Witchcraft Grows in US
[Out of the Shadows: Wicca Grows in Austin and
Beyond by Qiling Wang] "Mary Caldwell has spiky pink hair, tattooed arms and
works in customer service for a software company. She’s also the leader of a
Wicca meet-up that gathers every other Monday at Monkey Nest Coffee on Burnet
Road.
On a recent Monday evening, she led the group in a
discussion of numerology – the belief that numbers have mystical meanings – as
well as rituals and personal experiences with spirits. Recently, some members of
the group had visited a local cemetery to commune with spirits.
“Some of the people in the group just see them, some
just hear them and some of them just smell them,” said Caldwell, 44. “It was
great fun.”
Wicca is a modern version of ancient pagan religions,
created in England and brought to the United States in the 1960s. Its followers
worship a goddess and a god, honor the Earth and practice ritual magic. They
follow the Wiccan Rede, a statement of principles that stresses the importance
of doing no harm.
“We believe that everything is part of the One,” said
Ed Fitch, 80, a Wiccan senior high priest and a member of Caldwell’s meet-up
group, one of several Wiccan or witches’ groups in Austin. “Everything in the
universe is linked to everything else in the universe.”
Because Wicca is a highly decentralized religion with
no central authority, it’s hard to get a tally of its members. The American
Religious Identification Survey, which periodically surveys 50,000 Americans,
said the number of self-identified Wiccans increased to 342,000 in 2008, up from
134,000 in 2001. The 2008 figures are the most recent available.
Wicca’s growth tracks the changing religious landscape
in the U.S., as a growing number of people leave established religions and
become either unaffiliated or switch to alternative religions. About 5.9 percent
of Americans followed a non-Christian faith in 2014, up from 4.7 percent in
2007, according to the Pew Research Center,
“The number of people who have institutional
affiliation are declining in general, so [Wicca] is part of a larger trend,”
said Jennifer Graber, an associate professor of religious studies at the
University of Texas at Austin. “People are not aligning themselves in
traditional religious ways...” Full text:
Out of the Shadows: Wicca Grows in Austin and Beyond
See:
Witchcraft