Witch’s Kids

"No Doubt We're In The Last Days" News

Witches no fantasy to pagan believers

By Jeff Wright

The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon (October 29, 2004).

Nine-year-old Luna Sansone thinks she may want to be an artist when she grows up. Or a witch.

But not just any witch. "I want to be a real witch," she says, "someone who makes herbs and things, and helps people make lots of tea, and makes protective spells."

As Wicca and related earth-based religions reach into the mainstream, more parents are passing down those beliefs to their children.

Tracy Sansone, mother of Luna and two younger children, says she expects that her offspring eventually will choose their own religious paths. In the meantime, "I want them to have a good background of observing what's around them, so they're not walking through life on blind faith," she says.

In Eugene, Krystal Barger takes a similar approach with her 10-year-old twin daughters, Allison and Lydia. Every morning, she and her girls each choose a Tarot or fairy card to meditate upon as they sit around an improvised altar of stones, feathers, driftwood, candles, sage and other totems.

"If you're really connected with the earth and what's around you, then you're able to make clear decisions," Barger says. "That's the most important thing to me, to make sure they feel connected with what they came from, the planet and nature."

What is known is that Barger and Sansone are part of a growing wave of parents turning to books, Web sites and other resources aimed at spreading the Wiccan way to children.

It's long overdue in the eyes of Norma Joyce, a founding member of Women in Conscious Creative Action, a neopagan group formed in Eugene in 1983.

"The children have been left out of this movement for a long time, and the parents are saying, `Wait a minute, we're serious about this,' " Joyce says. " `And we've settled down - we're not running around in the woods.' "