1. Every book mentioned in the text will be found in the Bibliography with publishing details.
2. The Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of the Temple of the East) is a ritual magic order of uncertain age. It was first mentioned in print in 1904; Aleister Crowley (according to his own version) became head of the British section in 1912; and in 1917 Theodor Reuss issued a Manifesto in Switzerland publicizing the Order. (See Francis King, The Secret Rituals of the O.T.O.)
1. These cords are for working ‘cord magic’, and each witch should have his or her own personal set. (They should not be confused with the one long and two short cords mentioned in the list above, which are used for binding the Postulant; we suggest that the coven should keep a separate set of these, to be used only at initiations.) One traditional use of a nine-foot cord was to tie it in a loop, put it over the athame stuck in the middle of the floor, pull the loop to its full (four feet six inches) length, and use it like a compass to draw the Magic Circle. Doreen says: ‘This of course would be in the old days when people had cottage floors of rammed earth. I suppose they could have used the white-handled knife or a piece of chalk to draw the actual circle, depending on the surface they were working on.’
2. One of our witches, a housewife who had to keep her Craft practice secret for a while, had as her athame and white-handled knife two knives among her kitchen equipment, identifiable only by herself; her pentacle was a particular silver dish in her display-cabinet; and so on. Such necessary secrecy, in persecution days, was of course the origin of the traditional witch’s broomstick — a magic riding-pole disguised as an ordinary household besom.
3. The Alexandrian practice is to use two cords only — a red cord for the neck and wrists and a white cord for the ankle. But Doreen tells us: ‘Our cords were usually red, the colour of life, but sometimes other colours were used, green, blue or black. No particular significance was attached to this, except that we preferred red if we could get it, but it was not so easy then to get good suitable silk cord.’
4. This resembles a feature of the Masonic initiation, as does the presenting of a point to the Postulant’s breast.
5. Of Gardner’s texts, this only appears in High Magic’s Aid. The Alexandrian ritual uses it, but as an order later when the two ankles are bound together — clearly the wrong place.
6. If the Initiator is the High Priest, this may be felt a suitable occasion to add Drawing Down the Sun (see Section VI) to the traditional ritual.
7. The Cabalistic Cross is pure Golden Dawn (see Israel Regardie, The Golden Dawn, 3rd edition, Vol. 1). It appears in Gardner’s text, ‘but in practice I do not remember us ever doing this’, Doreen tells us. We include it here for completeness, but we do not use it at initiations either; like many witches, we often use Cabalistic magic, but feel it is out of context in something as traditionally Wiccan as an initiation rite. Malkuth, Geburah, and Gedulah (otherwise Chesed) are of course sephorith of the Tree of Life, and the Hebrew declamation means literally, ‘For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever’ — an interesting hint that Jesus knew his Cabala. Some Cabalists believe that it was this knowledge, even when he was a boy, that astonished the doctors in the Temple (Luke ii, 46-7).
8. High Magic’s Aid gives this form; Text B gives ‘Perfect love for the Goddess, perfect trust in the Goddess’. We prefer the shorter form, because it also implies love and trust within the coven, and can be quoted and held up as a standard to be maintained.
9. High Magic’s Aid gives this form; Text B gives ‘Ye dread lords and gentle goddesses’. Since the Lords of the Watchtowers are the recognized guardians of the cardinal points and have been summoned in the Circle-casting ritual, we prefer the High Magic’s Aid form. The Postulant’s ordinary name is used here; a witch name is not taken until the second degree.
10. Or whatever God- and Goddess-names the coven uses. (See our comments on the names Cernunnos and Aradia).
11. The Gardner texts are the same for both sexes: ‘breasts, formed [or erected] in beauty and strength.’ Doreen explains: ‘This was an allusion to the human body as a form of the Tree of Life, with Gedulah on one side and Geburah on the other.’ We prefer ‘breasts, formed in beauty’ for a woman and ‘breast, formed in strength’ for a man; these are more in keeping with the Fivefold Kiss as a salute of male/female polarity, and with the essentially Wiccan (rather than Cabalistic) tone of the other four statements.
12. Elsewhere the Book of Shadows says that while he is kneeling the Initiate’s cable-tow should be tied to a ring on the altar.
13. This is our own addition to the Book of Shadows list of presentations: we make it for the reasons we give in Leaves from The Book of Shadows.
14. High Magic’s Aid merely says ‘priest and witch’, and Text B ‘priest[ess] and witch of the Great Goddess’. For once, we rather prefer the Alexandrian form.
1. Gardner says it is possible that the stories of Ishtar and of Siva may have influenced the myth, ‘but the point of the story is different…. I think that its origin is most likely Celtic.’ (Witchcraft Today)
2. This is the traditional wording of the presentation to the Watchtowers; but a High Priestess is not otherwise referred to as a ‘Witch Queen’ until she has a coven of her own plus at least two others hived off from it. (See Eight Sabbats for Witches, Plate 15.)
3. Text C merely says: ‘Circle three times. Secure.’ But if the High Priestess prefers, there is no reason why the Witches’ Rune should not be chanted during the circling, which in that case continues until the Rune is finished.
4. This questioning and spanking, by the Initiator and then the coven, is an Alexandrian addition. We include it here because we use it ourselves. We find it introduces a stimulating change of pace between the two solemnities of the ritual scourging and the Oath, and also ensures that the entire coven will remember the new name. But it is a matter of choice. Text C runs without interruption: ‘I give thee a new name, — . Repeat thy new name after me, saying …’ Doreen Valiente comments on our custom: ‘This is just like the old custom of the Beating of the Bounds, when children were given a light blow or a smack to show them where the parish boundaries were; an old folk custom which I believe is still kept up in some places.’
5. It is sometimes our practice for Janet to call Stewart (or vice versa) to kneel on the other side of the Initiate to form the Magic Link as well, so that we can both will power into him or her together. On other occasions, whichever of us is the Partner will just reinforce the Initiator’s effort mentally, without moving. It is one of those cases in which a good working partnership will know intuitively what is right at the time.
6. Gardner did not describe these five points in words in his ritual; he showed them by a sketch.
7. Text C merely says ‘Use. S.’ (’S is the Book of Shadows shorthand for the kiss.) The candle-inscribing is our way of using it. The Initiate keeps the candle in a safe place, and when he founds his own coven, he lights it on the altar for the new coven’s first Circle and leaves it to burn out completely. Even if he never founds a coven of his own, he still keeps the candle as a token of his right to do so.
8. The Alexandrian practice is to carry the wand three times round the Circle, thus waving it to the cardinal points twelve times in all. The other tools are only carried round once. We do not know the reason for this.
9. We have added the Cup to the Book of Shadows list of presentations, as we did in the first-degree rite, for the reasons we give.
10. Text C is headed ‘The Magical Legend of A.’ and begins: ‘Now A. had never loved, but she …’. The Witchcraft Today version is headed ‘The Myth of the Goddess’ and begins: ‘Now G. had never loved, but she …’. ‘A.’ is the initial of the Goddess-name used by Gardner, and ‘G.’ merely stands for Goddess. There are many Goddess myths, and ‘The Legend of the Descent of the Goddess’ seems better as an identifying title. Covens may of course use their own Goddess-name instead of ‘our Lady the Goddess’ if they prefer.
11. The Gardner texts say ‘to the nether lands’ — one of Gardner’s rare bloomers, because it always comes out, comically, as ‘to the Netherlands’ — i.e., to Holland. We really do suggest that ‘to the Underworld’ is better, for this one reason.
12. Gardner added his own footnote here in the Book of Shadows: ‘There was a Celtic custom of binding corpses. The cord which had bound a corpse was useful in learning second sight.’ He repeated and amplified this statement in Witchcraft Today, Note 2.
1. The only published version of the Wiccan Law we know of appears as Appendix A to Alex Sanders’ biography King of the Witches (see Bibliography under Johns). There, it is quite wrongly entitled ‘The Book of Shadows’; but this is typical of the book as a whole, which is more interesting as a case-history than as a factual document. This version of the Law purports to date from the persecution days, but its antiquity and authenticity are highly dubious. It may, however, enshrine fragments of traditional material, and provided that the obviously out-of-date elements are ignored, many of its clauses offer a good working guide to coven procedure. Doreen shares our doubts; she says: ‘For one thing there is a distinct whiff of male chauvinism about it; and for another, it is rather fond of threatening and cursing people who disagree with it, like a preacher in a back-street tin chapel! The verses 51-80 inclusive used to be in old Gerald’s book, but not the rest.’ She also points out that it implies that witches were burned in England, whereas in fact they were hanged — ‘a little point that has tripped up many. I have never regarded this document as being authentic, personally; although as you say, it may enshrine fragments of traditional material handed down orally.’
2. The Text A version is very cryptic, Text B only slightly less so, and Text C merely appends the verse alternative. Most of the details were handed on by word of mouth. Gardner’s High Magic’s Aid alludes to the third-degree rite briefly, when the witch Morven tells the hero Jan: ‘When you are past the Pentacle [i.e., the second degree] ‘twill be my duty to tell you further mysteries, the Mystery of Mysteries, when you know what it consists of, we will speak further. ‘Tis not a thing to be lightly done.’ Doreen comments: ‘Anything further, and the publisher in those days [1949] might well have refused it!’ Leland’s Aradia states plainly that Tuscan witches used to ‘love in the darkness’ in honour of Diana, though this seems to have been celebratory rather than magical.
3. Referring to Gardner’s custom, Doreen Valiente tells us: ‘Although in theory the Great Rite could be performed and consummated before the assembled coven, in practice I do not remember ever being present when this was done. If others were present, then the Great Rite was done only in token … If the Great Rite was to be used actually to make magic, then it was always performed in private.’
4. The text simply says, ‘kisses both knees, extends arms along thighs and adores’.
5. The text says ‘is the male’ and ‘is the female’; but, for the reasons we give in note 4, we feel the correspondence is more complex than this, so we prefer to say ‘is to the male’ and ‘is to the female’. In blessing the wine, normally the Priest speaks the words; but for the Great Rite, Text B allots them to the Priestess, though for the blessing of the cakes it leaves the words to the Priest as usual.
6. The text says ‘Paten (Pentacle)’; some covens do serve the cakes on the pentacle, while others keep a special dish for the purpose.
7. In our normal blessing of the cakes, we use the shorter ending, ‘that fulfilment of love which is perfect happiness’; and this seems to have become a common form. The whole blessing (with the substitution of ‘Queen’ for ‘Lord’) was taken from Crowley’s Gnostic Mass, which uses the longer ending as given here. It may be felt that the longer form is appropriate to the special occasion of a Great Rite.
8. The text merely says ‘Scourge’, without specifying the number of strokes; probably the traditional 3, 7, 9, 21 is intended. We feel that, if the scourging is used at all, three strokes are quite enough.
9. We suggest ‘twice’ if the Priestess is second degree, now taking her third; ‘thrice’ if she is already third. Text B says ‘twice’, but Doreen Valiente thinks this refers to the number of scourgings undergone.
10. The text says after this: ‘Only said if Priestess has not prepared the rite before.’ We see no reason why it should not be used on every occasion.
11. Doreen’s note: ‘As the Fivefold Kiss was given, after the first kiss upon the feet, the Priestess opened her arms and stood with feet apart in the Pentacle or Goddess Position, holding the scourge and the athame. She thus impersonated both the God and the Goddess for a brief moment.’
12. Text A says, ‘Holy Twin Pillars, B. and J.’ This stands for Boaz and Jachin, the Masonic names for the twin pillars of Solomon’s Temple, representing the complementary principles of Severity and Mercy. The ‘B. and J.’ was dropped from Texts B and C. In this ritual, the ‘Holy Twin Pillars’ are the Priestess’s breasts, which are kissed at this point. (In the alternative form of the Great Rite which we gave in Eight Sabbats for Witches, because of the different positioning of the Priestess and the Priest, the Pillars are taken to be the Priestess’s legs.)
13. This sigil is known as the Crowned Pentagram. The pentagram itself is kissed in the order of the Invoking Pentagram of Earth, and the upright triangle is kissed deosil. Recalling the First Degree Sigil (the inverted triangle) and the Second Degree Sigil (the inverted pentagram), Doreen notes that they are combined in the Third Degree Sigil, ‘but no longer inverted; they are now both upright, in their true position. Also, it is a figure which has eight points and thirteen sides, both numbers important in the Craft. It could also be interpreted as “Two joined in One, upon the Five Points of Fellowship”. Or as the human being (the Pentagram) crowned with the Cone of Power.’ (Incidentally, Stewart would like to point out that the third-degree pentagram in Figure 7(c) of the first edition of What Witches Do was unfortunately printed the wrong way up.)
14. When the Great Rite is symbolic, some may prefer the alternative we gave in Eight Sabbats for Witches: namely that, instead of the Priest laying his body over the Priestess, a woman witch hands the Priest his athame, and a man witch hands the Priestess the chalice at this point in the declamation. The Priestess holds up the chalice, and the Priest holds the athame point downwards above it; on the words ‘Lance to Grail’, he lowers the point into the wine. After the declamation, he kisses her and she sips; she kisses him and he sips; and the wine is then passed round man-to-woman, woman-to-man, in the usual way. The Priest then addresses the Watchtowers as in the text.
15. Text B says ‘Genitals to genitals’; we find this somewhat clinical in the poetic context of the rest, and prefer Text C’s Lance-and-Grail metaphor. If the Great Rite is ‘actual’, this is obviously the intended moment of union; but equally obvious, one cannot dogmatize about so private a rite.
16. If the rite is ‘actual’, this is where the rest of the coven leave the room.
1. A piseog (pronounced ‘pish-oge’) is a deliberately malevolent charm, kind of debased rural voodoo, of which several cases have come to our attention when farmers have asked us to counteract their influence. It may be anything from an aborted calf foetus to a symbolic arrangement of feathers.
2. It must be remembered that a charged object may also maintain astral links with (for example) a previous owner — a principle made use of in the exchanging of linked talismans or, come to that, of wedding rings. One should also guard against such a link doing unintended harm. For instance, in a recent Circle Janet was wearing a lovely robe made for her as a present by an English witch friend. We were having to work psychically, and very intensively, for the neutralization and capture of a psychotic double murderer who was on the loose and causing great public alarm; and we took special care (since psychotics are astral dynamite) to protect ourselves against any backlash. Just before we began, Janet realized that the robe might form a link with our friend in England, who was unwarned and could be vulnerable. She immediately took the robe off and put it outside the Circle. (We had put a seven-day limit for our working to take effect; and coincidence or not, it was satisfactory that the man was found and arrested six days later, having done no further harm.)
3. The word Qabalah is variously transliterated from the Hebrew as Kabalah or Cabalah, all with or without a double ‘b’ or the final ‘h’. We have settled for Cabala; but where we are quoting someone else, as here, we respect their own choice.
4. See Appendix A for Doreen Valiente’s research into the facts about Dorothy Clutterbuck, the New Forest witch who initiated Gerald Gardner.
1. We would point out again that this does not mean that in Wiccan eyes the Goddess is ‘more important’ than the God; the two aspects are eternally equal and complementary. For a fuller explanation of Wicca’s matriarchal structure and its emphasis on the Goddess aspect, see Eight Sabbats for Witches, and also Section XV in the present book.
2. When making Invoking or Banishing Pentagrams, some covens include the sixth or ‘sealing stroke’, as shown here; others merely return to the starting point, omitting the sealing stroke, as was the Golden Dawn custom (see Eight Sabbats for Witches, footnote).
1. As we explained in Eight Sabbats for Witches, whenever anyone has to enter or leave a Circle, a ‘gateway’ must be ritually opened with a widdershins gesture, and re-closed after use with a deosil gesture. Normally this is done with a sword or athame, but on this occasion the wand may be suitably used.
1. By ‘vampiric tendencies’ we do not of course mean that your guest is likely to leap on you during the night and sink his Hammer Film teeth into your jugular. Witches and occultists use the term ‘vampire’ to describe a person who drains energy from those around him or her. Vampirism is not necessarily deliberate, or even conscious; and it may be a temporary condition. For example, elderly invalids are very prone to vampirize young children, and it is inadvisable to have both sleeping in the same house if it can be avoided. If it cannot, wise witch or occultist parents will take steps to protect the child psychically — by a Circle round the child’s bed, for example. Vampirism is one of the first phenomena one learns to detect as one trains one’s psychic abilities, we have found.
2. On this question of sealing the aura, a tip from Dion Fortune. Her heroine in Moon Magic tells how after a psychic attack she got out of bed and went to where the remains of supper lay on the table, ‘drank what was left of the milk and ate a sandwich, for there is nothing like food to close the psychic centres’. The converse of this, of course, is that positive psychic work may be less effective on a full stomach.
3. It is worth remembering that a mental Banishing Pentagram of Earth, strongly envisaged and coupled with the equally vigorous mental command ‘Go away!’, is one of the simplest and most effective ripostes to a psychic threat or an unwanted astral entity. We recommend our own witches to practise it so that it becomes almost a conditioned reflex to such situations. The first time that one of them made use of it in action was when he was dreaming so vividly and consciously that he knew he was astrally projecting; he found himself being approached by what he described as Various nasties’ of unpleasant appearance. He flung his Banishing Pentagram at them and ordered them to go away (with a rather pithier phrase than that). They all vanished into an image of a bank’s night safe and gave him no further trouble. He is still wondering about that unexpected symbolism! These simple responses are often more powerful than complicated ones. A favourite of Janet’s, when she is faced by an urgent problem to which she cannot see the answer, is to envisage the Goddess and cry ‘Help!’ It has worked time and again.
1. Pronounced ‘Reeah, Beenah, Gee’ (with a hard ‘g’ as in ‘gate’). Rhea was the primordial Greek Goddess who was the mother of Zeus; it was a pre-Classical, Cretan name, and the deep cave where she is said to have borne Zeus and hidden him from his jealous father Cronos may still be visited high in the Cretan mountains. Binah is the Supernatural Mother sephira on the Tree of Life, which receives the pure directionless energy of Chokmah, the Supernal Father, and gives it form; the Hebrew word means ‘Understanding’. Ge is the Greek word for Earth, and also for the Earth-Goddess herself. The Sea Priestess gives ‘Ea’ instead of ‘Rhea’ throughout; Ea was the Assyro-Babylonian God of the Water element and of supreme wisdom. Dion Fortune may have decided later that a male God-name, however elementally appropriate, was not quite right for this essentially Goddess poem, because in the sequel Moon Magic (in which various verses of the poem also appear) she replaced it with ‘Rhea’; and for our Goddess ritual we have followed her example.
2. Pronounced ‘Shadd-eye el Ch’eye’ — both words rhyming with ‘high’, and the ‘ch’ guttural as in the Scottish ‘loch’. Shaddai el Chai, or Shaddai el Chaiim (’Supreme Lord of Life’ or ‘of Lives’), is the God-Aspect of the sephira Yesod on the Tree of Life in the World of Atziluth; or, in simple terms, the Moon function of the ultimate Life Principle.
3. If she is skyclad, or in a swimsuit or bikini, she may of course go in farther and actually wade out of the sea; this is naturally more dramatic.
1. We say ‘as far as land animals are concerned’ because modern research produces increasing evidence that cetaceans (whales, including the dolphin, which is a small whale) have a level of consciousness which may be comparable to our own, but which has so far gone unrecognized because it has developed a very different ‘shape’ from ours, thanks to their different environment, different reaction-to-danger problems and different (and in some ways superior) sensory awareness. They have a sophisticated method of communication which many researchers believe has the complexity of a true ‘language’. They look after their sick, teach their young manners and have a marked sense of humour. Some whales even produce ‘songs’ lasting as long as half an hour which they repeat almost exactly on later occasions, of a complexity in terms of ‘informational bits’ which Carl Sagan has compared to that of The Odyssey or the Icelandic Eddas.For an absorbing survey of the field, read Mind in the Waters (see Bibliography under McIntyre). But even assuming that whales have consciousness comparable to that of man, our point about homo sapiens being the spearpoint of Earth’s evolution remains. Whales as we know them have been around for twenty-five million years or so, and in their simpler environment seem to have achieved a balanced and integrated consciousness which minds its own business, so to speak, without crucially affecting the rest of Nature. Homo sapiens, on the other hand, has been around for only half a million years and is at a revolutionary stage in his mental (and psychic) development. Because of this, and of his unparalleled ability to manipulate his environment, he has an almost limitless effect, for good or ill, on every other species and on the planet itself. (In this context, it is shaming to realize that man has killed two million whales in the last fifty years, and that some cetacean species are rapidly nearing extinction. Cruel enough by any standards; but if whales do turn out — as seems likely — to be as conscious in their way as we are in ours, this is not even ‘hunting’; it is genocide, comparable to Hitler’s programme for wiping out the Jews.)
2. The various planes as they apply particularly to the make-up of a human being are discussed in more detail in Section XII, ‘Reincarnation’; see especially the table.
3. As Thelma Moss vividly describes it: ‘The awakening of science from its long sleep in the bed of matter.’ (The Body Electric) And as Gerald Durrell said in his TV series on animals, Ark on the Move: ‘I think the ideal scientist should be half poet, half lunatic and half artist — that’s three halves, which make a whole.’
4. ‘To put it in simple, nonscientific terms, nuclear physics has robbed the basic units of matter of their absolute concreteness. Paradoxically, mass and energy, wave and particle, have proved to be interchangeable. The laws of cause and effect have become valid only up to a certain point. It does not matter at all that these relativities, discontinuities, and paradoxes hold good only on the margins of our world — only for the infinitely small (the atom) and the infinitely great (the cosmos). They have caused a revolutionary change in the concept of reality, and irrational reality has dawned behind the reality of our “natural” world, which is ruled by the laws of classical physics. Corresponding relativities and paradoxes were discovered in the domain of the psyche. Here, too, another world dawned on the margin of the world of consciousness, governed by new and hitherto unknown laws that are strangely akin to the laws of nuclear physics.’ Aniela Jaffé’s section in Man and His Symbols, (see Bibliography under ‘Jung, Carl G’).
5. A fascinating example of this changing attitude is the subject of The Secret Vaults of Time by Stephan A. Schwartz (see Bibliography), which describes how an increasing number of archaeologists, including J. Norman Emerson, the most respected figure of Canadian archaeology, have made consistent use of psychic sensitives in their work, with demonstrable (and sometimes startling) success.
6. The story that Galileo (1564-1642), after the Inquisition had forced him to recant the Copernican theory that the Earth moved round the Sun, muttered ‘Eppur si muove’ (’All the same, it does move’), is probably apocryphal, but it is true in spirit and worth recalling here; for witches and others who know from their own experience the reality of the Inner Planes, but are bombarded by the ‘proof of sceptics that it cannot be so, are familiar with this same reaction: ‘Eppur si muove.’
7. Haitian Voodoo has the same concept. ‘The idea of psychic force is sometimes described in the word “poin” (point) which would seem to be a reference to the point of intersection at which the psychic energy from the world of the invisible is transmitted to the visible, material world.’ (Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen, chapter 2, note 29.)
8. The law that the strength of any radiation decreases in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from its source. For example, if a lamp sheds x amount of light on an object 1 metre away, it will shed x/4 amount of light on an object of the same size 2 metres away, x/9 at 3 metres, x/16 at 4 metres, and so on. This does not apply to beamed radiations, such as a searchlight or parabolic radar — but telepathy is not like this either; it may be picked up in several directions at once, and the strength of reception seems quite independent of distance.
9. By definition, monotheism believes in one God only, and polytheism in many gods. But we should be clear about this. Most polytheists, from the priests of ancient Egypt to modern witches, know perfectly well that there can only be one ultimate Creative Force; they merely personify ‘It’ symbolically in a number of different aspects, such as Isis, Osiris, Ma’at, Thoth, Aradia, Cernunnos, Aphrodite, Mars and so on, so as to be able to relate to the many ‘wavelengths’ on which the Creator manifests Itself. Monotheists, on the other hand, personify It as one (these days exclusively male) figure; Christianity acknowledges something of the aspect-principle by the device of the Trinity, and Catholicism in particular admits the Goddess-aspect through the back door in the carefully subordinated form of the Virgin Mary, and approaches more specialized aspects through the mediation of individual Saints. What it boils down to is that monotheism cannot admit creative polarization at Divine level, whereas polytheism wholeheartedly accepts it.
Polytheism is also by nature tolerant; if a stranger’s God seems to have valuable attributes, you can happily add him to your pantheon of God-aspects. (Hindus have often horrified Chistian missionaries in this way; impressed by Christ’s teachings, they hang his picture up beside Shiva, Kali and the rest, and wonder why the missionaries object.) Monotheists, on the other hand, inevitably see other people’s Gods as devils. ‘Quite apart from the genuine insight into the wholeness of existence, the single essence without seam, psychologically there is a tendency for the monotheistic idea to harden intellectually into the monolithic, the uniform, the one-tracked. This is to over-emphasise the One at the expense of the many…. And may lead to intolerance of the variety of life.’ (Tom Chetwynd, A Dictionary of Symbols)
10. Though in fairness to Mohammed, his Koran gave women certain clearly defined rights which were unheard-of in that time and culture. For seventh-century Arab women, it was a revolutionary document. But it has suffered the fate of all patriarchal dogma; even when it is progressive at the time, it becomes ossified into Divine Law for centuries after changing conditions have made it reactionary.
1. We must emphasize again that it can never be said that all witches believe in any particular theory, because dogma is alien to Wicca; each witch believes what he or she finds acceptable or significant. On reincarnation, some witches explain the recall phenomenon in terms of racial or genetic memory, the influence of the Collective Unconscious, or in some other way. For ourselves, we find these other explanations inadequate; but that is only our view, even if among witches it is a majority one.
2. A contemporary of Jerome’s, St Gregory, wrote: ‘It is absolutely necessary that the soul shall be healed and purified, and if it does not take place in one life on earth, it must be accomplished in future earthly lives.’ And Gregory, regarded as one of the four great fathers of the Eastern Church, was famous for his strict orthodoxy.
3. ‘Spiritual’ is a loaded word for some people, particularly those with a puritanical upbringing. These may prefer the term ‘causal body’, which is often used as an alternative.
4. The change-over principle provides an answer to a question we are often asked: ‘In blessing the wine, why does the woman hold the athame and the man the chalice? — you’d expect it to be the other way round.’ The blessing of the wine involves all the planes. On the material plane, the couple symbolize male-active, female-receptive by their bodily presence. Again on the mental plane, the man takes the active role by speaking the necessary words. But the blessing is meant to take effect on the astral and spiritual planes; and to express this, the woman holds the active symbol (athame) and the man the receptive one (chalice). The ritual thus perfectly symbolizes the interweaving of male and female functions on the various planes. All this reminds us that to call the athame ‘male’ and the chalice ‘female’ can be misleading in some contexts, but to call them ‘active’ and ‘receptive’ respectively is accurate in all contexts and on all the planes.
5. This is not to imply, of course, that only men make proper artists or poets. But it does seem true that the Muse function is typically a female one. Maybe the woman artist or poet does not need a Muse; it is difficult to envisage a female Robert Graves writing a book called The White God! Tom Chetwynd suggests that the Eros side of life (the principle of attraction and involvement) is always represented by a male god ‘presumably as the more suitable object of pursuit for women’ (or for the anima in man), whereas the Muse (of ideas) and Wisdom ‘are both feminine for contrary reasons’ — as the treasure sought by man or by the animus in woman. (A Dictionary of Symbols) The dark aspect of the Muse is the Siren (ibid) — in personal relationships, the woman whose influence on the man’s psyche is destructive rather than creative.
6. For some thoughts about the role of Jesus.
7. The Druids seem to have been very pragmatic about this. It is said that they sometimes made actual loans to each other, against IOUs repayable in their next common incarnation.
8. Since all relationships are dynamic, we suppose even soul-mates must have their crises. One of our members has threatened to write an occult novel entitled The Thousand-Year Itch!
9. A classic example of the animal group soul, on a small scale, is the beehive. In the case of bees, the ‘individual’ is the hive; the separate insects are differentiated for function much like the cells in a mammal body — queens and workers even starting off as identical eggs. The purposeful behaviour of the hive is entirely a collective one, with its separate component insects being as expendable in the interest of the whole as are outworn cells in the human body. It is much easier to understand bees if you regard the swarm as one complex and very well-adapted organism.
10. Racial, tribal etc. group souls may be said to continue to exist as collective influences even with the accelerating individualization of their members; and these influences may be for good or ill. One of the less admirable features of European occult thinking in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a widespread assumption of the superiority of the European (i.e., white Caucasian) racial soul; many writers and fraternities seemed to take it for granted that it represented the peak of human spiritual evolution so far reached, instead of one contribution among many to that evolution — which is the kindest thing one can truthfully say about any racial soul.
11. An example from our own experience: in October 1972, by which time we felt we had the main outlines of our joint Egyptian incarnation clear, but neither of us had been to Egypt in this life, Stewart had a ‘waking dream’ about the Egyptian life but was uncertain whether it was genuine. He began to tell Janet, who interrupted and said: ‘I’ve seen that room. Don’t describe it — draw a plan of it without showing it to me, then I’ll draw a plan, and we’ll show them to each other.’ The two plans were clearly of the same room, even down to a square pillar in the middle of the same wall having no apparent purpose and no relevance to the story. We realized that telepathy was a possible explanation. But a year later we went to Egypt, and when we visited Luxor temple we were convinced that this was where the incident had happened; and Stewart insisted that the room no longer existed but had been in a set of rooms beyond the temple’s surviving rear edge and forming three sides of a rectangle. So we checked with our friend Ahmed Abdel Radi of the Department of Antiquities, who confirmed that the rooms had existed, with the layout Stewart described, but their foundations were now covered by the village streets and houses. This was only one of several confirmations which our Egyptian visit produced.
12. Many Lifetimes does, however, put forward one concept not found in the classical theory: namely that the immortal Individuality accumulates a ‘wardrobe’ (the authors’ own simile) of ‘supra-physical bodies’ from life to life, which seem to correspond to the usual idea of the etheric. The suggestion is that the supra-physical body which shapes and sustains your physical body in this incarnation may be a reactivated one from an earlier incarnation (and not necessarily the immediately preceding one). It may even be one appropriate to an earlier stage in this incarnation, unhealthily retained beyond its proper term, and thus giving rise to illness because physical and supra-physical are unmatched. The authors seem to have based successful healing on this theory. It is not necessarily incompatible with the classical theory; the Individuality could carry with it remembered ‘blueprints’ of earlier etheric bodies, and naturally tend to re-use them — much as a liquid solution of a crystalline substance carries the ‘blueprint’ from which it rebuilds crystals of characteristic shape and structure. This ‘wardrobe’ theory would certainly explain the fact that ‘fellow-travellers’ as remembered from past common incarnations are sometimes (though not always) recalled as visually similar to their present appearance, though it must be admitted that, even when the recall is genuine, this apparent similarity may be psychological projection.
13. Or even from the day after; dreams may often use precognitive material, not necessarily significant in itself, but as the simple ‘bricks and mortar’ of the manifest content. The classic book on this aspect is J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time. Our own dream recordings confirm Dunne’s assertions about precognitive material in dreams, though we keep an open mind on his theoretical interpretation of the phenomenon.
1. So was the teaching of Jesus. What started out as a religion of love and positive behaviour has all too often been transformed, by a monstrous growth of official dogma, into a creaking structure of sectarian bitterness and life-denying prohibitions.
2. Jesus again; he made exactly the same point in his too-little-remembered statement, ‘The Kingdom of heaven is within you’, and in the parable of the talents.
3. Some witches argue endlessly about whether or not the Cabala should be allowed to ‘contaminate’ Wicca. A review of our Eight Sabbats for Witches in The Cauldron said: ‘At least it is one book on witchcraft you can tell people to buy without first warning them to ignore the Quabalistic bits!’ Some feel the Cabala is too steeped in Judaeo-Christian thinking. Others see it as a useful filing-system for concepts, which can be adapted to Wiccan philosophy as it can to many others; and certainly many witches whose outlook is anything but Judaeo-Christian have so found it. For ourselves, we find it a profound and flexible system which helps us to categorize ideas and their inter-relationships in our own minds, and have no difficulty in relating it to the ‘pure’ Old Religion. We agree, however, that one should not confuse the two symbol-systems, and we prefer therefore to keep Cabalistic symbolism out of our Wiccan ritual practice. On the other hand (for example) we frequently use the Tree of Life layout in Tarot divination, because it is the most fruitful method we know of pin-pointing the key factors in a complex situation. (See Section XIX.)
4. The Gaia Hypothesis was propounded by two distinguished scientists, Dr James Lovelock FRS and Dr Sidney Epton, in an article in The New Scientist of 6 February 1975. They put forward the unconventional proposition that ‘Life defines the material conditions needed for its survival and makes sure that they stay there.’ They point out that for over 3,500 million years on Earth, ‘If the temperature or humidity or salinity or acidity or any one of a number of other variables had strayed outside a narrow range of values for any length of time, life would have been annihilated.’ The fact that all these variables have stayed within the safe limits (often, as Lovelock and Epton show, against all apparent likelihood) led them to the proposition ‘that living matter, the air, the oceans, the land surface were parts of a giant system which was able to control temperature, the composition of the air and sea, the pH of the soil and so on so as to be optimum for the survival of the biosphere. The system seemed to exhibit the behaviour of a single organism, even a living creature. One having such formidable powers deserved a name to match it; William Golding, the novelist, suggested Gaia — the name given by the ancient Greeks to their Earth goddess.’ They add that ‘In man, Gaia has the equivalent of a central nervous system and an awareness of herself and the rest of the Universe’ — and they have some sobering and scientifically backed things to say about the responsibility this places on humanity.
5. The use of the terms ‘white’, for beneficent, and ‘black’, for malevolent, magic is traditional, but unfortunate nowadays because of its possible racist misinterpretation. Having had coloured witches in our coven, we hope we are absolved from any such misunderstanding. We use the terms in their accepted magical sense merely because they are immediately understood when talking to non-witches. Some occultists use the terms ‘right-hand path’ and ‘left-hand path’ instead; but (a) these are not always understood by the layman, and (b) in Tantra they are used respectively to mean the Dakshina Marg, or solar-masculine, and Vama Marg, or lunar-feminine, magical principles, and their implications of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ seem to be a male-chauvinist corruption of these original meanings. (See Kenneth Grant, Cults of the Shadow.)
1. ‘Prometheus the stealer of fire, Heracles the dragon slayer, the countless creation myths, the fall from paradise, the mysteries of creation, the virgin birth, the treacherous betrayal of the hero, the dismembering of Osiris, and many other myths and fairy tales represent psychic processes in symbolic images. Similarly, the figures of the snake, the fish, the sphinx, the helpful animals, the Tree of the World, the Great Mother, the enchanted prince, the puer aeternus, the Mage, the Wise Man, Paradise, etc., stand for certain motifs and contents of the collective unconscious.’ (Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C.G. Jung) Just after we wrote this Section, Princess Grace of Monaco died tragically after a car crash. World reaction (especially here in her ancestral Ireland) was understandable; she was a much-loved lady, and rightly so. But its intensity was significant. Grace was, literally, a living legend; she lived out a classic myth for all to see — the peasant’s granddaughter who became the modern equivalent of a strolling player and was snatched away by her Prince Charming to be his Princess and rule beside him over their fairytale principality. Her story was archetypal right through — so it hit everyone right there in the Unconscious.
2. That this was the explanation for the phenomenal success of that immortal radio series The Goon Show was fully understood by one of its creators, Michael Bentine, himself a very gifted psychic. In his book The Door Marked Summer he says: ‘To me, it is fascinating that there, for anyone to listen to and think about, is a definitive example of the effect of the simple magical principles of repeated ritualization and its proven ability to evoke instant and potent archetypal images in the minds of the participants in its rites. The Golden Dawn, Stella Matutina (another significant magical group), Royal-Arch Freemasonry, the dark rituals of the Nazis or, for that matter, the beautiful rites of the Tridentine Mass — all of them use the same basic principles of mind entrainment by ritualized symbols and deliberately evoked imagery by sound that we (unconsciously) used in the construction of The Goon Show.’
1. The American witch Starhawk, who emphasizes the vital distinction between ‘power-over’ and ‘power-from-within’, says: ‘I use the word matristic (“mother-oriented”) rather than “matriarchal” because for many people matriarchy implies a reverse image of patriarchy. Academics debate endlessly about whether cultures ever existed in which women exercised power over men. But the point I am trying to make about Goddess-centred culture is that power was based on a principle different from that under patriarchy.’ (Dreaming the Dark) She defines magic as ‘the art of evoking power-from-within and using it to transform ourselves, our community, our culture, using it to resist the destruction that those who wield power-over are bringing upon the world.’ (Ibid., p.xi.)
2. Also perhaps by the women’s generally greater shamanistic ability.
3. Among those authorities who did not overlook the menstrual sexual peak were Jung himself, C.D. Daly, Mary Jane Sherfey, Alex Comfort, Paula Weideger, William Masters and Virginia Johnson.
4. Shuttle and Redgrove suggest that the symbol of the cervix — the cone with the central depression, or more fully (as it is seen in the speculum) as the round swelling nestling in a crescent — appears more widely than has been recognized. The omphalos is one example; the Assyrian moon-tree, one of the oldest symbols of the Goddess, is another. We know of revered omphaloi in Ireland — from a churchyard one at Kells, Co. Meath, to the many apparently natural ‘bullawn stones’, boulders with a depression on top where rainwater gathers and is considered to have magical healing properties. We wonder, too, if the disc and horns of Isis, usually interpreted as being a solar disc within cow’s horns, were originally a nestling cervix? (See Plate 13 for all these examples.)
5. ‘Only a minority of Irish Catholics fully accept the Church’s prohibition on divorce and contraception, according to an article by the Rev. Liam Ryan, professor of sociology at Maynooth, in the monthly review, The Furrow…. Only 53 per cent of those with third level education fully accepted papal infallibility’ (The Irish Times, 6 January 1983). Father Ryan wrote of ‘a new type of Catholic, as yet in a minority’ which is ‘characterised by an informed appreciation of the value of the supernatural and sacramental life of the Church but retains an independence of mind largely on moral matters’. He also found that, although women Catholics reflected more orthodox attitudes than men, ‘there was evidence of a closing of the gap among the younger age group.’
A report published on 13 January 1983 by the Laity Commission of England and Wales found that Catholic women there agreed that abortion was wrong in general, but not necessarily in all circumstances. Contraception ‘was virtually taken for granted and seen as a matter for individual conscience’, and there was a feeling that the Church should recognize that valid marriages sometimes broke down and that it should allow the parties to remarry if they so wished. The report, Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man?, was based on discussions by groups of women specially convened for the purpose in 1976 and 1977, but its publication seems to have been delayed because of misgivings among certain members of the Lay Commission. The women in the groups resented being treated as second-or third-class citizens in the Church, and the report itself called on the Church to ‘put its own house in order and undertake a rigorous and thorough examination of its own attitudes towards women. At present these still tend towards the mediaeval.’
6. Even Dion Fortune was not entirely free from this prejudice. Her book The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage is mostly excellent and full of occult wisdom; but she wrote it between the wars, and parts of it reflect the attitudes of the time. And to be fair, the implications of the population explosion were unrealized half a century ago.
1. The Sufis maintain that Mohammed also gave an inner teaching (’the Wisdom’) to a select few, distinct from the outer teaching transmitted in the Koran (’the Book’).
1. There is no need for us to keep repeating ‘or established lovers’ every time. By ‘married couple’ we mean a man and woman with a continuing and exclusive sexual relationship, whatever their personal or legal arrangement may be.
2. It is our practice, when Drawing Down the Moon is not performed, for the High Priestess to deliver the Charge in its ‘she, her, hers’ form, instead of the ‘I, me, mine’ form. This emphasizes the difference and gives special meaning to the first-person form when Drawing Down the Moon is performed.
1. Gerald Gardner’s own attitude to naturism had its roots in the 1920s, long before he became a witch. He was in a Malayan hospital, crippled by synovitis in the knee. Medical treatment dragged on, until he persuaded the ward sister to wheel his bed outdoors where he exposed his leg to the sunshine. His bent leg straightened the same day. ‘This near-miracle had far-reaching effects on Gardner’s opinions. It made sunshine and fresh air suddenly appear to him as the positive forces they are, instead of the taken-for-granted elements they seem to most of the world. It led him, much later, to accept medical advice and take up nudism seriously. It helped to break down the last vestiges of that late-Victorian stuffiness which had surrounded his childhood. Gardner is an empiricist; sun-heat had worked, and later in his career in Malaya and after he had returned to England, he was often to use its healing and stimulating powers to good effect.’ (J.L. Bracelin, Gerald Gardner: Witch.)
2. For some recipes (and warnings) see Erica Jong’s Witches.
1. There is some physiological support for this tradition. Black’s Medical Dictionary (see Bibliography under Thomson) says the pineal body ‘is of unknown function, although a body resembling an imperfect third eye is found in its position in some of the lower vertebrate animals, as for example in the lizard Hatteria’.
1. It may be argued, of course, that telekinesis is etheric rather than astral in nature. Perhaps Kirlian photography can throw light on this?
1. The Druids may be credited with the invention of the aspirin, since it was they who discovered the pain-killing properties of salicin, the willow-bark extract which is its ancestor.
2. Whenever a High Priestess (or come to that, a solo worker) senses that superfluous power has been left undischarged, she should make sure that it is ‘earthed’ before the group disperses or the work is put aside. Nonsense games involving physical movement, in clear contrast with the serious work just completed, are one effective way of doing this. Another simple one is for everybody to go out of doors in bare feet, or to press bare hands against the earth, and to envisage the excess charge leaking away into the ground. A more drastic method is to send the coven on a mile run cross-country in the dark!
3. Another strange phenomenon with epilepsy. Once, when Janet was demonstrating clairvoyant diagnosis to a group, a stranger challenged her to say what was wrong with him. She could pick up nothing. He then removed a silver pendant from his neck and said he was an epileptic; he had found that no psychic could diagnose it when he was wearing silver. With the silver gone, Janet could sense the difference at once. We have had no opportunity to test this on other subjects, but other sensitives may like to experiment further.
4. The same force is called chi in China and mana in Hawaii; and growing Western interest in such things has produced other names — od (Reichenbach, Germany), animal magnetism (Mesmer, Austria), orgone (Reich, USA), bioplasma (Inyushin, USSR) and bioenergy (Thelma Moss and others, USA).
1. In passing, we would suggest that the Christian Apostolic Succession was not thought up by Jesus himself, because it seems alien to the spirit of his teaching, but was an invention of the Pauline establishment for its own hierarchical reasons.
2. If she can learn this and the Cernunnos invocation by heart, so much the better; otherwise she will need one hand to hold the text.
3. in the next section on this addition to the traditional list.
1. See W.B. Crow’s The Arcana of Symbolism, for details of the Four Treasures. They were said to have come from four islands in the ocean, the remains of Atlantis; and it is interesting that the legendary East/South/West/North placings of their origins are the same as those of the elements in the witches’ Magic Circle.