Reflections on Amateur Conjurors

I'm beginning to have some idea what the Wiccans are up to. I mean, no - no I don't, not really. Most of them, I suspect, aren't up to anything. That was my report to Kate, who's supposed to be teaching me but mainly seems to let me make my own mistakes.

They're idiots.

Well, no. Not really. They're really not any more ignorant than, well, almost everyone - and at least one of them is smart enough that she seems to be putting things together. She is, rightly and understandably, scared... and there is not a thing I can do to reassure her, let alone help. It's just possible that if we leave things alone, she'll take care of the whole matter for us; but of course we can't do that.

It's frustrating, watching other people's drama.

The High Priestess of the Coven seems to be the problem. She's stumbled onto something real. I'm not sure how, exactly, but it's certainly possible - we moved all our texts to the Archives, but despite various efforts to eradicate them, the remains of books and scrolls still occasionally show up. So this woman has caught a glimpse of something legitimately outside of consensus reality, and she's using it to bring in new followers and pull her existing followers in tighter.

And she's summoning things. I haven't witnessed it yet, but I've overheard some of her people talking about it: genuine contact with something outside our world.

This won't end well. She'll either lose control and expose things that we don't want exposed, or she'll keep control and, potentially, become our rival. The Elders don't consider either of those outcomes acceptable, so the Watchers (myself included) won't let it reach that point. Ending the matter won't be hard; the real challenge is keeping our involvement - and the fact that there's any sort of "involvement" - unknown.

The only alternative is for us to recruit her, along with anyone she's given too much information. If I'm right about this, someone will approach her soon. I don't know too much about how these things work, but I'm surprised this hasn't happened already.

Personally, I think we'd be better off to recruit the other one - her follower, the one who's starting to figure out what she's doing and what it might mean, the one who's sensibly scared of the potential risks. The one who's trying to figure out how to stop her own High Priestess without setting off something apocalyptic or ending up in jail. But since that might say regrettable things about my sympathies, I didn't include it in my report to Kate.

Instead, I made a random account from a public Internet cafe in the orient, and suggested that she get in touch with Father Peter. Father Peter, if you remember, is a retired Catholic priest who attends the same church that my girlfriend and I (sometimes) do. He's the one who got his Diltiazem prescription from the pharmacy where I used to work, the one who used to bait me about serving the "lord of this world." He's the the one who I suspect knows a lot more - a lot more real things - than he's prepared to let on. There is, at least, some chance that he can help her.

I hope I don't regret that, later.

Reflections of a Deranged Cultist is a work of fiction. No neo-Pagans were spied on during the writing of this post.