ABSTRACT
In the last decade or so there has been a growth of interest from young people in Britain (as well as elsewhere in the Western world) in ‘witchcraft’ and other forms of Paganism. The Pagan Federation have recently brought the age of membership down from 18 to 16 and have appointed a youth officer, in response to the many enquiries they have from teenagers (Pagan Federation 2009). Although the ‘teenage witch’ phenomenon has only attracted media and academic interest in recent years (for media, see, for example, the Channel 4 documentary Teenage Kicks: the Witch Craze aired 28 August 2002, and for academic publications, Berger and Ezzy 2007; Cush 2007a, 2007b), the interest of young people in Paganism was certainly present among students in the late 1980s (see Cush 1997), and many of today’s adult Pagans first became interested as teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s (Harrington 2007). It is however the third generation of teenage witches that has hit the headlines. In a similar time period, Paganism has begun to establish itself as a new/revived/reconstructed ‘world religion’ appropriate for inclusion in university Religious Studies degrees (see, for example, York 2003).
