Fast growth in Paganism, Wicca (the joke that is no joke)

The modern made up “wicca” and “witch” thing is a combination of laughably stupid hokum and spectacularly dangerous demonic infiltration.   The Enemy is perfectly fine with being involved with “games” (e.g., ouji, cards, etc) and this risible wicca rubbish, so long as they get a connection, a chance to oppress or to possess.

I read at The Christian Post that…

Witches Outnumber Presbyterians in the US; Wicca, Paganism Growing ‘Astronomically’

The population of self-identified witches has risen dramatically in the United States in recent decades, as interest in astrology and witchcraft practices have become increasingly mainstreamed.

While data is sparse, Quartz noted, the practice of witchcraft has grown significantly in recent decades; those who identify as witches has risen concurrently with the rise of the “witch aesthetic.”

“While the U.S. government doesn’t regularly collect detailed religious data, because of concerns that it may violate the separation of church and state, several organizations have tried to fill the data gap,” Quartz reported.

“From 1990 to 2008, Trinity College in Connecticut ran three large, detailed religion surveys. Those have shown that Wicca grew tremendously over this period. From an estimated 8,000 Wiccans in 1990, they found there were about 340,000 practitioners in 2008. They also estimated there were around 340,000 Pagans in 2008.”

Pew Research Center studied the issue in 2014, discovering that 0.4 percent of Americans, approximately 1 to 1.5 million people, identify as Wicca or Pagan, meaning their communities continue to experience significant growth.

The rapid rise is not a surprise to some given philosophical and spiritual trends in culture.

“It makes sense that witchcraft and the occult would rise as society becomes increasingly postmodern. The rejection of Christianity has left a void that people, as inherently spiritual beings, will seek to fill,” said author Julie Roys, formerly of Moody Radio, in comments emailed to The Christian Post Tuesday.

“Plus, Wicca has effectively repackaged witchcraft for millennial consumption. No longer is witchcraft and paganism satanic and demonic,” [Oh yah?] she said, “it’s a ‘pre-Christian tradition’ that promotes ‘free thought’ and ‘understanding of earth and nature.'”

Yet such repackaging is deceptive, Roys added, “but one that a generation with little or no biblical understanding is prone to accept.

[…]

Blame?

Bishops in general.  Next, priests.  They’re not doing, and have not been doing, their jobs.

How badly have they performed over the last decades?

Young people are turning to this wicca bull****, that’s how bad.

The practices of wicca, etc., are openings and invitations to demons.  Demons are rigidly legalistic.  If they take something as an invitation, they attach and claim a right to be in a place or oppressing a person.   Their claims have to be broken.  Use of sacraments and sacramentals help greatly in this.  Priests are able to break these claims.   In stubborn cases, priests can bring in the big armament as well.

This wicca garbage is a joke that is no joke.

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

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31 Comments

  1. GypsyMom says:

    Oh, yes, these attachments are very difficult to break. If they aren’t broken first, they get passed down to succeeding generations, as well. They pass on a tendency to certain sins within the family line, and these sins grow and spread like the proverbial ripples from a stone thrown in a pond, spreading the attachments further and further. And even when work is done to break the attachments, the demons continue on with their “legalistic” claims and try over and over to get their “territory” back. These wiccan fools have no idea what they are doing to themselves, others, and especially to any children they may have.

  2. UncleBlobb says:

    My brief experience with people interested in this kind of activity is that they see themselves “on the margins” of mainstream culture of any kind, and they seek to find fellowship and meaning in this stuff. I’ve known a man who was very ill-treated by nominal Catholics as a child in “Catholic” gradeschool, and who never got over it, and was a practioner of this until his tragic death. I think part of the blame may also be on un-Christian behavior and beliefs by nominally Christian layman as well as clergy. The wages of sin is death.

  3. Cafea Fruor says:

    Actually, along the lines of UncleBlobb’s comment, I think I would blame the breakdown of family life before I’d blame bishops and clergy. I think people turn to this stuff because they saw their nominally-Christian family entirely fail them, and then they make the incorrect assumption that it’s the faith that’s bad, not just the family that isn’t actually living the faith.

  4. Anneliese says:

    You can’t blame it all on the clergy. You can blame the parents as well. I had a terrible religious upbringing partly out of laziness and loss of faith from one parent and confusion about the faith from another.

    They’re also the issue of curiosity and influence of secular media. Netflix has the Sabrina show, which is really disturbing. The promotion they sent out was an email invitation inviting viewers to watch a black baptism. One a my friends, a transitional deacon with the Dominicans, started watching it with some of the brothers. I advised him that it wasn’t a good idea. He said he needed the “research.” I asked my guardian angel to talk to his guardian angel. He then started having nightmares and he stopped watching the show. I think that was the fastest response from my guardian angel I ever received.

    Another thing, at least I believe, is that it really stems from a lack of faith and trust and patience. I can understand the draw of it, having been tempted myself with wanting to know what is going to happen in life. I learned the hard way by engaging in the occult, despite the short time I did engage. I hope people can get away from it because these people don’t know what they’re dealing with. They’re literally playing with fire.

  5. HvonBlumenthal says:

    The fact that Chesterton did not say it in so many words does not diminish the truth of the aphorism that a man who ceases to believe in God will believe in anything.

  6. Southern Catholic says:

    The education of the child starts at home, so I would put most of the blame on the parents, then the bishops and priests. I am in the same boat as Anneliese.

  7. Dad of Six says:

    Yes, to quote a certain Lone Star State parson: “It’s seems fun until you wake up one morning with a demon gnawing on your arm.”

  8. majuscule says:

    A woman I know from my school days whom I have recently reconnected with and interact with on Facebook has admitted to being a “white witch” while also being a “Catholic”. White witches supposedly do good things. (Yeah. Right.) She’s also a Gaia worshipper (but I take it that’s already part of being a white witch).

    From what I gather she is somewhat estranged from her children and grandchildren. I do not know if they have any religious affiliation.

    In my social media dealings with her I try to gently correct her crazy ideas or ignore them completely. It’s good exercise to try to be kind and truthful in a non-threatening way. I’m going to try Anneliese‘s method and ask my guardian angle to have a talk with her guardian angel.

  9. Anneliese says: You can’t blame it all on the clergy. You can blame the parents as well.

    Bad clergy and bad laity react upon each other, disedify each other, and multiply each other’s bad effects. Bad clergy promote unholiness among the laity, and, since the clergy come from within the ranks of the laity, bad laity produce more bad clergy.

  10. Kathleen10 says:

    There’s enough blame for everybody.
    Younger parents today are showing us what a weakened Catholicism can do, not much. I can testify to this in my own family, where there are now almost no Catholics who attend Mass regularly. In one family group, the children recently shared with me they play games that have painted figures they painted themselves, and they have “battles” and invoke powers, etc. I tried to warn them against that, but was poo-poohed, as I am by my son when I diss Harry Potter. There is paganism and the occult in so many things presented to children today, it’s very discouraging. Usually alongside it is sexual/gender confusion, games allow boys to pretend to be girls and vice versa. All of it very dangerous. But a weak Church and faith offers no protection against these dangers, and the culture promotes them. Given that parents are often so poorly educated in the faith or about the occult it leaves children completely vulnerable. Poor children today.

  11. Mario Bird says:

    Mainstreaming paganism — I saw in an Alaska Airlines magazine that Oregon is using Studio Ghibli-style anime to advertise their tourism. There was a creature in the ad holding what I have now come to understand is a “stang.” Perhaps the good Abp. Sample will take note. Ut Ecclesiam tuam sanctam regere et conservare digneris: Te rogamus audi nos.

  12. jflare29 says:

    Some years ago, a friend of mine who grew up at least tacitly Methodist had begun exploring Wicca. I wrote a letter of caution, then received her letter back; she wasn’t very happy with me. In the name of mutual understanding, I purchased a few books about Wiccan belief. When I finally determined what the Wiccan Rede actually said, I was shocked by…how little there is of it. I had expected a book-length something, but could find only about 20 lines of poetic verse. Most of active Wiccan thought seems to focus on one phrase: “Lest ye harm none, do as you will.” I recall being quite perplexed by how anyone could develop…whatever belief Wiccans claim to profess from that.
    I recall being even more surprised by the most workable answer:
    Most of them come from Protestant backgrounds, whereby they don’t honestly understand the Bible in any depth. That was especially surprising because of the Protestant ability to quote scripture. I’ve learned the hard way that, most Protestants might know the most “common” verses, yet most have never looked at the Bible in it’s entirety, nor sought to properly correlate the ideas conveyed by one passage with the ideas conveyed by another.
    What was almost AS surprising was how, upon reading Ashleen O’Gaea’s book on family Wicca, except for her dread of masculinity, her unwillingness to give her family the same legal names as for daily use, and her rejection of any moral norm, she sounded…mostly Catholic in her method of argument.
    I’m afraid Wicca does, indeed, pose a serious concern for faith in today’s world.

  13. AnthonyJ says:

    Wicca is definitely satanic. There is a new version of Sabrina the Teenage Witch on Netflix. The trailer for it doesn’t even try to hide the pervasive satanism in the show.

  14. AnthonyJ says:

    On a personal note, I had a friend who was tied up with the occult. It put a strain on our friendship and I stopped associating with her. She contacted 3 years after our estrangement and said she had changed. I thought she was sincere,but soon learned she got even deeper into occultism and became a “medium” herself with a channel on YouTube. My association with her ended again, permanently this time. She tried her medium nonsense on me without my permission while we were having coffee saying she saw my deceaed grandfather in the coffee shop with us.

  15. MrsMacD says:

    For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.

  16. JesusFreak84 says:

    Um, some of y’all who are seeing the devil in painted kids’ toys are doing as much for Wicca as anyone else. When someone weighs the proponents and opponents of the religion, paranoia and delusion and seeing the devil where he is not will only convince the person questioning that ALL opponents of Wicca must be this irrational. Look at what Westboro did for the common perception of opponents of the LGBT agenda: it did tremendous damage to the credibility of the entire anti-LGBT side. Why create a straw man when you can find the real thing?

    [This comment is rather strange.]

  17. bibi1003 says:

    Our beautiful church, built in 1850, was closed and our parish moved to a new, ugly concrete block auditorium of a church. The old church was sold to someone who made it into an event hall. I recently read on their website that they had some kind of Harry Potter kids’ party there. One of the kids said it was cool because the stained glass windows really made it look like Hogwarts dining hall. The child apparently didn’t recognize Jesus and the Blessed Mother who are depicted in those windows. It makes me sick.

  18. Jacob says:

    Yet such repackaging is deceptive, Roys added, “but one that a generation with little or no biblical understanding is prone to accept.”

    I watch a lot of Jeopardy! Biblical literacy has really decreased over time. Occasionally there are some folks who know their Bibles when the biblical themed categories come around, but more and more, folks are not even getting the basics.

  19. PostCatholic says:

    Sharing the view from over the fence: I find Wicca ridiculous. I’ve had people explain their “ancient Celtic rituals” but just try asking them who Turenn, Morrígan and Brigid were and you get blank stares. I don’t think there are gods and demons in the world except as ordinary mortal homo sapiens, but because that doesn’t mean all theistic beliefs are remotely equal. It’s thing to believe in a faith with the provenance that “comes to us from the Apostles,” that has been elaborated by the best thinkers of centuries; it’s quite another to co-opt a dead and largely undocumented religion in order to legitimize silly bonfire pastoral dances at moonlight in the state park. One I can disbelieve yet respect as a serious and important religious and philosophical system, the other is just a nonsense.

    Because Unitarian Universalists allow a “free and responsible search for truth and meaning,” we’ve had some of the more inoffensive (but they all offend logic) phenotypes of paganism establish “covens” at our churches. I’m among the UUs who think that’s slightly less “responsible” than Scientology, but those in my cohort seem to make little headway.

    Here endeth my humanist lament.

  20. adriennep says:

    Remember, the Devil hates Latin for a reason. The Catholic Church has it (history, tradition, good drama) and they don’t.

  21. Bellarmino Vianney says:

    Unfortunately there are very clearly several “wiccans”/witches that attend Catholic Churches on a regular basis. This makes sense – they want to destroy/harm the Church, so that is where they can be found.

    Many of them stick out like a sore thumb, and more than a few of them appear to wear “veils” and other head coverings; they serve during the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and they are often “extraordinary ministers” of the Most Holy Eucharist.

    I am not mocking veils. It is just clear that, in my area at least, numerous wiccan-types/witches wear veils and other head coverings. My opinion is that more than a few of these are actually dudes, and they wear and other head coverings to hide their true gender. (There is also a connection between “transgenderism” and Satanism – duplicity, duplicity, duplicity. Anywhere there is any type of duplicity, there you will find Satan.)

    [Let us not forget the “stang”.]

  22. HvonBlumenthal says:

    The mentality of dabbling in ouija boards is not dissimilar to that of most freemasons : “Oh it’s just a bit of fun….!”

  23. Nigelteapot says:

    JesusFreak84,

    The two posts I have seen of yours on this site has both been attacks on Catholics in the defense of the occult, specifically “wicca” which is as “ancient” as 1950 and sends lonely women to hell via the lust for “power” that never comes. It calls upon the same demons as any other devilry and damns people just as quickly (maybe even moreso), so let’s not downplay what has sent millions into eternal suffering.

    On the first message I saw, you were defending the honor of your devil worshipping “friends.”

    This time it seems personal.

    Chesterton once said that one should never be proud that they are fine with things that frighten their grandmother, because it most likely is that their grandmother is still alive and they are already dead. As Chesterton also said, only a living thing can swim against the stream, even dead things can go along with it.

    Go to Confession and seek out a Bishop of you are partaking in this evil.

  24. Suburbanbanshee says:

    Okay, there’s a lot here to talk about:

    1. The “Oregon, Only Slightly Exaggerated” video doesn’t have any stang carriers, at least in the only vid I was able to find. It seems to be promoting Oregon animation studios as well as Oregon tourism. The only pagan feature was a depiction of a Dragon Boat Race, which is not particularly occult (it’s either about demanding rain, controlling floodwaters, or demanding justice, but mostly it’s about racing and gambling on it). There is a guy carrying two hiking poles.

    2. Yes, the Netflix Sabrina show is a moral disaster, as you’d expect from the producers of Riverdale. Weep for Archie Comics, again.

    3. Careful discrimination between what is pagan or occult, and what is just imaginative play and fantasy, is indeed one of the things Catholicism has fought for. We worship Truth Himself, not Hysteria; and Truth Himself enjoyed telling stories, and was known for it among rabbis.

    4. Today’s Wiccans and neo-pagans are even less concerned with having any clear concept of worship, or indeed of the occult, than their predecessors. These are kids who literally do not know what they are doing. I would say that they do not care, but it’s pretty obvious that they don’t know enough to know that they care, and they obviously hunger for what is eternal and wise. It’s just hard to know where to start, because they are so ignorant of almost everything. It’s as if they have been locked in a closet or Plato’s Cave, and have come out as adults with no concept of anything real.

  25. PostCatholic says:

    Why create a straw man when you can find the real thing?

    When it comes to demons and devils and ghosts and zombis and vampires and Sith lords and other bugaboos that “made you do it,” they’re all straw man arguments. If one needs a personification of evil, one need look no further than the evil that lurks in the minds of persons.

    [While people are capable of great evil, it is SPECTACULARLY naive and, in some cases, dangerously stupid not to consider seriously the activity of the Enemy.]

  26. Semper Gumby says:

    “Pew Research Center studied the issue in 2014, discovering that 0.4 percent of Americans, approximately 1 to 1.5 million people, identify as Wicca or Pagan…”

    That number is almost certainly an underestimate. Not all Wiccans or Pagans prefer to be identified as such. It is unlikely that the vague word “Pagan” included Christo-pagans (pagans who affiliate with a church), techno-pagans, shamans, urban shamans, Reconstructionists (Norse, Greek, Egyptian etc.), Hermeticists, Satanists, etc., or practioners of New Age, Santeria, Santa Muerte, Eastern mysticism, etc.

    There are also people who do not adhere to Judaism or Christianity, do not identify with Wicca or paganism, but have been secularized by pop culture to the point that they may be functional pagans.

    Wicca itself was developed in Britain c.1949 by Gerald Gardner (1884-1964), who was interested in folklore and various occult practices and groups. Gardner also met with Satanist Aleister Crowley (Crowley created the Black or Gnostic Mass as a perversion of the Catholic Mass), and Wicca is influenced by Crowley’s writings and practices.

    For example, Crowley’s guiding principle of “Thelema”: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”, and the Wiccan “Rede”: “And it harm no one, do what you will.”

    Gardner appears to have derived his rituals, “covens,” “horned god,” and eight annual holidays or “sabbats” from Margaret Murray’s 1921 book “The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.” Murray’s book has since been discredited by scholars.

    Since the 1960s Wicca has transformed mainly into a Goddess cult with the Horned God as an equal or consort. Notable Wiccan leaders/speakers and their books include: The Spiral Dance by “Starhawk,” Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler (of National Public Radio), various books by Zsuzsanna Budapest, and Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner.

    Some Wiccans admit that Wicca dates only to the 20th century, others insist it is pre-Christian (possibly in an effort to be seen as equals with the Reconstructionists who are reviving ancient rituals of, for example, the Celts and Greeks). Some Wiccans today believe discredited 19th century scholars who wrote that the Catholic Church executed 9-20 million females as witches.

    Wicca can also be a gateway to more diabolical practices such as Goetia (elaborate rituals for invoking demons). A Wiccan browsing through the occult or magic categories at Amazon will find detailed books on ancient Egyptian and Greek magic by, for example, Hans Betz or Stephen Skinner. It’s up to the individual Wiccan what to include in their personal “Book of Shadows.”

    Two articles. The first is a slick piece of pro-Wicca propaganda in The Guardian from 2015. This article is an example of how Wicca is glamorized by pop culture:

    “Season of the witch: why young women are flocking to the ancient craft”

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/24/witch-symbol-feminist-power-azealia-banks

    A helpful 1999 article from Catholic Faith & Family magazine now found on the CatholicCulture website:

    “Dispelling the Charms of Wicca”

    https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=1289

  27. Lurker 59 says:

    People gravitate towards a good narrative. The narrative of one’s family, one’s culture, one’s religion, binds people into social structures and it becomes a part of their identity and helps them to plot the course of their lives. Western Society has largely lost the Western narrative through part abandonment and refusal to teach it, rejection and ridicule of a strawman of it, to supplanting it and replacing it with another monomyth. It is to the point that people cannot distinguish between real Christianity, real paganism, and the real occult.

    Most of what is modern “paganism”, of which Wiccanism is a subset, is a bunch of new age flimflam that has no historical depth and connectivity to anything other than being a fusing of a very surface understanding of far eastern philosophies and western tribal ritualism. That said, the danger lies in that the narrative structure that it presents is more captivating than what people are exposed to elsewhere.

    It needs to be said that just because something is pagan doesn’t mean that it is occult. The Lord of the Rings is not, by Tolkien’s own statements, a Christian Allegory, but it is equally wrong to consider it to be something that is occult or leads to the occult. Likewise, studying Homer, Plato, and Cicero are important and should not be rejected because they are pagan (as Tertullian did). Just because something is pagan doesn’t mean that it is of the occult and just because something uses the terms of Christianity, doesn’t mean that it isn’t the occult underneath.

    The dangerous aspect of all of “Wiccanism” is not that it believes in forest spirits (for Catholicism speaks of angels, powers, principalities, dominions, etc. that have localized dominion over places, objects, and persons) but that it encourages in the dabbling in ideas and actions that the practitioners do not understand. As an example, these people playing at being witches and warlocks think that they have the authority to summon, bind, and then command spirits. That is the aspect that leads into danger.

  28. HINT TO ALL:

    If you decide to go over the edge and to tell people that they are possessed (in so many words) in this combox, I will probably delete your comments.

    Sapienti pauca.

  29. excalibur says:

    Wiccans/witches have been casting spells against President Trump. We need Catholic priests to counter this, by offering Masses for President Trump and his family, by going to the public sites this has sometimes been done at and exorcising that place, etc. The devil is real, and some of those casting spells may well be at least partially possessed.

    Why is the devil against President Trump? Think hard and fast about this, people. Your nation, and Christianity (particularly His Church) are in the devil’s bulls-eye. No matter what Trump’s personal peccadilloes may be, he appears to be a tool of the Lord, thus the evil work being done against him, and from many quarters.

    Our Lady of Fatima pray for us.

    JMJ

  30. Gab says:

    First time I heard of these people was when they were going to place a hex on President Trump to prevent him from being elected. The next time I heard about them , thanks to the media fiercely promoting their cause, was when they were going to prevent Judge Kavanaugh from being confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.

  31. aviva meriam says:

    I live in an area affectionately referred to as the buckle of the bible belt. :D

    For years, the Barnes and Nobles stores allocated more (and more prominent) sales space to New Age/Wiccan/Pagan books and materials than to books on actual Judaism, Christianity and Islam Combined. They do this because of the actual sales patterns experienced within their stores, not based on ideological biases.

    This is a growing phenomenon and we need to pay attention. Do NOT underestimate this trend.

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