{"id":11058,"date":"2019-12-06T16:34:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-06T23:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11058"},"modified":"2019-12-06T16:51:46","modified_gmt":"2019-12-06T23:51:46","slug":"witchcraft-cycles-and-the-official-witch-of-la","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11058","title":{"rendered":"Witchcraft Cycles and the Official Witch of LA"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

“Official Witch” Louise Huebner with Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, late 1960s.<\/p><\/div>\n

Jason Mankey’s Raise the Horns <\/em>blog (in the sidebar) carries his look back over the previous decade, “Paganism & Witchcraft in the 2010’s.<\/a>” I urge you to read it.<\/p>\n

I would like to add just a little bit of nuance to one passage:<\/p>\n

Until recently Modern Witchcraft was generally tied into some sort of spiritual system. Most of the self-identified Witches I knew twenty years ago talked at least a little about the sabbats or maybe \u201cthe Goddess.\u201d Today that\u2019s no longer really the case and \u201cWitchcraft\u201d seems to be associated more simply with just \u201cmagic.\u201d There are some who will argue that it\u2019s always been that way, but I disagree. Books on Witchcraft emphasized a variety of different things, a lot of today\u2019s Witchcraft simply focuses on magickal practice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Apparently I am one who disagrees, because it feels like we are swinging back to the 1960s\u20131970s, when there were books out on witchcraft that had nothing to do with Wicca; in fact, few people have ever heard of Wicca. But everyone has heard of witchcraft.<\/p>\n

To continue ….<\/p>\n

I interviewed Amanda Yates Garcia<\/a> recently and read her book, much of her story was familiar to me because we are of a similar age, however . . . With the exception of Michael Hughes I didn\u2019t know any of the people who blurbed her book (rare for me in the Witch-world), and I\u2019m pretty sure Yates Garcia and I have never been to the same event. That\u2019s not a knock on her (or I hope, me), just an example of the two parallel Witchcraft worlds that exist today. She\u2019s operating in a different sphere than I am on Patheos and at Llewellyn, and that\u2019s OK, but it seems more common today than it did 20 years ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here again,we have cycled around. Amanda Yates Garcia immediately reminded me of Louise Huebner (1930\u20132014), who got herself named Official Witch of Los Angeles County in 1968.<\/a> Here is her story how how it happened.<\/a><\/p>\n

She claimed to have learned witchcraft from her mother and grandmother. Someone has put her 1969 album Seduction through Witchcraft<\/em> up on YouTube, so you can experience it yourself. <\/a>Different media, same shtick, am I right?<\/p>\n

“A lot of today\u2019s Witchcraft simply focuses on magickal practice”? That is true and probably will continue to be true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Mankey’s Raise the Horns blog (in the sidebar) carries his look back over the previous decade, “Paganism & Witchcraft in the 2010’s.” I urge you to read it. I would like to add just a little bit of nuance to one passage: Until recently Modern Witchcraft was generally tied into some sort of spiritual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,75,95,6,29],"class_list":["post-11058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blogging","tag-california","tag-journalism","tag-wicca","tag-witchcraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-2Sm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11858,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11858","url_meta":{"origin":11058,"position":0},"title":"“Childish and Credulous Fantasy”: How the BBC Viewed Witchcraft in 1962","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 1, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Pop over to the BBC archive to watch presenter llan Whicker pontificate about witchcraft in a short television segment from Hallowee 1962. Among other non-information, Whicker trots out the bogus \"nine million witches executed\" figure from the Renaissance and Early Modern witch trials. He also interviews Cecil Williamson, Gerald Gardner's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Britain\"","block_context":{"text":"Britain","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=britain"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/williamson.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/williamson.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/williamson.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":2900,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2900","url_meta":{"origin":11058,"position":1},"title":"Quick Review: Spellbound: Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 16, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Karen Palmer, author of Spellbound: Inside West Africa's Witch Camps, is a veteran journalist, not a historian of witchcraft, so for me to read the book from the latter perspective is to do her a slight disservice. (As an inside, the subtitle might\u00a0 better read \"Inside Ghana's Witch Camps,\" but\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Africa\"","block_context":{"text":"Africa","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=africa"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11816,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=11816","url_meta":{"origin":11058,"position":2},"title":"Call for Papers: Pagans and Museums","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 16, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"NOTE UPDATED DEADLINES AT BOTTOM Museums and contemporary Paganism are inextricably linked. Gerald Gardner, founder of modern pagan witchcraft, first publicized Wicca in 1951 at Cecil Williamson\u2019s Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft at Castletown (later The Museum of Magic and Witchcraft) on the Isle of Man. Some of his\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"museums\"","block_context":{"text":"museums","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=museums"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/ray-buckland-34-17-at-museum.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/ray-buckland-34-17-at-museum.jpg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/ray-buckland-34-17-at-museum.jpg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":793,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=793","url_meta":{"origin":11058,"position":3},"title":"Helen Duncan’s Family Tries Again for a Pardon","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 17, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Mary Martin was 11 years old when her father taught her to box. She would come home from school scratched and bruised, her ears ringing with abuse from the playground. Mary Martin had the unhappy distinction of being the granddaughter of Britain's last convicted witch.Descendants of Helen Duncan, the \"last\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"England\"","block_context":{"text":"England","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=england"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8868,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8868","url_meta":{"origin":11058,"position":4},"title":"They Were Not Witches \u2014\u00a0They Are Our Martyrs","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"This is the memorial created in 1992 for the victims of the Salem trials in Salem, Mass. Each \"bench\" contains the name of an accused person: \"Margaret Scott. Hanged. September 22, 1692.\" Walk there, and you know that it has become a shrine. Then you realize that you are walking\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/red-coat-3.jpeg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/red-coat-3.jpeg?resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/red-coat-3.jpeg?resize=525%2C300 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":12300,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12300","url_meta":{"origin":11058,"position":5},"title":"Free Download on Historians of Witchcraft","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 25, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"To be clear, The War on Witchcraft treats historical writing about the late medieval and early modern witchtrials, seen as an outbreak of \"unreason.\" From the publisher : Historians of the early modern witch-hunt often begin histories of their field with the theories propounded by Margaret Murray and Montague Summers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"history\"","block_context":{"text":"history","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=history"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/9781108948746.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11058"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11072,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11058\/revisions\/11072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}