So in fourth grade I accidentally started a cult dedicated to Witchcraft.
It didn't start out that way, of course. In third grade I got kicked out of Girl Scouts because I was too me. Meaning that I didn't see the need to spend time getting badges or selling cookies, I just wanted to run around and pretend to hunt things in the woods, set things on fire, and be chaos in the field trips that were taken. So obviously, I was 'asked to step away from Scouts activities' until I could get my shit together (i.e. be more mature), which never happened. But all my friends were still in Girl Scouts. And I still wanted to hang out and do things with them too.Ā So I started a club.
A club where I was the leader of a 3-person coven.
Now keep in mind, I was like a goddamn 10 year old. Everything I knew about witches was from the movies Hocus Pocus, The Witches, and the Witches of Eastwick and all that. My club was Hocus Pocus themed and my coven was the Sanderson sisters. And since I was the one in charge and the oldest, I was Winnie. Made sense at the time. My two friends were super eager to be a part of it and we handmade a Book of Shadows and I decorated a small cardboard pencil box to make it look like human skin with stitching, with a clay pentagram glued on top.
At recess we'd yell lines from the movie Hocus Pocus, chant the spells from the movie, and be chaotically evil. But we looked like we were having so much fun that the other girls in my class were begging to join. So we had to expand the coven.
I invented initiation rituals where people had to donate things they found or had, like plastic gemstones, dried out chicken bones/wishbones, insect exoskeletons that people found, butterfly wings, feathers, a rabbit's foot, fake gold coins, a mummified bird leg. I kept them all in the human skin decorated pencil box. I filled little plastic baubles with colored sand and salt. I had a small vial I filled with red food coloring to look like blood. And every recess the girls would use chalk and draw large pentagrams on the playground, sit in a circle and chant and sing and clap in rhythm to commune. The coven had expanded to maybe a good 14-15 girls. With us all running around and pretending to put spells on people and being general menaces.
During a field trip where we learned how to hand-make wax candles, half of my class who were all part of the coven were yelling out loud howĀ EXCITEDĀ they were to make candles for our rituals and spells for witchcraft. Everyone was abuzz and the candle-making instructor was mortified. During school craft time, my girls would shape pentagrams out of pipe-cleaners and put them on strings around their necks to wear everyday.
All of my time outside of school I was hand-writing and drawing grimoires with made-up spells and drawings. I would give them out to the non-initiates so everyone could have grimoires of their own. I looked up Latin phrases in books from the library and we would sit in our chalked pentagram circles at recess with our eyes closed and screamed meaningless Latin.
Since for some reason I was such a cult of personality and the witchcraft club was all that the girls would talk about, the boys started to want to join too. But I think we made them our slaves instead? I don't really know why they went along with it, but we made them runners and sent them on errands to get stuff for us and THEYĀ WOULDĀ DOĀ IT. I guess we made the boys our human familiars before I even realized it was even a thing.
Anyways, the club was getting a little out of hand. The playground was covered in large pentagrams, cars coming through would hear girls chanting in Latin, and there were animal bones and fake blood in a box. The Catholic school that all this was happening at was getting concerned. And forced me to shut it down.
I was kind of relieved to be done with it at that point. The coven grew too large, the management of things was getting out of hand and taking up too much time. I was spending all of my free-time stapling tea-stained pieces of paper and writing grimoires in Latin. And IĀ had sort of moved on to my Egyptology phase.
