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Dear Readers….

Hi! Evelyn Vaughn here, welcoming you to the Witches in Print website.

One of the great things about this particular group of magic-users, founded by Maggie Shayne some years ago, is that we are so varied in our beliefs and practices. We’re all writers. And we’re all of a belief system that many would label “witch.” But there, similarities end. Some of us are degreed Wiccan priestesses in an established tradition. Others, like me, are far more eclectic.

I’ll say it flat out—you don’t have to call me a witch if you don’t want to. I have run into pagans, now and then, who hesitate to include self-taught solitaries in the same category as those who formally study with a coven. To which I say… um, okay. Sure.

Honestly, I don’t really worry whether others consider me a witch or not. Just know that when I hesitate to call myself a “witch,” it’s not because I’m in any way ashamed of the associations with the word! As the old saying goes, some of my best friends are witches! I just hesitate to claim power or tradition that misrepresents what I really am.

So… what am I? And if I’m so vague about it, why am I here on the Witches in Print site?

I am, first and foremost, a world walker. Books. Television shows. Movies. Dreams. Give me a story form, and I’m happy to dive right in, to live in it at the same time that I’m living on this plane… sometimes, more than living on this plane! I’ve been like that my whole life. It wasn’t until I’d reached my twenties that I learned that the witches and magic that graced so many of my favorite stories weren’t just a fantasy. I first discovered Wicca around 1989 or 1990, with the novel BURNING WATER by Mercedes Lackey. On a trip to San Francisco—which had far more interesting bookstores at the time than did Dallas/Fort Worth—I picked up Scott Cunningham’s THE TRUTH ABOUT WITCHCRAFT TODAY and Laurie Cabot’s POWER OF THE WITCH, and it felt like a homecoming.

This stuff was real?!?

What followed was a solitary conversion to Wicca that lasted easily ten years. I read almost everything by the late Scott Cunningham, and still consider him one of the true ambassadors for the Craft. I studied many of the other standards – Raymond Buckland, Janet and Stewart Farrar, Silver Ravenwolf, Margot Adler, Starhawk, and so many others. After about a decade of individual study, I joined the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans for several years, and got to know other wonderful magic users. And then….

And then, I found myself changing again. I’d never been particularly good at the “requirements” of the Craft. I wouldn’t always celebrate the sabbats. In fact, while I like some of the basic elements of ritual—candlelight, for example, and incense—I’m not at all detail oriented. I don’t have a ceremonial bone in my body! This isn’t to say that I found anything wrong with CUUPS (which is an amazing organization) or with ceremonial magic or any of the other fascinating faces of the Craft. But I moved from what many consider the First Law of Magic – the Law of Knowledge—to the second, the Law of Self-Knowledge. I became comfortable with what I am, and what I am doesn’t seem to label very easily, and certainly can’t support any powerful claims of degree or “special” knowledge. Especially since (as with so much in the astral), it keeps changing! But here’s what I CAN tell you.

1) I’m fairly well-read on the topic of Wicca and magic. That doesn’t give me any more of a direct a line to the Truth (or, in my opinion, truthS) than it does anybody else, but I’m not speaking from complete ignorance either. 

2) I do believe in feminine deity, which for many people is more than enough reason to call oneself a witch. Half the time I just call Her “God,” because of habit… “Oh my God!” comes more naturally to me than “Oh my Goddess!” But I figure it’s like calling female performers “actors” instead of “actresses,” or using the term “flight attendant” instead of “stewardess.” There’s nothing wrong with the word “Goddess,” and in fact I do use that term the other half of the time. But I’m not particularly rabid about it. It is my personal opinion that She has bigger things to worry about.

3) I’m not big on specifics, which is not to say I think the people who do value specifics are wrong, just that I think we’re on somewhat different paths, hopefully to the same place. I love the “one river, many wells” concept of religion, and the belief that all gods are one god, all goddesses are one goddess, and together they are One. I love studying the different faces of the Goddess (and God, when I use the term to refer to Her masculine consort). But I don’t see as huge a chasm between paganism and Christianity as many witches might.

4) I believe in the Everyday Sacred. That magic is everywhere, all the time. I think that the “Laws of Magic” you can find listed in so many places have truth in the mundane as well as the astral world—that words carry power, for example, and that everything contains its opposite. “Harm none” and “According to the free will of all” can be as important in a traffic jam as in spellwork. And finally….

5) Stories are my very favorite magic. I firmly believe that creating stories (published or not) is a way to create magic, and reading (or viewing) stories is something akin to leaving the body. Well-loved characters are a kind of “thought form” (as described as the Stewarts in SPELLS AND HOW THEY WORK). And the “fictional” worlds with which we saturate ourselves, whether from TV or books, are as important to our inner selves as the worlds to which we might astrally travel.

So, that’s me. If you find any of it interesting, then check back now and then—I’ll not only be announcing my upcoming publications, but occasionally contributing essays on some of the above topics.

Just don’t feel you must take my word on any of it.