Meryl Smith Lawton

Green Witch | Trey Capnerhurst’s beliefs stem from a wide variety of pagan traditions.

It’s that time of year again. Pretty soon miniature Hannah Montanas and Edward Cullens will be terrorizing neighbourhoods, begging for candy and ringing doorbells in the middle of supper. Later, the tartlets who dress up their doggies will hit the nightclubs, as Halloween has become more of a sexy circus and less of a supernatural celebration. Where’s the spook factor in hanging out with 5,000 of your closest friends on a sweaty, sparkle-and-feather-boa-infested, seizure-inducing dancefloor?

So this year, I wanted to get up close and personal with the real Halloweeny set. But as there’s a shortage of ghouls and vampires in town to interview, I set my sights on the one Halloween character I could talk to: the witch. Is there any truth, I wondered, to the pointy-hat-and-cackle stereotype? Even beyond Halloween, what’s it like to be a witch in Edmonton these days?

Which is how I find myself sitting in the pleasantly cluttered kitchen of an Edmonton witch. And despite the warmth outside, I’m freezing. “Magic?” I ask the witch.

“Air conditioning,” she says, rubbing her very pregnant belly.

Lisa Fedirko is a Wiccan witch, and has been for much of her life. Except for when she was Christian Reform. “I was always interested in Wicca and witchcraft, it’s just always made sense to me, even when I was a kid in a pretty hardcore Christian faith,” she says. “I was worried then that if I didn’t believe what I had been taught, I’d go to hell, but as I matured and was allowed to question things, I found that Wiccan beliefs are much more suited to my life and philosophy.”

Beliefs like living in harmony with nature, the divinity of earth-based male and female deities, and the threefold law that states whatever you do to someone else comes back to you three times. Like a super-charged golden rule.

Many Wiccans do believe in magic. “But magic isn’t necessarily what people think,” says Fedirko. “People think magic is about turning people into frogs and such. Boy, would I like to see that!” She grins. “But magic is really about creating the right intentions and carrying them out.”

But being a witch in Edmonton is not all spooky fun and games. Many modern witches have been persecuted because of mistaken connections to Satanists — “which is ridiculous,” says Fedirko. “I’ve had people scared that I was going to eat their children, because ‘that’s what witches do,’” she says with a grimace. “I’ve lost friends. I even had one guy say I should be burned at the stake, but he spelled it S-T-E-A-K, so I didn’t take it that seriously.”

But Fedirko did take the threat of job loss seriously. “I used to work at a daycare,” she says. “I was quiet about my religion, because it’s personal to me. But I wore a small pentacle charm under my shirt, and one day it must have slipped out. A parent saw it, and before I knew it, I was hauled into my boss’ office.” That boss stopped short of actually firing her, but problems continued, and Fedirko was eventually transferred to another daycare.

Fedirko is not the only Edmonton witch to face discrimination. Trey Capnerhurst is a Green Witch — the name refers to her politics and her reverence for nature and people, not the colour of her skin. Not a Wiccan, but a traditional witch (which means her beliefs stem from a wide variety of pagan traditions), Capnerhurst is vocal about her faith, which can cause issues for some closed-minded folks.

“Things have gotten much better here in Edmonton,” Capnerhurst says, “but when I first started practicing in the 1980s and 1990s, things were pretty complicated for many pagans. The first occult bookstore here was firebombed, and if we ever gathered together, we had to make sure we had guards, and there was always some kind of disruption.”

Being pagan in Edmonton is not unlike being a part of many minority communities here. “There are a lot of parallels between the pagan community and the gay community,” Capnerhurst says, “and we’ve shared many of the same issues.”

Which can involve coming out of the broom closet, so to speak. “I was officially ‘outed’ when I ran in my first federal election, which raised some eyebrows. [Capnerhurst ran for the Green Party in the last two federal elections.] But I’ve lived in the same neighbourhood for 10 years now, and it doesn’t even faze my neighbors when I wander around outside in my garb.”

But she still has to fight it at times — for instance, Capnerhurst recently switched her daughter’s school because of what she felt was intolerance of her religious beliefs.

Although things have gotten better for pagans in Edmonton, we’ve got a lot farther to go, according to Capnerhurst. As a political animal, Capnerhurst would like to see pagan practitioners organize and work together. “The only way for us to have political clout, the only way for us to be able to fight prejudice and hatred, is for us to organize,” she says. To that end, Capnerhurst is attempting to start a nonprofit pagan organization to help rewrite some of the historical biases people have had against witches and pagans.

And what do witches really think of Halloween? “Don’t get me started,” says Capnerhurst. “Let’s just say, do you think it would go over well with the native community if we all dressed up in feather headdresses on one of their holy days and had a fake powwow? That’s what commercial Halloween is like for us.” Fedirko is a bit more circumspect. “Oh, sure,” she says. “Halloween is a lot of fun. I love dressing up in a costume and taking my daughter trick-or-treating, like anybody else. But it has absolutely nothing to do with my faith. I celebrate Samhain [pronounced sow-wen or sow-wane, depending on whom you ask] on Nov. 1, which is the witches’ New Year. That’s the important holiday, not silly, commercialized Halloween.”

According to both Fedirko and Capnerhurst, the heart of living as a witch, Wiccan or otherwise, is the antithesis of what many people think. “We are healthy, strong, and live a life with devotion for the Earth, our Mother,” says Capnerhurst.

“For the last time,” says Fedirko. “Witches don’t worship Satan. And we don’t eat babies.” She rubs her pregnant belly for emphasis. “I mean, isn’t that kind of gross?”

This is the first in a series of stories on what it’s like to live
in Edmonton for different spiritual groups. Come back
next week for a profile of an Evangelical Christian.