Witchcraft—and spirituality without religion—is the selfie of the soul. They are the beliefs of people who do not want to submit to anything larger than themselves, but do not want to be alone in the universe.

http://takimag.com/article/witchcraft-the-selfie-of-the-soul/#axzz5X90kimt1

by Theodore Dalrymple 

…According to the article, between a million and a million and a half Americans now “self-identify” (ghastly word!) as witches. Witchcraft or Wicca is now the fastest-growing religion—or is it a hobby, like crochet and philately?—in America and no doubt elsewhere in our crumbling civilization. It isn’t yet as common as tattooing, but one cannot help feeling that the two phenomena are related in some way…

But to return to the American witches, soon no doubt to be counted by the tens of millions if the rapidity of the spread of tattooing and other manifestations of mass bad taste are anything to go by. What was most significant was that the article gave no demographic breakdown whatsoever of the witches: For the author of the article (or perhaps the editor), a witch is a witch is a witch. Or at any rate, that is what he would have his readers believe, because he does not want to be accused of stoking prejudice. After all, the words witch and witchcraft, even today, have no very favorable connotations. No one says, “She’s a witch” meaning “She’s a very nice person with whom it would be a pleasure to have dinner.”…

It might be interesting to conduct a survey to establish how people imagine the demographic profile of the average or median American witch. Read the rest of this entry »