By Ali Ikram
Morrinsville will play host to the fourth New Zealand Pagan Festival, starting Friday.
Official statistics show that thousands of Kiwis follow the pagan way of life.
Nightline met with a member of the Order of the Oriental Templars, a secretive group that once counted infamous British occultist Aleister Crowley amongst its numbers.
Lionel Snell was dressed like an accountant on holiday. He's what's known as a 'chaos magician', and while he's used to people thinking that's a bit odd, so are a lot of things.
"Where I come from in England, there were these people who would meet in a temple where there was a field surrounding it where dead bodies were buried, and they'd kneel down in front of images of human torture and degradation and pretend to drink human blood and eat flesh," says Mr Snell.
"That, word for word, is an accurate description of a Church of England ceremony, but it complete misses the point."
Under the pen name Ramsay Dukes, Mr Snell wrote some occult classics. He also was a school master at Eton - the only time his studies into magic caused a problem he says was when he taught a student the art of hypnotism.
"About a fortnight later there was this front page headline in the Daily Telegraph, something like 'Witchdoctor magic at Eton', as he'd hypnotised a boy and sent him walking down the corridor."
Mr Snell will be a star turn at the festival.
Organisers says paganism is so hot right now.
"We have school teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, police officers," says organiser Tracey Royce.
In fact, in the last census there were over 1800 wiccans, spiritualists and druids resident in New Zealand.
But with nudity banned at the festival, surely Satan still has a place in the grand scheme of things?
"There are groups who address the dark side and they form a relationship with it," says Mr Snell. "They find it useful, it's very unlikely to be throwing yourself at the feet of the dark side."
Where would he put himself in that continuum?
"Somewhere in the middle, I think," he laughs.
While we wanted to know more about the order of the Oriental Templars, sadly Mr Snell had taken a vow of silence.
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