A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner, with 20 printings and 290,000 copies in print, the company has successfully launched many new Wicca titles. Last year, Llewellyn debuted its attractively illustrated Witches' Calendar 1998, which sold more than 90,000 copies. This year, the company is selling a 1999 Witches' Calendar, along with a spiral-bound Witches' Datebook. In the 1990s, movies about wicked witches have been far outnumbered by those portraying witches as benign, or even hip. Both stars studied books about witchcraft as they prepared for their roles.
Witches also seem to be in touch with popular tastes.
One can find Wiccan accents in the music of Tori Amos, and in recent print advertising campaigns for Cover Girl makeup and Finesse shampoo. Some universities and divinity programs now offer degrees in Goddess spirituality. And the Internet is teeming with witchcraft-related sites, many of which help connect online seekers with local covens. And while Salem, Mass., may have been the hotbed of witchcraft during the heyday of the infamous witch trials of the 1690s, in which nearly two dozen women lost their lives, San Francisco Chronicle religion writer Don Lattin says California has provided fertile ground for Wicca during the past two decades. While she finds some of pop culture's treatment of witches cliched and superficial, she believes most of it is beneficial.