 She
is a business-woman with a degree in theology and librarianship
who goes by another name out of business hours. She is called
Dark Wolf. Her fellow white witch is a publicist by profession
and her Pagan name is Night Shade.
From Wolf Lodge, which is their witches' temple in suburban
Kensington, Johannesburg, they practise their arcane arts.
On a dark and stormy afternoon, they painted a blue crescent on
my forehead and "unbound" me from my former lover:
Witchcraft still holds an ugly image of mad women flying around
on broomsticks who put curses on people. Dark Wolf and Night
Shade are calm, normal women whose inability to find what they
were looking for in mainstream religions led to their spiritual
paths as Pagan witches.
They mostly keep their beliefs and private way of life to
themselves because of the stigma of evil attached to witchcraft.
As white witches, they explained, their strongest belief is that
whatever anyone does come back to them three-fold and that
nature is the manifestation of divinity.
"Witches are good; they get bad press and are often
believed to be associated with Satanism," says Dark Wolf,
national president of the Pagan Federation of South Africa.
Psychic tools
"We don't even believe in
Satan. We believe in the love of nature and animals." Their
spells and rituals cover healing, divination, exorcism, and
finding out why things happen and why people do things.
They say they could banish and unbind people, but they do so
with consent, using their own psychic tools - tarot cards,
crystals, pendulums and various others.
Dark Wolf explained that the ritual to unbind me was for me to
let go of my emotional ties or ill will. Their temple, a room in
the house where witchcraft is performed, has an altar and
symbolic gear.
Dark Wolf and Night Shade began the ritual by invoking the
goddesses of earth, fire, water and air to join us, before
making their protective circle to ward off any bad energies.
They cut a photograph of me and my former love, separating the
two of us and putting his half in a box and mine on an amethyst
crystal. I was told to write all the negative things I could
recall from our relationship on a mirror with my favourite
lipstick.
The part I thought would be the most difficult to take seriously
was when we ran around the circle, chanting: "Queen of
darkness, queen of light, the past is gone and the future is
bright." It was strangely cathartic. Then I smashed the
mirror into the cauldron and bade him farewell, before burning
his photograph and a sentimental letter he had sent me.
Then, my photograph was stuck to a candle , and wolf hair, hair
from the two witches and my own was bound to it. This I have to
discard on a new moon weekend. It represents the old me that was
a part of this couple.
These two attractive, long-haired women then offered me coffee
and we chatted about light-hearted things.
Dark Wolf comes from a Christian background, which she rejected
in search of something that fitted her belief systems. Night
shade, however, took to exploring religions to find her path by
first trying tarot cards through as boyfriend, and then by
reading copious books on witchcraft.
while Wicca - a popular
modernized version of witchcraft - is very popular, these
witches do not subscribe to it. They are witches who follow the
ancient forms of witchcraft. They explain that in the days of
old, witches were midwives and homeopaths, not evil women.
The Witchcraft Suppression Act
still exists in South Africa, with a maximum penalty of 20 years
in prison and lashes for those practicing witchcraft. However,
they believe the new constitution's protection of freedom of
religion overrides this law, and that they are free to practise
witchcraft.
Dark Wolf said that since
childhood, people called her a witch, "possibly because of
my features". The patriarchy of Christianity forced her
away from religion. "Female spirituality came to me by
default as I left the church and felt lost without
religion."
She worked in management in a
large corporation for seven years. Many of her colleagues were
convinced she was a witch and one day tried to test her in a
similar way to the Middle Ages, when witches were burnt at the
stake. "They threw a bucket of water at me, and it I had
jumped one way, I was a witch, and if the other, I wasn't. I
jumped over the bucket and later complained to the company
CEO."
Branded a witch, she started
reading about witchcraft. She started doing her own
incantations, and burning candles. It all came naturally to her.
Eventually she started the Pagan
Federation of South Africa so that people of similar Pagan
beliefs could communicate and gather.
Tolerance
Night Shade's father was a Free
Mason and her mother a theosophist. Despite her alterative
beliefs, her mother called her a witch when she was just 14
because she refused to go to church. She was introduced to tarot
cards, which enthralled her, and led her to reading about
witchcraft.
What attracted these two women to Paganism and witchcraft was
the faith in a creative power that was tolerant, sensible,
practical and based on nature. Their guiding rule is "Do
what you will, hurting none".
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