Women walk the occult path

Pagan ceremony in progress. Paganism offers women leading positions where their role as mothers and life-givers is honored and respected.

Black magic women, white witches, black witches, pagan high priestesses, druidesses, female shamans, women witchdoctors and wiccans -- we celebrate ladies of the occult, females with secret talents and power, women in touch with the darker side of humanity.

More and more women are abandoning the mainstream religion of their parents, and are finding themselves and freedom in pagan, pre-Christian religions such as wicca, witchcraft, shamanism, and various ancient, indigenous beliefs. We talk to men who have dated these black magic women.

Wiccan chick

James, San Diego: I fell in love with an occult chick when I was in my 20s at college. She was a wiccan who worshipped mother earth, the sun, spirits of nature. She loved ancient religions, not belief systems like Christianity that built empires, exploited people, and wiped out indigenous cultures.

She was a serious chick, very into Native American rights and rites. And she loved drumming and chanting. Every time I visited her place, we'd listen to drumming music, the sort of stuff that'd get you into a trance and heighten your experience of being closely bonded.

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She led a coven, a group of women plus a guy hair stylist. They sit in her apartment drinking red wine, listening to drumming and chanting, and casting spells.

They asked me to sit in on those coven meetings, but it wasn't my thing. I couldn't take it seriously. A lot of people are freaked out by witches. They think witchraft is satanism, but it's not. It's pre-Christian religion, much of which has inspired New Age thinking.

I never found my wiccan woman and her friends to be threatening or frightening. They were a bit weird, but they were just doing their own thing that made them happy.

She shaman

Edgar, Stockholm: I dated a beautiful Sami woman called Leila, who renounced the Christianity of her parents and became a shaman.

She had a fancy drum, made of birchwood and reindeer hide, which was built specially for her and given magical powers in a ceremony. She'd beat that drum and do a kind of singing or chanting called jojking, which is like Native American chanting.

Leila would get lost in her jojking, which was often a low wailing, conjuring up her ancestral homeland, her ancestors, their lives as migratory reindeer herders. She was heavily influenced by a Finnish Sami dude called Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, who sang at the opening ceremony of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.

Valkeapää also wrote the music for the movie Pathfinder, which was a semi-decent account of Sami life made in a Hollywood style.

Leila had a foot in two worlds and two cultures. She could be modern and western when she needed to be, and she could be completely indigenous if that was better for her.

She said that Christianity had enslaved her people and repressed their sexuality.

She broke with me after a year. She said she couldn't be with someone from the dominant culture. She had to marry one of her own. That sucked, but I guess it made her happy. It's what she needed at that stage of her life.

Voodoo queen

Justin, New Orleans My wife Rosie is the daughter of hippy parents. They've gone from being revolutionaries wanting to fire up the world's masses to organic farming, where the aim is to feed people with good food that heals the planet.

Rosie has gone through the whole hippy thing: no-rules childhood; pot-smoking parents; free love; then the disillusionment that followed the 60s; and now the hope that the green movement will save us all.

Rosise has always been edgier, more daring than her parents. Plus she's traveled much more than they have. She's been to Africa and Haiti, where she discovered voodoo.

When she got back to New Orleans, she delved into the rich voodoo tradition in the city, which can be traced all the way back to the slave trade. She reasearched Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans.

We have a dog called Zombi, in honor of Marie Laveau's snake of the same name.

Rose makes her living by doing readings, including tarot cards, distant viewing, contact with deceased family members and ancestors, plus secret voodoo ceremonies in the city, many of which attract some really influential people who want to keep their involvement secret.

Pagan princess

Jesper, Överkalix: I had a fling with a 100 percent cuckoo poet chick who left an obscure Hindu sect to set up her own witches' coven in northern Sweden.

This woman, Gudrun, was a man-hater. She couldn't stand guys, she was always bitching about them, how they ran the world, started wars, screwed up the planet, and kept women down.

Gudrun was my first encounter with magical thinking, which is a kind of mental disorder if it runs your life, which it did in her case.

Gudrun was into numbers and patterns of numbers. We'd be driving along and she'd say, Look at the phone number on that hoarding. If you add it together and subtract my birthday backwards, you get my house number. I'd be like, So what?, but she thought that kind of stuff had special significance. It was some earthly energy communicating to her.

She thought she could transport herself around the world while asleep, astral projection I think she called it. She believed a part of her could literally travel where she wanted to. If we were in different countries, she'd ask me, Did you feel me when I visited you last night?

I never did feel anything but I told her I did to make her happy.

Gudrun fancied herself as a ghostbuster. She'd visit haunted houses to chat with the spirits there. She'd calm them down and persuade them to move on. That would please the owners who'd pay good money for her services.

We split up because I couldn't take that stuff seriously. It was a world of fairies, make-believe, and sad Goths in black outfits. And it was also obvious that Gudrun needed medical treatment. Some of her beliefs caused her to be deeply depressed, and I knew for a fact that she had suicide and mental illness in her family.

By Bob Whitby Giallo

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