Coming Out of the Broom Closet

By Oriana Syed

Lexie Wedge was about to start singing. She stood at the microphone, arms glued to her sides. Noting her anxiety, the audience murmured encouragement. Buoyed, the ten-year-old launched what would be her debut performance—Kelly Clarkson’s “Breakaway.” She started softly, as if to herself: “I’ll spread my wings and I’ll learn how to fly…I’ll do what it takes ’til I touch the sky.” Her parents, in the front row, mouthed the words. At one point, Lexie’s voice faltered, but she continued. The end of the song brought thunderous applause that swelled to a standing ovation.

If the song and its presentation were heartwarmingly familiar—a little-girl performer, an audience vested in her success—the context was not. A member of a family that practices Wicca, a nature-based religion centered on pre-Christian beliefs, Lexie was singing to a largely Wiccan audience at a regional fund-raiser hosted by the Society of Elder Faiths (SEF).

A recent American Religious Identification Survey estimated that 134,000 adults in the U.S. identify as Wiccans. Tenets of the neo-pagan tradition include taking responsibility for one’s actions and minimizing harm to oneself and others. The religion pays equal homage to God and Goddess and espouses the Law of Threefold Return, similar to karma, which holds that whatever benevolent or malevolent actions a person performs return threefold. Wiccans follow the Wheel of the Year, taking part in eight festivals known as Sabats that provide an understanding of life and death as parts of a cycle. They also celebrate Esbat, a ritual observance of the full moon.

Persons converting to Wicca cite motivations such as rejection of one’s inherited religion and the wish to adopt a belief system that can be passed down to one’s kin. In the case of Lexie’s mother, Jen Wedge, both reasons applied. She became a witch (a female in the Wiccan faith) for the sake of her then-unborn daughter. During her pregnancy, Wedge yearned for a spiritual path for her young family, she said. As a child, she hadn’t followed any religion. Her parents identified as Christian, although she never knew what that meant beyond “We believe in God.” The family lived across the street from a church but never attended. Then, during her pregnancy, Wedge came across a flyer at a Worcester bookstore for a Wiccan study group. Intrigued, she attended a meeting and soon began training with her husband.

Ten years later, Wedge is convinced she made the right decision. The family practices the faith at home and in the spiritual community to which they belong. They often attend prayer circles and festivals. Wicca is the lens through which they see their world. Even so, Wedge encourages her two children to listen more and share less when it comes to religion in school. In the Wedge family, religion is considered personal—an impolite subject of conversation outside the home. Not always do her children comply. In preschool her son, Logan, once reprimanded his peers, saying, “The Goddess of the flowers wouldn’t want you to step on them like that!” When a boy told him there was only one God, Logan replied, “Nope, there’s a whole bunch.”

In a world where Hollywood stereotypes of witches—think Hocus Pocus, The Witches of Eastwick and Sleeping Beauty—permeate our social consciousness to such an extent that it’s hard to see beyond hyperbole, it’s understandable that Wedge urges her children to exercise reserve when it comes to their religion. Movies reproduce an age-old prejudice against alternative faiths, including Wicca, and portray those who subscribe to Wicca as hags, seductresses and outcasts. Lexie, for her part, keeps her religion under wraps at school. “I haven’t really talked about it with my friends,” she said. “But I do stuff with them that is Wiccan to me.” For instance, Lexie is a member of her school’s “clean team.” To her classmates, this after-school activity is simply about cleaning up the environment. Lexie, on the other hand, is practicing one of the tenets of Wicca: respecting nature.

As part of an informal survey to learn more what everyday Bostonians know about Wicca, ten Kenmore Square pedestrians were asked to share their impressions. A young man on his way to work laughed uncertainly and muttered something about male wizards. A Japanese student en route to class asked, “What’s a Wiccan?” Another student blurted out “freaky ritualistic sex,” then clamped her mouth shut: “Sorry, that’s what came to mind first.” Other subjects suggested that Wiccans were appropriately depicted in the teen horror film The Craft. A cop taking a swig of his Dunkin Donuts coffee began slowly, as if preparing his words: “I see Wiccans as outcasts that join a secret society to feel more powerful and relevant because they don’t feel that way in their actual lives.” A woman smiled and admitted that the word brought to mind Salem and black cats. A young couple said they view Wiccans as trendy “goths.” The last person surveyed asked timidly, “Wiccans…is that a branch of Satanism?”

This last is exactly the sort of reaction that Wiccan Sophia Potter dreads. The lack of a Satan-like figure in its theology induces allegations that Wicca is a form of Satanism—despite the fact that its practitioners don’t believe in “good” or “evil,” but only in neutrality. Potter, who defines herself as a solitary witch, is intentionally secretive about her faith. She often gets comments about her last name, though usually not because people know she’s Wiccan. “It’s a secret joke with me,” Potter said with a smile. Asked why she isn’t more open, Potter explained that there’s a risk of running into someone who dismisses Wicca as a sham, or even worse, confuses it with something malevolent.

Potter was raised a Unitarian Universalist but never felt connected to that worldview. In her senior year of high school she came across a book entitled Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, by Scott Cunningham, and realized that Wicca encompassed ideas she already held. In particular, Potter was drawn to the emphasis on developing a spiritual connection to the Earth and its elements. It wasn’t easy to tell her parents, she said. “My mom was upset…mostly about me leaving the Unitarian Church.”

Lynda Warwick, an SEF Wiccan priestess, had an easier time telling her family that she had become Wiccan—perhaps because her parents are agnostic and she sensed they would be supportive of her choice. In 1988, after having experimented with several varieties of Christianity before renouncing the religion for what she felt was its focus on sin, Warwick was searching for an alternative. Her partner introduced her to Wicca, for which she immediately felt an affinity: “I liked the notion of worshipping the divine as eminent in nature.” As a lesbian, Warwick liked that Wicca holds women and femininity in high regard, which is probably also why in general females outnumber males in the religion.

Although Warwick is more forthcoming about her faith than Potter, she has encountered her share of bigotry: “I had a Pentecostal classmate from high school offer to pray for my soul when she ran into me and my pentacle in the grocery store,” she recalled. Still, Warwick managed to shrug off the incident. “I don’t remember what I said to her. Today I’d say ‘thank you,’ so I hope I said something like, ‘If you feel you need to, I appreciate the concern.’”

Not all reactions are negative, though even those that are not intended to be offensive can be uninformed, said Potter. Some people fall prey to an almost visceral gush of curiosity: Do you own a broom? Do you perform magic? Do you worship the devil?

“The worst one I’ve ever gotten was someone asking me if I would turn them into a toad,” Potter said with a grimace.

Well…do Wiccans perform magic? In Wicca, Warwick said, magic is the ability to change consciousness in accordance with will, using symbols or objects to represent concentrated emotional and mental focus on a particular goal, such as working toward prosperity or health. “It’s not that different from prayer in that respect—I find a charged stone in my pocket and remember what I’m supposed to be working on, as a Catholic might find her rosary,” she said. Whether there is some kind of supernatural effect of concentration remains unknown. For Potter, casting spells is usually part of a ritual, and her spells are always directed toward herself: “I usually cast a spell to help get rid of a bad habit or negative aspect of my personality that I want to change.”

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter series, has succeeded in giving magic a positive spin. However, the witchcraft she has made a pop-culture phenomenon differs from the faith that Sophia Potter observes. “Wicca is a religion, and there’s no religion in Harry Potter’s world,” she said. Warwick agreed. “Wicca’s form of magic is more like prayer than potions class,” she said. Potter noted that while the witchcraft presented in the Harry Potter books is not Wicca, there is still an important commonality between the message in the books and that of her faith: love.

Indeed, at the SEF fund-raiser where Lexie sang, the air was charged with laughter. Children chased one another around the adults’ feet. A baby cooed at his mother as she rocked him. People lined up at long tables loaded with apple cider, meat pies, pastries and coffee, chatting animatedly.

Lexie’s dad, a large but unimposing man with tattoos and long black hair, took the stage after she finished. “I can’t compete with that,” he said of his daughter’s debut, before launching into a love poem he’d written for his wife. When he finished, his wife mopped her eyes and embraced him. A woman seated in the audience turned to the man next to her and whispered loudly, “Maybe you should become a Wiccan! They’re so romantic!” Perhaps coming out of the broom closet isn’t such a bad idea after all.

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