethnic, Feminist, and Neo-Pagan. And in this book we are (mostly) talking about Neo-Pagan Witches—the revival, or re-creation, or new creation (depending on your viewpoint) of a Neo-Pagan nature religion that calls itself Witchcraft, or Wicca, or the Craft, or the Old Religion(s). This religion, with its sources of inspiration in pre-Christian Western Europe, has a specific history—clouded though it may be—and a specific way of being in the world.
    We saw that the word witch comes from the Old English wicce, wicca, and these words derive from a root wic, or weik, which has to do with religion and magic. We saw that many practitioners of Wicca will tell you that Wicca means wise, although that is etymologically incorrect. Others will tell you that Wicca comes from a root meaning to bend or turn, and that the Witch is the bender and changer of reality.
    But etymology does not help one to confront the confusing feeling that lies behind the word witch. The very power of the word lies in its imprecision. It is not merely a word, but an archetype, a cluster of powerful images. It resonates in the mind and, in the words of Dr. Ulanov, takes us down to deep places, to forests and fairy tales and myths and friendships with animals. The price we pay for clarity of definition must not be a reduction in the force of this cluster of images.
    Witches are divided over the word witch. Some regard it as a badge of pride, a word to be reclaimed, much as militant lesbians have reclaimed the word dyke. But others dislike the word. “It has a rather bad press,” one Witch told me. Another said, “I did not plan to call myself Witch. It found me. It just happened to be a name—perhaps a bad name—that was attached to the things I was seeking.” One Neo-Pagan journal stated that the term Witchcraft is inappropriate as “it refers to a decayed version of an older faith. ” 4
    Some witches will tell you that they prefer the word Craft because it places emphasis on a way of practicing magic, an occult technology. And there are Witches—the “classical” ones of Bonewits’s definition—who define Witchcraft not as a religion at all, but simply as a craft. Others will say they are of the “Old Religion,” because they wish to link themselves with Europe’s pre-Christian past, and some prefer to say they are “of the Wicca,” in order to emphasize a family or tribe with special ties. Still others speak of their practices as “the revival of the ancient mystery traditions.” But when they talk among themselves they often use these terms interchangeably, and outsiders are left as confused as ever.
    Sadly, it is only poets and artists