Witchcraft & Christianity: The Story of My Salvation

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

WITCHRAFT & CHRISTIANITY: THE STORY OF MY SALVATION

CHAPTER 1: CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER 2: INTO THE WIDE WORLD

CHAPTER 3: BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA

CHAPTER 4: MODERN MAGIC

CHAPTER 5: SKYCLAD

CHAPTER 6: FEMINIST WITCHCRAFT*

CHAPTER 7: ATHEISTS

CHAPTER 8: HALLOWE’EN

CHAPTER 9: INVISIBLE KNIGHTS

CHAPTER 10: ‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

Chapter 11: CUNNING CRAFTINESS

CHAPTER 12: BORN AGAIN!

EPILOG

Footnote:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge my debt to my parents and family, my music teachers, to those of various faiths who opened my eyes to spiritual realities so that eventually I was born again.

I’m grateful to Thomas Nelson, Inc., the USA’s foremost Christian publisher, and its division WestBow Press, for publishing this novel.

I thank publisher WestBow’s Author’s Assistants and Editors who were patient, kind and efficient.

To the many people, Christians, Pagans, Witches and others, who helped to open my eyes, that I might see, I offer grateful thanks to God Almighty:

may they all be blessed. As Jesus said in John 14, verse 1: Let not your heart be troubled ….

WITCHRAFT & CHRISTIANITY: THE STORY OF MY SALVATION

*by pen-name ‘Ann Grammary,’ real name & current address: Joyce Rosenfield, 205 Texas St., Antioch, CA 94509, BibleHarp@sbcglobal.net

[Footnote:]

*‘The Witch’s Workbook,’ which Joyce wrote 1971 under the pen name ‘Ann Grammary’ was intended as a humorous collection of ‘spells’ Simon & Schuster Paperback Books published in 1973. In its one printing, it sold 70,000 copies. Now it’s out of print but I’ve seen used copies for sale at high prices. I advise readers not to get it!

**This book, Witchcraft & Christianity: The Story of My Salvation is a Novel based on my life experiences.

Chapters one and two are literally true, as the photos show; Chapters three to the end are in novel form, based on my experiences in the Occult.

Quotations from the HOLY BIBLE are from the New King James Version copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

CHAPTER 1: CHILDHOOD

I was born in New York City to a young Jewish couple in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power in Germany. But I was not aware of the dark clouds that were rolling over Europe.

Perhaps my older sister, whom I’ll call Kerry, was aware of current events then, for she was very verbal and bright, and talked to our Daddy as she grew up. I didn’t.

I was shy and from age five I watched Dad play piano by ear, my eyes on the level of the keyboard. Kerry was two years older than I, and in Junior High School (P.S. 115, Elizabeth Barrett Browning Junior High School) she became known as the Encyclopedia." When I entered that Junior High, an all-girl public school, I was only known as Kerry’s little sister, her shadow, a fairly good student but not out-standing as she had been.

Only in music was I to show any special talent. This was, of course, in the days of radio (before television) and no computers or cell phones.

Neither Kerry nor I were given any religious training. Dad was a hard-working scientist who’d graduated from the night school of M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) He’d gone to their night school called Lowell Institute of Technology, while courting my mother and became an Electrical Engineer.

The Depression hit in 1929 and they moved down to New York, for at that time, engineers could not get a job easily. Dad worked repairing ships’ meters in our apartment in New York, and Mom, whom I’ll call Janey, had to lug those heavy electric meters down to the shipyards, causing her to get varicose veins although she had wonderful health otherwise.

Dad was an atheist and had his business in our apartment. We had practically no visitors but one day a couple knocked at the door. My Mom answered it, and they said they were Scientists. They knew we were probably Jewish from our last name, Rosenfield, and because most people in our immediate neighborhood were also Jewish.

My Mom had never heard of the religion, Christian Science and replied to the strangers, Oh! We’re also scientists. What can we do for you? Won’t you come in?

The misunderstanding was soon cleared up. They left and we had a good laugh: this became a family story. Mom was always respectful to people of every race and religion, but there was the belief (of my Dad) that religion was something only fools believed in.

When my Dad was a boy, he had had an Orthodox Jew’s training. His name was Moishe, Hebrew for Moses, ironic, since he grew up to be an atheist. His parents who were very devout, keeping a kosher house, and poor as they were, Grandma Bubby Sonia had four sets of dishes, for fleishick (meat), milchick (milk products) and parve (neutral: neither meat nor milk), to obey the Bible’s Old Testament rules in Leviticus about not eating meat and milk together, waiting the prescribed number of hours before eating them in sequence; not eating the wrong kind of shellfish or, of course, pork and other forbidden edibles.

When little Moses, my Dad, was about eight or nine years old, he liked to read fairy tales, he said, but soon he switched to reading about science and to build simple ham radios. Crystal sets were inexpensive, and as he read more and more about radios and electricity, he abandoned fairy-tales, and became a believer in Science.

He taught his public school teachers about radio, just as later generations of kids were to teach their elders about computers.

He began to see the Bible’s stories as just another sort of fairy tale.

The reasons my Dad became an atheist were two-fold. First, there was a great deal of religious, national, and racial prejudice in Massachusetts in those days, prejudice against the Irish, against Catholics, against Jews, and against non-whites. Secondly, in his religious training, the accent was on strict obedience, without trying to understand biblical rules or encouraging boys to have a personal relationship with God. (Only boys had religious instruction leading to their bar mitzvah, there weren’t bat mitzvahs for girls there, at that time.)

Third, Dad had begun his acquaintanceship with Science and it contrasted sharply with the unproveables of the Bible he was memorizing, to recite for his twelfth birthday, when he would become a man, in a traditional rite in Massachusetts, but as a young teen, had as he said, gone from reading fairy tales to reading about the new scientific wonders, like ham radio.

He had his bar mitzvah at age twelve only to please his devout Jewish mother, he told us. (His Dad had gone blind, and passed away.)

Thus, in the midst of many Jewish people, in the Bronx, my older sister Kerry and I were not inculcated with Jewish beliefs, although our parents maintained the virtues of honesty, loyalty and love. My Dad kept to Jewish tradition in being totally faithful to Mom, and would never eat milk and meat together, nor eat lobster or other forbidden foods.

Though he knew that was illogical, he maintained a Jewish menu all his life -- out of habit, I believe.

One summer, when all my Christian schoolmates went to Bible Study, I begged my parents to let me go, too. They were offering Jewish Bible Study free, too, and they finally agreed to let me go. I learned how to read the Hebrew letters, and at the end of the summer, I was delighted to receive a tiny little Hebrew book for perfect attendance.

We read the Jewish prayer for the Sabbath evening, Fridays when the day of rest begins and a Jewish man’s wife recites it, lighting two candles and saying, Baruch ataw Adonai Elohenu .... I had no idea what it meant.

I learned to pronounce the prayers we were taught, but I don’t recall their ever explaining what these prayers meant.

There was nothing in that summer session about who God was, or our relationship with Him. I suppose they thought our parents were teaching us about God, whose name must never be spoken aloud, it was so holy.

We learned to recite and read in Hebrew the prayer that a Jewish man’s wife said on Friday evening that began the Sabbath day, Saturday, the day of rest.

[God created the world in six days and on the seventh day He rested from His labors.] Genesis 2:1-3

[God set apart the day as a day of rest.] Genesis 2:3

My parents didn’t rest on Saturday; they worked hard and took no vacations till they retired. They’d walk in the evenings, after work, if it wasn’t raining, and that was their recreation along with a weekend visit to the (free) Bronx Zoo or Bronx Botanical Gardens. All four of us would go then, and at 5 PM each week my father would listen to The Shadow on his new portable transistor radio. Hush, children, Mom would say, Daddy’s listening to the radio.

When Bubby Sonia, my Dad’s mother, came to stay with us, she said the Sabbath prayer in her room, and we could see her arms raised over her two candles; she wouldn’t handle money on that holy day.

At age ten, we (like all our Jewish school chums) were given a pendant on a fine silver chain, with a little silver container of the Ten Commandments that I really liked. True, I couldn’t have told you what the Ten Commandments were, but it was pretty and somehow special. It was something that said to the world, just as others wore a cross, showing they’re Christian, I can wear this, showing I’m Jewish, and I need not be afraid, living in a free country.

My folks may not have been religious but they were patriotic and very grateful their parents had had the courage to come to America.

There was virtually no prejudice in our New York neighborhood heavily populated with first and second-generation Jews like ourselves. I used to frequently see students from the local Catholic School who wore blue and green plaid skirts and vests I wished I could wear to school. One winter day two little girls my age (eight) stopped me as I came home and asked if I were Jewish. Yes, I said, wondering if they could recite the alphabet backwards, a feat I’d heard Catholic students could do.

They asked me in a perfectly friendly way to take my hat off so they could see my horns.

What? They weren’t hostile, just curious. They explained they’d been told Jews had horns -- like the devil. (I doubt if they’d been taught this at School, but probably heard some rumors from older children and made this conclusion.)

There weren’t any movies in those days like The Passion, Mel Gibson’s creation, and in that year, 1941, we were at war with the Nazis, so Hollywood produced many war films that featured an American team that was fighting for us -- a team that comprised an all-American white hero and a Catholic, a Jew, and a Black man. Tolerance was promoted and even women were appreciated publicly as Rosie the Riveters.

I was puzzled and shocked by the eight year old pair in their neat uniforms, who thought because I was Jewish, I must have horns. I walked away, sensing some sort of danger, though they’d seemed perfectly friendly. In my entire childhood, there was only one similar incident in the playground. There were so many other things to occupy my mind, I didn’t try to figure it out.

In the winter, when it snowed, my sister and I went to the nearby vacant lot and built an igloo. In the spring, there was the tiny stunted apple tree that burst into fragrant pink and white blossoms where it grew just behind a wooden fence protecting pedestrians from a high cliff. Each spring, I’d crawl out to take part of a little branch in a neighborhood that was 95% concrete and brick -- no lawns, trees, or flowers. The ledge behind the fence was about a foot wide, and I felt perfectly safe. Of course, I never told my busy mother!

My piano teacher’s upscale apartment house was the only one landscaped. Around it, and on the adjoining steps, were banks of lavender-hued lilacs. They looked and smelled wonderful, and each summer I’d help myself to one or two branches with big blossoms on them. I’d never been told Thou shalt not steal was one of the Ten Commandments but I knew it was wrong to steal and I kept my theft secret from my parents.

We didn’t have a lot of toys, but got packages of hand-me-down clothing from our better-off cousins in Florida. Rarely did we go shopping when things were on sale at the big Alexander’s clothing-store, in walking distance. I knew there must be a connection between this store and the song my Dad played on the piano frequently -- Alexander’s Ragtime Band, but I couldn’t figure out what it was, and never asked.

When I was a teen-ager, my father’s mother, Bubby [Grandma] Sonia, came to live with us for a couple of years in our Bronx apartment, and she had her own room. She was sweet but so different, with her broken English (she spoke Russian, German and I think Polish.) That and her religious beliefs and food customs seemed so alien that I rarely talked to her. In later years I wished I had!

My mother looked like a short version of Ingrid Bergman. (Mom was only