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184 Neopagan Witchcraft
encountering departed friends and relatives who
show up to greet them, and a meeting with a
powerful, spiritual Being who some have called an
angel, God, or Jesus.
Although most near-death experiencers report
encounters with departed relatives and beings of
love, others are less positive. Instead of ascents into
realms of light, the latter experiencers report
descents into hellish darkness, confusion, and
even torment. In some cases, they even report
hearing screams and cries of pain, presumably
from damned souls suffering in hell. These individuals
emerge from their experience with fear.
Such reports have generated controversy among
NDE researchers. People like Moody assert that in
all the years of their study, they have never talked
with anyone who had hellish experiences. Critics
have been quick to note that most of the individuals
championing the reality of negative NDE experiences
are conservative Christians, who are thus
predisposed to take such reports seriously because
of the implicit support they provide for the reality
of their particular theological perspective.
See also Demons; Hell and Heaven
For Further Reading:
Moody, Raymond A. Life After Life. New York:
Bantam, 1976.
———. The Light Beyond. New York: Bantam,
1989.
Rawlings, Maurice S. To Hell and Back. Nashville:
Thomas Nelson, 1993.
Scott, Miriam Van. Encyclopedia of Hell. New York:
Thomas Dunne Books, 1998.
Neopagan Witchcraft
The word witch has several possible meanings: (1)
In the academic discipline of anthropology, a
witch is a negative sorcerer found in the folklore of
societies across the globe. (2) The English word
witch, from which the anthropological term was
taken, refers specifically to a female wizard, traditionally
viewed as practicing black magic and as
being in league with Satan. (3) Finally, a significant
number of participants in the neopagan movement
refer to themselves as witches or Wiccans.
Although contemporary Satanists and neopagan
witches both draw from a number of the same
intellectual currents and are similar on many
points, there is animosity between the two movements.
Thus while some contemporary Satanist
groups that utilize elements from pre-Christian
religions are also technically neopagan, they
would most likely reject this label.
Modern neopaganism aims to recreate the
pagan religions of antiquity—usually not as they
actually were, but as they have been idealized by
romantics ever since the Renaissance. There were a
number of attempts at recreating pagan religions
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, most of which left only literary remains.
One of the few groups to make a lasting contribution
to the religious landscape was Wicca, founded
in Great Britain in the mid-twentieth century by
Gerald B. Gardner, a retired civil servant. Partly
because Wicca is focused on the worship of
goddesses, it has been adopted by feminists
attempting to create alternative forms of spirituality
that are free from the biases of traditional
male-dominated religion.
Building on the speculative scholarship of
Margaret Murray and others, Gardner accepted
the notion that the Inquisition represented an
effort by the Church to destroy lingering remnants
of pre-Christian paganism. Gardner further
claimed to have been initiated into one of the last
surviving traditional covens. By virtue of this
claim, he was able to assert that Wicca was a lineal
descendant of the “old religion” of Europe, antedating
Christianity by millennia. This claim has,
however, been thoroughly discredited. Although
he was undoubtedly sincere in his desire to revive
archaic paganism, Gardner’s claim to have been
initiated into a coven with an ancient lineage was
fabricated as a strategy designed to give his
nascent movement greater legitimacy. Instead of
representing the survival of an ancient religion,
Wicca was a creative synthesis of elements drawn
from Freemasonry, ceremonial magic, Aleister
Crowley, Robert Graves’s notion of a pre-
Christian goddess religion, Charles Godfrey
Leland’s “Witches Gospel,” Murray’s imaginative
reconstruction of the “old religion” from
Inquisition records, and other sources.
In contrast, Anton LaVey, the person usually
regarded as the founder of modern Satanism,
never claimed to be the lineal descendant of an