I don’t need the Hollywood hype machine to tell me when the newest Harry Potter movie is to be released at my neighborhood cineplex. All I have to do is listen for the sound of the Rev. Douglas Taylor and his “Jesus Party” followers sharpening up their scissors in Lewiston for their annual public Potter protest and book-shredding spectacle.

Taylor staged such an event last year in Kennedy Park on the day before the debut of the “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” movie. Now he’s announced to the press that he’ll hold an “Anti-Harry Potter Conference” today, the eve of the release of the film version of J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster sequel “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.”

The reverend, who is convinced that the enormously popular fantasies will lead children into a life of witchcraft and assorted evildoings, has invited parents, school board members, librarians, teachers, booksellers and clergy to join the Potter protest and learn all about modern witches and their spells and incantations. At the end, he promises, everyone will have the chance to join in a mass exorcism-by-scissors of “The Chamber of Secrets” book, which he insists is nothing less than a training manual for young occultists.

When I read about this year’s protest, I summoned Judith Monroe, who lives in Hallowell and happens to know a thing or two about modern witches right here in Maine. She wrote a fantasy novel about them several years ago. Called “Widdershins,” it’s the tale of a few witches who bring their good magic to bear on a small Maine island and the residents who hope to preserve the natural beauty of the land. For research, Monroe studied the history of witches and the Christian hysteria that caused the death and imprisonment of thousands of herbalists, midwives and other innocent elderly women in the Dark Ages. She also befriended several Maine witches.

“And I liked every one of them,” said Monroe, who is 71 and a professional harpist.

By the way, she noted, none of her witch friends were warty-nosed crones cloaked in black. They tended to be white, well-educated, upper-middle-class women – artists, musicians, scholars and writers, wives, mothers and grandmothers, who found the source of their spirituality in the feminine, nurturing qualities of the natural world rather than in more traditionally patriarchal religions. If they owned cauldrons, they probably used them to bake beans or make chowder. In fact, Wiccans can be so average-looking that people like Taylor wouldn’t even know if he bumped into one with his grocery cart at the Shop ‘n Save.

If modern witches tend to keep their nontraditional beliefs to themselves, she said, it’s because they’d have a devil of a time trying to convince certain people they’re not the bizarre Satanists they’ve been suspected of being for centuries.

“The ones I’ve known are very bright, environmentally concerned women who have a reverence for the planet and care about all living things as decent people do,” Monroe said. “They won’t hurt you.”

Rather than chop up harmlessly entertaining kids’ books to exorcise demons that don’t exist, she said, Taylor could better use his ministry to help promote a spirit of tolerance among those Lewiston residents who are openly resentful of the Somalian refugees who have recently settled in that city.

“Intolerance should worry us more than anything,” she said. “Now that really is scary.”