They do, however, get a load of publicity, in blockbuster films and at Halloween balls, though the tricks, treats and TV images of witchcraft are a far cry from the real thing.

Witchcraft today is nothing if not diverse, and perhaps the main link between hundreds of thousands of male and female witches is their participation in what some observers call one of the fastest growing religions in the West.

A witch today is more likely to sport a tattoo than a wart at the tip of the nose, more apt to champion the rights of an animal than to boil it down to the bone in a bubbling cauldron.

A Wiccan - the name for a revived and popular form of witchcraft - may also have more in common with TV star sensation "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" than with a hag whose wrinkles alone would send Hollywood denizens screaming in terror.

So goes the unmaking of an age-old tale, the folklore of generations.

"It's very eclectic", said Michaud, alias Athenos, who leads a coven in the city of Metz. "Wicca isn't just a bunch of sorcerers. Bringing back our ties to nature is very important to us."

Like most new religions, "Traditional Wicca" is crafted from different ancient beliefs, and shaped into structured tenets by a modern founder. Gerald Gardner's post-war books are the modern witch's canon, re-establishing the practice of coven groupings and initiations, or the individual teaching of witchcraft, by priests and priestesses.

Deeply opposed to religious hierarchy and gender inequality, Wicca ascribes divinity to both a God and Goddess -- but witches can also believe in as many gods, local or universal, as they wish.

"You don't have to be Wiccan to be a witch. You can be Buddhist! We have people in our community who are Jewish," Traci Laird, part of a 300-strong witches' group in Texas, said. "Witchcraft is a mystical side of religion, of spirituality."

In the United States, 134,000 people identified themselves as Wiccans for a respected religious survey undertaken by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001.

With its decidedly 21st-century ethos and politics - not to mention its dabbling in rites from Celts, Druids, Ancient Egyptians, Paganism and Old Norse - Wicca sounds like a New Age mantra, but many witches reject the association outright.

"It's a bunch of mish-mash," Michaud said. "The French Wicca is much more realistic than that."

The Wiccan coven, he pointed out, is a forum for serious teaching, describing the traditional three-step initiation from initiated member, to priest, to high priest, as "a little like getting one's driver's license."

After three years of study, with "very scientific, very rational" instructors, Michaud has begun his own coven, which in turn focuses most of its efforts on initiating newer witches into secret rituals, including rites and spells that can heat up a love affair, or clinch a coveted business deal.

His spellwork comes at a price -- set by the customer -- since "we've got to stop kidding ourselves, these (spell materials) cost money!"

Love spells are always popular. They can be as simple as one rite that calls for a love seeker to braid three pastel-colored strings together, then think strongly of the beloved tying a knot. A series of seven knots are tied in succession, and the braid is worn until love is found, when it must either be kept safe or burnt to ashes and scattered in streams or the open seas.

The Book of Shadows, an individualized collection of rites and spells for everything from divination to astrology and herbology, is also shared among witches of a coven.

Key to the Wiccan creed is the Goddess, recentering a female divinity in contrast with traditionally male-oriented Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

"Women were always on the second rung (in monotheistic religion)...on the periphery, oppressed" Michaud acknowledged. "In Wicca, they have found a religion of their own."

For the women at the Tejas Web Witch Camp, who in this week of Samhain (the pre-modern and newly re-used name for the Celtic New Year) are riding the hills of central Texas on horses, not broomsticks, the "reclaiming" of an identity as a witch is both political and spiritual.

They are part of a larger Reclaiming movement, which runs camps in Britain, Canada and Germany, rooted in a deep eco-feminism aiming to reconnect humans with nature, and women to the divine.

Laird, one of the Tejas witch camp organizers, described the transformative moment of becoming a Wiccan: "As I have embraced the term 'witch' it has become an extremely empowering process. Reclaiming a name for women which has been maligned and feared, I sense a stepping into my own power, as a woman."

But for all their strength in numbers, their egalitarian creed and the downright good sense of their one binding law -- inflict no harm upon others -- witches are sorely in need of an image boost.

Some laymen still believe they work to do evil, and that they use infamous "diabolic" texts like France's "The Secrets of the Great Albert", a tome of practical folklore and spells dismissed by French witches as "chock-full of errors" and a quaint homage to a 13th-century Dominican scholar and dabbler in alchemy.

"Wicca is very little known in France," said Michaud, even while acknowledging "those who know are adolescents who watch 'Charmed' or 'Sabrina'," two other TV shows starring a couple of comedy witches.

Buffy, her TV peers, and the wild worldwide popularity of films like J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and the superficially mystical "The Matrix" have sent thousands of teens to witch web sites seeking kinship and answers.

They find both on the Internet and in the real world of witches' "moots", held in local pubs and cafes, special meetings for teen witches, across camp bonfires, and behind the masks of a Samhain ball.