Laurie Cabot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is missing citations and/or footnotes. This article or section may use words or ideas of other works in its text without citing sources. Using citations to support claims outside the realm of elementary knowledge helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies. Please improve the article or discuss this issue on the talk page. Help on using footnotes is available. This article has been tagged since December 2006.

Laurie Cabot is an American Wiccan high priestess, and was one of the first people to popularize Wicca in the United States. She is the author of such books as The Power of the Witch, and also founded the Cabot Tradition of the Science of Witchcraft and the Witches' League for Public Awareness. In the 1970s, Cabot was declared the "official witch of Salem, Massachusetts", by then-Governor Michael Dukakis, to honor her work with special needs children.

She continues to reside in Salem, where she owns a shop called The Cat, the Crow, and the Crown. Cabot claims to be related to the prominent Boston Brahmin Cabot family. She is perhaps the most high-profile self-proclaimed witch in Massachusetts. She is a part of Salem lore, and a bona-fide local celebrity in that city and throughout Boston's North Shore.

[edit] Life and career

Laurie Cabot was born Mercedes Elizabeth Kearsey in 1933 in Weewoka, Oklahoma. She grew up in California and came back east to New England as a teenager. She maintains that her interest in the occult began in childhood. She developed this interest in Boston as she became a young woman haunting the halls of the Boston Public Library.

During the 1950s Cabot worked as a dancer in a nightclub called "The Latin Quarter" in Boston's notorious "Combat Zone," the city's red light district. She married twice, with each marriage producing a daughter, Jody Cabot and Penny Cabot, respectively. She chose to raise her daughters as witches, and dressed her younger girl mainly in black when the two would be seen in public. This was during the 1970s and her eccentricities regarding the decisions she made for her daughter attracted some degree of ridicule. She is currently searching for one daughter ([1]) while apparently estranged from the other ([2]).

Laurie Cabot opened the first "witch shop" in Salem in the 1970s, as Salem started to become a tourist destination. At present time, there are numerous such shops throughout downtown Salem, but it was Laurie Cabot who was the trailblazer so far as these businesses are concerned. Her shop sold herbs, jewelry, Tarot card decks, and other occult accoutrements. She later relocated her shop to an old gambrel-roofed house on Essex Street. This new shop was named "Crow Haven Corner" and was successful for a time. The store is still open, though no longer owned or managed by any member of the Cabot family (formerly, her eldest daughter Jody had operated this shop). Cabot still maintains a shop in Salem, on Pickering Wharf. She is as well-known for her businesses, lectures and books. Laurie Cabot has been a guest on both "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and on Phil Donahue's talk show in the late 1980s. [3]

[edit] Incidents and controversies

Laurie Cabot is also known for her sometimes controversial behavior. There was a legal situation in the mid 1990s in which Cabot allegedly threatened local real estate agent, Janet Andrews, with her gun ([4]). She was later ordered to give up her gun ([5]).

She garnered more notoriety in 2004 when Salem Police came to her home in order to remove her adolescent grandson --Jody's only child-- from the home ([6]). Both incidents were covered by local and national press and even featured on CNN.

A policeman claimed that during the latter incident Cabot ordered him to look into her eyes, telling him he was cursed once he did ([7]). Cabot denies she ever cursed the policeman, stating that performing harmful witchcraft goes against her public statements regarding wicca, or witchcraft. She has steadily maintained that witchcraft is never meant to be employed to cause harm or destruction.

[edit] External links

• Laurie Cabot's official website
• Article: Police: Witch Put Hex On Department, Cabot Says 'I Don't Do Curses'
• Laurie Cabot biography