Pomona College Witch Studying Wicca Ways : Witchcraft Practitioner Also Teaches a Course in ‘Principles and Practice of Pagan Magick’

Summer is icumen in

Lhude sing cuccu

--The Cuckoo Song (Anonymous)

June was different.

There is nothing preternatural about July, nothing mystical. Hit the beach, catch the rays, have the coven over for a Coke. August promises more of the same.

But June was different, right up to the last days.

James Johnson is packing for vacation.

“Mostly A’s, I think,” the slender Pomona College freshman says. “Maybe a couple of Bs. Pretty good year.”

Into the suitcase go T-shirts, socks, pants. Books, papers, a deck of cards, a razor. The dormitory detritus of a college boy.

In a separate valise, Johnson stows the rest of his gear: candles, mojo bags, painted rocks, incense. Then the amulets, talismans, charms and potions.

Johnson gives the room a final once-over. “Oh yeah,” he says. Off a wall rack and into a side pocket of the suitcase goes the wand. Can’t leave the wand behind, not with the summer solstice coming up.

Johnson hefts his bags into the hallway, then returns for a stout, gnarled branch easily as tall as he is.

To most of us, it’s a stick. To Johnson, it’s a “staff.”

It figures.

James Johnson is a witch.

There are witches and then there are witches.

Johnson doesn’t look like one, Lord knows. Then again, it probably takes one to spot one.

To the tyro, a witch is a dark, pointy bag-lady sort of hant on a stripped-down mop. A cackling crone with a nose wart hunched over a vat of iguana entrails. But a long-haired kid in a messy dorm room?

He’s No Satanist

Johnson dismisses the popular concept with a wave of his hand--or his wand, as the case may be.

“A lot of people--maybe most--confuse witches with Satanists,” he said. “Witches get a lot of bad press. We don’t harm anyone. In our--um--rituals, we try to raise psychic energies to help people.”

You’ve heard of Glinda the Good? Meet James the Just.

“Witches, real ones, don’t believe in Satan, or practice black magic, or sacrifice furry little animals or any of that stuff,” Johnson continued. “At least not Wiccans.”

Johnson is a Wiccan, a splendidly amorphous if widespread band of pagans, no two of whom cling to precisely the same tenets. Save one: “Basically, there’s one pretty universal admonishment,” Johnson said. “Don’t hurt anyone, or yourself. It’s called the Wiccan Rede and it goes, ‘An it harm none, do what thou wilt.’ ” Which, he admits, leaves a lot of leeway.

Wicca means witchcraft--or, to its practitioners, simply “the Craft,” much as Yale-Harvard is “the Game” or Musial “the Man.” It derives, Johnson thinks, from the medieval Celtic word for “wise,” which later came to mean “to bend, or twist.”

“Pretty apt,” Johnson said, “because the Craft, if nothing else, is flexible.”

So is Johnson, about as undogmatic as a practicing witch can get.

Nevertheless, there are certain loose guidelines involved in casting a spell, exorcising a torment or whipping up a love potion, “and with practice, you can do it as well,” Johnson tells his classes.

Oh yes, he teaches Wicca too. . . .

To undergrads and alums alike, Pomona College is idyllic, expensive, inventive, stimulating, fun.

Contributing to the fun factor, and to the invention and stimulation as well, is a program called Quest, sponsored by Mortar Board, an honor society for seniors.

Taught by the students themselves, Quest courses are non-credit, non-textbook and about as freewheeling as a Wiccan on the fly. Last year’s lineup included “Cappuccino for the Underachiever,” juggling, sushi making and “Everything You Wanted to Know About Harmonicas but Were Afraid to Ask.”

Among this year’s courses: windsurfing, boomerang throwing, hammock making and “Principles and Practice of Pagan Magick.” “Group preparations,” read the brochure for Johnson’s classes, “will prepare participates for the ‘Circle.’ ” An optimistic assessment.

Just before sundown on a velvet June evening, Johnson leads a tiny troupe of semi-believers across campus and into a secluded garden. The fragrant hideaway seems designed by the jaunty Wiccan deities themselves for Johnson’s arcane ritual.

Around the rim of the lawn, geraniums, foxglove and columbine harbor a kaffeeklatsch of twittering sparrows. In one corner of the garden rises a twin-columned stone statue. Pomona College calls the statue “Sea Bird,” but it looks for all the otherworld like a looming dolmen right out of Stonehenge.

Instinctively, Johnson defuses the image, draping the columns with twined trailers of bougainvillea. At the base of the statue he places a box of strawberries and a chalice of wine. (“Call it grape juice,” he said. “I’m only 18.”)

The “participates” sit in a circle on the lawn in front of the statue. “I’m going to be tracing a perimeter,” Johnson explained. “We’re gonna be real mellow and everything’s gonna work out. Go with the flow.”

Quiet flows the don as Johnson wordlessly traces a circle around the group with his alleged staff. “This is the place between the world of materialism and the world of the spirit,” he intoned, stopping at each point of the compass to hail the ancient and honorable Spirits of Earth, Wind, Fire and Water.

As the circle meditates, a zephyr from the southeast lifts Johnson’s ethereal incantations and scatters the words like spores: “ . . . fertility . . . perpetuation . . . awakening of Mother Goddess . . . myriad and undying . . . the light within you. . . .”

Spilled on Ground

“Grape juice” is sipped, the rest spilled on the ground. There is some business with the fruit. (Satanists, they say, are into the hard stuff. Wiccans do strawberries.)

There is some chanting--some “Ra’s” and “Ma’s” and what seems to be a tribute to the cloven of hoof: “EE-I-EE-I-O!”

Everyone is smiling now, and Johnson returns to his ad hoc altar for a benediction of sorts: “Merry met, merry part and merry meet again.”

As if on cue, a plump little tiger cat, a kitten, really, wanders out from under a bush, sniffs at the dolmen, then rubs itself on Johnson’s shoe.

“I’m not surprised,” a delighted Johnson said after the ceremony. “Cats have a mysterious ambiance. In ancient Egypt, you know, they were treasured, even worshiped.”

“They were used as familiars,” volunteers Maureen Hickey, Johnson’s girlfriend and a member of the circle.”

‘I don’t know if the cat knew I was a witch,” Johnson said , modestly, “but I’m sure it felt the energy and was drawn to it and was healed by it--and added to the spell in a very, very intuitive manner.”

There was a spell, then? “Sure,” Johnson said. “In the pagan calendar, today was Beltane, a Scottish ritual heralding the awakening of the Mother Goddess to the Earth, a time of fertility.” (Dorothy Pearson, a Scot, later confirms the celebration. “We’d climb up this mountain,” she said, “and wash our faces in the dew. As far as I know, nobody got pregnant.”)

As for healing, Hickey, in a post-ritual rap session, confirmed the salubrious properties of the Circle: “It’s good for my ulcers.”

“In our last Circle,” student Doug Williamson said, “we strove for health and prosperity. My health improved immediately. I can’t swear it was due to the spell, but it did happen.

“Prosperity? Well, I’m still poor, but one out of two ain’t bad.

“Whatever, it gets you away from the mundane, the grind, the schoolwork. It’s nice to summon a little elegance to your life.”

Someone asked Johnson whether he can cast a spell for good grades. “Yeah,” the witch said, “but it might not be a bad idea to hit the books.”

Love potions? “Also possible,” the witch said, “but they’re vastly overrated.”

“I don’t know,” Hickey said. “I have drawn people to me with my own concentrated energies, making myself have a more magnetic personality.”

“Sounds a little like Norman Vincent Peale,” someone said.

“Who’s Norman Vincent Peale?” Hickey asked.

All things considered, how did Johnson become a witch?

“You just know you are,” he said, back in the dorm. “It’s intuitive. you ought to read Rule No. 8 of the ‘Principles of Wiccan Belief,’ adopted by the Council of American Witches.”

“Calling oneself a ‘witch’ does not make a witch,” reads No. 8, “but neither does heredity itself, nor the collecting of titles, degrees and initiations. A witch seeks to control the forces within him/her-self that (make it) possible to live wisely and well without harm to others and in harmony with Nature.”

Fair enough, but how does one groove into “the Craft” in the first place?

“I’ve always been kind of interested,” Johnson said. “You know, watching ‘Bewitched’ on TV and all. When I was about 13 I got a book on magick--not magic, which is prestidigitation. It wasn’t a very good book--kind of silly, really--but it got me started.

“Another book, ‘White Witchcraft,’ was helpful, but I wasn’t so much interested in the Craft as in casting spells.”

“When I was 14,” he confessed, “I was infatuated with this girl, a regular Aphrodite. So naturally I did a love spell. . . . It failed miserably.

“Later I came to appreciate the principle that ‘If this thing isn’t any good, don’t make it happen.’ God, they say, works in mysterious ways. So does karma.

“Anyway, it all scared the hell out of my father. He didn’t understand it. Like, in the Bible it says, ‘Do not suffer a witch to live.’ The Bible meant something else, of course.

“By then I’d gotten into the religious aspects of the Craft. Some friends and I formed a coven--a group of witches who get together to share knowledge and experiences, perform rituals, celebrate the pagan holidays. . . .”

On Johnson’s personal altar, first in his Pomona dorm room, now set up in his Los Angeles home, are any number of “psychic keys”: crystals, candles, pyramids, crossed sticks, dishes of rock salt. Around his neck bobs another psychic key, a pentagram, a five-pointed star with a single point up. (“That’s important,’ Johnson said. “That’s how you can tell a Wiccan. Satanists hang their pentagrams so two points are up, like a pair of horns. You get the inference. . . .”)

Psychic keys--they can be colors, smells, sounds as well--are just props, Johnson admitted, but “props that help you tune into the proper frequency of energy that you want.”

Talismans, amulets, charms and potions (“amulets attract; talismans send”) are objects, simple or elaborate, over which a spell is cast, to be used later when the need arises.

Has the need ever arisen for Johnson?

“Sure,” he said. “The most recent spell I cast, well, I wanted a single room, a private dorm room for next year. I suppose it’s not all that easy rooming with a witch who’s getting up at 3 a.m. and chanting and everything.

“As for me, I wasn’t crazy about living with some football player who’s going to come in late and spew all over my altar.

“So I just pulled the energy from the air and got my room.”

“If it sounds weird, so be it. I don’t mind at all. I look forward to a life of weirdness.”

“It was incredible,” Johnson said, just back from the three-day Pacific Circle, a witches’ camp-out in the Angeles National Forest in celebration of the summer solstice.

“You should have been there. The joy, the love, the consideration! I mean, here were these tables of handicrafts, thousands of dollars worth, and the proprietors wander off and leave the stuff and nobody dreams of stealing it.

“I was amazed at how many different approaches there were to the Craft. Many worshiped just the Goddess--I’m into duality myself: yin/yang, masculine/feminine, pantheism, polarities--but there wasn’t the same stink as there was last year, when the feminists were accused of being a little too Dianic.”

What does one do at a pagan conclave in the copse?

“Just about everything,” Johnson said, a little vaguely.

Do they leap about bonfires at midnight, that sort of thing?

“Hey, why not? It’s a great way to raise a ‘cone of power.’ And there’s a shamanistic workshop, a Bardic Circle, Native American rituals, a song contest. . . .”

Johnson hauled out a Wiccan hymnal, a sort of “Sing Along With Witch,” and hums a few bar sinisters.

There’s “Summer Is Icumen In,” of course, and “Lady Weave Your Circle Tight” and “Joy to the World.” (“Joy to the World “? “Well, we kind of change some of the words around. . . .”) There’s “Silver Lady, Golden Lord” and “The Popinjay’s Decree” and “Our Lady’s Brothel,” which, Johnson insists, is sung “very rarely.”

Be that as it may, the whole affair, the whole Craft for that matter, at least the way Johnson practices it, sounds convivial, if not downright exuberant.

Johnson fairly beams. “It is, it is! There’s not anything in religion to rule out fun, is there?

“Fun is an exquisitely important aspect of Wiccan ritual, and why not? I don’t think you should take anything too seriously. I’m a great believer in a kind of cosmic merriment.”

Next time you see one of those spectral harpies, then, looping the loop under a full moon and kvetching over toil and trouble and teen-agers, don’t confuse him/her with a Wiccan.

“No way,” the witch of Pomona concurs. “Remember, aside from the spells and the potions and all, what we do mostly is celebrate the passing of seasons, the joy of life, nature, the biosphere.

“You can call it occult if you want, even supernatural.

“I prefer to think that we witches just find the super in the natural.”