Is Blair Witch Contributing to the Spread of Wicca?

by Sam Folk-Williams, from www.98six.com

There have always been groups of people--especially on college campuses--who find themselves marginalized for one reason or another. Maybe they're gay, maybe they're artists, maybe they're anarchists, or maybe they have a different religion than the mainstream. According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, college campuses are experiencing a population explosion of a less likely group of marginalized students: practicing witches.

"Wicca is not the modern practice of the ancient religion of one group of people," says Kaatryn MacMorgan of the Universal Eclectic Wicca (UEW) organization, in an article for the Student's Guide To Wicca website. "It combines portions of many different religious beliefs from many different European tribes with many of the rational ideas that have evolved in the past two hundred years." As MacMorgan further explains, "Wicca is a religion. Like all religions, Wicca is a lifestyle, a relationship with the divine [as well as] a set of mores."

Need more explanation? According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wiccans and pagans "revere everything in nature as having a divine energy and believe in a polytheistic structure of gods and goddesses. They embrace a variety of earth-based beliefs, including traditions of ancient Celtic, Norse, Egyptian, druid and shamanistic origin." Also according to the Chronicle, student witches are no longer sticking to the underground. At more than a hundred colleges and universities across the country, groups of Wiccans and Pagans have formed official student organizations that meet, hold events and have a presence on campus just like any other student group.

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Why are students turning in bigger and bigger numbers to the lure of witchcraft? It's anybody's guess--general boredom with typical middle class life, the ever present young person's desire to do something "different," cult movies, TV shows and the Internet have all played a part in spreading the word and getting people into the scene. And what could be sitting at the top of the cult-flick list that has helped bring on all this Pagan excitement? Last year's $141 million-grossing The Blair Witch Project is a likely candidate.

Artisan's follow-up to the original film, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 follows five college-age people who spend the night in the infamous Maryland woods where the original was purported to have gone down. What happens? They end up encountering some super scary witch-type horrors that provide about two hours of supposedly spine-tingling thrills.

Whether or not you rush out to see the sequel, you can probably count on one thing: although the name of the film, Book of Shadows, is lifted from a core teaching of traditional Wicca, it probably won't be an accurate representation of the Wicca religion. According to The Witch's Voice, an authoritative source on Wicca, the beliefs and practices at the core of Wicca are thinking freely, doing no harm, respecting the sanctity of all living things and the Earth itself, and using prayer as a means of expressing faith. Not exactly the stuff of horror films. Of course, there's not much doubt that regardless of how accurate the film might be, it's definitely contributing to the spread of Wicca among not-so-mainstream Gen-Y types.

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