"I cast some pretty stupid spells to manipulate people," he said. "And it all came back on me. It crashed, and all my friends went away. It was like karma."
Dominik now says he learned a hard lesson in what witches call the threefold rule: "Everything you send out comes back to you threefold." His experience sent him fleeing back to the Catholicism of his family, but not for long. He's now 17 and has counted himself a devout neo-Pagan for three years.
"People see witchcraft and spells as a way to have power, but that's totally false. The whole goal of Wicca and spells is to gain control of yourself," he said.
When neo-Pagans celebrate the festival that they call Samhain (sow-een)--what the rest of the world calls Halloween--more teens than ever will be among them. Some will be the children of adult pagans. These are youngsters who have grown up in the faith and are now becoming teenagers in large numbers, according to sociologist Dr. Mary Jo Neitz, who has studied two groups of Wiccans for 13 years and has noticed about a 20% increase in teens over the past five years.
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Other teens are being brought to neo-Paganism by the influence of the internet where Pagan sites abound. One of them, The Witches' Voice, has its own teen page and includes almost 300 other sites devoted to teens. It also lists teen covens and groups all over the country. At least one Californian group meets in a high school, and web pages sponsored by teen Pagans are plentiful. One site, New Moon Grove, hosts a club for young Wiccans that lists 1,002 members.
One is hosted by an 18-year-old Midwestern college student named Cabell "Copper" Gathman, whose site includes her photo and indicates she has been a solitary eclectic Pagan for four years. "I always believed in magick.that is to say, I believed when I was small, and I never was able to let go of wanting to believe," she wrote in a page titled "How I Got This Way."
"Neo-Paganism tends to attract people who feel disenfranchised from mainstream religion, and as a liberal female bisexual, I definitely did," wrote Copper, in response to an e-mail query.
