Adults in Britain now have the chance to take a class in witchcraft. The class description is “an introduction to modern Wicca with an emphasis on personal development and the practical uses of witchcraft in the 21st century.” Instructor Kevin Saunders, a former chief press officer for the Green Party, is a Wiccan High Priest. The class will focus on personal development. “We won’t be doing a great deal of magic spells because, whilst the general public watches on television so-called witches waving wands around and transforming things with a flash of fairy powder, that is not what it’s about.” Saunders says that although witches do not have the typical “dualistic” Christian sense of good and evil, they do not intend to allow anyone who wants to use natural energies to harm others to take the course. “We point out that one of the rules within Wicca is the three-fold law, which means anything you give out comes back to you three times. You’ll find it will hurt you a damn sight more than the person you are aiming at, therefore it isn’t a good idea.”

On the one hand, I think this is really cool. On the other hand, I hope it doesn’t focus on being TOO “practical” and end up as a wishy-washy new age version of things – just another angle for the same ideas found in the self-improvement isle of Barnes & Noble. You can hover a long time on the threshold of power – wanting to use it to create what you want and being afraid that it will hurt others. The ironic part is that in order to get to ‘true power’ you have to pass that threshold where you don’t doubt yourself and you KNOW that you are aligned with what I’ll call source energy, and in that state, hurting others is really impossible – it’s a built in safety system. The big “U” thinks of everything.