Don’t Eat the Incense: Children in Ritual

Erin’s daughter Aisling was not quite two years old when Erin began her solitary practice of Wicca. Raised in a vaguely Protestant home, Erin had been curious about other religions from an early age and had visited a number of different churches as a child, but she found these experiences unfulfilling. What she found in these churches, for the most part, she describes as “hypocrites, manipulators, judgmental people, many unloving ways, women haters, tricksters.”¹ Erin tried several other spiritual paths, briefly deciding that she was an atheist before finally joining a Unitarian Universalist church, where she was introduced to contemporary