Roots of Your Craft - Day 7
What was your earliest memorable exposure to the concept of witchcraft? How did it influence your interest in it?
My earliest memory of witchcraft as something that existed in the real world (as opposed to cartoon witches in kids’ story books - Meg and Mog anyone?) was probably when I was 13 years old. We were doing a History project on witchcraft in England in the Middle Ages. Actually, the title of the project may even have been “Women as Witches in Fifteenth Century England” or something like that... I think the point was, as I went to an all-girls’ school, we were meant to unpick the misogyny and prejudice behind the witch hunts.
Anyway, I soon found out that what was required for the project was very simple, surface-level research. I very quickly got sucked down the rabbit-hole of Paganism and Wicca, and outside of my school work I built up ring binders full of information.
Back in 2003, most of the easily available materials were on Wicca and Paganism. That was more or less it. So I immersed myself in it, I was utterly fascinated by it. There was a time when I could recite the Wiccan Rede by heart. Once I’d printed out and photocopied almost entire books’ worth of research on Wicca, I started looking at dream interpretation. Pages and pages of symbols and meanings, colour theory, astrology... man, I had so much!
But it was all pretty much knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I didn’t practice at the time. I just consumed. I think the Goddess and Horned One aspects - at least, how they were presented to me in the books I read at the time - put me off. As I said in yesterday’s challenge answer, I wasn’t raised with any spiritual belief system. I had already decided that Christianity and other organised religions weren’t for me, and as I far as I was concerned, practicing Wicca meant practicing a religion and believing in something that I didn’t.
Having said all that, my fascination with witchcraft never left me. I suppose it became a sort of longing. I hoped that one day, some big spiritual event would happen and - TA DA! I could freely become Wiccan without any doubts. Ah, teenagers. In my twenties was when that longing was at its lowest I suppose. I was at university, I was deep into Shakespeare, anime was my biggest obsession... then I left university and had to become a real adult. EURGH.
The longing returned. Slowly, and mostly in regards to the aesthetic and the paraphernalia. Until the first national lockdown in the UK, March 2020. I had the time to go down the rabbit hole again. And boy, was that rabbit hole waaay bigger than I remembered. I discovered that there are plenty of witches out there who aren’t Wiccan or Pagan. That was a huge moment for me. Suddenly, witchcraft was back on the table.
I don’t regret all that time I spent delving into Paganism and Wicca. It meant that so much of what I read more recently already had a familiar feel to it - I was just no longer processing everything though the very specialised lenses of Paganism and Wicca. It was incredibly liberating, but without all that fevered, obsessive teenage research to give me starting points, I think I would still be floundering and not really knowing where to begin.
So, thank you 13-year-old me. You did good, kid.
