Fiona Horne - Witch: A Magickal Journey: A Guide to Modern Witchcraft

Some say that you have to be born a Witch a Witch cannot be made. I disagree. In our society, where the majority of alternative spirituality is hushed or treated with derision and scepticism, it can be hard to hear your inner calling.

I spent most of my teenage years as a practising Catholic, going to Mass every Sunday with my parents and attending a Catholic girls-only high school. At times I found comfort in the rituals that many people of all faiths reduce their religion to. It was pleasant to think that all I had to do was be good and I would go to heaven, and that the only spiritual responsibility I had in my life was to obey the Ten Commandments.

When I was thirteen I had a favourite nun, Sister Geraldine, who taught at my high school she was tough and cool and didnt take crap from the school heavies. She told me one lunchtime that shed never had a boyfriend in her life, that shes always loved God and Hed always loved her back, and she always felt happy and good about herself. I was in High School Hell at the time, no girlfriends, no boyfriend, constant fighting at home, and in her words I saw freedom from the depressing nightmare my life had become. So, I decided to become a nun.

I started to read the Bible and educational books about the Catholic faith but I found so many contradictions and disempowering female stereotypes, that instead of my usual attitude of blind acceptance of having faith I started to question everything spiritual Id been brought up to believe. The deeper I delved into the religion the stranger it seemed to me, being made mostly of legends and unexplained laws, yet demanding absolute faith in these stories and rigid adherence to the rules. I listened to the sermons preached from the pulpit and became more and more convinced that the Catholic faith was not for me.

I started to look for alternatives. The most obvious one to an angry, rebellious thirteen-year-old who didnt want to be Catholic any more was Satanism. So I went to the library and discovered the tacky fiction writer, Dennis Wheatley. All his books featured demons and evil witches, Satanic sabbats, sex and death. This all seemed quite thrilling at the time and I happily lit black candles in my bedroom, said the Lords Prayer backwards and read the Malleus Maleficarum under my sheets at night by the light of a torch. However, rather than becoming seduced by black magic, I became depressed with its banal, cruel and perverse obsessions and my interest waned. About the same time my attractiveness to boys increased and not long after discovering Satanism I discovered boys, and they were to occupy my every waking thought for the next few years of high school.

Later in my teens, having established my independence by leaving home and getting a job, I started thinking about my spirituality again. It was now the 1980s and the New Age movement was exploding. Lots of books on alternative spirituality started to appear and I got swept up by the positive thinking brigade. I bought books on affirmations and personal healing by Louise Hay and books on manifesting pleasing things in my life like Shakti Gawains Creative Visualisation. If anything bad happened in my life I would focus on the positive and attempt to think only happy and constructive thoughts. Consequently I felt frustrated and let down when I wasnt always able to avoid unpleasant experiences and it became quite a struggle to stay positive all the time. My wholesome interest in the New Age mutated into scepticism.

Some of the New Age books I read over my late teens mentioned the word paganism and I strongly identified with its concept of living close to the land, being environmentally responsible and finding divinity in Nature. So I became a vegan, avoiding all animal products in my life, including leather and honey, and recycling everything that I could. As I read more books I started feeling drawn to those that had that mysterious and exotic word witchcraft in them. At first I thought I was going to be inundated with Satanic scare stories again, but instead I was excited to find a documented nature-worshipping religion that placed great emphasis on the sacredness of the individual and the land.

For a while I browsed through these books finding all the terminology and rigmarole a bit off-putting but then one day I saw Ly Warren-Clarkes The Way of the Goddess (now published as Witchcraft in Theory and Practice) and my life changed. Here was a book about Witchcraft, or more specifically, Wicca, that was both easy and thrilling to read, and I realized that all along I had been a Witch, even since those early nave days of Satanism. Here was a religion that made sense: it was dynamic and logical, loving and responsible, sensuous and holy.

I felt very attracted to the fact that Wicca acknowledges many different Goddesses and Gods, but most importantly, recognizes that they can exist within the individual, not in the sky out of our reach. In fact, the Craft doesnt provide answers as to what the Goddesses and Gods actually are, but emphasizes that whichever way the individual relates to them is the right way for her/him. I have always felt that the Gods and Goddesses do not exist in their own right but are projections of our consciousness.

Over the ages humans have created deities to teach us about ourselves. In Witchcraft ritual I treat the Goddesses and Gods as if they are real and I do feel I commune with some kind of presence, but I consider that Im tapping into a deeper level of personal consciousness. There is, however, something called the egregor in which most Wiccans believe. This term involves the concept that Goddesses and Gods and other metaphysical entities actually gain astral substance as more and more people think about and relate to them, and through this they come into a kind of sentient existence.

Anyway, back to the story! I was twenty-one when I bought Lys book and within a year my bookshelf was crammed with over fifty books on Wicca, and using The Way of the Goddess as a guide, on the Summer Solstice of my twenty-first year I declared my love of the many faces of the Goddess and God to the Universe and initiated myself as a first degree Witch. Over the next few years I practised as a solitary Witch, keeping it pretty quiet, often not really sure if what I was doing was right, but persevering anyway. I started studying naturopathy to learn how to heal, because from my reading I ascertained that my Witchy ancestors were primarily healers and I felt it appropriate that I respect the fact by becoming a healer myself. So I worked in a health food store by day, studied naturopathy at night and played guitar and sang in a punk band on the weekend.

When I was twenty-four I received a phone call from a guy who asked me if I wanted to sing in a band that played a techno-metal fusion style of music. It sounded cool to me and I said yes. This band eventually became Def FX, and it was ultimately through the lyrics that I wrote and some interviews that I did in various publications and television shows a few years into the life of the band, that I came out of the broom closet and let people know that I am a Witch.

Originally, I would never have wanted to be a spokesperson for the Craft, being wary of having my beliefs treated with the usual lack of respect most Witches who come out in the media receive. But, as more and more people kept asking questions I sensed a genuine and respectful interest so here I am writing a book about Witchcraft.

Hubble bubble too much trouble

The above heading is the title of a newspaper article in which the journalist said that after attending a seminar on Witchcraft that Witches aint what they used to be; that in the search for acceptance we have become whitewashed and theres nothing wicked or titillating about it anymore. The journalist said These days, your self-proclaimed Witch looks like a suburban mother of three, more used to Tupperware parties These white Witches are just about as scary as lady bowlers and about a tenth as interesting. She obviously got a dose of the lighter side but what else could she have expected in the first meeting? If you meet someone at a party, you dont usually begin telling them your darkest sexual fantasies or your worst fears you just show them your lighter side. Only when someones earned your trust do you let them into your darker side. Anyway, she certainly wasnt going to get an in-depth education in a complex subject in an afternoon.