Even Witches Have Names is a short fictional work based on facts. It tells the story of a Christian minister who was also a witch and the work that he and his wife did in building a bridge between witchcraft and Christianity. It tells the story of Gabriel Seminger's life and work and in the process teaches the reader many of the rituals of witchcraft, or Wicca, as it is called today. This book is a good read and a good teaching aid as well.

EVEN WITCHES HAVE NAMES

By Richard E. Kuykendall

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2012 Rev. Dr. Richard E. Kuykendall
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4669-3426-9

Contents

Introduction...............................................ixIn the Beginning...........................................1Spiritwind and Witchcraft..................................11Family and Witchcraft......................................22Creation Spirituality, Not Creationism.....................38Witchcraft in the Gold Country.............................46Retirement and Witchcraft..................................75The Death of a Witch.......................................102

Chapter One

IN THE BEGINNING

The spiritual adventure I call my life began in a dysfunctional, nominal Christian home in Southern, California. Until I was about ten years old, I attended a Christian church on a fairly regular basis. When, however, my family moved out of our church's area, we never went to church again.

For the next few years, all I could think about was music and girls, and then one summer in the late sixties, everything changed. My world was transformed with the smell of incense, the sound of tambourines and sitars, and a blaze of psychedelic colors. The Hippy Movement was in full swing, and I was swept off of my feet by its magical mystery.

Along with many other young people of my generation, I began to explore my inner world with the use of "mind-expanding drugs," and I also began to consider the wisdom of non-Christian spiritual traditions—the wisdom of the East, as well as Native American spirituality.

And in the midst of all this, I remember a dream I had one night of three witches—young women who stunned me with their eyes. It was as if beams of light shot out of their eyes and into mine, and the light was blinding. I remember trying to deflect the beams of light with the palms of my hands. This was my first brush with witchcraft.

But then, as it turned out, I became a Christian as result of a strange brew of different factors. On the one hand, there were a number of personal crises. My parents divorced, I was expelled from school, and I was involved in a very sick, drug-laden relationship. And then on the other hand, there came the sound of music—it was Jesus Christ Superstar. This rock opera reintroduced me to Jesus, but this time not as the second person of the trinity—the divine being who had been set before me as a child. This time, I met Jesus of Nazareth, a long-haired spiritual rebel who suffered and died for what he believed in—a man who had doubts and questions but who nevertheless kept going. This Jesus I could relate to, and I saw him as the answer to my problems.

With my conversion also came a call. I felt called to be a minister. I really didn't know how I would fulfill this calling; I wasn't even a member of a church.

At first, I planned to start a commune—a religious community where we would all live according to the Bible, apart from the world of the flesh. This, however, was only a dream without much substance or support. And so I ended up joining a church and going to college to be a minister.

At this time in my life, in the early years of my Christian experience, I was very zealous for the truth, to the point that some of my friends called me Gabe the Ripper because of the way I could rip into a person with "the sword of the Spirit." I practiced apologetics in a very unapologetic manner—quoting scripture and verse to back up any point I was attempting to shove down an unbeliever's throat. I would even take my college professors to task if they showed their soft underbellies during a lecture.

The one person in my life, however, who was impenetrable was my mother. At this time, she was attending a spiritualistic church called Tzadi; Tzadi was a Hebrew letter and had meaning in the Jewish mysticism of Kabbalah. Every time I went to see her, there were different colored candles burning in her home that were supposed to help create certain affects. And she told me stories of reading auras and of divine healings and even claimed that her psychic gifts had been in our family for generations and that it would continue to be passed down. A number of years later, after my daughter was born, my mother said that she too had the gift.

And where was I in all this? I saw it all as the workings of the devil intended to persuade the unwary off the path. For hadn't Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man comes unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6).

I believed that my mother was "giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of devils" (1 Timothy 4:1). But no matter what I said, she would not be persuaded of the evil of her ways. Eventually, I gave up on trying to convince her, and I agreed to let her live with her own choices.

By the time I finished my undergraduate work, I was married to a nurse (who, of course, was a committed Christian), and I received a call to serve as associate pastor of a church in Lynwood, California. I served a year's internship there and then went on to seminary as was customary in my particular denomination. And so my wife and I, together with our newborn son, packed up our things and moved to Michigan where the seminary was located.

Probably because of influences that went back to my hippy days, I focused my studies on philosophy and world religions; I took literally everything I could take in these areas, and as result, I found that by the time I graduated from seminary, I could no longer believe that Christianity was the way, the truth, and the life. And so when after seminary I was assigned to a church near Pasadena, California, I ended up resigning within a year.

In the two years that followed, I did a number of jobs unrelated to my "calling," and then because of financial problems due mainly to my being unemployed, my family—I, my wife, son and daughter (who was born just before I graduated from seminary)—ended up having to move in with my wife's father; and all four of us slept in one bedroom on two single beds. While we were living with him, I found in his library a number of books on the occult and witchcraft—books like Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today, Margaret Murray's The Witch Cult in Western Europe, and many others. As I read these books, I became fascinated with witchcraft; I saw that it had been greatly misunderstood, that it wasn't the sinister thing that most people made it out to be. To me, it seemed to be a spiritual path that consciously attempted to put itself into harmony with the earth and the divine feminine, as well as with one's own psychic energies. Beyond this, despite people's misconceptions, it seemed to be a very ethical religion with its law summed up with the words "And it harm none, do what you will." And beyond this, there was the Law of Threefold Return, which simply meant that whatever one does to another will return threefold upon oneself. It was thus an intensification of Christ's Golden Rule: "Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you."

Out of the church now, and with no spiritual or intellectual chains to bind me, I felt open-minded enough to give witchcraft a chance. And so at night, when my wife was at work and when my children were asleep, I would go outside and try to duplicate the rituals that were described in these books. And you know what? I never did find out why my father-in-law had these books in his library. My wife insisted that they had to have belonged to someone else, one of his...