Wicca's Sweet Song

I became a Christian when I was 16, and when I was 26, I decided to dabble in wicca, a modern-day, neopagan version of witchcraft. What you might call “witchcraft light.” I did my dabbling briefly, on what I considered the relatively safe periphery, but dabble I did.

Today I thank God I wasn’t hooked by wicca or one of its neopagan cousins (druidry, Kemetism, Odinism, etc.), but at the time I didn’t see much of a conflict between wicca and Christianity. Or I didn’t want to. I was angry with God, and looking back, I think I wanted to take a jab at Him, and witchcraft light was the perfect vehicle. Wicca seemed so harmless. Sweet, even. It was just the ticket. Prove yourself, God. If wicca’s so bad, show yourself and tell me.

The television show Charmed, with its three pretty witch sisters, didn’t exist at the time, but the wiccans and witches I met in the 1980s were just like those sisters—fun, kind, and accepting. Especially accepting. The patchouli-soaked, post-hippie women I met worked very hard at being accepting.

There’s a lot of talk in today’s witch, wiccan, and neopagan communities about acceptance. You must accept the “path” others are on; accept others’ beliefs, even when those beliefs are obviously self-contradictory; and accept any combination of beliefs any practitioner wishes to cobble together. Some believe in astral projection, shamanism, and Keltrian druidism, others in the Green Man, the “Lord and Lady,” and Dianic wicca.

There are some, particularly more traditional witches, who don’t care for what they consider the “fluffy bunny,” cafeteria-style approach of today’s wiccans, but for the most part it’s all about acceptance. It’s like tolerance: You’d darn well better have it.

This acceptance doesn’t extend to Christianity, of course. Any witch, wiccan, or neopagan forum on the Internet is eye-opening in this respect. Christians, forum posters say, are killjoys, they believe in sin, they usurped pagans’ celebrations and witches’ sabbats for their own use, and they want to impose their outdated moral standards on everyone.

Worst of all, Christians acknowledge that truth involves exclusions—that God can not be both Jesus and Buddha. Or Jesus and Hecate, Jesus and Rhiannon. Jesus’ claim that “no man comes to the Father but through me” is Christianity’s most serious crime.

If you’re not aware of how the tentacles of wiccan/neopagan beliefs have worked their way into the culture, especially among young people, I recommend you do an Internet search for “wicca” and “forum” or “neopagan” and “forum.” But be prepared for some of the saddest reading you’ve ever done.

The most heartbreaking posts are by girls and boys barely in their teens. My mom and dad are Catholics, they say, or Baptists, and they don’t understand me. They don’t accept me. I’ve always been strange, they say, and now I know why. I was meant to walk a different path.

They want a secret, magic name, they want to dream dreams and see visions. They want acceptance—and they find it. They crave the supernatural and don’t realize that Jesus’ Incarnation was a mysterious, supernatural event far beyond the wildest wiccan imagination.

God was gracious to me and quickly showed me the truth about wicca and its cousins. I so easily could have fallen into it, and then tumbled into the rabbit warren of new age nuttiness. Wicca’s superficial attractions alone—the jewelry and incense, the music of Celtic-influenced wicca, and so on—were enough to pull me in. That’s how I was at that age.

Over the years I’ve learned that what seems harmless, even good, can be—and I won’t mince words here—evil. Some people are lured from God by obvious, black-hatted evil, but for most it’s the sweet song that grabs them. And sadly, for many of today’s young people, that sweet song is wicca.

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