His father was an atheist and, Shiff says, tried to raise his children to be atheists, too. When Shiff’s family lived in a tiny Massachusetts town for a few years during his childhood, the next-door neighbors were Jewish. Shiff didn’t know that, though, until the day his neighbors awoke to find swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans scrawled across their door. Shiff’s father called him and his sisters to the dinner table and told them what happened. “I want to make it real clear to everybody: Don’t mention to anybody that you don’t believe in God,” Shiff remembers his father saying. “And if anyone asks, say you’re Christian.”
That’s how Shiff ended up spending a few years attending church and getting to know Christianity. But neither atheism nor monotheism felt right to him. So in his 20s, he started to dream up his own religion, drawing partly on the things he’d learned from his grandmother. But whenever he came across the ancient Egyptian religion in books or television shows, it seemed true. “I go, ‘This is kinda like what I was trying to create,’” Shiff says. “‘Only already fully developed and richer.’”
John Gilhooley
Kemetic Witchcraft blends millennia-old Egyptian theology with modern pagan practices
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His journey toward witchcraft happened in tandem with a career in computer programming. He specialized in “assembly language,” low-level code that is used to make systems work more efficiently. Shiff claims there are still satellites in orbit running programs he wrote. He also says he invented the “Quick Pick” button for California Lottery machines. But with the advent of faster computer systems, the need for assembly-language programmers dwindled—until Shiff’s greatest skill was one the world had no need for.
So, he got the job at Ralphs.
“Most customers know him by name, that should say something right there,” says Zachary Johnson, who has worked at Ralphs since before Shiff started in 2007. He and Shiff chat outside the store after Shiff’s Pick Up Stix meal. “Some people find his overt friendliness comical,” Johnson says after Shiff goes back on duty. “Some people, it’s a little too much for them.”
“He’s the kind of guy who whenever you see him, it makes you happy,” says Din Dalebout, a regular customer. “If he’s a witch, then we need more witches in the world.”
The customer-service environment is certainly different from what Shiff had dealt with before. For one thing, he’d never worked at a business where holidays are merchandising opportunities. And Shiff isn’t cool with most mainstream holidays. The Halloween witch decoration is the most egregious example, but Shiff was also asked to set up displays for St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday named for someone who, he says, was sainted for killing pagans. When he told a manager he didn’t want to complete the task because of his religion, a few co-workers raised eyebrows. Some hadn’t known he was a witch.
Ever since then, Shiff claims, a few of his fellow employees have harassed him for being a witch. Usually, he says, the taunts include the word “evil.”
* * *
There’s a term for going public with your paganism: “Coming out of the broom closet.” Like any other “closet” a person might come out of, the person doing the coming out should brace for strange glances and stranger questions.
Jamie Martinez Wood, a Costa Mesa-based Wiccan author, has heard a few of those questions: “‘Do you still fly around on brooms?’ ‘Can you make Lucy Liu fall in love with me?’” she recalls. “People laugh about what they don’t understand. People don’t understand witchcraft. Instead of taking the time to consider it carefully or intellectually, they respond from an emotional, closed-minded thing and just poke fun at it.”
Shiff points out that the religion faces a millennia-old legacy of mistrust from a much larger religion: Christianity. Witchcraft and spellcasting are denounced throughout the Bible—including a few calls for the death of those doing the castings. Pagans speak with solemnity about the “burning times,” when witches were killed, tortured and ridiculed (think Salem). Shiff says that’s why he takes such offense at the animatronic witch’s line about victimizing children: Likely unwittingly, the device’s manufacturer has been forwarding a myth used to justify oppression and murder of witches throughout history.
Fox, based at Wisconsin’s Circle Sanctuary, one of the country’s largest Wiccan churches, sees it in broader terms. “Across the ages, minority religions in a society often have had this harming of children, eating of children, attached to it as part of a way of oppressing minority beliefs,” she says. “Sometimes, it’s being applied to Christians in places where Christianity is a minority faith. Just because this slur is out there, this doesn’t mean any of these groups have done it.”
