So you want to be a teenage witch?
(Review)
Author/s: Anna Mulrine
Issue: March 1, 1999
How-to books may be just for fun-or not
Have a friend who's feeling sick? During a dark or full moon, take an unfertilized egg from a black hen. In a sacred space, clean, consecrate, and empower the egg, then rub the egg over your friend's body and chant: "Within, without; up and down; I banish the illness; all around." Finish by throwing the egg in a body of water, asking the water to whisk the illness away.
This New Age "spell" is among dozens of mystical exercises laid out, cookbook style, in Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation, a 250-page handbook that is flying off the shelves at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and other mainstream stores. Written for 10- to 17-year-olds by New Age author Silver Ravenwolf (a Wiccan pseudonym), it boasts everything a kid needs to become "a pentacle-wearing, spell-casting, completely authentic witch!" That includes instructions for such uniquely teen rituals as the Bad Bus Driver spell, the Un-Ground Me spell, and the Just-Say-No spell.
In its third reprinting, Teen Witch is well on its way to becoming the all-time bestseller at Llewellyn Publications, a small New Age publishing house. And Element, another small publisher, has introduced a line of kids' books that tackle such topics as extrasensory perception, reincarnation, and dream interpretation. The lines' popularity is part of an overall boom in all things New Age, spawned by such films as The Craft and Practical Magic and the popular TV program Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Author Ravenwolf is quick to assure parents that they needn't worry about young readers donning black robes and sacrificing the family pet. And she makes a special point of disavowing Satanism. Likewise, the Element series can be enjoyed as a harmless-enough introduction to Eastern mysticism and homespun folklore-from tarot reading to feng shui, a practice that combines Chinese astrology and interior design.
Still, with their hands-on, how-to styles, the books strike some child- development experts as vaguely creepy. And to devout followers of mainstream religions, they may seem downright sacrilegious. "The church generally frowns on the incorporation of holy water into spells for stuffed animals," says Bill Ryan of the U.S. Catholic Conference.
Others express concern with the books' authoritative tone. Element's bestseller, The Encyclopedia of Mind, Body, Spirit & Earth, presents as facts phenomena that, depending on your belief system, are clearly fiction. The passage on "astral flying" (defined as visiting the heavenly plane above earth) asserts: "Many adults become closed to experiences like [astral flying]. ... Children sometimes lose the ability to fly astrally when an adult doesn't believe them." That, says Annie Ayres, a children's librarian at the Chicago Public Library, suggests that the authors "aren't approaching this as objective presenters of information but rather as believers."
Sleepover stuff. Caitlin Burns thinks parents should lighten up. The 13-year-old at Old Trail School in Bath, Ohio, says she wouldn't take anything in Teen Witch seriously-including the Hot Wheels spell, which suggests that teens can conjure up their dream car by chanting over a Matchbox toy. The exercises in Element's ESP and Face Reading books, she says, "are the kind of stuff we'd do for fun at parties." Indeed, Linda Ferreira of the Scholastic Book Clubs, which offer two of the Element books, says kids have always searched for magical solutions to problems-with Ouija boards and Magic 8-Balls, for instance. Element books, she says, are simply "good sleepover activities."
What to do if your kids tote home some New Age reading material? "Read what your kids are reading," advises Sylvia Maxson, a professor of early childhood education at California State University-Long Beach. "Ask questions like, 'What do you think of all this?' and 'What confuses you about it?' Then explain your beliefs." The worst thing parents can do, experts agree, is to take the books away. Says Gery LeGagnoux, a clinical professor of psychology at the University of California-Los Angeles who paraphrases from Do-it-yourself Feng Shui: "It fits right into the image of the overbearing parents sapping them of their qi."
COPYRIGHT 1999 U.S. News and World Report, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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