The Profile of a Witch:
No Green Skin, No Pointy Nose, No Warty Chin

Children may dress as witches for Halloween, donning black robes and pointy hats, but, explains a West Chester University sociologist, witches actually look just like us.

In an upcoming book, Teenage Witches: Magical Youth and the Search for Self, Helen Berger, a sociology professor at West Chester, and Douglas Ezzy of the University of Tasmania explore witchcraft through personal interviews with 90 practitioners in the United States, England and Australia.

The subjects of the book are young witches between 17 and 23 years old, who began practicing witchcraft as teens. Several were also raised as witches, including two in the United States, and, contrary to popular lore about witches and witchcraft, most of them talked about their desire to live an ethical life as a witch.

“One of the young witches who is an American college student claims she turned to witchcraft at the age of 14, intending to turn her boyfriend into a frog,” recounts Berger. “She didn’t do that, but she stayed a witch because of the spirituality.”

The book represents the first research to examine the phenomenon globally on three continents. The authors note that such globalization of the new religion is in part a product of the media most popular among young people: movies, books, television and most notably, the Internet.

Berger, who has been researching witches and Neo-Pagans since 1986, argues that witchcraft is a new religion, though others call it a cultural phenomenon, or a cult. Teen witches, the authors note, are not “being seduced into the religion” by cult leaders, as the public may believe. Rather, they are “exploring a spirituality that they feel speaks to them and their needs.”

She previously explored witchcraft in her books A Community of Witches (1999), Voices from the Pagan Census (2003) and as editor of Witchcraft and Magic in Contemporary North America (2005). According to Berger, Halloween, in fact, was a Celtic holiday absorbed into Wicca tradition and called “Samhain” by pagans, who consider it one of their major holidays.

“As the Neo-Pagans practice it, Samhain is a solemn celebration of death,” says Berger. “It is the time when the veils between the worlds of the dead and the living are at their thinnest. Pagans believe that spirits that are lost find their way to the next world.”

The celebration, she says, involves individuals sharing their losses with their community at a ritual. Each person may speak of the ones they’ve lost – any sentient being from a person, to a pet, to a plant – and how meaningful that being was to them. Most participants bring a photo of the lost one or something to commemorate and honor their spirit.

Although not a witch herself, Berger has participated as a guest at Wicca rituals, including Samhain rituals. And she does have a black cat, named Ezekiel, from the book of Ezekiel, on which, she notes, most Western magical tradition is based.