10/17/2026
Counsel for the Craft: Phyllis Curott and the Fight for Religious Recognition
On January 15, 1985, Judy Harrow was finally allowed to sign New York City’s clergy register. She had spent almost five years seeking permission to perform marriages for members of her Wiccan congregation. At one point, according to a contemporary account in Liberty magazine, a clerk questioned why the Covenant of the Goddess should receive the same treatment as St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “Well, you don’t think you’re the same as they are, do you?” the clerk asked.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Harrow replied.
The New York Civil Liberties Union helped press the case. The city’s Corporation Counsel issued an opinion supporting registration in July 1984, but the clerk’s office did not inform Harrow. A reporter discovered the opinion months later. Only after Harrow confronted the office with it was she permitted to register.
Phyllis Curott, a New York lawyer and Wiccan priestess, later described serving as counsel to the Wiccans in the 1985 dispute, with the NYCLU’s assistance. Religious-liberties work would become a substantial part of her career. She was prepared to identify herself publicly as a Witch and to represent people whose religious practices government officials sometimes found difficult to take seriously.
Her commitment to civil rights preceded her involvement in Witchcraft. Curott describes her father as a union organizer and her mother as a community organizer for the NAACP. She studied philosophy at Brown, earned a law degree at New York University, and went into legal practice. In her account of those years, she was working on union corruption cases in New York while managing a rock band at night.
She also encountered a group of women practicing Witchcraft. Their invitation initially made her uncomfortable, and she declined. Eventually she joined them and undertook several years of study. She dates her priesthood to 1981 and her public identification as a Witch to 1983. She founded the Temple of Ara, where she developed her own approach to Wiccan practice and the training of clergy.
Curott’s account of her conversion emphasizes experiences she understood as encounters with the divine. She describes dreams, premonitions, and a growing conviction that the natural world was sacred. A reader need not share those convictions to understand the problem she faced as an attorney: officials could mistake their disbelief in a religion for a reason to deny its adherents ordinary rights.
In 1993, Curott attended the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago as First Officer of the Covenant of the Goddess. The Greek Orthodox delegation withdrew after protesting the inclusion of Witches. Curott was among the Wiccan participants whose presence the delegation opposed.
A separate dispute arose over permission to hold a full-moon ritual in a public park. Curott’s later account makes a distinction that more celebratory versions tend to overlook. The first application requested hours when the park was closed. She acknowledged that the city could legitimately refuse it. The applicants corrected the hours, but the city denied permission again, even though other religious groups had been allowed to worship there.
With assistance from the local ACLU, the group challenged the refusal and obtained a permit. Curott, who described herself as both an attorney and a plaintiff in the dispute, reported that more than 700 clergy and practitioners from different faiths attended the ritual.
Her argument did not require an exemption from the park’s rules. It required officials to apply those rules consistently.
Book of Shadows, published in 1998, brought her religious life to a much wider audience. The memoir described her introduction to Wicca and her efforts to reconcile spiritual experiences with a professional life that offered little encouragement to discuss them. Its author was a practicing attorney explaining why she had become a priestess, with enough detail about ritual and belief to let readers consider the religion beyond its public reputation.
Curott understood the advantage her education gave her. “It gave me tremendous credibility,” she told The New York Times, referring to Brown and NYU. The newspaper reported that five publishing companies had competed for the memoir. Those credentials helped secure attention for a subject that she knew many readers would dismiss.
The Los Angeles Times even reassured readers that she had a “full set of teeth.” The condescension was hard to miss.
Curott continued writing about practice as well as defending the right to practice. Witch Crafting examined the reasoning behind rituals and spells, including their ethical implications. She has rejected the Wiccan Rede and the Threefold Law as the foundations of her own teaching. Her alternative emphasizes the sacredness of nature and the obligations that follow from belonging to an interdependent living world. Whatever one makes of that theology, her books make clear that she was willing to question teachings within Wicca as well as misconceptions about it.
She also remained involved with the Parliament. By 2015 she was its vice chair and had created its inaugural Women’s Assembly. She drafted the Declaration for the Dignity and Human Rights of Women adopted at that gathering. The declaration challenged religious leaders to confront teachings and practices used to justify discrimination against women and girls. It asked them to accept women’s equal participation in decisions affecting their lives, including decisions within religious institutions.
This work required more than securing recognition for her own community. It meant asking other religious communities to examine how they exercised authority, particularly over women. Her willingness to work with them did not prevent her from criticizing the harms she believed religion could sanction.
In 2021, Curott served as the Parliament’s program chair. Pope Francis sent a blessing, and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew addressed the closing plenary, where Curott also spoke. Neither contribution explicitly endorsed Wicca, a limitation she acknowledged afterward. Even so, the gathering now entrusted a Wiccan priestess with organizing its program, nearly three decades after a delegation had withdrawn over Wiccan participation.
She held the program chair’s role again when the Parliament returned to Chicago in 2023. That gathering emphasized the defense of freedom and human rights against authoritarianism. Curott’s work had become part of a broader interfaith effort, although the practical concerns of religious minorities remained important to her.
Asked about acceptance in her 2021 interview with The Wild Hunt, she spoke about custody disputes and the fear of losing a job because of one’s religion. “I’ll be able to say we’re accepted by the mainstream when we’re no longer battling to keep custody of our kids,” she said. The recognition she sought had to extend to people who would never publish a memoir or speak at an international religious gathering.
Sources
Scott James, [“By the Power Invested In Me,” Liberty, July–August 1985, pp. 2–3](https://tomrue.net/by-the-power). Contemporary reporting on Harrow’s registration, the NYCLU’s involvement, and the city’s legal opinion, reproduced in Tom Rue’s archive.
Phyllis Curott, [“The Religious Rights of Wiccans and Pagans,” Beliefnet](https://www.beliefnet.com/faiths/2000/06/the-religious-rights-of-wiccans-and-pagans.aspx). Curott’s firsthand account of her role in the New York clergy dispute and the Chicago permit dispute.
Phyllis Curott, [“Perspective, Passion & Purpose”](https://www.phylliscurott.com/perspective-passion-purpose). Her account of her parents, early legal work, involvement in music, and introduction to Witchcraft.
Howcast, [“Wiccan Priestess Phyllis Curott”](https://howcast.com/videos/513907-wiccan-priestess-phyllis-curott-wicca/). Video transcript in which Curott dates her priesthood to 1981 and her public identification as a Witch to 1983.
Parliament of the World’s Religions, [“Women’s Task Force”](https://parliamentofreligions.org/womens-dignity/womens-task-force/). Institutional biography documenting her education, vice-chair role, and creation of the 2015 Women’s Assembly.
Phyllis Curott, [“About Phyllis”](https://www.phylliscurott.com/about-phyllis). Her account of the Temple of Ara, her theological positions, and her authorship of the women’s declaration.
Penguin Random House, [Witch Crafting](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/35718/witch-crafting-by-phylis-curott/). Publisher’s description of the book’s treatment of Wiccan practice and its alternative to the Threefold Law.
Doreen Carvajal, [“Better Living Through Sorcery; New Broom Sweeps Witches’ World,” The New York Times, October 26, 1998](https://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/26/books/better-living-through-sorcery-new-broom-sweeps-witches-world.html). Contemporary reporting on Book of Shadows, the publishing auction, and Curott’s comments about her education.
Mary Rourke, [“She’s Got That Old-Time Religion: Witchcraft,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1998](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-03-ls-18966-story.html). The source of the description quoted in the piece.
Antonio Pagliarulo, [“Historic Parliament of World’s Religions,” The Wild Hunt, November 4, 2021](https://wildhunt.org/2021/11/historic-parliament-of-worlds-religions.html). Reporting and an interview covering the 1993 withdrawal, Curott’s 2021 program role, and her assessment of religious acceptance.
Parliament of the World’s Religions, [“Rev. HPs. Phyllis Curott Leads Welcome Ceremony at the Women’s Assembly,” 2023](https://parliamentofreligions.org/2023-chicago/rev-hps-phyllis-curott-leads-welcome-ceremony-at-the-womens-assembly/). Transcript of her address and the declaration’s demands concerning women’s rights and religious authority.
Associated Press, [“A Throng of Interfaith Leaders to Focus on Combating Authoritarianism at Global Gathering in Chicago,” 2023](https://apnews.com/article/parliament-world-religions-chicago-interfaith-c45b6f2332f8f6d429c8a403b640277d). Independent confirmation of Curott’s 2023 program-chair role and the gathering’s principal concerns.
