The witching hour

According to Cassandra Latham, the rules of spell-casting are: don't dabble but do persist; do not start anything that you can't finish; be aware that anything you wish for in another person may come back to you; and be precise. 'Don't just ask for money, because your nearest and dearest might drop down dead, leaving you an inheritance.'

Candle magic

'A good general-purpose spell that anyone who believes in it can do,' says Latham. Pick a candle of an appropriate colour for the job (green or pink for love, yellow for wealth, red for strength, blue for good fortune, mauve for wisdom, brown for stability). If you wish to draw something towards yourself, write its name from the top of the candle to the bottom. If it's something you want to dispel, write it from the bottom to the top. Candle magic, like most magic, is best done after dark. To draw something to you, begin the spell on a new moon; to dispel it, begin on a waning moon. Light the candle and strongly visualise what you want to achieve for as long as you can maintain concentration. Blow out the candle. Repeat the procedure the next night, and again each night until the moon has completed its waxing or waning. Bury or burn the candle debris. Don't throw it away. Don't talk about the spell; and, once it's done, forget about it.

Witches' ladder

Dedicate a piece of rope to magic. Following the same lunar pattern as for candle magic, each night tie one knot in the rope while strongly visualising what you wish to achieve. Tie the knots towards you to draw your object inward and away from you to dispel it. Witches' ladders have a long tradition in Cornwall, where they were commonly sold to fishermen before a trip out to sea. Untying the first knot would unleash a light breeze, the second a stronger wind and so on. A witches' ladder also refers to a string of 40 beads used like a rosary as an aid to concentrated repetition.

Witches' poppets

Poppets are wax, clay or even Plasticene figures resembling the person on whom the magic is to be focused. In a coven, the poppet may be consecrated on a witches' altar, attached by cord to both a woman and a man (according to the Wiccan belief, that male and female energy combined create the most effective magic), and given the appropriate symbolic treatment. The poppet's leg might be bandaged as part of a healing ritual, or its mouth might be sewn up to prevent the living person it represents from spreading gossip. Once the spell has worked, the poppet will be burned or buried, thereby releasing the spell.

When I was a little girl, I thought I was a witch. Borrowing my mum's old milkpan, I would pass balmy summer evenings stirring livid stews of wild berries and gladioli over a bonfire at the back of our garden, then pour the resulting brew into jam jars and label them "potion". I communicated with other (invisible) witches in witch language scrawled over my cupboard door. I made up witch songs and caterwauled them out of the window at night. I began demanding to be persecuted. My particular hankering was to be tossed into a chasm, though these are not at all common around Basildon. To my mother and father's credit, they resisted what must by then have been the almost irresistible, and I lived on. Not content with my good luck, I acquired a black cat. Finally, and to my eternal regret, I fed my hamster to a toad.

Some time soon after, I discovered Fuzzy Felt, or perhaps it was Pippa dolls, and forgot all about witchcraft. Until a couple of years ago, that is, when The Old Religion, as witches often call it, suddenly emerged from the broom closet and into the light. The Craft and The Blair Witch Project appeared on film, The Witches Of Eastwick went into production as a musical. The first of the Harry Potter books was published and sold in its millions. Sabrina The Teenage Witch and Buffy The Vampire Slayer began airing on British TV. All over Britain (and America and beyond), Hecate was getting hip. Something curious was happening.

It got curiouser and curiouser. During my research for this article, I found a tarantula on my doorstep. Sometime later, a live crow in a knotted dustbin bag appeared (and flew to its freedom the moment I opened the bag). Now, crows and tarantulas don't wash up on my doorstep every day, but life is plump with coincidence, weirdness happens, and though intrigued and slightly ruffled I carried on all the same.

According to the Pagan Federation, there are currently 10,000 initiated witches in this country and more than 100,000 pagans. Compare this with 6,000 practising British Druids and 4,000 Buddhists, and you'll get the point. What was once taboo is now almost de rigueur. The witch religion, Wicca (wicce is the Anglo-Saxon word for witch), though only founded within the past 50 years, is growing fast. And we're exporting it. In the past couple of years, Wicca has really taken off on the continent and in the English-speaking world, most particularly in the US and Australia. No one knows how many Wiccans or witches there are worldwide, but a million would probably cover it. And it all began here in Britain.

Some definitions are called for. Wicca is a subset of paganism, as well as being the witch religion, and while all Wiccans are witches (even the men), not all witches are Wiccans. Some witches are agnostics, or Christians, or Hindus, or just plain old witches. The latter are often known as hedge witches. They tend to work alone and often describe themselves as being in The Craft. Most Wiccans, by contrast, work in covens. It goes without saying that not all pagans are witches, nor, necessarily, are all witches pagans. Wizards and warlocks, by the way, are neither witches nor Wiccans, but people (usually men) who practise high magic (more of which later) with no overtly religious context. So far as we know, there aren't many of them.

To make it all crystal clear, let's just say that The Witches Of Eastwick are Wiccans, Sabrina is a hedge witch and, if Harry Potter is anything, then he is probably a wizard. Paganism and witchcraft have been a thriving part of British culture for as long as there are records. In the 11th century, King Canute was sufficiently threatened by them to issue anti-pagan and anti-witchcraft laws, and witchcraft was still illegal in this country until 1951. But The Craft was relatively tolerated in England. Elizabeth I had her own court witch in the form of John Dee, the royal alchemist, and even during the great witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, witches were rarely burned alive in England, as they were in continental Europe and Scotland. They were hanged or strangled, then burned.

Having lain low for a century or so after those particular horrors, British witches began to re-emerge in the 18th century, in the guise of cunning men and wise women, local oddballs who lived on the outskirts of villages and ministered to broken hearts and neighbourhood grievances.

Cassandra Latham still does. Britain's only professional witch (her tax return states her occupation as "village witch"), Latham whips up charms and spells for the locals of St Buryan, near Land's End, and, via her website, for anyone else prepared to stump up a modest fee or offer a skill to trade. Latham even looks the part - a tiny, impish thing with sky-blue eyes and witchy, black hair, chopped, rather charmingly, mullet-style. A qualified nurse and counsellor, Latham turned to witching 16 years ago, after a back injury put paid to her nursing career, but she always knew she was different: "I didn't have a wonderful childhood and I retreated into otherworldliness. Part of the work I do now involves walking between this world and the spirit world, and I did that, too, when I was a child. It used to be an escape route, now it's a choice."

Glaswegian pensioner Mary Rands inherited her interest in witchcraft from her grandmother, who was considered "fey". Rands' sister is also a witch. "I chose witchcraft, but witchcraft also chose me," she says. Most witches have no family connections to The Craft, but feel drawn nonetheless. Maureen Brown is a qualified Jungian psychotherapist, who has been a member of a coven in Croydon for the past 26 years. "As a child, I was considered strange because I saw things with lights around them, which I now know to be auras. I was always different. I was always a seeker." In her early 20s, Brown was introduced to two witches at a party and never looked back. "By that time, I had experimented with many of the major religions, but I just knew that witchcraft was for me."

Caroline Robertson, proprietor of Westbury Music, the UK's leading independent dance-music label, was initiated into Wicca four years ago, but her interest in witchcraft began in childhood. "I was always a daydreamer. I believed in the force and power of nature and in the mystery of life." She bought her first pack of tarot cards at university. "It was 1970, Lennon and McCartney were doing their thing and everyone was getting a bit mystical." According to Robertson, you don't have to be born a witch, but it takes a certain kind of person to become one. "A businessman's mind would be wasted in a coven. Witchcraft is about threshold worlds and shifting realities. It appeals to odd people, loners, folk who don't follow the normal rules."

Cassandra Latham doesn't follow "the normal rules", but her clients - she sees about 200 a year - tend to be regular Joes and Joannas with all the usual problems. "The reasons people used to go to cunning folk in the past are the same as the reasons people come to me now. Relationships, jobs, money, health. People often ask me to cleanse their homes of psychic debris. One of the most common things I get asked to do is to remove curses, but no one ever asks me for anything ridiculous. It's pastoral work, just like the vicar, really."

Well, not quite like the vicar (though Latham says she gets on well with him). "What makes me different from a psychotherapist or any other counsellor is that I use magic. I believe that old habit patterns lie in the unconscious. If you want to change them, you need to communicate to the unconscious in a way it'll respond to - with symbols and archetypes and ritual. If you perform a spell with particular motifs, it will clear the unconscious ground. I find it very effective and very quick. You could spend years in psychotherapy getting to that point, whereas magic will take the shortest route, and in it goes."

Ah yes, magic. It's nonsense, obviously. Well, perhaps not complete nonsense. But definitely something for the funny folk. Except, except ... we all do it. Every time we step over cracks in the pavement, don our lucky ties for the job interview, spit on the dice before we throw, we have fallen under magic's spell. Vivianne Crowley, senior lecturer in the psychology of religion at London University, puts it like this: "Magical thinking gives us a sense of control in a world of random events. It gives you a sense that the universe is listening to you and speaking to you. Psychologically, that can be a very useful strategy." Children employ magical thinking every day and the world religions all have some magical element. What else are biblical miracles or the mysticism of the Jewish cabbala? However much we may pooh-pooh magic, we seem to be saturated in it all the same. "Magic connects with people on some ancient level," says Latham. "It's like a race memory almost. It hits the primitive part of our minds."

Crowley agrees: "Most witches believe that magic is innate in the human psyche. It's something lots of people can develop." She's not talking about sawing ladies in half or card tricks. She's talking about actual, transformative magic.

But what is magic? Well, no one really knows, but received wisdom defines it as the use of the will to effect change, and recognises two types: natural and high, or ritualistic. In natural magic, witches emphasise folk wisdom. They may cast spells and use candles, herbs, wax images, crystals and scrying or divination objects such as crystal balls and dowsing rods, as well as more familiar psychological techniques such as meditation, visualisation and repetition to focus their minds on the effects they want to manifest. Natural magic is craftwork, and its practitioners regard themselves as craftsmen and women. They are in The Craft.

High or ritualistic magic tends to focus more on ceremony, ritual and invocation. Alchemists were generally high magicians, but high magic's most famous son is probably the turn-of-the-century mystic and occultist Aleister Crowley. Most ritualistic magic is conducted in groups or covens. Witchcraft's own religion, Wicca, makes much use of it. "The difference," says Latham, "is that high magic is formal and theatrical."

Does magic work? Graham King thinks so. Four years ago, King sold his successful business making specialist cameras for archive libraries, got rid of the Jag and the country cottage, burned his collection of silk ties and bought the Museum Of Witchcraft, Boscastle, on the north coast of Cornwall, which he now runs as a going concern. Fifty thousand visitors come to the museum every year to peer at the cases of charms, amulets, poppets (wax dolls), wands, athames (ceremonial knives), scourges (ceremonial whips) and talismans. Having spent 20years as a scientist, technician and businessman, King now devotes his life to witchery. "I'm a scientist, but I believe in magic because I've seen it work," he says. "I don't know why it works, but I accept it does. Look, I have been employed in the electronics industry, and I don't know how electricity really works, either, but it does, right?" He has a point. Hands up who really understands how the telly makes pictures, or the microwave makes dinners. As for the VCR . . .

Debate as to whether magic is a psychological or supernatural power, or a bit of both, boils like a brothy cauldron in the witching community. Vivianne Crowley (no relation to Aleister, incidentally) is in no doubt. "The power of magic is 90% psychological and 10% anomalous events not beyond scientific understanding but beyond current scientific understanding. Even the British Psychological Society has become interested in the ability of spiritual practices to manifest healing powers, and in clairvoyance, psychometry [the ability to divine by touching something] and telepathy, those techniques psychologists call parapsychology." She points out that there is now a chair of parapsychology at Edinburgh University, it's that respectable.

According to Crowley, Wiccans simply harness and develop these parapsychological techniques. Which is both disappointing (no fabulous supernatural phenomena) and intriguing (anyone can do it). "Could I turn a lightbulb into a frog?" asks Maureen Brown. "Yes, but it would take a very long time, and all my energy, and it's easier to work for the money and then go and buy a frog." Caroline Robertson agrees: "I could probably change plastic to gold, but it would take years." Crowley is sceptical. When I told her that some witches claimed to be able to turn lightbulbs into frogs, she just laughed and said, "Rubbish!"

The obvious question remains. If magic is as powerful as some witches claim it to be, why can't witches put a stop to famine/war/ disease? And why isn't every witch a millionaire? Or immortal? Ah, well. For one thing, witches are human, as fallible as doctors or politicians (and we all know how fallible they are). Most witches just aren't all that competent, and the ones who are tend not to mouth off about it. Not so long ago, a very public attempt by the self-proclaimed king of the witches, Kevin Carlyon, to prevent the building of the Channel Tunnel by burning an effigy of a train raised a good few nudge-nudge, wink-winks in the pubs around Lewes, East Sussex, Carlyon's home town, and knocked something of a dent in the reputation of The Craft. These days, most witches have learned to be more modest about their powers. "I'm not Superwitch. I would say that I have a 70% success rate," says Latham, "but I can't think of any business which is 100% all the time."

Then there's the responsibility. "If people think I'm going to wave a magic wand and whisk their problems away, they have to think again," says Latham. "I can help you to help yourself is all. If I waved a wand, I'd just be disempowering you." If that sounds a bit like self-help waffle, witches insist they get results. King recently cast spells for a couple who were finding it hard to conceive, and "baby Sean arrived nine months later". On the other hand, "I only get involved with things where there's real need. Someone who just wants a new boyfriend can sort themselves out."

What about black magic? Officially, Wicca operates a no-harm principle, the so-called Wiccan Rede, but King claims that "the principle is recent and not many witches stick to it". King himself admits to having cast spells with "broken mirrors and effigies and coffins to warn people to behave well. The circumstances haven't yet arisen where I might actually curse someone, but that's not to say there are no such circumstances."

Rands isn't so circumspect. In the 30-odd years she's been a witch (and a civil servant, qualified nurse, nanny), she's found herself in the hexing business twice. "Oh, I've stamped my foot and pointed my finger all right. I'm old-fashioned in that way. An eye for an eye. I cursed one man who was forcing his sexual attentions on women and he's now got a very nasty incurable skin disease. That might not have been my doing, of course, it might have happened anyway. But..."

That said, most witches hesitate to use black magic because they believe in the threefold boomerang - that their actions will return to them three times over. Since sending her victim a skin disease, Rands' own health has taken a downturn. "If that's because I've ill-wished someone, then I have to take responsibility." Then she chuckles. "But it was worth it."

Cursing and hexing are partly what gives witchcraft a bad name, of course. But even if black magic were effective, in the context of the damage done in the name of the world religions, a little skin disease among roués doesn't seem so bad. All the same, there's a reluctance among many witches to talk freely. You can hardly blame them for having a persecution complex. Somewhere in the region of 40,000, mostly women, were murdered in Britain during the great witch-hunts, for an assortment of evils ranging from spinsterhood and warts to ergot poisoning. (Ergot is a fungus that infects rye, causing convulsions and hallucinations in anyone who eats it. There is now plenty of evidence to suggest that the symptoms of the "possessions" at Salem and elsewhere - in the UK in East Anglia especially - during the witch-hunt period were the result of ergot poisoning.)

Even now, in our secular age, we can't quite make up our minds about The Craft. Though the Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1951, we're still edgy about witching. Lest we forget, it was only 15 years ago that we had our own Salem, with the tabloids screaming blue murder over supposed acts of satanic abuse by witches and Devil worshippers. Even though a 1994 government enquiry into the whole affair found that ritual abuse "has never been substantiated by empirical evidence", the public remains willing to lump witchcraft in with Satanism, as though the two were some devilish double act. (For the record, witches do not believe in the existence of Satan, so it would be a little eccentric of them to worship him/her/it.)

Earlier this year, evidence of ritual activity was discovered on the hills overlooking the Meon Valley, near Southampton. Wax had been dripped on to the ground from candles and, buried in a circle, investigators uncovered 12 dead rats. Meon Valley police immediately contacted Graham King at the Museum Of Witchcraft for advice. Inspector Shaun Moore of Meon Valley police says: "We are concerned it might lead to something." The headline in the Southern Daily Echo (and it was a big one) read, "Occult Probe". Shock and horror! Wax drips and dead rats.

Unfortunately, discrimination against Wiccans and pagans is alive and well, tinged with ignorance and paranoia. Drama teacher Ralph Morse was recently suspended from his job at Shenfield high school in Essex after admitting to being youth officer for the Pagan Federation and a practising witch (he was later reinstated). The school's headteacher, John Fairhurst, issued a statement saying, "We completely and unequivocally reject their world of witchcraft and magic." Rands was asked to leave her post as a nanny after her journalist employer accused her of using witchcraft to "steal the children".

In the US, things are even worse. Despite a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and religion, Harry Potter (our own dear HP!) is banned in schools in Kansas and Colorado for promoting witchcraft. (The rows of chain stores and discount outlets piled high with pointy Hallowe'en hats and broomsticks are okay, though. That's just business.)

Thankfully, witches appear not to have returned the religious bigotry. Having made the journey from Catholic to witch, Rands insists, "there's not much distance between them. They share the same sense of ritual." Graham King goes further: "I would have no trouble invoking Christ. I would visualise him and ask for his assistance. I don't think he's the son of God, but he's a pretty good witch."

The next decade could see Wicca completely throw off its associations with the occult ("occult" means hidden) and go mainstream. Which would no doubt please its founder, Gerald Gardner (1883-1964). Claiming to have been initiated in the "Old Ways" by a crone named Dorothy Clutterbuck in the New Forest in 1939, Gardner published Witchcraft Today soon after the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951 and effectively founded what has become Wicca, the witches' religion. In Witchcraft Today, Gardner laid out the eight sabbats, or Wiccan festivals, an amalgam of the old pagan solstices and equinoxes and the Celtic nature festivals of Imbolc (Candlemas), Beltane (May Day), Lammas (beginning of August) and Samhain (All Hallow's Eve).

A mildly eccentric ex-colonial civil servant whose influences ranged from Hinduism to folk magic to freemasonry, Gardner conceived of a celebratory religion whose focus was on the power of the natural world. Wiccan rituals generally begin with the drawing of a magic circle, offerings to the elements and the four directions, and continue with a series of rituals, incantations and chants whose power rests in the symbolic marriage of male and female. But does that amount to a religion? Vivianne Crowley says it does: "A religion is a set of ritual acts and practices invoking or calling up the divine. By that definition, Wicca is undoubtedly a religion."

One problem with Gardner's work, however, was that, in order to give Wicca the authority he felt it deserved, he couched its rituals and incantations in purple prose, stuffing in grandiose archaisms wherever he could fit them, so that, to the unconvinced, Wicca can seem rather absurd, all thees and thous and thereforeuntos. Even the Wiccan salutation - Blessed Be - is tinged with hey-nonny-no.

Another problem is that Gardner appears to have been a bit of a perv. It was he who introduced into Wiccan ritual scourging, the practice of using flails or whips lightly to scourge the skin as an aid to concentration. This idea was not new - some Hindu and Christian sects still practise it - but there was no evidence that it had ever been part of witchcraft traditions. And his ideas about working "skyclad" or naked also raised some eyebrows. "Yes, Gardner probably was a dirty old man and virtually illiterate and, no, there is no evidence for scourges elsewhere in any witchcraft literature," admits Graham King.

Neither of these things appears to have put Wiccans off. "Wicca is a surprisingly modern religion that draws on some ancient ideas," insists Crowley. "Wicca venerates nature, and is associated with vegetarianism and animal rights. Its feminism and emphasis on individual responsibility matches people's perception of the world."

But, I say, nudity, magic, the mysteries of nature, it's all a bit un-British, isn't it? On the contrary, says Ronald Hutton, professor of history at Bristol University. "Wicca is very British - English, actually. We are the first nation to have industrialised and to have been acutely cut off from the natural world. Wicca is a response to that, a countercultural religion allowing people to link back with the land."

A product of our history it may be, but does Wicca have a future? Since its inception 50 years ago, it has branched off and taken on local flavours. There are now radical feminist, gay and all-male Wiccan groups. "Wicca is going through radical changes at the moment because of its growth," says Crowley. "There's a much wider range of people now, and a lot of those getting involved are not seeking the occult but a modern spiritual practice. They're attracted to participatory ritual, and there's a hunger for a spiritual system that enhances lives by bringing about an inner change. And Wicca is celebratory."

Wiccans themselves are optimistic. As Crowley says, "Wicca has no paid leadership, no buildings, no capital: it's like a huge voluntary group, but it's survived 50 years." Professor Hutton, himself a druid, agrees: "The fact that Wicca is a mystery religion and includes nudity and initiation rites means it will always shock the mainstream, but I think it will persist. Wicca is having a strong influence on rave and rock culture, eco-pagans and road protesters. The correspondence between magic and virtual reality means it also appeals to infotech workers. It's a religion for self-employed and self-reliant people, artisans and individualists, and it is currently finding its role as the clergy or inner ring to these groups. The 90s saw a remarkable pulling together of all the pagan strands."

No one I spoke to had any ideas about the tarantula and the crow, by the way. The woman in my local pet shop wasn't missing a tarantula, though she pointed out that they are great escape artists. So I've decided the tarantula was a runaway pet. But as for the crow, well, I really don't know what to think about the crow

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