Genuine Witchcraft

Thankyou for agreeing to speak with me, Mr Cyfrin. Could you please explain why you think it's important enough for you to interrupt your years of living quietly in the mountains like this?

Well, because there's been such a boom in books on witchcraft in the last decade or two there's also been a boom in the amount of extreme tosh on the subject unleashed upon the world. This isn't necessarily a bad thing since a lot of the tosh is useful at distracting people who are simply trying to soak up a little Wicca chic, and keeping them out of the hair of the people who are really dedicated to the craft. The temporary trend-oriented dabblers aren't really doing any harm but they do have an unfortunate tendency to reduce the magic circle down to the level of the hula hoop. This online book and program are however offering an alternative to just fluttering about on the edge of the circle. They're charting a path towards the circle's centre, jettisoning a hefty great wodge of superstitions, media misrepresentations, and varieties of Wiccan fundamentalism along the way. The Wiccan revival was built on a few pretty dodgy premises from an ancient Celtic tradition of eight seasonal festivals, and direct descent from neolithic shamanism, to enough craft laws to make the Ten Commandments look positively permissive. These were all a bit like training wheels on a bike: handy to keep us up at first but a bit of a drawback once we get up to speed.

People are spending millions of dollars on witchcraft every year.

Well that's why it's called disposable income. People are so disposed to dispose of it.

And can you help people not to waste their money?

Possibly. I can definitely encourage them to waste it on something other than witchcraft which doesn't really need to be a money pit. I'd certainly be trying to discourage non-witches from paying strangers online or elsewhere large sums to cast spells for them.

If I go to Google and do a search for love spells I find about two million pages in English and dozens of Google ads. What would you say to a person trying to find a real witch to do that?

That there are much worthier charities around if they really want to get rid of their cash.

How can you tell whether the person they're dealing with is actually a real witch and not a con artist?

Well you can certainly find squillions of genuine witches online, but it's unlikely that any of them will be in the spell-hawking business. That doesn't mean that there's not a very venerable tradition in most cultures of real witches working their craft as a trade. These days in Wicca and related versions of witchcraft you don't find that, but that's only one sub-category of witchcraft. If someone's really insistent on employing a magical repair person they should approach the choosing process very carefully. The proportion of people totally misrepresenting their abilities in spell-casting, mediumship, psychic readings and so on is much higher than among say plumbers or electricians. Which is really saying something actually.

That they're all con artists?

Not necessarily. A lot will be, and they're the ones who will barrage you with unverifiable qualifications and testimonials. They're very easy to spot. Their egocentricity will be powerful enough to send interference patterns through your monitor. Another bunch though will genuinely believe they have been blessed with the power to heal, prognosticate, and bring you more love and loot than you could comfortably cope with, while actually being as magically vibrant and psychically attuned as a tinned sardine. They can sometimes be utter sweethearts but... well you probably wouldn't want an incompetent surgeon removing your appendix, no matter how charming he or she happened to be.

What are the dangers of paying someone to cast a spell?

Poverty leaps to mind. Though of course there are dangers like someone believing a healing spell means they don't need to get a potentially dangerous condition seen to medically. Some shonky psychics can also wreak havoc with suggestions that your best course of action is to dump your husband, put the children up for adoption, and empty the goldfish bowl into the ocean.