- March 2000
 Phyllis Curott is a practicing witch, a civil rights lawyer, and more than a little upset these days with what's on the silver screen.
"The Blair Witch Project makes witches out to be evil hags who want to kill children. This fictitious movie puts real witches at risk", says Curott. "We just had an incident last week when someone reacted to ancient Jewish stereotypes. We must be careful". The recent shootings at a Jewish childcare center in Los Angeles touched the Ivy League-educated Curott, who was born to a Jewish mother and has been practicing witchcraft since the late 1970s.
Now, Curott and her coven aren't about to turn the Blair filmmakers into frogs, nor has she summoned her magical powers as a lawyer with that magical incantation, Ill sue. Rather, shed like the filmmakers to take responsibility. In early August, she met up with Eduardo Sanchez, co-director of Blair Witch, on Atlanta's WKLF-FM Regular Guys Morning Show. And she put the screws to him. "I asked him to put a disclaimer in his film like the one director Francis Ford Coppola added to The Godfather, essentially saying that this film does not represent the lifestyles of that community", she says. "And he said he supported that idea". But the distributor of the film, Artisan Entertainment, hasn't been responsive thus far, and now this witch is boiling mad. Artisan said it would not comment on legal matters, even though this reporter reminded media representatives that no suit has yet been threatened against them.
Artisans reaction doesn't mean that Sanchez and his colleagues will hear their names mentioned over a steaming cauldron in a curse sealed with an eye of a newt and wing of a bat. Curott has devoted much of the last 20 years to dispelling the witch stigma.
Witchcraft, also called Wicca, is actually an ancient European religion that predates Christianity and Judaism. It focuses on women's benign and magical powers and only became associated with devil worship after the advent of Christianity. "Witchcraft doesn't even mention the devil", she says. "How can we serve a devil if we don't even believe in one?"
If black cauldrons are used in ceremonies, they're only to represent the magical power of woman's womb to bring forth life. As for evil spells, it is a grave violation to Wiccan spirituality to harm people with supernatural powers. Yet witch oppression is as real and ugly as other religious persecution. Curott says she received death threats as she crisscrossed the country promoting her book, Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman's Journey into the Wisdom of Witchcraft and the Magic of the Goddess (Boardwalk Books).
Some of these threats came in urban areas like Seattle, she says, You'd expect city folks to be a little more tolerant of different ideas. Reports of vandalism in the Maryland area where the film takes place have increased in recent weeks, and Curott fears that could lead to more violence. "Lets say you are interested in witchcraft and live in the area, would you feel safe sending your children to the schools?" she says. "We don't want to see another hate crime".
At least 40,000 people, mainly women, are practitioners of the craft, and supporters say that there are as many as 3 million witches afraid to come out of the broom closet. Some girls have definitely felt the pressure. Last year in Lincoln Park, Mich., school officials ordered a 17-year-old honor student and self-proclaimed witch to stop wearing her five-pointed pentagram. They said the symbol, whose points represent the spirit and the elements earth, air, fire and water, violated a policy against wearing gang symbols.
The student went to court and in March forced the district to recognize the symbol as a religious one, akin to a cross or a Star of David.
Summoning the Law
- Curotts, a native of New York's Long Island, isn't afraid to call upon the greatest power in the land when her sisters are in trouble, the U.S. Constitution. In the mid-1980s, she won the right of Wiccan clergy to perform marriages in New York City.
We will fight when we need to, in the same way others have, she says. And we will succeed. As president emerita of the Covenant of the Goddess, Curott appeared at the parliament of the worlds religions in 1993, when she addressed some 7,000 church leaders on the Wicca way. "Some people think we fly in on a broomstick, she says. But we can change the stereotypes. We have a message of peace and love, a woman's perspective."
P.S. In 1607, Bridget Bishop became the first of 23 men and women who lost their lives in the Salem witch hunt. None of the alleged witches was burned at the stake. Actually, 19 were hanged, three died in jail and one was crushed to death under the pressure of two heavy boulders.
Written by Buck Wolf / ABCNEWS
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