An Interview with Wiccan Author

Phyllis Curott

by Sirona Knight

Phyllis begins the interview by saying, "To practice Wicca, you need to get out of the living room and go outside, even if you have to climb on the roof of your apartment building in Manhattan. You can't practice Wicca disconnected from divinity and the embodiment of divinity."

She continues, "I have a country house where I do my writing. It's on the North Fork of Long Island and it's an eco-system unto itself. It's farm country, and the old potato farms are being replanted with grape vines. As I sit here looking out the window, to the right is the creek and there are the swans, and out the other window, there are two crows. We are raised with this transcendent God thing that he's not present in the world, and that's what keeps us in our living rooms and in our heads instead of in our bodies and the body of experience. The earth is the embodiment of divinity and nature is our teacher. We all have the same teacher. It's one reason I'm such an advocate for people getting out of their heads and into their bodies, into the body of the divine, into nature."

Phyllis Currot's first book, Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman's Journey into the Wisdom of Witchcraft and the Magic of the Goddess, has done phenomenally well, propelling her into the public eye as a prominent witch. Basically the book tells her personal journey from being and Ivy League lawyer to becoming a witch in New York City. Reflecting, she says, "Wicca is all about feeling, and not a head trip. It's a journey of the heart."

What were some of your first experiences with Wicca?

"Like most people, I had all kinds of experiences as a child. I think that's because we are very open when we are young. There are people who know they are witches as children, but I wasn't one of them. I was clearly set on the path, but I don't think my parents intended it. One of my absolute favorite books as a child was the original Wizard of Oz, where Dorothy literally walks through the four directions on her journey to discover that she had the power within her all along. We would get to the end of the book, and I would always say, "Start over." I now have a cairn terrier, and he looks like a blond Toto from the Wizard of Oz."

"My mother used to read to me before bed every night, and besides Wizard of Oz, she also read me all of Bulfinch's Mythology, cover to cover. I was raised in a very intellectual household, not a religious one. Religion wasn't part of my vocabulary. It was perceived as superstitious, something that impeded people from fulfilling themselves, a way of controlling people as opposed to liberating them. I still think that is largely true."

What were your early experiences with nature?

"Even though I was raised in the suburbs and went to schools in the city, the country was always an important part of my upbringing. When I was young, I went to camp. My mother took us on weekend expeditions, out into beautiful and natural areas, to Maine, Vermont, the Berkshires, the Catskills, and the ocean. I always had a feeling of happiness and joy and presence, of not being alone when I was in the woods as a child. I think that is true for most children. We are just weaned away from it by a very repressive culture."

Sounds like this attraction to the country and nature set the stage for your attraction to Wicca. At what point in her life did you know you were a witch?

"It was a fascinating series of experiences for me. The path really opened up for me during my second year of law school when all sorts of remarkable simultaneous things started happening. I was very fortunate because those experiences had an objective part to them. You don't need to be psychic or have special powers to be a witch. My definition of a witch is someone who is paying attention, someone who is able to see the sacred in the world, and its patterns in play in their own lives."

"My journey into Wicca began when I was in my early twenties. I realized that I wasn't going nuts, but I knew there was more to reality than what meets the eye so I turned to physics. I was a hyper-rationalized. I had gotten a philosophy degree at Brown and my law degree at NYU. When I turned to physics I got the explanation that everything is energy and interconnected, and the mind has the capacity to interact with the universe on that quantum level in very profound and amazing ways. This gave me an explanation as to why I was having premonitions that manifested and dreams that came true, and why my sense became very acute, some which didn't last and some that did."

"The most profound thing that happened was a recurring dream that I keep having. I probably had it about five times. It was a very vivid dream. I would wake up from it, which is how I remembered it. It was a simple and enigmatic. It was a dream where I saw a woman who was somewhat larger than life with a crown on her head. She was seated, bare breasted, and holding a book in her hand. She was very serious, maternal, but not severe. As I would look at her, there was a light that would grow at her throat. It would get brighter and brighter, and the dream would bleach out, and I would wake up. Sometimes when I woke up, she would still be visible, and other times it would just be white. I had no idea what that was."

"I was simultaneously having a series of experiences of Dionysus manifesting and of pan piping. I had the good sense to follow, and through a series of synchronicities, I was led to this coven of witches. I was offered an opportunity to have my cards read by someone who was introduced to me as a witch. She described herself as a white witch. I had read tarot cards in high school, but never had anyone else read my cards for me."

"She asked me what my question was, and I responded, "Where does the path lie?" I really wanted to understand what was happening and I wanted to keep experiencing it. I wanted it to make sense. She just shot back and said, It lies within. And without hesitating I asked, "Yeah, but how do I get there?"

"I had always been a social activist, and my family was political activist and union organizers. My mother was an activist working with the NAACP in the early 1930's, so I was very outward oriented, toward social justice, not toward the inner path, so I didn't really know what she meant."

"When she was done reading my cards, she said she was starting a women's group and thought I might find the answers I was looking for there. She suggested I come, and I thanked her with no intentions of going. At the time, I was managing a rock'n'roll band and working as a lawyer. A couple of weeks passed and she called me, and told me I was given a very special opportunity. There were precious few covens in the 1970's, everything was secret, and even if you went into an occult shop it was impossible to get invited into a circle. And there were no books, nothing. I had no sense of how amazing it was because I had no sense of what it was."

"About the same time as these events were unfolding, I would go to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Arts. I was always drawn to the Egyptian collection, and I was walking through, trying to figure out a lot of personal decisions one day, and I really wasn't thinking about this circle, and I found myself in an enclosed sculpture garden that was new and I had never been in before. I was strolling through it, and suddenly I was confronted by the figure in my dream. It was a statue that was sculpted in Rome by an American sculptor and it was called the Libyan Sybil. It was she. That bleaching out in my dream happened and I almost passed out. A guard came over and sat me down. I felt nauseous and I couldn't even look at her. There was a six-pointed star at her throat and a crown on her head. She was holding a sheaf of paper. I was blown away, and I looked up the word Sybil. It said, "ancient priestess, witch." This circle I had been invited to was the last place I had wanted to go, but I went."

"When studying physics, one of the things I read was that a group of neuro-physicists had conducted experiments and speculated that when people in various mystical traditions enter altered states of consciousness, they can more easily interact with the quantum field of the universe in a seemingly magical way. I wasn't living in California; there weren't any Native Americans to study with, no Esalan, nothing. I hadn't taken drugs in the 1960's so I didn't really have a frame of reference for mystical experiences. I couldn't argue with what I had just experienced in the sculpture garden. This was a life-changing experience."

Describe your first ritual experience?

"There were about 75 women in this room at the back of the bookstore that you got to by going through the wall that opened. It was a secret door. The back room was a temple that was used by us. There were no green faces, warts, or pointy hats, just a lot of very cool women from their late teens to white-haired ladies. It was utterly amazing. My friend went with me, and there were some people there who were waiting for me to come. The coven's crone welcomed me."

"I was comfortable with the women, but I wasn't comfortable with the ritual. I had no idea what they were doing. They had an altar in the middle and were saying all kinds of things that made no sense to me. Then they walked around the four directions and said things that made no sense to me. I didn't have the faintest idea what they were doing. They talked about the Goddess, and at the time, I couldn't even imagine God, let alone the bigger stretch to Goddess, but I was intrigued. My experiences had been so profound that I wanted to understand them and I wanted to explore them, and I wanted to keep having them."

"At that very first ritual, I was told that witches had nothing to do with Satanists, that it was a distortion that had arisen in the witch craze, and an extension of the Inquisition. Since part of my family is Jewish I had a sensitivity for what they were saying. It rang true for me. I went out and did my research and it was indeed true. Wicca has absolutely nothing to do with Satanism or those wacky stereotypes. The accusations against witches flow from the accusations made against Jews. The stereotype of the big nose Jew and the big nose witch, the hooves, the horns, the worshipping Satan, the murdering Christian babies, the same distortion, same lies, same torture, but aimed at women, many of whom were not witches. It was the moment where women lost their entire standing. It was the female holocaust, the historical moment when women lost their place within the culture. Women couldn't own or inherit property. They were forbidden from receiving an education, and they couldn't leave their houses. That was the moment, and it's why we have the struggle today for equal rights, to control our own bodies, and participate in the culture."

"So I started to work with these women and stayed with it for three and a half years. There were basically two Gardenarian Priestesses who decided they wanted to do a women mysteries circle. They called it the Minoan Sisterhood. The two priestesses were Italian American, working class, and salt-of-the-earth, who both gave the most minimal explanations for everything. They just showed me how to do what they knew how to do. That is one of the reasons I am still an advocate for Wiccan practices as a methodology for encountering the divine and making magic."

"Other women began pressing me to do a circle. So I started a coven and have now been working in one for almost 20 years. I now work with men and women. If someone had asked me in high school what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would never have anticipated being a witch. But it makes perfect sense. It's a profound spiritual path. I call my tradition the Shamanic Wicca tradition. My work has its Gardenarian roots, but they are adapted and very deconstructed."

You seem to have a distrust of organized religion. How did this shape your beliefs?

"In Wicca, there is no prophet, no Guru, no hierarchy, so everyone that practices the religion of Wicca is creating it. It is a new religion. I do not believe that what we are doing is what was being done 600 years ago, or even 50 years ago. We don't have to have an unbroken, historical, hereditary line of tradition to be legitimate. In fact, the single most significant event in any culture throughout history has been the birth of a new religion and that is what Wicca is. That's part of its strength."

"If people truly learn to master these practices then the practices will transform them. If they play act, which you can do with witchcraft, and mouthing other people's words and not actually engaging the practices, then you are going to stay on the surface of the experience. That's one of the reasons I wrote my second book, "Witch Crafting: A Spiritual Guide to Making Magic" (Broadway Books). It's not a how-to book; it's a why-do book. It's both provocative and revolutionary."

Each person has a different role in life, depending on the path we choose. When describing her role in the Wicca Movement, Phyllis says, "I've always been a forward thinker so I've been working on deconstructing Wiccan dogma. I start out by saying if I don't piss somebody off, then I'm not doing my job right. I have very specific criticisms of how contemporary Wicca is being practiced. My first criticism is that lots of people who are coming into Wicca recently and basing their practices on the literature that has been published are approaching magic in a very mechanistic fashion. In keeping with our instant gratification culture they see spell casting as the most important aspect of Wicca. So then people see Wicca not as a religion but as a means for manipulating the universe. In order to secure the goodies, they want the magic spell and word. The whole idea of just give me the spell, give me the formula, tell me where to stand, what to say, and what to grind up and burn, that whole view comes from the modern rationalist view. It works off the idea that the universe is a machine and all you need is the right fuel or ingredients. The universe is not a machine, it's an organic entity. It is holy, sacred, and alive."

What are your perceptions of magic?

"The common definition is that magic is the art of changing consciousness at will, which I think is far too narrow. It's a useful beginning point in that we need to shift our consciousness to see the sacred. But magic is not just the changing of consciousness to project your will to manifest your desire, and it's not just formulas, spells, and potions. Magic isn't something you do to the world. Magic is something that the divinely living universe does to you. It is a partnership, a co-creative process, an artwork, a fulfillment of destiny, which is full of difficulty, challenge, struggle, and hardship. It's not about instant gratification, but it is about ecstasy."

"A witch is somebody who has learned to use Wiccan practices, and the practices enable you to take off the blindfold and see the sacred, in yourself, each other, and the world. Once you have made that connection, that's when the magic starts. Your life becomes magical and making magic, casting spells, creating rituals, becomes not a way of manipulating, but of creating, not a way of commanding and controlling, but of communing and co-creating. Magic has always been distinguished from religion and I think that's false and a fiction. When you and the universe are dancing together, when you are creating together, you make magic. You see the world in a totally different way. The energy of the herb, oil, or candle can't be unlocked until you understand that everything is sacred, that it's holy and divine. I practice Wicca by always expressing my appreciation to the divine. The sacred is present in the world and in all people, and that's where the magic comes from."

When presenting her personal philosophy, Phyllis says, "The other bugaboo I have with contemporary Wiccan practice is the Threefold Law. My specialty in philosophy was ethics and from the very beginning the Threefold Law drove me mad. It is not a basis for ethics, and certainly not a basis for Wiccan ethics. It is essentially a theory of punishment. It's patriarchal. It's saying I won't hurt you because if I hurt you something much worse will happen to me, so I will behave and be good. Every time I read an article on Wicca it seems that every witch in the universe is saying we don't do bad things because we believe that what we do is returned to us three times so we would be injured. I cringe. The press prints that and never questions it because it is in keeping with the Judeo-Christian model that if you behave badly you will be punished. The Threefold Law was just a manifestation in the 1960's from the whole Eastern Karma thing. If you are going to have a basis for ethics in shaping a new religion and taking the responsibility for shaping a new religion that has the potential for changing the world in the ways that it most needs it, we need to look very carefully at what the basis is for our own morality, for our choices, how we conduct ourselves. For me, the theory of punishment is not the basis for how I make my decisions for how I behave in the world. It comes from the old biblical model."

"Our morality as witches comes from the fact that we live in a world that is sacred. As a witch we are paying attention to the fact that the world we live in is sacred. It's holy and divine, so the only way to behave in a world that is charged with divinity is with reverence and respect and gratitude. Even when you are dealing with people who are dreadful and horrible there is an understanding that there is an underlying divine energy. That doesn't keep up from picking up a gun and killing a Nazi. Nature shows us that we have to defend ourselves. You don't find evil in nature, but you do find it in humanity. Out of that patriarchal model that God placed man here on earth to have dominion over all things. People engage in evil because they are disconnected to the divine."

Much what people into Wicca do is healing work, for themselves, others, and the Earth. The Goddess energy is very much a healing energy. What is your view?

"We know from the experiments that have been done and the studies that have been published by Duke University and other universities that are showing that people who have been prayed for and don't know that they have been prayed for by people they don't know have a significantly higher survival rate. When you practice Wicca you realize that everything is interconnected. I have two very good friends, both of whom are witches, one a member of my group, and both were diagnosed with terminal illnesses. I'm a big advocate of using everything at your disposal, using traditional medical protocol enhanced with herbs, acupuncture, diet, visualization, and magic. Both of these people were supposed to be dead within two years and it's ten years later. Periodically, the entire community has sent healing energy to them, and we regularly put one of the them when he's in town in the center of the circle, do visualizations and run energy through him. We mostly do laying on of hands and moving energy. We invoke Gods and Goddesses of healing, raise energy from the earth. We begin by connecting to the divine always, and then we direct the energy, in this case, toward healing. In one workshop, those that wanted to be healed formed a circle in the center and faced outward. Then a circle of healers formed around them, facing toward the people in the inner circle. Then we had a third circle of women on the outside who raised energy by chanting and drumming who sent the energy to the healers who in turn sent it to the women who needed it. It was terrific and there was a lot of healing power."

"One of the most profound experiences I have had with healing was my own healing. Most everyone who walks this path in a serious way has to confront the dynamic of becoming ill. I didn't think that when I was young. Wicca is an initiatory path, not a path where we fly to heaven, but a subterranean path. It has always been an earth religion where we go down and through and then we come back up. The Dionysian forces have always been very important for me. I became extremely ill and I was dying. I had picked up two very severe and obscure parasites. It took almost thirteen years to diagnose them and by the time they did, I was pre-cancerous and was dying. I felt like it. I had the metabolism of an eighty year old woman, and I couldn't stand. I had to lean on something, and my blood pressure was appalling. It was awful. We took tests for parasites and found I had gotten one in Costa Rica while I was producing a documentary and the second one I picked up on my honeymoon in Italy in the Bay of Naples in site of the ancient temple of the Cumayan Sybil, who was the Sybil devoted to Hecate. The site had been built by the Goddess worshipping Minoans so everything fit into place. I realized that I had been initiated by Hecate. I felt like I had been living in the Underworld. I had to make the journey back and was able to heal and come back as a result of the discovery of the spiritual dynamics of why and where I had gotten sick. I literally was healing and coming back to life and leaving the Underworld as I was writing my book which was my child. It was the same year as my mother died. I emerged and birthed the book. A lot of my friends who enter their forties feel panicky about getting older, but I feel younger than I did ten years ago, more powerful and alive. In the process of healing myself, of learning to heal myself and learning to understand the role of illness and the role of spiritual dynamics in illness and the necessity of understanding the meaning of the events in our lives in the context of the big story of great myth, I came back with something to share. I can emerge from being a priestess in a very private way to a public role who is more visible. It was part of my initiation. Your life is your magic."

Does your family accept your beliefs?

"I was very open with my family, and took my time explaining Wicca to them little by little. My mother was always a feminist so she appreciated the feminist point of view. I don't think they ever understood spiritual aspects although they were both two of the most spiritual people I have ever known. I was very lucky, and the rest of my family all know I'm a witch. I have always been ahead of the curve but I think they were all kind of stunned that I could do this in such a public and visible way. Most of my law business has gradually disappeared. I also had a real estate practice with lots of very traditional male long-term clients who sort of evaporated after my first book was published. I still have women clients. I lost a lot of aspects of my law practice that were very lucrative when I went public so it was a sacrifice. But in exchange for that sacrifice, I've been given the chance to do what I most love. I have discovered that I love to write, lecture, and travel all over the world."

"I was very nervous when I went public and scared to death at what was going to happen. I got some flack from my male colleagues with the standard jokes and put-downs. I had experienced a similar sort of patronizing behavior when I first went to law school. Five percent of lawyers were women when I started law school so I was treated like an idiot child. It was reminiscent of what I had experienced before, so I was better able to deal with it. I knew the problem was theirs not mine."

Wiccan writers and activists many times do what they must, driven their deep seeded desire to make the world a better place to live, particularly in terms of religious and spiritual freedom. This desire keeps them moving forward often in the face of obstacles, dangers, and pressures. How do you describe you role in the Wiccan Movement?

"If you are going to be public and fight this battle, you have to be smart. You have to understand that people perceive you through a distorted lens. If you are going to take on the responsibility as a Wiccan activist, you have to do it by understanding that part of your responsibility is to make a correction for the distortion in their lens. That requires you to be a shapeshifter. There is nothing about witchcraft that requires us to wear black robes. It's not a part of my religion. When you dress like that, you are playing into the stereotypes. If you are going to be an advocate for the Wiccan community in mainstream culture, you have to do in a way that is effective and to me that means you have to present the best aspect of who we are. So when I'm in public, I don't wear black or funny robes. I wear a business suit when I do an interview. I look like myself. When people listen to me, instead of seeing someone who frightens them because I look like a stereotypical witch, I look like they do so they are more able to listen and hear what I have to say. We deserve to practice our religion in peace. We have children and we have to protect them from persecution. We should be able to practice our religion and not be afraid of losing our jobs or custody of our children and that means that we have a lot of very hard work to do to normalize our reception. We have to correct the negative stereotype. It's our responsibility. We shouldn't have to do it, but we do."

Phyllis has done a lot to bring Wicca mainstream, generating new respect for it through the enormous media campaign she did on her first book. She explains, "I was never a person who sought the public eye. I have a unique position where I can interface between the Wiccan community and the mainstream, between the community and the media. I hired the top public relations person in the United States, the same person who does Deepak Chopra and Marianne Williamson. I spent a fortune and put it back into the effort of being highly visible. We mounted a campaign that had never been done before in television, radio, in the major magazines and newspapers, not just in this country but in major papers around the world like London, Sydney, and Amsterdam. With the rarest exception, it was absolutely positive. Even the National Enquirer ran a positive piece on Wicca. I like to think it actually made a difference because there has been a key change in the amount of coverage Wicca is getting and the quality of that coverage and respect. Had I attempted this ten years ago, it wouldn't have worked."

"Wicca works. If you work these practices, they render results. I'm a rationalist and it profoundly works and I think that is why so many people are drawn to it. We are hungry to be in the presence of divinity. We have been without for so long, it's become a hunger of our souls. There is a wound at the center of the Western world and there is a tremendous need for that divine connection. As we go mainstream, we are accepted and more and more people come to Wicca and find that it works. Because it works, they stay and more people come with them, for example, husbands, brothers, sisters, friends, parents, children, because it is a spirituality that really works. It's not abstract based on fate or dogmatic. It connects you to the divine and renders positive results."

"Because Wicca is such a powerful spirituality, it terrifies the powers that be. It's been heating up since the seizing of the White House in the past election. As a result, there is an acceleration of legal cases due to the brazenness of the Christian groups trying to assert their power. I do a lot of interface work and sometimes at very high levels. I've always been an activist but never one who sought attention. I'm much more the philosopher and practitioner. I've always thought about practicing. Something would happen, and I would be needed, and I would do it, and then I would go back to my cave."

"I truly believe that this spiritual movement has the things that the world most needs at this critical moment. We living in "Lord of the Flies." We are exploiting the earth for short term greed. That's what you get when God isn't present. The question is how do we change that. I believe we can change it by rediscovering the sacred. You can find the sacred in yourself, in your life, in nature, in the world, and in other people, and you start to live in a world that is literally charged with divinity. When you see and experience the world in that way, it changes everything about the way in which you live. You don't have to think twice about recycling or living in a way that is respectful of the earth. It creates the posture to live in a way that is healthy and balanced and that will save us from ourselves."

In closing, Phyllis admits candidly, "I get hate mail periodically. As a lawyer, I have always been public. I have a P.O. Box and usually I get pamphlets about witches being Satanists and I put them in the hate mailbox. I keep them because I was getting threatening phone calls. I did get a death threat during my book tour in Boulder, Colorado, and I had to change hotels. Every week I get two or three emails from people that are fired from their jobs because they are Wiccan. You have to be prepared to fight a battle, and you have to be prepared to pay the price. I made the choice, and paid the price. Because of my willingness to pay the price I won great prize, the freedom from fear and I get to do what I love most in life. The farther away you get from the machine, the easier you can find your authentic self and free yourself from the machine."