Sexual Attitude Attracts Men to Witch Churches, Study Says

A provocative study claims many men belong to predominantly feminist, goddess-worshiping witches’ covens because they like shedding the image of a take-charge male and because they also enjoy “more spiritual” sex with women they meet in them.

“Witches believe that sex is natural, good--and in certain cases, holy,” said KellieRymes of Northridge, a USC student who will describe her research today at a meeting in San Diego of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

In interviews with nine male witches in the Los Angeles area, her subjects “were not coy about the attraction of this [sexual] aspect of Wicca,” Rymes said, “and they all raised the subject of sex themselves.”

Wicca is a common umbrella term for what witchcraft practitioners variously describe as a pagan, pantheistic or, simply, Earth religion. Goddess figures tend to be more prominent than male gods. Covens tend to be small, usually 13 people at most, though academic researchers say they sense a rising popularity of the movement.

Many covens are exclusively female and some are all-male. In covens that admit both men and women, one scholar estimated the ratio of women to men was 60-40.

Two other researchers giving academic papers on Wicca at the San Diego meeting, reached by telephone, agreed that sexuality is not a guilt-laden topic in Wicca but they questioned whether men in covens are typically there to pursue sex.

“If men come into a coven thinking this a great way to meet chicks, they’re going to be disappointed,” added Michael Shaw of West Hills, who said he was a high priest of a witches’ coven. Only “a small percentage of men follow the pagan path because they want to get laid,” Shaw said.

Rymes said this week that she is not suggesting that men set out to become witches because they are looking for sex, “but when they do have sex, now that they are witches, they feel that it is spiritual and less guilt-ridden.”

A second important reason given for staying involved, she said, was that the men did not feel pressured to be “dominant” in relations with women and that they could escape pressure to meet stereotypical expectations of manhood.

Rymes said she talked at length to nine heterosexual men from nine Wicca covens in the greater Los Angeles area. One had been in Wicca for 20 years; the others from two to six years.

“All have jobs that people would consider respectable, such as a grant administrator, a construction supervisor and someone in the jewelry-making business,” she said. They ranged in age from 27 to 45, some single, some married.

Practitioners say that Wicca differs from mainstream society’s common perception that witches cast evil spells, summon demons or sacrifice animals.

“People often mistake them for Satanist groups,” said Rymes, who is not a practitioner. “And the men hate to be referred to as warlocks,” a common term for male witch that they say literally means “oath-breaker.”

Neither coven meetings nor Wicca festivals are occasions for sexual debauchery, said Rymes, who attended a small full-moon ceremony and two ritual celebrations of Samhain (Halloween to outsiders), one public and one private.

“They were no more exciting than Baptist summer camp,” said the Baptist-raised USC undergraduate, “except that Baptists didn’t allow dancing.”

Donald Miller, a professor of religion at USC, said he supervised Rymes in her research and suggested that she offer it for presentation at the conference this weekend by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.

“She did her interviews in a disciplined way, but 10 interviews is a limited sample,” Miller said. “It’s a provocative finding for scholars who want to explore this issue.”

Wendy Griffin, an associate professor at Cal State Long Beach’s women studies department, said that in American and British Wiccan groups “the celebration of sexuality and sensuality is very much a part of the philosophy, but I don’t know that Wiccans are having any more sex than anyone else is.”

She added that she knows a lot of Wiccan men “who are happily married.”

Doctoral student Nancy Ramsey of UC Santa Barbara, like Griffin a specialist in Wicca studies, was also skeptical of the claim that male witches find sex the big attraction.

“Sexuality is part of one’s spirituality; but on the whole, serious Wiccans and serious pagans believe in responsible sex,” Ramsey said. At Wiccan festivals, such people--called “party pagans” by other witches--”tend to be spotted real quick, and they are kind of shunned by women,” she said.

Rymes generally agreed with Ramsey, quoting Wiccan author Margot Adler on the pagan principles of doing no one harm and the “Three-fold Law,” which states “anything that you do--good or bad--comes back to you threefold.”

Self-professed witch Marsha Smith Shaw, wife of Michael Shaw, who together lead the First Wiccian Church of West Hills, contended that, in one sense, single men who consider joining any religious group are also checking out its women.

“They are sizing up the women at Catholic churches and Jewish temples,” she said. “Men are men.”