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America's most famous witch, Sybil Leek, lives comfortably today in Florida, "practically a millionaire," she says, from sales of her books. She takes pride in being a hereditary witch whose lineage, she says, goes all the way back to 1134. Redhaired, with deep-set blue-green eyes, Sybil at 48 still looks her part. Like many another witch, she prefers to call her craft by the Anglo-Saxon name of wicca, which is thought to have referred to a kind of early medieval medicine man. She admits that witchcraft is power and bemoans the fact that in America "power leads to corruption. People wish to use witchcraft to personal advantage. [In] pure witchcraft, the life force is all important. Satanism is death. Wicca is a religion designed to preserve life."
Aidan Kelly's San Francisco Bay area coven seems more designed to celebrate life. Kelly, 31, a former Roman Catholic who is a manuscript editor of physics textbooks, generally follows a variety of witchcraft called Gardnerian, after a retired British customs official, Gerald Gardner, who formulated it in England in the 1940s. Gardnerian witchcraft is what Occult Debunker Owen Rachleff calls "library witchcraft": it seems to have been largely concocted from books, perhaps combined with some rudimentary witchcraft practices of existing covens in the Hampshire hills. Kelly himself is one of the founders of a Gardnerian spin-off called the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn, and has rewritten many of Gardner's rituals and created new ones of his own.
The main ritual is conducted every month when the moon is full. If the ceremony is indoors, it is conducted "sky-clad"—in the nude. It begins with a dance, men and women rotating in a circle facing out. "Thout-tout-a-tout-tout," they sing, "throughout and about." The men put their weight only on the toes of their left feet, which gives them a hobbling gait. At a certain moment, the priestess breaks free and guides the others inward in a spiral. When she gets to the center, she kisses the man next to her and begins to unwind the spiral. Each woman then kisses each man, and the spiral opens up into a circle again.
The double-spiral dance, claims Kelly, is a 6,000-year-old symbol of reincarnation, which the witches ardently believe in. Costume, obviously, is minimal: a white waist cord for first-degree witches, a red cord for second degree, and a magic knife called an othame. So far, not even Kelly has felt prepared to go for the highest degree, the green garter. Among other things, it involves a milder version of what Gardner called the "Great Rite," an act of ritual sexual intercourse. "Nobody in our coven," says Kelly, "has felt ready to take it."
PROPHECY. Power, the occultists and their critics agree, is at the core of the occult quest for self-realization. Time and again, converts from traditional religions relate how they resented being told what to do by their priests or ministers, how the occult gives them freedom to do what they want, seek what they want. In Christianity the Gospel message is