“Hubert Humphrey Was a Vampire!”

“So you’re telling me,” I ask the Pope of Witches, “that Hubert Humphrey was a vampire?”

“Yes, he actually was. Hubert was a very interesting person.”

So says Carl Llewellyn Weschcke. We are sitting in his spacious office at the St. Paul headquarters of Llewellyn Worldwide, the largest independent occult publishing house in America. At age seventy-two, he’s a sage and grandfatherly figure, like a well-groomed Father Christmas or Albus Dumbledore. He has been president of Llewellyn for forty-three years. The ascendance of his company has both mirrored and fueled the rise of New Age from an obscure fringe phenomenon to the remarkably mainstream movement it is today. And because of his influence, the Twin Cities is one of the nation’s major pagan population centers. Just across town, in fact, the hugely popular Edge Fest conference kicks off later this month. Weschcke can take some small measure of credit—or blame, depending on your point of view.

The Weschcke family has for four generations combined business with an uncommon interest in unusual religions. Carl’s grandfather Charles was a successful pharmacist, patent-medicine inventor, and prominent theosophist who passed his views on to his son and grandson. As a young man, Carl felt his life’s work went somewhat beyond his grandpa’s herbal laxative, and in January 1960 he spent forty thousand dollars on a small mail-order astrology publisher, Llewellyn, and moved it from Los Angeles to St. Paul.

Unless he’s clairvoyant, Carl couldn’t have known how successful this would be. He tells me that if he’d only wanted to make money, he’d have done something else. But he was passionate about the occult, and he identified with the company so strongly that he literally took its name as his own. And his timing was perfect: Llewellyn may have been decidedly fringe in the Eisenhower era, but few people in the fifties guessed that the next decade would be…the sixties. Vision-questing hippies found their needs met in a steady stream of books with the distinctive crescent-moon logo on the spine.

In the late sixties and seventies, Carl Weschcke flourished as a sort of public emissary for Wicca, the ancient religion of witches and warlocks. Crowded gatherings at his bookstore, a former mortuary he dubbed “Gnostica,” snowballed into the first openly pagan public events in America, now remembered as the legendary “Gnosticons.” These were sort of Star Trek conventions for druids, psychics, witches, and astrologers, who flocked here from all over the world. He picked up that tongue-in-cheek papal moniker for his founding role in the Council of American Witches, a short-lived but influential cadre of occultists. Their main accomplishment—creating a thirteen-point statement defining Wiccan belief—was no small feat for a brand of faith with no central authority, and no moral precept other than “If it harm none, do what thou wilt.”

“That was the first time in this country that witches got together to try to hammer out something saying ‘This is the way we should act toward one another,’” says Magenta, a cofounder of the New Alexandrian Pagan Library in South Minneapolis. It was a vital statement of self-identity for New Age religion in the face of a mainstream that often equated nature worship with Satanism.

Still, Weschcke was willing, if not eager, to play the role of the eerie wizard around the press, who relished such an interesting character. Newspaper photos of him back in those days are often candlelit and spooky, his eyes owlishly peering out like a Midwestern Vincent Price. Articles describe secret initiation rituals into his coven at the notorious mansion on Summit Avenue, supposedly the state’s most haunted building, that was Weschcke’s home and corporate headquarters.

After his son, Gabe, was born, Carl decided to settle down a bit. He sold the mansion and discontinued the festivals. These days, he is relieved to have it all behind him. “I never enjoyed being in the limelight,” he insists. “But I did it because I felt I had to do it. I was a very shy person as a young boy, and basically reclusive. I did a lot of lecturing on behalf of Wicca, and some I felt very good about. I was on the Phil Donahue show once. And no, I didn’t enjoy it.”

Magenta credits Weschcke’s open lifestyle with helping to break down barriers not unlike those faced by gays and lesbians. “In the seventies and eighties, a lot of us weren’t willing to be out of the broom closet,” she says. “People were worried about losing jobs, losing houses, losing kids. But Carl was publishing the books, so he kind of had to be.”

The last decade has seen an enormous increase in the New Age audience. Llewellyn has thrived, especially in the burgeoning teen market, with books like Silver Ravenwolf’s The Solitary Witch. But the tarot cards are growing more insistent. Not today, but soon,Weschcke must face the inevitable: retirement. “I’ve got 10,000 books I haven’t read,” he said. “I’ve got books I’d like to write.”

Maybe one will be a Wiccan biography of HHH. Humphrey wasn’t a blood-drinking fiend, explains Carl, but more of an energy vampire. (This is a relief.) “I remember one time he was giving a speech in downtown St. Paul,” Weschke says. “There was the most drained man. He was pasty white. He’d been at it all day. And then he started talking. And you could see him absorbing vitality from the people. The more he talked, his cheeks got rosy, he got this vibrant energy, bouncing up and down. That’s a form of vampirism. It happens.”—Christopher Bahn