A Conversation With... Phyllis Curott

The Monthly Aspectarian: Phyllis, you have an interesting background, being an attorney and a Wiccan as well. I know that you're involved in defending Wiccans and fighting the anti-fortune telling laws.

Phyllis Curott: One of the things I've been very involved in since I began as an attorney is civil liberties issues. I've been interested in civil liberties and the First Amendment since high school when I was the editor of my high school newspaper. That's what started it all off. I began a network of attorneys called the Religious Liberties Lawyers Network a few years ago with another attorney. We try to provide legal assistance, generally research and networking resources, when cases come to our attention that involve First Amendment religious issues around the country. One of the things we've been seeing a great deal of are cases involving divination, astrology and tarot, where there are restrictions being placed to try to limit people's ability to practice various forms of divination.

TMA: How did this all start for you? Were you an attorney first?

PC: Simultaneously, actually. My first book, Book of Shadows, uses the story of how an Ivy League lawyer became a witch to explain the spiritual journey that's involved in Wicca, and my discovery of the Goddess, which was very profound. It's about my discovery of this very ancient and very modern religion which is now the fastest growing spirituality in the United States. At the time, over twenty years ago, it was very small, well-hidden in the back of the broom closet. It was the last thing in the world that I expected I'd ever get involved in. Certainly not as an attorney. But as destiny would have it -- and it was absolutely destiny operating -- and with the assistance of a Tarot reading -- actually by a Wiccan high priestess -- I ended up studying with a coven which is in New York. It's quite remarkable to me now to look around more than twenty years later and see that this is indeed the fastest growing spirituality in the United States. It's a very exciting phenomenon. What speaks volumes in any culture is the birth of a new religion; in this case, the rebirth of an ancient religion taking a very new form.

TMA: It's interesting to watch the neo-Pagan movement -- to use that umbrella term -- take shape.

PC: That term would be very appropriate because it is much more than just Wicca.

I started out as an attorney working in the area of civil liberties, and fairly quickly after being initiated, in 1985, I was approached by some witches in New York who were being denied the right to register with the City Clerk, which was required if they wanted to perform legally binding marriages. I took the case and with the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union, which I've always been involved with, this was an example of how you can fight city hall and win. I was successful in winning them the right to register and to perform in New York City.

One of the things you learn when you practice this kind of law is that virtually all of it is pro bono, so you can't make your living at it. That's the first thing you learn. If you're lucky, you'll get an award. The second thing you learn is that you'll have to be constantly fighting these battles. You don't fight them once and win. They keep coming up over and over again. People have to be willing and prepared to fight for them, and it can take a lot of courage to stand up and paint a target on yourself, you know, to say "Here I am." But if you've been singled out or harassed by a municipality or a school or an employer, you're already a target and so the only way to deal with it is to stand up and fight for your rights. And when you fight for your rights, it can be expensive. Litigating in the United States is very costly, but with the help of the ACLU those costs can be reduced. We usually win. If it's an appropriate case that is a clear violation of the First Amendment, we can win. People have to be prepared for resistance and then prepared to fight, knowing that in the long run they will win. When they do so, they're protecting the First Amendment. That's very important.

TMA: The First Amendment issues are very clear, but I've been aware of cases of child custody where the woman's interest in Wicca or being a Tarot reader or astrologer has been used against her.

PC: The issue of religion in most states is not supposed to be considered in the determination of the custody of a child. However, when the issue is raised that a religious practice may not be in the best interests of the child, then the issue can be raised. Unfortunately, many, many judges have nothing but very stereotypical ideas about Wicca or about Tarot or astrology. That's one difficulty we deal with. We have to educate the public and, specifically, when we're in a litigious situation, we have to educate the judge. That can be a real challenge.

TMA: Especially if he or she has a closed mind to begin with.

PC: Or a fundamentalist orientation. There's a battle going on right now with the director of the prison system in California where tremendous inroads were made by a colleague of mine, Pat McCullough in winning the right of inmates to practice Wicca or other forms of neo-Paganism, and to have ritual tools, including Tarot cards. A new director has just been appointed and all of a sudden, those rights are disappearing. That's a battle that we're going to have to fight soon.

TMA: Have you had any of the child custody fights yourself?

PC: No, I haven't, not in New York, although there was one that came three years ago involving a woman in Long Island. Her husband accused her of being a witch, tried to use that as the basis of trying to get custody of the children, and the judge refused to take any evidence on the matter. He actually chastised the attorney for bringing it up. The Religious Liberties Lawyers Network has provided legal research and background information when custody cases have come up.

TMA: It's unfortunate but understandable that the larger culture sees Wicca, witchcraft and Satanism as the same thing. You and I know that they're very different.

PC: They're totally different. There was absolutely no Satanism in the Old Religion of the Goddess at all. Or in any of neo-Paganism. That decision five hundred years ago -- when the church completed its very effective persecution of the Jewish community by accusing them of worshiping Satan and extended the success of the Inquisition to the remaining Shamanic religions of Europe and to the persecution of women -- that's where that distorted idea [came from], that witchcraft involved the worship of Satan. It is a complete fabrication. It's what I call The Big Lie. Unfortunately, the victor gets to rewrite history, to frame the social perspective, so most people for the last five hundred years have grown up with that perspective. But there's a real shift going on, and I think it's because there are people like myself and others who are writing books and doing a lot of media and taking legal cases who are out there saying, ...No, sorry, we absolutely refuse to allow you to stereotype us any longer. It's as offensive to us as it was to the Jewish community to have been characterized in a similar manner as little as fifty years ago. We're standing up and we're saying it's not acceptable.

I've been fighting this battle in the media now for many years ... I went really public in '88, then tremendously public with Book of Shadows. I did a massive campaign and will be doing another one when Witch Crafting comes out [in September] to remedy that stereotype in the media and in public perception. That's a big battle, and it's going to take a long time, but we've made so much more progress so much more quickly than I ever expected twenty years ago.

TMA: Satanism isn't even a religion. It doesn't have its own symbols. Any Satanists I've beeen aware of have been like children playing with matches.

PC: I have a dear friend who is a psychiatrist who specializes in this area of concern. Studies that he was required to learn to get his degree showed that most practitioners who call themselves Satanists are adolescent boys from broken homes where there's drug abuse, addiction, alcoholism, and frequently other abuse going on, and very often, a sort of fundamentalist religious context. It's a severe and inappropriate reaction to the world in which they're living. It has absolutely nothing to do with Wicca, nothing to do with the Tarot.

I was deeply offended by the show, Touched by an Angel, which a number of years ago depicted the use of Tarot cards as a tool of the devil. It was deeply offensive that their people could get away with that in this day and age.

TMA: There's so much reference in popular culture now to metaphysics that for the last few years I've had this idea of setting up a consulting shop in Hollywood. You know, "Get It Right Metaphysical Consulting." It makes me crazy every time they use a metaphysical reference and get it wrong.

PC: About 99% of what they depict is wrong. At least now they're attractive and they're not evil, but everything else is completely ridiculous. The Blair Witch Project was incredibly offensive to me because they played on the old stereotype of the evil witch that kills children. I was furious, in a rage. I went on a big campaign against that.

The others, Bewitched, and now Harry Potter, these are very benign and what's good is that they portray witches as good. There are stereotypical special effects, which makes it a little silly, and that's kind of offensive, but what's most important is that one step at a time, Hollywood is increasingly embracing the reality of witches as good. They've always had good witches "... Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, you know ... and Hollywood is doing more and more of that. I think that reflects more and more what's happening at the grass roots.

There's a lot of pop culture that's being generated by the explosion of this movement. Some is the result of mediocre scholarship, some is the result of the publication of books that repeat things over and over again. One of the things that I have seen happening is the development of dogma. It's an inevitable consequence of maturing, you know ... your arteries harden! And that's the reason I wrote Witch Crafting. I was lecturing all over the world and people wanted a book they could work with. The how-to books that were out there were phenomenally dogmatic. They were very two-dimensional and approached the universe if it were a machine and magick as if it were mechanical. They're not. The essence of Wicca is that the world in which we live is holy and sacred and divine. It's numinous and alive. When one engages in magick, it is the process of co-creation with the sacred and living universe. The universe is not a machine, and magick is not the secret formula for manipulating the machine. You don't stand here, say this, do this, pull the lever and out comes your instant gratification. Magick is a profound spiritual process that's rooted in the idea of co-creative partnership with deity, with indwelling deity, a deity that surrounds us. I wrote Witch Crafting to critique a lot of this dogma that I think is clogging contemporary neo-Pagan thinking and practices..

TMA: Such as the Threefold Law?

PC: I devoted an entire chapter to that in the new book, chapter seven, "Witchcraft Without Rules," and I think that other than my campaign in the media, it probably will be my single most important contribution to the movement. It's very simple.

The Threefold Law basically says that whatever you do will return to you three times over. Therefore, witches don't use their powers, magick, their abilities with spells, etc., to manipulate or harm anyone else. Because if they did so, they would be harmed three times over. That stuck in my gut for a long time because I studied ethics and philosophy. (That was my major at Brown University and then law school.) That's not ethics, that's expediency. Really what it is, is a remnant of Biblical patriarchial thinking. It's a rule based on punishment and fear. What it says is, if I do something wrong, I will be punished, and therefore I will behave. Expediency, self-interest, and this is the weak cousin of an ethical norm. It's bad morality and it's not the basis upon which we should conduct ourselves and our lives and our spiritual practices. There is a lengthier analysis in the book of what's wrong with it.

TMA: I want to know where my Three Times rewards are for the good things I've done.

PC: There you go, what is this Three Times thing anyway? That's the other thing, you know, the carrot on the end of the stick. As I began to think about it more and more, the simple question came up, "If that's not the basis of Wiccan and neo-Pagan ethics, what is?" When you really start to look at this, to take it apart, it's really transparent, it's obvious. If we live in a sacred world, we live in a sacred manner. It's just that simple. If you live in a world that is divine and holy, you treat it with reverence and with respect and care. And that is the basis upon which you conduct your relations with all aspects of the world in plants, air, water, other human beings. You're motivated by your experience of the indwelling sacred.

TMA: I think that more damaging to the neo-Pagan movement than the Threefold Law is Crowley's maxim, "And it harm none, do what thou wilt is the whole of the law."

PC: We are indicted in the rest of the religious community for that. They look at that and they think we're hedonists and amoral. If you understand what it means, that it's an extension of the concept of living in the sacred universe, then you can say if indeed we understand and experience the world as sacred, and we behave in a reverential and sacred manner because of that, then we are free to do what we think best as long as nothing is harmed. You have a tremendous freedom, but with it comes responsibility that you are not engaging in behavior that does harm to the sacred.

TMA: And then you figure "harm none" is an add-on. Then it's really open to misinterpretation.

PC: You qualify it. One of the reasons that I wrote Witch Crafting was that there was a lot of this stuff floating around, being mindlessly repeated, people not thinking about it. We're at a critical junction. This movement's been around now for at least fifty years in its modern form, and for the last twenty years has grown. There are about four million Wiccan practitioners right now in the United States. We have a responsibility. It's time for us to do a little self analysis, to look at ourselves and really look at what we believe and why we believe it and what we practice and why we practice it. And throw out what doesn't work and what's the remnants of patriarchal thinking. Really create a religion as an alternative that's based on the idea of living in a sacred world.

TMA: It's very interesting to watch the neo-Pagan movement evolve. On the one hand, it's an attempt to revive something old enough that ... nobody really knows what the Druids did, and yet you've got people claiming to be Druids.

PC: We don't know. We don't know what witches did, and we don't know what worshippers of the Goddess did. This is one of the best kept secrets of thousands of years. We have, however, the same teacher. One of the things that I find so ironic is that this is an earth religion. It says that the sacred is everywhere present in the world. That the world itself is a body, a deity. We don't know precisely what our ancestors were doing, but we do know that we share the same teacher, and that teacher is nature. That's our great spiritual teacher. Though lessons will be different for us because we're modern and have a different relationship to the natural world, I think that there will be a profound spiritual similarity to the essence of what our spiritual ancestors understood about the sacredness of the earth and what we can understand about its sacredness. Frankly, it's far more critical for us to come to that learning than it was for our ancestors, because we're the ones who stand at the brink of extinction.

TMA: It's very clear to me that if we're to save humanity's place on the planet, we're going to have to reestablish our relationship with Mother Earth.

PC: It is critical. It is the critical issue. There's no question. In the next twenty to thirty years that there will be so much that we will not be able to return to.

TMA: For the past two thousand years we've divorced ourselves from the Mother. That has to be rectified.

PC: I studied core shamanism simultaneously with my training as a witch, and so in my approach, the two have always been deeply intertwined. The reason I wrote Witch Crafting was to strip away a lot of the ceremonial stuff and focus on the shamanic aspects of contemporary Wicca. There are a lot of key practices within contemporary neo-Paganism that I think really do enable us to experience the sacred in ourselves and in the earth. Divination is one of those methods, whatever way you choose, astrology or Tarot, runes, whatever methods. These are mirrors for seeing into oneself, for seeing the sacred in oneself. They're also a symbol system for engaging in dialogue with divinity. That dialogue enables us to lead a sacred life, to live guided by deity, and that's a very profound way to live, a wonderful way to live.

Wiccan high priestess Phyllis Curott is an attorney and the author of Book of Shadows (Broadway Books, 1998). Curott was named one of the Ten Gutsiest Women of the Year in 1999 by Jane magazine. She has been profiled widely in the media, lectures frequently, and is widely respected for her work promoting civil rights and religious freedom. For more information, see the following websites: www.witchcrafting.com and www.bookofshadows.net.