How Even Witches Lose Their Charm

The Malleus Maleficarum is clear on one point above all others: witchcraft results from insatiable carnal lust and is therefore a form of sexual depravity as well as religious heresy. 

Thus it was widely accepted in the early modern period that witches copulated with demons and that their rituals involved obscene and unnatural acts including masturbation, bestiality, and feasting on the flesh of infants. Via a potent combination of sodomy and sorcery, witches threatened to subvert the very foundations of the moral and political order of society and this made them wicked, dangerous - and fascinating. 

But what of witchcraft today?

Alas, if many practitioners are to be believed, it has become a depressingly tame affair: few covens now insist upon nudity, or practice the more controversial rites involving sex and scourging. And far from providing a rare opportunity to form a perverse relationship with the satanic, pagan witchcraft merely affords the chance to commune with a loving Nature and explore methods of spiritual self-discovery and personal development.

The Dionysian frenzy of the orgy and the blasphemous humour of the black mass has given way to a New Age theology that upholds many of the same stupidities and myths that govern conventional thinking. Wicca, I'm sorry to say, is a humanism. And the witch, far from being a figure who inspires terror, is often now just a Twilight-reading Barbie Goth hardly deserving of the name.