What can we learn of this witch figure? . . . She takes energies out of consciousness and pulls them toward the unconscious to forge a link between the two mental systems. . . .

We know the roots of our consciousness reach deep into the nonhuman, archaic unconscious. . . . The witch archetype makes visible to us the very depths of what is humanly possible, the great silences at the edge of being. . . .

She stirs up storms that invade whole communities of people. She conducts vast collective energies to our very doorstep. . . . These undirected unhumanized spirit forces are symbolized for us as ghosts, dead ancestors, gods and goddesses come up from the world below. . . .

What do we gain from this vision? A sense of perspective. . . . The witch-seer makes us see into the proportions of life. . . .

The radical impact of the witch archetype is that she invades the civilized community. She enters it. She changes it. . . . She heralds the timeless process of originating out of the unconsciouss new forms of human consciousness and society.

—DR. ANN BELFORD ULANOV ¹

THE WORD witch is defined so differently by different people that a common definition seems impossible. “A witch,” you may be told, “is someone with supernatural powers,” but revivalist Witches do not believe in a supernatural. “A witch,” you may be told, “is anyone who practices magic,” but revivalist Witches will tell you that Witchcraft is a religion, and some will tell you that magic is secondary. “A witch,” you may be told, “is a worker of evil,” but revivalist Witches will tell you that they promote the good. The historian Elliot Rose observed that the word witch is “free to wander, and does wander, among a bewildering variety of mental associations,”² and the occultist Isaac Bonewits has asked:

Is a “witch” anyone who does magic or who reads fortunes? Is a “witch” someone who worships the Christian Devil? Is a Witch (capital letters this time) a member of a specific Pagan faith called “Wicca”? Is a “witch” someone who practices Voodoo, or Macumba, or Candomblé? Are the anthropologists correct when they define a “witch” as anyone doing magic (usually evil) outside an approved social structure?³

Bonewits does away with some of this confusion, as we shall see, by dividing Witches into many types, including Classical or cunning folk, Neodiabolic, Familial, Immigrant, Ethnic, Feminist, and Neo-Pagan. And in this book we are (mostly) talking about Neo-Pagan Witches—the revival, or re-creation, or new creation (depending on your viewpoint) of a Neo-Pagan nature religion that calls itself Witchcraft, or Wicca, or the Craft, or the Old Religion(s). This religion, with its sources of inspiration in pre-Christian Western Europe, has a specific history—clouded though it may be—and a specific way of being in the world.

We saw that the word witch comes from the Old English wicce, wicca, and these words derive from a root wic, or weik, which has to do with religion and magic. We saw that many practitioners of Wicca will tell you that Wicca means wise, although that is etymologically incorrect. Others will tell you that Wicca comes from a root meaning to bend or turn, and that the Witch is the bender and changer of reality.

But etymology does not help one to confront the confusing feeling that lies behind the word witch. The very power of the word lies in its imprecision. It is not merely a word, but an archetype, a cluster of powerful images. It resonates in the mind and, in the words of Dr. Ulanov, takes us down to deep places, to forests and fairy tales and myths and friendships with animals. The price we pay for clarity of definition must not be a reduction in the force of this cluster of images.

Witches are divided over the word witch. Some regard it as a badge of pride, a word to be reclaimed, much as militant lesbians have reclaimed the word dyke. But others dislike the word. “It has a rather bad press,” one Witch told me. Another said, “I did not plan to call myself Witch. It found me. It just happened to be a name—perhaps a bad name—that was attached to the things I was seeking.” One Neo-Pagan journal stated that the term Witchcraft is inappropriate as “it refers to a decayed version of an older faith.” ⁴

Some witches will tell you that they prefer the word Craft because it places emphasis on a way of practicing magic, an occult technology. And there are Witches—the “classical” ones of Bonewits’s definition—who define Witchcraft not as a religion at all, but simply as a craft. Others will say they are of the “Old Religion,” because they wish to link themselves with Europe’s pre-Christian past, and some prefer to say they are “of the Wicca,” in order to emphasize a family or tribe with special ties. Still others speak of their practices as “the revival of the ancient mystery traditions.” But when they talk among themselves they often use these terms interchangeably, and outsiders are left as confused as ever.

Sadly, it is only poets and artists who can make religious experiences come alive in telling about them. Most descriptions of mystical experiences are monotonous and banal—unlike the experiences themselves. And that is why, after all other chapters lay finished, this one remained unwritten. I had stacks of notes lying in piles on tables: descriptions of Witchcraft by Witches; definitions of Witchcraft by scholars; theories on the origin of Witchcraft by historians, the theories of modern Neo-Pagan writers like Aidan Kelly and Isaac Bonewits; a hundred stories and anecdotes.

But Ed Fitch, a Craft priest in California, told me, “To be a Witch is to draw on our archetypical roots and to draw strength from them. It means to put yourself into close consonance with some ways that are older than the human race itself.” I felt a slight chill at the back of my neck on hearing those words. And then I remembered a quotation from Robert Graves’s The White Goddess that the true “function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse,” that all true poetry creates an “experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.” Graves said that one must think both mythically and rationally, and never confuse the two and never be surprised “at the weirdly azoological beasts that walk into the circle.”⁵

So perhaps the best way to begin to understand the power behind the simple word witch is to enter that circle in the same spirit in which C. G. Jung consulted the I Ching before writing his famous introduction to the Wilhelm-Baynes translation. Do it, perhaps, on a full moon, in a park or in the clearing of a wood. You don’t need any of the tools you will read about in books on the Craft. You need no special clothes, or lack of them. Perhaps you might make up a chant, a string of names of gods and goddesses who were loved and familiar to you from childhood myths, a simple string of names for earth and moon and stars, easily repeatable like a mantra.

And perhaps, as you say those familiar names and feel the earth and air, the moon appears a bit closer, and perhaps the wind rustling the leaves suddenly seems in rhythm with your own breathing. Or perhaps the chant seems louder and all the other sounds far away. Or perhaps the woods seem strangely noisy. Or unspeakably still. And perhaps the clear line that separates you from bird and tree and small lizards seems to melt. Whatever else, your relationship to the world of living nature changes. The Witch is the changer of definitions and relationships.

Once on a strange and unfamiliar shore a group of young and ignorant revivalist Witches were about to cast their circle and perform a rite. They were, like most modern Wiccans, city people, misplaced on this New England beach. They had brought candles in jars and incense and charcoal and wine and salt and their ritual knives and all the implements that most books on the modern Craft tell you to use. The wind was blowing strongly and the candles wouldn’t stay lit. The charcoal ignited and blew quickly away. The moon vanished behind a cloud and all the implements were misplaced in the darkness. Next, the young people lost their sense of direction and suddenly found themselves confronting the elemental powers of nature, the gods of cold and wind and water and wandering. The land—once the site of far different ancient religious practices—began to exert its own presence and make its own demands upon the psyche. Frightened, they quickly made their way home.

The point of all this is simple. All that follows—the distinctions, the definitions, the history and theory of the modern Craft—means nothing unless the powerful and emotional content that hides as a source behind the various contemporary forms is respected. This content lies in the mind. There is something connected with the word witch that is atemporal, primordial, prehistoric (in feeling, whether or not in fact), something perhaps “older than the human race itself.” The story of the revival of Wicca is—whatever else it may be—the story of people who are searching among powerful archaic images of nature, of live and death, of creation and destruction. Modern Wiccans are using these images to change their relationship to the world. The search for these images, and the use of them, must be seen as valid, no matter how limited and impoverished the outer forms of the Wiccan revival sometimes appear, and no matter how contested its history.

The Myth of Wicca

Many have observed that myths should never be taken literally. This does not mean that they are “false,” only that to understand them one must separate poetry from prose, metaphorical truth from literal reality.

The Wiccan revival starts with a myth, one that Bonewits used to call—much to the anger of many Witches—“the myth of the Unitarian, Universalist, White Witchcult of Western Theosophical Britainy.”

It goes something like this: Witchcraft is a religion that dates back to paleolithic times, to the worship of the god of the hunt and the goddess of fertility. One can see remnants of it in cave paintings and in the figurines of goddesses that are many thousands of years old. This early religion was universal. The names changed from place to place but the basic deities were the same.

When Christianity came to Europe, its inroads were slow. Kings and nobles were converted first, but many folk continued to worship in both religions. Dwellers in rural areas, the “Pagans” and “Heathens,” kept to the old ways. Churches were built on the sacred sites of the Old Religion. The names of the festivals were changed but the dates were kept. The old rites continued in folk festivals, and for many centuries Christian policy was one of slow cooptation.

During the times of persecution the Church took the god of the Old Religion and—as is the habit with conquerors—turned him into the devil of the new one—the Christian devil. The Old Religion was forced underground, its only records set forth, in distorted form, by its enemies. Small families kept the religion alive and, in 1951, after the Witchcraft Acts in England were repealed, it began to surface again.⁶

At this point the Wiccan Myth branches in many directions. Different Wiccan traditions (or sects) have a different story to tell. Many will mention the work of Margaret Murray, whose Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) popularized the idea that Witchcraft is the surviving pre-Christian religion of Europe. Many will mention Charles G. Leland, whose books, written at the turn of the century, described a surviving Pagan religion in Italy, including a Witch cult that worshipped Diana, and a host of ancient Etruscan survivals. Others will mention Gerald B. Gardner, a retired British civil servant who said he was initiated into one of the surviving ancient English covens in 1939. Convinced that the Witch cult was dying from lack of knowledge about it, Gardner published some of what he had learned in a novel, High Magic’s Aid, and after the repeal of the Witchcraft Acts in 1951, published Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft. British Witches will often mention the work of the Witchcraft Research Association and its short-lived magazine Pentagram, which did much to aid the revival.

The elements of this Myth of Wicca can be found—in much lengthier form—in almost all the introductory books on the modern Craft that were circulating prior to 1980, including works by Gardner, Doreen Valiente, Justine Glass, Patricia Crowther, Stewart Farrar, and Raymond Buckland. Many elements are unquestionably true—such as the idea of pre-Christian survivals in Europe. Others are sharply contested by scholars—in particular, Margaret Murray’s theory of a universal, organized Old Religion.

Until several decades ago most Wiccans took almost all elements of the myth literally. Few do so today, which in itself is a lesson in the flexibility of the revival. Many scholars refuted the literal accuracy of the myth and then wrongly dismissed the modern Craft itself as a fraud. One cannot really understand the revival of Witchcraft today without first becoming familiar with some of the sources that formed the Wiccan Myth and gave birth to the revival. These sources include the matriarchal theorists, such as J. J. Bachofen and Friedrich Engels; the British folklorists; Margaret Murray’s theory of Witchcraft in the Middle Ages; and the books of the revival, in particular Gerald Gardner’s writings in the 1940s and 1950s.

The Murrayite Controversy

While modern Wicca has very little to do with the witchcraft of the Middle Ages or the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the revival was strongly influenced by Margaret Murray’s writings.

Although there have been many different approaches to the study of medieval European witchcraft, until about eighty years ago there were two main opposing theories, humorously called by the historian Elliot Rose the “Bluff” school and the “Anti-Sadducee” school.⁷ The former, reflecting the rationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concluded that witchcraft was a delusion invented by the Inquisition. Rationalist scholars said that “supernatural elements” in reports of the trials—accounts of flying through the air and transformations into animals—made them totally suspect. In addition, the use of torture to obtain these accounts rendered them useless as evidence. Opposing scholars, such as Montague Summers, believed in the reality of Satan and accepted all trial reports as accurate and literal.

In 1921 Margaret Murray published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Murray was foremost an Egyptologist and secondarily a folklorist and anthropologist. After reexamining the trial documents of the Inquisition, she argued that witchcraft could be traced to “pre-Christian times and appears to be the ancient religion of Western Europe” centered on a deity which was incarnate in a man, a woman, or an animal. One of its forms was the two-faced horned god known to the Romans as Janus or Dianus. Murray wrote that the feminine form of the name—Diana—was found throughout Western Europe as the leader of the witches. Because of this, Murray called the religion the Dianic Cult, although she wrote that the god rarely appeared in female form and a male deity had apparently superseded a female one. This “organized religion” was, according to Murray, primarily a fertility cult, in the tradition described by Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough. It was a cult of the god who dies and is reborn, and whose birth and death are reflected in the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of crops. According to Murray, this cult had originated with an aboriginal British race of small people who were the reality behind the fairy faith. The cult had participants in all classes from the peasantry to the nobility. The two main festivals of the cult, on May Eve and November Eve, were described as “pre-agricultural,” having more to do with the fertility of animals than of crops.

Murray wrote that witches practiced a joyous religion. They met at the eight great festivals (sabbats) and at more general meetings (esbats) in covens of thirteen. They feasted and danced and had shamanistic visions. She argued, in fact, that the trial reports of accused witches describing themselves as flying through the air and changing their shape into animals were “ritual and not actual,” a “clear account of the witch herself and her companions believing in the change of form caused by the magical object in exactly the same way that the shamans believe in their own transformation by similar means.” Murray also argued that the coven, the sabbat, and all other aspects of the accusations made against witches had a reality behind them. The Inquisition had simply turned the god of the witches into their devil and substituted evil for good.⁸

Murray’s later books, The God of the Witches (1933) and The Divine King in England (1954), were even more controversial, particularly the latter. In that book she argued that the idea of the sacred king was a reality in Britain and that many English kings had been ritually murdered; she contended that most of Britain’s royalty had been members of the Dianic Cult. Most scholars dismissed this book as the work of a crackpot who had the audacity to publish at the age of ninety. (Murray was a remarkable woman who lived to be a hundred. She published her autobiography, My First Hundred Years, in 1963, the same year she died.⁹)

Murray’s theories were well regarded for some time. In the last forty-five years, however, they have been discredited. The arguments against her were many: that she took as true stories that may have been fabricated under torture; that, while she gave good evidence for Pagan survivals in Britain, she did not give evidence that an organized Pagan religion survived, or that this religion was universal, or that covens or sabbats existed before they appeared in trial reports.

The primary value of Murray’s work was her understanding of the persistence of Pagan folk customs in Britain and her realization that Witchcraft could not be examined in isolation from the comparative history of religions or from the study of anthropology and folklore. But most scholars today dismiss most of her work.

Studies of European witchcraft, particularly of what has come to be called the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are so vast that to summarize scholarship after Murray would be impossible in a book of this nature. Also, the scholarly landscape has changed completely since Drawing Down the Moon was first published.

Norman Cohn: Witchcraft as Delusion

The late historian Norman Cohn was the author of Europe’s Inner Demons (1975). Cohn argued that the stereotype of the witch comes from a specific fantasy that originated in antiquity. This fantasy—that there exists in the midst of the larger society a small clandestine society engaged in antihuman practices, including infanticide, incest, cannibalism, bestiality, and orgiastic sex—was an age-old tradition. It was first used by the Romans to characterize Christians, and later by the Christians to characterize Jews as well as heretical Christian sects such as the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Manichaeans, the Montanists, and groups such as the Knights Templar.

Cohn doubted that a sect of witches ever existed; therefore his book is the history of a “fantasy.” He argued that folklorists Jacob Grimm and Girolamo Tartarotti—long considered the originators of the view that witchcraft is a pre-Christian religion—merely drew attention to the persistence of pre-Christian folk beliefs that later contributed to the stereotype of the witch. Karl Jarcke in 1828 first stated that witchcraft was the former Pagan religion of Germany, surviving among the common people. Ten years later Franz Joseph Mone described German Witchcraft as an underground esoteric cult. Cohn believed neither theory was convincing; neither Jarcke nor Mone could show that the worship of ancient gods was “practised by organized, clandestine groups in the Middle Ages.” Cohn’s next victim was the historian Jules Michelet, whose famous book on witchcraft, La Sorcière, appeared in 1862. He characterized Michelet as an “aging romantic radical with neither time nor desire for detailed research.” He argued against Michelet’s view that witchcraft was a protest by medieval serfs against an oppressive social order and that those serfs came together in secret to perform ancient Pagan dances and satires of their oppressors. Such a view, wrote Cohn, was prompted by “a passionate urge to rehabilitate two oppressed classes—women, and the medieval peasantry,” but there was no evidence behind it.

Next, Cohn took on the idea of witchcraft as the survival of a fertility cult. He wrote that Frazer’s The Golden Bough “launched a cult of fertility cults,” and in 1921, when Murray’s theory of the Dianic cult appeared, “the influence of The Golden Bough was at its height.” He was completely contemptuous of Murray. Because she was sixty years old when she put forth her theory, he was convinced that her mind was rigidly “set in an exaggerated and distorted version of the Frazerian mould.” (In fact, throughout the book Cohn uses age as a reason to dismiss a scholar or an idea.) He argued—like many other scholars—that Murray could not prove the existence of an organized cult. But his main criticism was that she eliminated the fantastic features of the witch trial reports and gave a false impression that realistic accounts of the sabbat existed. If there are parallels between the descriptions of the sabbats and fertility rites, they are, he observed, meaningless. For him the sabbats were a complete delusion, a fiction. He rebuked such historians as Elliot Rose and Jeffrey Burton Russell for still being under Murray’s influence despite their criticism of her work; and he expressed dismay that Murray’s work had “stimulated the extraordinary proliferation of ‘witches’ covens’ in Western Europe and the United States during the past decade, culminating in the foundation of the Witches International Craft Association, with headquarters in New York.”

Cohn’s main point was that no story with “impossible elements” should ever be accepted as evidence. “Nobody has ever come across a real society of witches,” he wrote adding:

Taken as a whole, that tradition itself forms a curious chapter in the history of ideas. Over a period of a century and a half, the non-existent society of witches has been repeatedly re-interpreted in light of the intellectual preoccupations of the moment. The theories of Jarcke and Mone were clearly inspired by the current dread of secret societies; that of Michelet, by his enthusiasm for the emancipation of the working classes and women; those of Murray and Runeberg, by the Frazerian belief that religion originally consisted of fertility cults; those of Rose and Russell, maybe, by the spectacle of the psychedelic and orgiastic experiments of the 1960s.¹⁰

According to Cohn, scholars had simply been “grossly underestimating the capacities of human imagination.” He wrote that the many “fantastic” notions about witches had a long history in folk beliefs—that they practiced evil, that they changed shape and flew through the air—but were never significant until new Inquisitorial procedures began to investigate ritual magic. At that point, small-scale trials of individuals accused of consorting with demons took place. These were minor affairs, and most of the accused were priests. It was not until all parts of the “fantasy” were put together and believed by those in authority that the witch persecutions could really begin. For most peasants, witches were simply those—mostly women—who harmed by occult means. The other notion, that witches were members of a secret sect headed by Satan, came from educated Church leaders and Inquisitors when the Inquisitors themselves had become convinced of the reality of the sabbat and nocturnal flights. (Murray, as we have seen, never considered the nocturnal flights to be real, but believed them to be shamanistic visions similar to those reported by religious visionaries around the world.)

At the end of Europe’s Inner Demons Cohn, unfortunately, adopted, whole hog, the most popular witchcraft religion of our day—psychiatry. The origins of witchcraft in the Middle Ages lie in our unconscious, he wrote: It is a fantasy at work both in history and the writing of history. The witch hunts would never have taken place without “the fantasy of a child-eating, orgiastic, Devil-worshipping sect.” The only continuity is in the fantasy. And where did those fantasies come from? Cohn’s answer was that they represented “the innermost selves” of many Europeans, “their obsessive fears, and also their unacknowledged, terrifying desires.” These fantasies of cannibalism and infanticide were in all folklore, and their roots were in childhood, part of the “wishes and anxieties experienced in infancy or early childhood, but deeply repressed and, in their original form, wholly unconscious.” The creation of a society of witches was, therefore, an unconscious revolt against Christianity as too strict and repressive.

One of the problems with Cohn’s argument was his limited conception of the possible. For example, he considered all reports of orgies to be fantasy. He stated, “Orgies where one mates with one’s neighbour in the dark, without troubling to establish whether that neighbour is male or female, a stranger or, on the contrary, one’s own father or mother, son or daughter, belong to the world of fantasy.” Here he is surprisingly ignorant of the history of sex and ritual. Orgiastic practices were a part of religious rites in many cultures of the ancient world. And while most modern group sexual encounters lack a religious dimension, one has only to read reports about modern sex clubs to know that orgiastic experiences are not merely a product of fantasy.

Mircea Eliade: Witchcraft as an Archaic Pagan Survival

In 1976, the historian Mircea Eliade wrote an essay, “Some Observations on European Witchcraft,” that noted that although Murray’s work was filled with errors and unproven assumptions, more recent studies of Indian and Tibetan documents “will convince an unprejudiced reader that European witchcraft cannot be the creation of religious or political persecution or be a demonic sect devoted to Satan and the promotion of evil.”

As a matter of fact, all the features associated with European witches are—with the exception of Satan and the Sabbath—claimed also by Indo-Tibetan yogis and magicians. They too are supposed to fly through the air, render themselves invisible, kill at a distance, master demons and ghosts, and so on. Moreover, some of these eccentric Indian sectarians boast that they break all the religious taboos and social rules: that they practice human sacrifice, cannibalism, and all manner of orgies, including incestuous intercourse, and that they eat excrement, nauseating animals, and devour human corpses. In other words, they proudly claim all the crimes and horrible ceremonies cited ad nauseam in the Western European witch trials.¹¹

Eliade pointed to the cult of the benandanti, unearthed by Carlo Ginzburg. On the four great agricultural festivals of the year these Italian wizards fought a battle (in trance) against a group of evil wizards, the stregoni. They went to their assemblies in spiritu, while they slept, and their central rite was a ceremonial battle against the stregoni to assure the harvest. “It is probable,” wrote Eliade, “that this combat between benandanti and stregoni prolonged an archaic ritual scenario of competitions and contests between two opposing groups, designed to stimulate the creative forces of nature and regenerate human society as well.” The persecution of the benandanti took place in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in most of the trials the accused were charged with adhering to a cult of Diana. The Inquisitional model pressed upon the accused had an effect and “after fifty years of Inquisitorial trials, the benandanti acknowledged their identity with the witches (strighe and stregoni ).” They began to speak of the sabbat and pacts with the devil. Eliade argued that though this example gives no evidence for Murray’s horned god or for her organized system of covens, it was nevertheless, “a well-documented case of the processus through which a popular and archaic secret cult of fertility is transformed into a merely magical, or even black-magical, practice under pressure of the Inquisition.” Incidently, Norman Cohn dismissed the benandanti because their experiences were all under trance and therefore, to him, illusory.

Eliade also described parallels in Romanian studies, significant because there was no systematic persecution of witches in Romania, no institution analagous to the Inquisition, and the “archaic popular culture” was therefore under “less rigid ecclesiastical control.” Romanian witches were reported to change their shape, to ride on brooms, and to fight all night at specific festival times until they became reconciled. The Romanian Diana was connected with the fairies, and the Queen of the Fairies came to be associated in name with Diana, Irodiada, and Aradia—“names,” Eliade wrote, “famous among western European witches.”

Eliade concluded that “What medieval authors designated as witchcraft, and what became the witch crazes of the fourteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, had its roots in some archaic mythico-ritual scenarios comparable with those surviving among the Italian benandanti and in Romanian folk culture.”¹²

Modern Wicca, while retaining the use of such terms as esbat, sabbat, and coven, bears no resemblance to the European witchcraft that the scholars have discussed. There are no beliefs in Satan, no pacts, no sacrifices, no infanticide, no cannibalism, and often not even any sex. Still, the theories of Margaret Murray were strongly influential in stimulating the revival of Wicca, and it can be argued that her work alone generated a number of British covens.

In the last twenty years, the entire landscape of scholarship has changed. Scholars have made meticulous studies of trial records in scores of European communities. A good summary of current scholarship is Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe by Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow (2nd edition). Most scholars now put the number of people killed for the crime of witchcraft from the late fifteenth century through the seventeenth century at between forty and fifty thousand, not millions or even the one million figure I used in the first edition of Drawing Down the Moon. With an unknown number of others who “received a more random form of justice at the hands of their neighbors, through common assaults, lynchings and social ostracism.”¹³ Scarre and Callow argue that it will never be possible to know with complete certainty how many people in Europe were prosecuted for witchcraft and how many suffered death, since records were not always kept, and even where they were, some were lost. But they still say a reasonable figure for executions between 1428 and 1782 is forty thousand. Other scholars put the figure at fifty thousand. The worst persecutions were in the 1590s, and during the period between 1630 and the 1660s. Some of the worst persecutions took place in Germany, with far fewer trials in Italy and Spain, “the heartlands of the Inquisition.”¹⁴

About 80 percent of the victims were women, although in some places (Moscow, for example) male victims predominated. Often the women were poor, and a large number were over fifty. Murray’s theory is given short shrift here, as is Jules Michelet’s thesis that witchcraft was a protest against repressive social conditions. Scarre and Callow also believe there is little evidence for the 1976 groundbreaking feminist work by Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses, that argued that the suppression of witchcraft was the suppression of midwives and healers by the emerging male medical establishment. The authors argue that while clearly misogyny played a role, this theory cannot explain why some of the most vociferous voices for persecution came from the peasantry.

Scarre and Callow also say there is little evidence for the thesis of H. R. Trevor-Roper, who argued that the Catholic Church used the stereotype of the witch in local struggles against groups it would not or could not assimilate. Trevor-Roper wrote that the stereotype of the witch might have died had it not been revived in the century of the Black Death and the Hundred Years War, and had it not received new strength from the struggle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which “revived the dying witch-craze just as it had revived so many other obsolescent habits of thought: biblical fundamentalism, theological history, scholastic Aristotelianism.” He asserted that every major outbreak of the witch persecutions in the 1560s and after took place in the frontier areas between Catholics and Protestants. For example, persecution in England was fiercest in Essex and Lancashire, where Catholicism was strong. In Catholic France most of the witches were Protestant and often came from “Protestant islands” like Orléans and Normandy.¹⁵ Scholars like Scarre and Callow counter this position and argue that witchcraft trials happened in many places where there was little or no interdenominational strife. And in a few cases, Catholic and Protestant lands exchanged information on witchcraft activities.¹⁶ In addition, many prosecutions were spurred on by popular demands not by secular or religious authorities. In fact, many scholars today argue that the persecutions were strongest where the church was weakest, and those accused of witchcraft had a better chance of acquittal in ecclesiastical courts.

Historians who emphasize class, like the English historian Christopher Hill, theorized that witchcraft persecution was used for social control, and for control of the peasantry by the monied classes. Starhawk develops this idea further in her beautiful essay “The Burning Times” in which she argues that “the persecution of Witches undermined the unity of the peasant community.”¹⁷ By destroying village healers, one could fragment community and make it easier to enclose the common lands. But Ronald Hutton argues that Hill has been pretty much discredited today, since he often relied on literary works that provided a distorted view of reality. Most scholars today do not believe there was a mass dispossession of common people by enclosure. Hutton writes:

What we have found instead is a more complex picture of competition between different sorts of commoners, and of landlords, for the use of resources in a time of unprecedented economic opportunity. In other words, it wasn’t a straightforward class struggle, and commoners were less often victims and more often opportunists, than the traditional polemics have held. On the other hand there was plenty of class consciousness around, and working people were often very good at protecting their interests and deeply involved in politics.¹⁸

Other Sources of the Witchcraft Revival

Many of those most responsible for the revival of Witchcraft were influenced by many authors other than Murray and Frazer. They were knowledgeable about classical sources, such as Lucius Apuleius’s classical witchcraft romance, The Golden Ass¹⁹ (in which Apuleius becomes a priest of Isis after the goddess appears in a beautiful vision), and Charles G. Leland’s Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, published in 1899.²⁰

If scholars have contested Murray’s thesis, they have totally dismissed Leland by saying either that he was the victim of a bad joke or, since he had written satire in the past, he could not be taken seriously. Jeffrey Burton Russell, author of Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, has said that Aradia does not contain useful evidence.²¹ Elliot Rose has called it a product of art rather than a folk product. One interesting discussion of C. G. Leland can be found in Leo Martello’s Witchcraft: The Old Religion; another is in Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon.²²

Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903) was an American writer and folklorist who, according to the accounts of his niece and biographer, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, was a political rebel, an abolitionist, an artist, an occultist, and a folklorist. He lived with native American tribes; he studied with gypsies; he compiled gypsy lore, learned Romany, founded the Gypsy Lore Journal; he learned the Celtic tinkers’ language, Shelta; he became president of the first European folklore congress in 1899; he went to Italy and wrote a series of remarkable books that traced the persistence of Pagan religious beliefs. One of these books, Etruscan Roman Remains (1892), is a gem. In it Leland traces the names of Etruscan deities as they degenerated through time into lesser sprites and spirit beings who persisted in chants, rhymes, and incantations.²³ He achieved a measure of fame for writing a series of satiric verses about German-American immigrants, the Hans Breitman Ballads (1872), but few scholars have taken him seriously as a folklorist.

The controversy that surrounds Leland concerns his meeting with a woman named Maddalena who claimed descent from an old Witch family. She brought Leland what she said was the local Witches’ book, a mixture of myths and spells. Leland called it a translation of an early or late Latin work. The myths tell of Diana (or Tana), Queen of the Witches, and two different versions of her union with Lucifer, the sun. From this union was born a daughter, Aradia, who was to go to earth as the messiah of Witches and teach the arts of Witchcraft to oppressed humanity. Leland wrote that this was a sacred gospel of the Old Religion (la Vecchia Religione). He said this religion still prevailed in entire villages in the Romagna in Italy.

Elliot Rose dismissed the book and wrote that “The whole work reads much more as if one of its authors was consciously seeking to establish that the witch-cult was a cult of this particular nature, and grafted material calculated to prove it onto an existing straightforward book of incantations.”²⁴ To this day no one has established whether Maddalena made up the story, or Leland did, or whether there are elements of truth mixed with exaggeration—whatever the case, Aradia was used by Gardner and others and several beautiful stanzas from Aradia appear little changed in the rite known as “The Charge of the Goddess.” In Aradia this appears as follows:

Now when Aradia had been taught, taught to work all witchcraft, how to destroy the evil race (of oppressors), she (imparted it to her pupils) and said unto them:

When I shall have departed from this world,
Whenever you have need of anything,
Once in the month, and when the moon is full,
Ye shall assemble in some desert place
Or in a forest all together join
To adore the potent spirit of your Queen
My mother, great Diana. She who fain
Would learn all sorcery yet has not won
Its deepest secrets, them my mother will
Teach her, in truth all things as yet unknown.
And ye shall all be freed from slavery,
And so ye shall be free in everything;
And as a sign that ye are truly free,
Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men
And women also: this shall last until
The last of your oppressors shall be dead. . . .²⁵

In the modern Wiccan rite “The Charge of the Goddess,” as published, for instance, in The Grimoire of Lady Sheba, this is only slightly changed and depoliticized.

Whenever ye have need of anything, once in the month and better it be when the Moon is Full, then shall ye assemble in some secret place and adore the Spirit of Me, who am Queen of all the Witcheries. There shall ye assemble, who are feign to learn all sorceries who have not as yet won my deepest secrets. To these will I teach that which is as yet unknown. And ye shall be free from all slavery and as a sign that ye be really free, ye shall be naked in your rites and ye shall sing, feast, make music and love, all in my presence. For mine is the ecstasy of the Spirit and mine is also joy on earth. For my Law is love unto all beings.²⁶

Interestingly, many writers took Aradia’s political references as a sign of the degeneration of the text. The historian T. C. Lethbridge said that Aradia was “much distorted by political propaganda.”²⁷ Craft priest and writer Raymond Buckland concurred.²⁸ Doreen Valiente noted that “Its sexual frankness—which Leland has toned down in his translation—its attacks on the Christian Church, its anarchistic attitude toward the social order, all contributed to make it a book that was pushed aside.”²⁹ Leland was himself a political radical. The more modern Wiccan version was written by Doreen Valiente, who kept some of Leland’s phrases and added some of her own poetry.

Still, it is in Aradia, and in Leland’s other books, that the phrase “la Vecchia Religione”—the Old Religion—appears. And that is where the term, now used so often among Witches, may have originated. And Aradia’s importance in helping to create the revival cannot be stressed enough. In contrast to Murray, Leland as far back as the 1890s said that women were given an equal, perhaps superior, place in the religion. He wrote that whenever “there is a period of radical intellectual rebellion, against long-established conservatism, hierarchy, and the like, there is always an effort to regard woman as the fully equal, which means superior sex.” And he noted that in Witchcraft, “it is the female who is the primitive principle.” Leland’s book became very popular with feminist groups within the Craft, partly because the myth of the creation of Aradia and Diana placed the feminine principle first and partly because feminist Witches—the most political Crafters—have always been very sympathetic to the idea of a link between Witches and oppressed peoples. In the appendix to Aradia Leland wrote:

The perception of this [tyranny] drove vast numbers of the discontented into rebellion, and as they could not prevail by open warfare, they took their hatred out in a form of secret anarchy, which was, however, intimately blended with superstition and fragments of old tradition. Prominent in this, and naturally enough, was the worship of Diana the protectress. . . . The result of it all was a vast development of rebels, outcasts, and all the discontented, who adopted witchcraft or sorcery for a religion, and wizards as their priests.³⁰

Along with Murray and Leland, Robert Graves has been very influential in the Witchcraft revival. The White Goddess and some of Graves’s lesser-known works, particularly such novels as Watch the North Wind Rise and King Jesus, had an enormous impact on people who later joined the Craft. Several noted that after World War II a number of books put forth the idea of goddess worship as a way to turn humanity from its destructive course.³¹

Bonewits told me, “Graves is a sloppy scholar. The White Goddess has caused more bad anthropology to occur among Wiccan groups than almost any other work. It’s a lovely metaphor and myth and an inspirational source of religious ideas to people, but he claimed it was a work of scholarship and that people were to take what he said as true. There are still a few groups of Neo-Pagans who use Graves and Murray as sacred scripture.”

It is likely that certain members of the Craft have interpreted Graves too literally. Graves himself said that he wrote the first draft of The White Goddess in a few weeks, in a storm of passion, and from the beginning it was very clear in his mind that the book was poetic metaphor.³² His attitude toward Wicca was always one of bemusement. In 1964, writing in The Virginia Quarterly Review, he attributed the spread of organized Witch covens to Margaret Murray’s anthropological works. He argued that Witches existed in Britain from early times and that several covens had survived, but that Murray’s “sympathetic reassessment of organized witchcraft made a revival possible.” Graves looked at the Craft with some amusement, finding it numbered among its members idealists as well as “hysterical or perverted characters.” “Yet the Craft seems healthy enough in 1964, and growing fast,” he wrote. “It now only needs some gifted mystic to come forward, reunite, and decently reclothe it, and restore its original hunger for wisdom. Fun and games are insufficient.”³³

If much modern scholarship has dismissed Murray as a crank, Leland as a satirist, and Graves as a writer of poetic fancy, Gerald B. Gardner is usually put down as a “fraud” or a “dirty old man.” And yet it is impossible to understand the revival of Witchcraft without coming to terms with Gardner and his influence—an influence that is much greater than one would think from reading about his life or reading his works.

The most sympathetic accounts of Gardner’s life have been J. L. Bracelin’s poorly written biography, Gerald Gardner: Witch, Doreen Valiente’s beautifully written account in her The ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present, and the accounts of various Gardnerians, neo-Gardnerians, and ex-Gardnerians including Patricia Crowther, Stewart Farrar, and Raymond Buckland.³⁴ The most negative accounts can be found in the works of the occult writer Francis King and the historian Elliot Rose.

Here is the story as put forth by Bracelin, Valiente, Buckland, and others. Since certain parts of it are in controversy, this story can be thought of as part of the Wiccan myth.

Gerald B. Gardner (1884–1964) was an amateur anthropologist and folklorist who lived much of his life in the Far East, working as a rubber planter and tea planter in Ceylon and Malaya and later as a British customs officer. He wrote a book on Malay weaponry in 1936 (Keris and Other Malay Weapons) and went into retirement that same year, settling in Hampshire, England, with his wife. He joined a naturist society, apparently having become a nudist early in life.

It was in 1939 that Gardner, according to the story, contacted the Witch cult in England. Valiente, who, according to her own account, was initiated into the Craft by Gardner in 1953, writes that Gardner joined an occult society, the Fellowship of Crotona, which had constructed a community theater called “The First Rosicrucian Theatre in England.” Among the members of this occult fraternity was the daughter of Annie Besant, the Theosophist and founder of Co-Masonry, a masonic movement for women.³⁵

Bracelin writes that Gardner noticed among the members of the Fellowship a group that stood apart from the others.

They seemed rather browbeaten by the others, kept themselves to themselves. They were the most interesting element, however. Unlike many of the others, they had to earn their livings, were cheerful and optimistic and had a real interest in the occult. They had carefully read many books on the subject: Unlike the general mass, who were supposed to have read all but seemed to know nothing.³⁶

According to Bracelin, Gardner was taken to the house of a wealthy neighborhood woman named “Old Dorothy” and in 1939 was initiated by her into Wicca. Until recently little was known about “Old Dorothy” and many scholars assumed she was a fiction. Valiente wrote that the lady was known to her, but to tell the public who she is would “be a breach of confidence.”³⁷ In an appendix to The Witches’ Way, Doreen Valiente described her long and ultimately successful search for the birth and death certificates of Dorothy Clutterbuck.³⁸ Ronald Hutton, in The Triumph of the Moon, pretty convincingly demonstrates that Dorothy Clutterbuck existed, but may well have had nothing to do with Gerald Gardner or Witchcraft. Hutton writes that a woman named Dafo, the stage director of the Rosicrucian Theatre, was a close friend of Gerald Gardner throughout most of the 1940s, and may well have been his main partner in ritual.³⁹ In Bracelin’s account, Gardner was halfway through the initiation ceremony “when the word Wica was first mentioned: ‘and then I knew that that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived.’”⁴⁰

Gardner wanted to write about the Craft openly, but could not because of the Witchcraft Acts in Britain (the last of these acts was repealed in 1951, largely through the efforts of the spiritualist movement). In 1949 Gardner published High Magic’s Aid under the pen name “Scire.” It was a historical novel about the Craft and contained two initiation rituals, but there was no reference to the Goddess.⁴¹ After the last Witchcraft Act was repealed, Gardner came out with two books under his own name, Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959). In 1951 Cecil Williamson set up a museum of Witchcraft at Castletown on the Isle of Man. Gardner joined Williamson as the resident Witch and began creating quite a bit of publicity. Valiente writes:

G.B.G. decided that the time had now arrived for members of the Craft of the Wise to come out into the open and speak out to the world about their rituals and beliefs. . . . Whether or not he was right in this decision is still a matter of controversy among present-day witches, and seems likely to continue to be so.

There is no doubt that G.B.G.’s action was a complete break with the witch tradition of silence and secrecy. I have reason to think that it was also contrary to the wishes of his associates. Today, many persons inside the witch cult regard G.B.G. as having done far more harm than good by his publicising of witchcraft. Furthermore, they do not agree that G.B.G.’s version of the Craft is an authoritative one. . . .⁴²

Gardner’s version of the Craft was very different from that described by Murray. To him, Witchcraft was a peaceful, happy nature religion. Witches met in covens, led by a priestess. They worshipped two principal deities, the god of forests and what lies beyond, and the great Triple Goddess of fertility and rebirth. They met in the nude in a nine-foot circle and raised power from their bodies through dancing and chanting and meditative techniques. They focused primarily on the goddess; they celebrated the eight ancient Pagan festivals of Europe and sought to attune themselves to nature.⁴³

Valiente wrote that some of Gardner’s critics felt the publicity he generated was undignified, but, “looking back,” she decided that Gardner was “sincere.” Gardner’s coven “was mostly composed of elderly people” and he was afraid the Craft “was in danger of dying out.” She writes that many considered his insistence on nudity to be his own invention and that, while a very old and valid magical idea, it was unsuitable in the cold and damp of England. She also noted that many other Witches regarded much of Gardner’s writings as “a reflection of his own ideas.” She noted the use of Masonic phraseology in Gardnerian rituals and the use of quotations from Aleister Crowley.^g She wrote:

When I pointed out to him that I thought this inappropriate for the rites of witchcraft, as it was too modern, he gave me to understand that the rituals he had received were in fact fragmentary. There were many gaps in them; and to link them together into a coherent whole and make them workable, he had supplied words which seemed to him to convey the right atmosphere, to strike the right chords in one’s mind. He felt, he said, that some of Crowley’s work did this.

From my own study of these rites and traditions, I believe that this old coven which Gerald Gardner joined has fragments of ancient rituals; but fragments only. These were in the hands of the few elderly members that were left. Gerald Gardner, believing passionately that the old Craft of the Wise must not be allowed to die, gathered up these fragments and, with the assistance of his own knowledge of magic, which was considerable, and the result of many years’ study all over the world, pieced them together, and added material of his own, in order to make them workable. In doing so, he of necessity put the imprint of his personality and ideas upon them.⁴⁴

The controversy surrounding Gardner is over whether he was initiated into an authentic surviving coven, and how much of revivalist Wicca is his own invention or Crowley’s or Doreen Valiente’s or anyone else’s. Most writers who are not members of the Craft or sympathetic to it dismiss the entire revival as “a fraud” created by Gardner.

Francis King, the English writer, wrote a brief chapter on the Witchcraft revival in The Rites of Modern Occult Magic (1970). He estimated that between one and two thousand people in Britain were, at the time he wrote, members of covens that “are practicing, or believe that they are practicing, traditional witchcraft, which they suppose to be the stillsurviving fertility religion of prehistoric Europe.” King said that he believed that pre-Gardnerian covens did exist (although they may date no further back than the publication of Murray’s thesis), but he attributed the growth of the movement to Gardner’s writings. King argued that Gardner was initiated into a coven; that he did not find “their simple ceremonies to his liking,” and so decided “to found a more elaborate and romanticised witch-cult of his own.” To do this, he “hired Crowley, at a generous fee, to write elaborate rituals for the new ‘Gardnerian’ witch-cult and, at about the same time, either forged, or procured to be forged, the so-called Book of Shadows, allegedly a sixteenth-century witches’ rule-book, but betraying its modern origins in every line of its unsatisfactory pastiche of Elizabethan English.”⁴⁵

In fact, there has never been any evidence that Aleister Crowley was hired to write the Gardnerian rituals. There are elements of Crowley in the rituals, just as there are elements of Ovid, Leland, and Kipling. Still, this idea was floating around in the 1970s, and one priestess, Mary Nesnick (who worked in both the Gardnerian and the Alexandrian traditions before creating her own combination tradition known as Algard Wicca), wrote to me:

Fifty percent of modern Wicca is an invention bought and paid for by Gerald B. Gardner from Aleister Crowley. Ten percent was “borrowed” from books and manuscripts like Leland’s text Aradia. The forty remaining percent was borrowed from Far Eastern religions and philosophies, if not in word, then in ideas and basic principles.

Eliot Rose wrote a devastating critique of Gardner in his lively book A Razor for a Goat. Rose admits his biases. He is an Anglican who believes Witchcraft is foolish, and while it was “once rational to fear witchcraft,” it has “never been rational to admire it.”

Rose considered the Witchcraft revival to be a sort of literary production by a group of English men and women who were “sorry to see England going to the dogs” after World War II, and felt that a return to goddess worship would prevent this. The Witch cult, wrote Rose, “would happily combine the more aesthetically tolerable motifs of several former creeds and the least controversial ethical statements of all ages. Gods with Persian names and Greek bodies would prove, on examination, to have thoroughly Bloomsbury minds.”

Rose described Murray’s Witch cult as “male-oriented.” The myth of the Goddess, he said, “reeks of twentieth-century literary fashion,” and was not easily available before 1930. He wrote: “I doubt if at any date much before 1930 enough of the appropriate literature yet existed for many people to feel that to be truly pagan one must be ‘matristic.’” He dismissed Engels and Bachofen. He described Apuleius’s Golden Ass as “syncretistic” goddess religion and Paganism “of a very literary kind.” As for Leland’s Aradia, which was published in London in 1899, he dismissed it as another literary production. He called the book “post-Christian,” “not very pagan,” and “not very religious at all.” He took the position that the Italian Church had so thoroughly taken over the old festivals that it had “quite as good a claim to represent the old paganism as a cult that talks about Diana. . . .” As for Gardner, Rose said his version of Witchcraft was “syncretic,” full of Greek names and no Celtic ones, and he even described Graves’s contention that goddess worship is a part of the British heritage as a Nazi view.

Since Rose judged the revival of Wicca on the basis of its claim to “old traditions,” he could become quite acerbic, as when he observed:

Those who seek here for a mystical profundity hidden from common men will seek in vain, and wander in the same fog hand-in-hand with the eager latter-day necromancer on their left and on their right the Comparative Religionist spying out the elder gods. If they should pick up ten moonstruck companions, let them form their own coven to prove their own points; it will be as traditional, as well-instructed, and as authentic as any there has been these thousand years.⁴⁶

While various writers were dismissing the revival, within the Craft the debate for many years focused on the question raised by Valiente: Was Gardner’s version authoritative? Or was he merely an “upstart” and was there some other, older Craft that was authoritative? The second issue of Pentagram, the newsletter put out by the British Witchcraft Research Association, reprinted an address to the association in which Valiente paid tribute to Gardner and observed that many people assumed wrongly that he had invented the religion. Pentagram, she said, was beginning to contact surviving traditions that had had no contact with Gardner; the Craft had “survived in fragments all over the British Isles,” and each group had its own ideas and traditions of ritual and practice. And sure enough, other traditions, declaring themselves to be older, generally calling themselves “traditionalist” or “hereditary,” began to provide a counterpoint to the revivalist Craft described by Gardner. Various members of hereditary covens criticized the followers of Gardner and disagreed that Witchcraft was “a simple religion for simple folk.”⁴⁷

Almost all the writers in Pentagram took the view that the old traditions were fragmented, that these fragments once formed a coherent whole. They saw the Witchcraft Research Association as a kind of “United Nations of the Craft” that would open the way “for a truly great work to be performed; namely, the piecing together of all the true parts of the ancient tradition. . . .” In other words, Pentagram accepted the idea that Witchcraft was once the universal religion, which had been driven underground to survive in secret, with much being lost. Many articles encouraged the joining of traditions “before it is too late,” as the heritage was in danger and time was running out.⁴⁸

A Revisionist History of the Craft

How is one to reconcile all this controversy with the idea of Wicca as a serious movement? Did Gardner simply make it all up? Are there hereditary Witches? Are there covens that predate Murray and Gardner? Did Gardner have access to an older coven?

As we have seen, until a few years ago most scholars dismissed all segments of the modern Craft as a hoax. Some Witches said they were of very old traditions that existed long before the time of Gardner. Others said that Gardner’s version of the Craft was a “pure” tradition. And in America descendants of European immigrants insisted that they were Witches through family tradition, and that their Witchcraft didn’t resemble Gardner’s in the least. What’s more, many of them said that Witchcraft was first and foremost a craft and only secondarily a religion. At the same time, covens sprang up in many places, and coven leaders declared themselves to be heirs of traditions that were thousands of years old. Many of these were soon discovered to be liars. One Wiccan priestess told me, “I’ve never seen a really old Book of Shadows. I’m not saying they don’t exist . . . but like unicorns and hippogryphs, I’ve never seen one!”

What does this controversy have to do with the reality of the modern Craft? Fortunately, not much. Over the last thirty years, while some writers and scholars were dismissing the Craft as “silly” or “fraudulent,” Neo-Pagans and Wiccans began to reassess who they really were and what the Craft was really about. And during this time a number of Neo-Pagan American writers tried to piece together a revisionist history of the Craft.

In the beginning of this chapter it was noted that Isaac Bonewits had divided Witches into several categories. Now is the time to look at his arguments more closely, particularly as they are related to the origins of the Craft and the place of Witches outside the revival.

The history of Bonewits’s interaction with the Craft is a stormy one. He is a magician and occultist, who was for many years a priest of the New Reformed Druids of North America. He then founded a revivalist Druid group called Ár nDraíocht Féin. From the beginning, when he wrote Real Magic (1971), Bonewits has always been a bit snide about Wicca. He dismissed the “Myth of Wicca” a little too bluntly, a little too easily, and a little too early, and thereby angered many in the Craft. At the time of Real Magic and his later article, “Witchcult: Fact or Fancy?” most Witches accepted literally the idea of a universal Old Religion such as that described by Murray. Since Bonewits’s views were close to those of more inflexible scholars, he was branded by some as unfriendly to the Craft community. In the book, written when Bonewits was barely out of college, he argued (as he still does) that there never was a unified European-wide Old Religion. There were Pagan religions—many of which were very vital—and many European communities retained Pagan beliefs and even, perhaps, groups well into the Christian era; but Bonewits argued that the “Unitarian Old Religion of White Witches” existed in fancy, not in fact, “the product of local cultural egotism and bad ethnography.”⁴⁹ His final sally in Real Magic caused even more friction:

Some of the witch groups claim to be Christian, and except for the fact that they often do their rites in the nude, you could find more paganism and witchcraft at a Baptist prayer meeting. Other groups claim to be revivals or remnants of the nonexistent “Witch-Cult of Western Europe” (made so popular by author Margaret Murray). They get their “authority” from their Secret Beliefs Handed Down for Generations of Witches in My Family, etc. This sort of witchcraft tends to be a mishmash of halfforgotten superstition, Christian concepts, and Hindu beliefs. Thus, their “fertility rites” are done for “spiritual fertility” rather than physical fertility, though they like to hint that their ceremonies are really very exciting (they’re not—they are hideously boring to anyone who’s been to a good love-in).⁵⁰

Several years later Bonewits addressed a meeting of Witches in Minneapolis. His remarks were later published in Gnostica as “Witchcult: Fact or Fancy?” He later refined these arguments in a series of articles that appeared in Green Egg in 1976–1977 under the title “Witchcraft: Classical, Gothic and Neopagan.” He has changed these categories slightly in recent years.

Bonewits’s division of Witches into categories is meant to clear up some of the confusion surrounding the word Witch. For example, the “classical witch” or cunning folk, would be defined as:

a person (usually an older female) who is adept in the uses of herbs, roots, barks, etc., for the purposes of both healing and hurting (including midwifing, poisoning, producing aphrodisiacs, producing hallucinogens, etc.) and who is familiar with the basic principles of both passive and active magical talents, and can therefore use them for good or ill, as she chooses.

This “classical witch” would be found among most peoples. In Europe this woman (or man) would be an old peasant, perhaps, “a font of country wisdom and old superstitions as well as a shrewd judge of character.” For this kind of witch, writes Bonewits, religion was fairly irrelevant to practice. Some considered themselves Christians; some were Pagans. In Ireland many said that their powers came from the fairies. Relatively few classical witches exist today in Europe. But Bonewits thinks that most people who call themselves “witches” today are “Neoclassical”—that is they use magic, divination, herbology, and extrasensory perception without much regard for religion. According to Bonewits, 70 percent of the Witches in America today are “Neoclassical.”⁵¹

Bonewits’s “gothic witches,” now called “diabolic witches,” are those who appear in trial reports between 1450 and 1750. They represented a reversed version of Roman Catholicism, including pacts with the devil, the devouring of babies, and other pieces of propaganda that the Church used during the Inquisition. Gothic witchcraft, according to Bonewits, is a Church fiction. He refutes the Murrayite thesis of a universal Old Religion with the contention that witchcraft in Europe was a creation of the Inquisition, complete with descriptions of the sabbat, covens, and orgies. He regards contemporary Satanism as neogothic witchcraft because it descends from the gothic witchcraft created by Christianity. Most modern Satanists pattern themselves on the ideas created by the Church and proceed from there. (I would amend this to say that a few modern Satanists seem to be misplaced Neo-Pagans who have not been able to get beyond Christian terminology and symbolism.)

Bonewits does accept the survival of Neo-Pagans into the Christian era, although he is convinced that by the eleventh century most of them had gone underground or had been destroyed. Essentially he takes the orthodox scholarly position that until the middle of the fourteenth century witchcraft simply meant sorcery—the attempt to control nature—and was never an organized survival of Paganism; that the word acquired a new meaning in the fourteenth century, when it was identified as a heresy and was elaborated upon and spread by the Inquisition for its own political ends. We have met his arguments before: official Church policy that witchcraft was illusion was reversed; a new form of witchcraft was created by the Church to root out heresy; many of the old charges against Jews and Gypsies were “dusted off” and combined with the new inventions of the witches’ sabbat and the Black Mass.

Bonewits believes that some European families may have kept Pagan traditions alive (he notes that rich families often don’t get persecuted) but that there is no evidence of an underground organized religious movement during the European Middle Ages.⁵²

Bonewits uses the term “Neopagan Witchcraft” to refer to Wicca. He estimates that of the many thousands of people in America who consider themselves Witches, a statistical breakdown might look something like this:

⁵³

Like many others, Bonewits believes that folklore and literature gave birth to Neo-Pagan Witchcraft: the folklore of Frazer and the theories of mother-right, and Leland’s studies of Pagan survivals among the Italian peasantry. He says that the fields of folklore, anthropology, and psychology really began to develop between 1900 and 1920, as did psychical research and ceremonial magic. He speculates:

Somewhere between 1920 and 1925 in England a group of social scientists (probably folklorists) got together with some Golden Dawn Rosicrucians and a few Fam-Trads [see below] to produce the first modern covens in England; grabbing eclectically from any source they could find in order to try and reconstruct the shards of their Pagan past.⁵⁴

Bonewits attributes most Neo-Pagan Witchcraft in the United States to Gerald Gardner’s influence, and writes that Gardner took “material from any source that didn’t run too fast to get away.”

Family Traditions

Bonewits is most illuminating when he talks about the reality of Family Traditions (Fam-Trads). He accepts the idea that some “Classical witches” could have preserved folk traditions and agricultural festivals. While this was no organized universal cult, isolated and powerful families may have preserved many traditions, each family suffering contamination over the years. “There is plenty of evidence,” he writes, “of ancient Pagan traditions surviving under thin Christian veneers in isolated parts of Christendom,” but “there is almost nothing logical to suggest that the people leading these traditions were in touch with each other or shared more than the vaguest common beliefs.”⁵⁵ These families often call themselves Witches now, but whether they did a short while ago, or whether they have anything in common with modern Wiccans, remains in question.

Bonewits stresses the contamination of the European family traditions, as well as of those families that immigrated to the United States (Immigrant Traditions). Classical witches were becoming fewer in number, and “Scientism was rapidly becoming the supreme religion in the West.”

Most members of Fam-Trads made efforts to conceal their “superstitious” beliefs and Pagan magical systems. Instead they became involved in Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism in the 18th century, Spiritualism and Theosophy in the 19th; for all of these movements were considered more respectable than witchcraft, and still allowed the Fam-Trads to practice occult arts. . . . So as the years went by, members of the Fam-Trads absorbed more and more from non-Pagan magical sources and handed their new information down to each generation, often carelessly letting the descendants think that a Rosicrucian spell or alchemical meditation was a legitimate part of their Pagan heritage. So even today we have Fam-Trad witches who are far closer to being Theosophists or Spiritualists than to being Classical or Neoclassical witches.⁵⁶

Almost everyone who has met members of family traditions notes that their Craft is far different from the Witchcraft of the revival. They far more easily fit Bonewits’s description of “Classical witches.” As one Midwestern priestess observed to me, “I know about family traditions—there are lots of people who have been taught how to do various things. But it’s rarely called Witchcraft. Later on, of course, these people begin reading and they say to themselves, ‘I was taught to do that, and here they say it’s Witchcraft!’”

In Bonewits’s analysis, the Family Tradition Witches are essentially “Classical witches” who changed with the times. As he told me, “In order to stay unpersecuted, they had to use a lot of protective coloration. When Rosicrucian terminology was in, they would train their kids with that terminology. When Theosophy was in, they were Theosophists. When Spiritualism was in, they were Spiritualists. And this means that from an anthropological point of view, the Fam-Trads are extremely contaminated. The later generations don’t know what’s from the family and what’s been inserted.

“There may have been Family Traditions who read Frazer and Murray and said, ‘Oh, that’s what we’ve been doing,’ and copied down all this stuff, thinking, ‘This is our long-lost tradition brought back to us by this anthropologist or this folklorist.’

“And when a Family Tradition comes to the United States—an immigrant tradition—they’ll start to mishmash their family belief system with the folk customs of the people they’re living with. Today, many of these people are sitting on the borderline between being a neoclassical witch and a modern Wiccan Witch.”

Do the Witches of these Family Traditions speak about themselves as Bonewits describes them? The answer is, pretty much, yes, as we will see from a few examples.

Lady Cybele is a Witch who lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Her roots are Scots and Welsh, and the main family magical traditions come from her father’s side. Both her father’s parents were from Craft traditions. After arriving in New York, most of the family settled in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Cybele told me of family gatherings of over two hundred people at which a small group would get together on the side and talk about “the old ways” or “the way we used to do things.” Her family was wary about letting the neighbors know that they had any unusual practices. And to them Witchcraft was a practice. She said, “The religious aspect was very simple—worship of Mother Nature. God was in Nature and Nature was female. The Goddess was the earth. The oak tree, not the sun, manifested the male principle. That was about all the theology.

“When I was growing up, the spiritual aspects were not stressed as they are now. The Craft has taken a lot of influences from high magic. I think that’s a fine thing, but it’s fairly new to the Craft.”

Cybele’s tradition did not contain written laws. “If the Fam-Trads have a law,” she said, “that law would be: ‘If it works, do it; if not, throw it out.’ The Craft has always borrowed from every culture we’ve come in contact with.” Since the family lived close to the land, she was taught primarily agricultural magic—weather working and crop magic.

“I was shown how to do certain things, practical things. How do you make your garden grow? You talk to your plants. You enter into a mental rapport with them. How do you call fish to you? How do you place yourself in the right spot? How do you encourage them?”

For most of her life, Cybele was unaware of the Wiccan revival. “It wasn’t until college that I found out there were other people in the Craft, and I didn’t know there were many of us until 1964, when my husband came running home from the library where he worked, bubbling with excitement, saying, ‘There are more of us in the world.’ He had Gerald Gardner’s book and we read it through and he said, ‘This is incredible! They’re not like us completely, but, yes, we do this, and we do that, and whoever heard of that?’”

Cybele said that in her experience most Fam-Trads were loners who had difficulty working in covens. Occasionally Fam-Trads would work together, but seldom would it be a formal ritual gathering. More likely it would be a series of telephone calls: “Hey, did you hear about Sam Smith, who is going in for cancer tests Tuesday at eight o’clock? Think about it!” Cybele said that most of the Fam-Trad Witches she knew worked in street clothing and used common kitchen implements for tools. “I’ve added things from other traditions,” she said, “because I think they’re fun.”

I also talked with Bonnie Sherlock, a Craft priestess in Lander, Wyoming, before her death in 1976. She described the teachings of her Irish immigrant grandmother in similar terms.

“Her beliefs were Pagan, although her room was full of Roman Catholic statues and pictures. She never used the terminology that’s used in the Craft today. She called a pentagram a ‘star.’ If you had the ability, she referred to it as ‘the power.’ She did not use the term ‘aura,’ she would say ‘light.’ She never called it ‘Witchcraft,’ but simply ‘having the power.’ She called the summer solstice ‘the Middle of the Summer,’ and Beltane [May 1st] was ‘May Basket Day.’ Yule was ‘Yule’ and Samhain was ‘Hallows-een.’ She made incense from ground cinnamon in the pantry and pine needles.

“I learned from her that the Craft is a religion of hearth and fireside. The tools of the Craft are kitchen utensils in disguise. It’s a religion of domesticity and the celebration of life.”

Despite having these teachings, Bonnie Sherlock needed an impetus to begin working in the Craft. As with Cybele, that impetus came from outside and sounds strikingly similar.

“I got an advertisement in the mail and it had a list of books by Gerald Gardner. I decided to subscribe to the British magazine Pentagram. Then I saw a letter from Leo Martello in Fate magazine, setting up a method of getting Craft people together. Through Leo, I began corresponding with a man who became my High Priest.”

But this was still not enough. “You just can’t go around saying, ‘I’m a Witch.’ Perhaps it all boils down to the idea that you have to prove yourself to yourself before you can prove yourself to anyone else. I felt I had to have some kind of initiation. And so I went to a Native American Medicine Man. I went through a ritual, a three-day fast and vision quest. In creating our Delphian tradition, I used a combination of traditions, including Celtic and Native American material as well as things I remembered from my grandmother.”

Here is yet another story from a Family Tradition Witch, this one a man from Minnesota:

“I was brought up with a sort of old-fashioned American Paganoccult background. Mostly, I’ve revolted against this in much the same way most Neo-Pagans and other counterculture people have revolted against their Judeo-Christian backgrounds. Only a couple of members of my family were people I consider even remotely Aquarian, and they’re dead now.

“I was raised as a Pagan. My whole family are ‘old-fashioned witches.’ This doesn’t mean they’re anything like the Neo-Pagans or the Pagans of ancient Europe. Mostly it means they’re not Christians, Jews, Moslems, or modern intellectual atheists.

“Other than reference to ‘Mother Nature’ and the like, I was never exposed to the Pagan deities as described by Robert Graves and others, and the ‘magic’ my grandmother, mother, aunts, et cetera, practiced was derived from a wide variety of sources, mostly modern Masonic and Rosicrucian techniques, Spiritualism, ‘Gypsy’ card reading and divination, Theosophy, and so on. I have an idea the whole thing is rooted somewhere in the past in the Celtic Old Religion, but if so, the elements are so worn down as to be impossible to identify for sure.

“Most of the ways in which my upbringing differed from a standard American one are little nonverbal details. Like being put to nurse on a sheep-dog bitch when my mother ran short of milk, instead of being put on a bottle filled with cow’s milk and refined sugar. Cutting my teeth on meat gristle instead of a plastic pacifier. Lighting instead of blowing out the candles on my birthday cakes. Bringing home a ‘Christmas tree’ in a tub, roots intact, and planting it again in the spring. Those are the only things that I remember, but my personality turned out radically different from those of the kids I went to school with. For instance, I never had any true understanding of the Christian concepts of ‘sin’ and ‘guilt.’ As long as I can remember I’ve simply realized that if you do something ‘wrong,’ you get ‘punished,’ maybe by other people, maybe by the workings of Nature, but never by yourself.

“My family used the word ‘Witch’ rather loosely for anyone who practiced ‘magic’—it had nothing to do with going through any particular religious rituals, only operational rituals [spells]. The ‘magic’ I learned as a child was mainly what you might call ‘extrasensory perception’—knowing if an outsider was friendly or hostile, lying or telling the truth, having flashes of knowledge about the future or past of a person or object, locating lost things. As I got older, my aunt and uncle started teaching me from all sorts of ‘standard’ magical sources: the holy books of a dozen or more religions, the occult and spiritualist books of the last century and this. They also taught me their ‘personal’ system, which was a hodgepodge from many different magical systems, as well as a lot more that wasn’t magic at all but all the con-man tricks necessary to make my living as a magician if I wanted to. (They spent about thirty years traveling around the country calling themselves ‘Gypsies’ and supporting themselves mostly by doing various kinds of divination. They also gave people ‘profound spiritual experiences’ by turning them on with peyote without telling them what they were doing.) So I’m really not a ‘Witch’ in the sense the term is used among modern groups calling themselves by that name, even though I’ve used that term all my life. ‘Magician’ would be more descriptive, and it’s what I now use to describe myself, leaving ‘Witch’ to apply to the people who practice Pagan religions loosely derived from Celtic and other Indo-European Old Religions.”

As a final example, here is the story of Z Budapest, the feminist Witch of Los Angeles. This is what she told me of her childhood in Hungary:

“I was a Witch before I was a feminist. My family kept a book of who had lived and who had died, starting in 1270. There were quite a few herbalists in my family. At one point our family had a small pharmacy in a little town. My father was a doctor and many people in my family were healers.

“I observed my mother talking to the dead. I saw her go into trance and feel presences around her. She is an artist and her art often reflects Sumerian influences. She presents it as peasant, not Pagan, and so she gets away with it in Hungary. And in Hungarian, the word is the same.

“Many country folk buy my mother’s ceramics. She uses ancient motifs, such as the tree of life, flower symbology, and the idea of the Goddess holding a child within a circle of rebirth. She does spontaneous magic and chants, and rhymes. She tells fortunes and can still the wind.”

When Z was sixteen the Hungarian uprising occurred and she became a political exile.

“In one day I saw a total change occur. Suddenly the people of my country came out and loved each other. Hungarians usually hate each other. It was my first initiation into revolution. It made me decide to change my life. I wanted to live. I wanted to thrive. I decided my country was wiped out. I decided to check out the West.”

But when Z came to New York she discovered a new form of oppression. The Ford and Rockefeller foundations were giving scholarships to refugees. Men would get a reasonable income, but women could get very little money. They had to become waitresses to even get through high school. She ended up in a traditional role: wife and mother. After twelve years, feeling limited and enslaved, she was driven to make a suicide attempt. During this attempt she had a vision in which she died and death was not fearful. She told me:

“After this vision, I regained my true perspective of a Witch, how a Witch looks at life—as a challenge. It is not going to last forever, and it’s all right on the other side, so what are you going to do?

“And once that happened inside me, I just packed up and stuck out my thumb and hitchhiked from New York to Los Angeles. And I picked up a paper and there was a women’s liberation celebration on March 8th. And I thought I would check out these people. And I knew them. They looked like me. Some of them had my wounds; some of them had different wounds.

“I began to talk about the Goddess. I knew a lot of Pagan customs that my country had preserved, but which had lost religious meaning—although not for me. I also began to read about Dianic Witchcraft, the English literature. A year later I began, with several other women, to have sabbats. In 1971, on the Winter Solstice, we named our coven the Susan B. Anthony Coven.”

The pattern is clear. The family tradition begins quite close to Bonewits’s definition of “Classical Witchcraft”: a heritage of magical teachings, mostly oral. The religion is simple. There are no elaborate initiations. Ritual is at a minimum. It is a craft. Then there is contact with revivalist Wicca, in many cases with the “English literature”—Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner, among others. From this comes a new outward direction toward activity, and in some cases the adoption of more formal structures, initiations, and rituals.

The literature of the revivalist Craft had influenced almost everyone I met. And whatever Gardner had done in England for good or ill, his books had served as a catalyst or springboard for many covens and traditions that did not necessarily “look” Gardnerian. These covens had little of the minor trappings of Gardner’s Craft—the nudity, the scourge, the use of particular rituals. But the influence was there.

My interview with the poet and shaman Victor Anderson is a case in point. This was among the most mysterious of my encounters. His was the only story I heard that was clearly from the land of faery. It was pure poetry.

Anderson, the author of a beautiful book of Craft poems, Thorns of the Blood Rose, ⁵⁷ told me of his meeting with a tiny old woman who said to him, at the age of nine, that he was a Witch. He was living in Oregon when he came upon her sitting nude in the center of a circle alongside a number of brass bowls filled with herbs. He said that he took off his clothes, knowing instinctively what to do, and was initiated “by full sexual rite.” He then told me of the vision he had in that circle.

“She whispered the names of our tradition and everything vanished; it was all completely black. There seemed to be nothing solid except this woman and I held on to her. We seemed to be floating in space. Then I heard a voice, a very distant voice saying ‘Tana, Tana.’ It became louder and louder. It was a very female voice, but it was as powerful as thunder and as hard as a diamond and yet very soft. Then it came on very loud. It said, ‘I am Tana.’ Then, suddenly, I could see there was a great sky overhead like a tropical sky, full of stars, glittering brilliant stars, and I could see perfectly in this vision, despite my blindness.^h The moon was there, but it was green. Then I could hear the sounds of the jungle all around me. I could smell the odors of the jungle.

“Then I saw something else coming toward me out of the jungle. A beautiful man. There was something effminate about him, and yet very powerful. His phallus was quite erect. He had horns and a blue flame came out of his head. He came walking toward me, and so did she. I realized without being told that this was the mighty Horned God. But he was not her lord and master or anything like that, but her lover and consort. She contained within herself all the principles and potencies in nature.

“There were other strange communications, and then the darkness disappeared. We sat in the circle and she began to instruct me in the ritual use of each one of the herbs and teas in the circle. Then I was washed in butter and oil and salt. I put my clothes back on and made my way back to the house. The next morning when I woke up, I knew it had really happened, but it seemed kind of a dream.”

After the description of this vision had settled, I asked Anderson, “When did you decide to form a coven?” And he replied, “It was when Gerald Gardner put out this book of his, Witchcraft Today. I thought to myself, ‘Well, if that much is known . . . it all fits together.’ ”

On the other side of the country I questioned another Neo-Pagan leader, Penny Novack, one of the early leaders of the Pagan Way, a Neo-Pagan group that in theology was closely allied with Wicca. She described her entry into a religion of goddess worship.

“I was working as a cleaning lady for a small college in Vermont. There was a terrible snowfall and I was out on the road, hitching. The moon was up, a beautiful full moon, and I was walking along the road.

“Now, me and God had this relationship. I always yelled at God and God always said, ‘If you get off your ass and do something, it will straighten out.’ And sometimes it would and sometimes it wouldn’t.

“So I’m walking along this road, shaking my fist at the moon and saying, ‘Why am I not growing any more? What am I supposed to do?’ And I’m furious and I’m shaking my fist at the moon and getting more freaked by the whole situation when I get this message. I didn’t hear a voice. I just got this message: ‘Your problem is that your concept of the Eternal One is masculine, and until you can know the One as Feminine, there’s no way you’re going to grow.’ So I said to myself, ‘That’s weird. I never would have thought of that, but I’ll give it a try.’”

When Penny and her husband, Michael, moved to Philadelphia, Michael began to get interested in Witchcraft. Penny told him, “I’m not interested in magic. I want something that deals with goddesses and spiritual growth.

“And Michael is saying, ‘I read these books by Gerald Gardner, and it sounds like a real nature religion,’ and I’m saying ‘Don’t talk to me about Witchcraft.’

“A week later, in December of 1965, the local Republican committeeman came to call and, in passing, mentioned some Witches he’d like us to meet. He brought over a Gardnerian pamphlet, and things took off from there.”

Gardner in a New Light

In the late 1970s, Aidan Kelly, a founder of one of the most vital and beautiful Craft traditions in America—the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (NROOGD)—began to write about the origins of the Gardnerian tradition.

The early versions of his manuscript were titled “The Rebirth of Witchcraft: Tradition and Creativity in the Gardnerian Reform.” Within this work, Kelly did something quite new. He labeled the entire Wiccan revival “Gardnerian Witchcraft.” “I refer to this current religious movement as ‘Gardnerian,’” he writes, “because almost all the current vitality in the movement was sparked by Gerald B. Gardner, a retired British civil servant who instituted a reform (and I use this word very precisely) in the 1940s.”⁵⁸

Most modern Witches use the term “Gardnerian” to refer either to those specific covens that derive through a chain of apostolic succession from Gardner’s coven on the Isle of Man, or to those covens that use Gardnerian rituals, a large number of which have been published in books. NROOGD fits into neither category. But Aidan was saying something different—that the influence of Gardner on the modern Craft revival is much greater than most people realize, and that many groups have, often unknowingly, assimilated his main contributions.

The manuscript focused on the problems we have been considering—the Wiccan movement’s claim to historical continuity—since many members of the Craft (at least until recently) have said that their practices descend in a direct line from the pre-Christian religions of Great Britain and Northern Europe. As Aidan observed, most Witches see their religion as a “native Pagan religion of Britain and northern Europe that, according to Margaret Murray’s theory, underlay the politico-religious struggle that culminated in the witch trials of early modern time.” But, as we have seen, most scholars dismissed Murray’s theory and the entire movement as fraudulent. The truth, wrote Aidan, in the late 1970s, lies somewhere in between.

Kelly’s manuscript went through many revisions. Part of his work on Gardner was finally published in 1991 as Crafting the Art of Magic. One of his most important contributions was finding the earliest version of Gardner’s Book of Shadows in the Toronto collections of Gardner’s materials: Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical. It is the earliest version of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows, or the Gardnerian liturgy. The material found its way to Canada after Monique Wilson sold Gardner’s museum on the Isle of Man to Ripley’s International Ltd.

At the beginning of his research, when Drawing Down the Moon was first published, Kelly argued that there was no way of proving whether a New Forest coven actually existed. He wrote that if it did, its procedures were so rudimentary that new ones had to be invented. And whether he had traditional information, or simply took information out of books, Gardner tranformed the concepts “so thoroughly that he instituted a major reform—that is, as has happened so many times in history, he founded a new religion in the apparently sincere belief that he was merely reforming an old one” and although this religion may have elements of the Old Religion, it is “no more the same religion than the first Buddhists were still just Hindus, or the first Christians were still just Jews.”⁵⁹

The concepts that were new—the focus of Gardner’s reform—were: the preeminence of the Goddess; the idea of the woman as priestess; the idea that a woman can become the Goddess; and a new way of working magic that was particularly accessible to small groups. The last was a combination of the “low magic” common to folklore the world over (spells and recipes) and the “high magic” of the ceremonial grimoire. Added to this was the idea of the circle as a place to contain power. Sources used by Gardner included Ovid, Crowley, Kipling, Leland, and the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Aidan wrote that it really makes no difference whether or not Gardner was initiated into an older coven. He invented a new religion, a “living system,” and modern covens have adopted a lot of it because it fulfills a need. This new system has little to do with the rituals that are labeled “Gardnerian.” It has little to do with the few covens that “are part of the ‘orthodox apostolic succession’ of Gardnerian initiation.” The reform consists of these new concepts, the primary ones being the worship of the Goddess and a new way of working magic, a kind of middle-class magic (although Aidan did not use that term). The appeal of the Goddess makes the movement more significant than its size would indicate.

Aidan observed that Gardner’s reform took place during the same period in which Robert Graves published The White Goddess and Gertrude Rachel Levy wrote The Gate of Horn.⁶⁰ He wrote that

the essence of Gardner’s reform is that he made the Goddess the major deity of his new movement, and it is the Goddess who captures the imagination, or hearts, or souls, or whatever else they are caught by, of those who enter into this movement. It is as if western civilization were ready to deal again (or finally) with the concept of Deity as Female. Whatever the reasons may be why this readiness exists, it is this readiness which justifies and sustains the Gardnerian movement, not a pseudohistory traceable to the Stone Age.⁶¹

It was Aidan’s view that Gardner had never been given credit for creative genius. He had a vision of a reformed Craft. He pulled together pieces from magic and folklore; he assimilated the “matriarchal thealogy” set forth in Graves and Leland and Apuleius. With these elements he created a system that grew.

Kelly argued that the Craft is valid on its own terms. Why? Because it is a religion based on experience. The Craft is a religion that allows certain experiences to happen. It doesn’t need dogma. Its covens are linked by their focus on the pantheons of pre-Christian Europe, by their ethic of “An ye harm none, do what ye will,” and, primarily, by their worship of the Goddess.

In later years, after analyzing Gardner’s notebooks, Kelly came to believe that there was no basis at all for the claim that Gardnerian Witchcraft derived from the ancient Pagan religion of Europe. Looking at Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical, Kelly noted that many things were copied into it, including passages from the Greater Key of Solomon that appear in Gardnerian rituals and the initiation rituals that are found in Gardner’s novel High Magic’s Aid. Kelly contended that the book did not start out as a “Book of Shadows” but “had become one—in fact, the very first one—by the time it was filled up and retired.” Kelly argued that by looking at the documents it is clear that up until 1954 all the rituals were adapted from the Cabalistic procedures in the Greater Key of Solomon. There was, in his view, no emphasis on the Goddess as a major deity and on the high priestess as the central authority in the coven until after 1957, “when Doreen Valiente became the first such ‘Gardnerian’ high priestess and began to adopt Robert Graves’s ‘White Goddess’ myth as the official thealogy of her coven.” According to Kelly, it was only after the publication of Witchcraft Today, in 1954, that the Goddess and the priestess became dominant. Writes Kelly: “Valiente’s major work from 1954–7 was the creation of a Pagan theology on which rituals could be based; she also created rituals based on this theology by adapting the cumbersome procedures of the HOGD (Holy Order of the Golden Dawn) system to the needs of a small group. As such things go, I must consider this a major advance in magical technology.”⁶²

In the summer 1985 issue of Iron Mountain, Doreen Valiente replied to his arguments. She said that she did contribute many things to the present-day Book of Shadows of “what has come to be called Gardnerian Witchcraft,” but she said her contribution was by no means as extensive as Kelly believed. She said she was not the first Gardnerian priestess and that Gardner already had a working coven when she was initiated in 1953. Valiente said the existence of a pre-1939 coven in the New Forest area did not stand or fall on an analysis of the Gardnerian documents, that independent testimony about such a coven was given to the occult writer Francis King by the writer Louis Wilkinson. Valiente then described her own search for “Old Dorothy,” the high priestess who supposedly initiated Gerald Gardner in 1939. After a long search, Valiente found copies of her birth and death certificates and she asserted that her background corresponded to the account given of her in Bracelin’s biography of Gardner, and that she was living in the same area on the edge of the New Forest as were Gerald Gardner and his wife in 1939. As we have seen, Ronald Hutton asserts Dorothy Clutterbuck did live in the area but probably had nothing to do with Gardner or the Craft. Valiente also asserted that Kelly was simply wrong to say that there was no emphasis on the Goddess as a major deity and on the high priestess as the central authority in the coven until 1957. “The worship of the Goddess was always there,” she wrote, “and according to Gerald always had been there.”⁶³

In the last years of her life, Doreen Valiente revealed various pieces of information. Some can be found in her book Witchcraft for Tomorrow, and the Farrars’ The Witches’ Way reveals more. But there are many questions that remain unanswered. I asked Valiente, “What do you think did exist in 1939?” In a series of letters over the summer and fall of 1985, Doreen Valiente wrote that she believed Gardner did not invent the basic skeleton of the rituals. “I base this belief,” she wrote, “on what old Gerald told me, and on the rather disjointed state of the rituals which he had when I first knew him. They were heavily influenced by Crowley and the O.T.O., but underneath there was a lot which wasn’t Crowley at all, and wasn’t the Golden Dawn or ceremonial magic either—and I had been studying all three of these traditions for years.” She wrote that she believed the initiations were more or less as they are today, as were the concepts of the Goddess and the God and the role of the Priest and the Priestess. “Yes, I am responsible for quite a lot of the wording of the present-day rituals; but not the framework of those rituals or the ideas upon which they are based. On that I give you my word.”

Valiente also said she never believed “Gardnerian” or any other Witchcraft rites had “a direct line to the paleolithic.” On the contrary, she said, “I think that our present-day rituals bear the same sort of relationship to the ancient days that, for instance, the Sacrifice of the Mass in a present-day cathedral bears to the little ritual meal that took place under dramatic circumstances in the upper room of a tavern in Palestine somewhere around 33 A.D.” She wrote that she was intrigued by Isaac Bonewits’s suggestion that a group of folklorists in the 1920s got together with some Fam-Trads and some Golden Dawn Rosicrucians to produce the first modern covens in England.

Valiente also had some words that modern American Gardnerians would find surprising. Noting the tendency to use the titles of “Queen,” “Lord,” and “Lady,” within some American covens, she wrote: “All this bowing and scraping to ‘Queens’ and ‘Ladies’ makes me sick! The only Queen whose authority I acknowledge lives in Buckingham Palace!” She claimed such ideas were introduced into America by Monique Wilson.

In 1985, the priestess she was most impressed with was Starhawk. “Some years ago,” she wrote, “I did some scrying at a Sabbat, in the course of which I predicted that a new young priestess would arise who would do a great deal for the Craft in the future. When I read Starhawk’s book I felt that my prediction was coming true.” So I asked Valiente, “How do you assess ‘validity’? What makes someone valid?” She wrote back, “Well, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, ‘a witch is a witch is a witch is a witch.’ If someone is genuinely devoted to the ways of the Old Gods and the magic of nature, in my eyes they’re valid, especially if they can use the witch powers. In other words, it isn’t what people know, it’s what they are.”⁶⁴

Before moving on, it should be said that some people involved with Gardnerian Witchcraft have been looking at other sources for the Craft. Donald Frew, in a 1999 article in the scholarly Pagan journal The Pomegranate wrote that he now believes “that a direct line of transmission can be traced from the Hermetic and Neoplatonic theurgy of late antiquity to the beginnings of the modern Craft movement in the 1930s.”⁶⁵ Frew and Anna Korn went to the ancient city of Harran in Turkey, to conduct research. Frew argues that Paganism and Neo-Platonism remained active in Harran until the twelfth century, more than five hundred years after Paganism ended in the Roman Empire, and many Neoplatonists fled east. What’s more, Gardner, in his writings, mentions a short Neoplatonic work by Sallustius, a friend of the Pagan emperor Julian, On the Gods and the World. (In some translations it’s called Concerning the Gods and the Universe.) Frew writes that Gardner saw this text as explaining the basic theology of the Craft.

The Primary Craft Tradition: Creativity

Today most revivalist Witches in North America accept the universal Old Religion more as metaphor than as literal reality—a spiritual truth more than a geographic one. And while the first issue of Pentagram (in 1964) proclaimed that the old traditions were once a coherent whole that only needed to be pieced together again, many Witches never viewed Wicca monolithically and only a few dogmatists would view it so today. Bonewits’s old definition of Neo-Pagan Witchcraft would now be disputed by most Wiccans. And he himself has modified his views. But he once wrote:

“Neopagan Witchcraft” refers to people who also call themselves “followers of Wicca,” “Wiccans,” and “Crafters.” These people are Neo-pagans who have a duotheistic theology (a Goddess and a Horned God), who believe firmly that once upon a time everybody in Europe worshipped the same way they do now, that the Witches were the priests and priestesses of the Universal Goddess Cult driven underground by the Christians, and that someday every ordained Witch will become the leader of a congregation of Neopagans just as their predecessors supposedly led congregations of Paleopagans.⁶⁶

Bonewits, of course, was describing the Myth of Wicca early in its development in America, at a time when most Wiccans were newly initiated or were obsessed with re-creating “traditions.” But already by 1975 this had all changed. Many Witches no longer accepted the Murrayite thesis totally. While some still talked of “unbroken traditions,” few of them thought Gardner—or anyone else—had a direct line to the paleolithic caves. And people in the Craft were beginning to regard the question of origin as unimportant. Most had become comfortable with the idea of creativity and originality as the springboard to the Craft. As more and more of the Wicca came to see that there was no such thing as a totally unbroken or uncontaminated tradition, they began to reassess the meaning of their movement.

Today many Witches will speak forcefully about Pagan survivals. Many will talk about different traditions of ancient Pagan peoples and of a rich Pagan past. Many will speak of ancient mythology and folk traditions or about goddesses throughout the world. But they do not accept the Wiccan Myth as it was commonly described thirty years ago.

Many of them feel no link with the witchcraft of the Middle Ages or the seventeenth century, preferring to look farther back to the ancient Greeks, the Celts, and even the Egyptians. If they organize in “covens,” it is certainly not primarily because “covens” appear in some descriptions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witches, but rather because groups of seven to twelve people have proved over time—in encounter groups, therapy groups, and consciousness-raising groups—to be the best size for like-minded people to work together effectively. Modern Wicca descends in spirit from precisely those fragments of pre-Christian beliefs and practices that nobody denies: myths, poetry, the classics, and folk customs.

The comments of Witches are instructive. Ed Fitch, creator of the Pagan Way rituals, Gardnerian priest, and one of those who was attacked in the past for adhering dogmatically to the Wiccan Myth, told me:

“I think all of us have matured somewhat. After a while you realize that if you’ve heard one story about an old grandmother, you’ve heard six or seven just like it. You realize that the hereafter must be overpopulated with grandmothers.

“People like Raymond Buckland and myself used to believe that the Craft was very ancient. For a while I think I believed the Gardnerian Craft literally descended from rituals depicted in the paleolithic cave paintings in the Caverne des Trois Frères at Ariège, France.

“I think all of us went through this sort of thing. I know I did. But now, of course, the realization has come around to everyone that it doesn’t matter whether your tradition is forty thousand years old or whether it was created last week. If there is a proper connection between you and the Goddess and the God in the subconscious, and other such forces, then that’s what matters.”

Ed Fitch’s former wife, Janine Renée, said she felt that Murray’s chief contribution was to show the prevalence of Pagan survivals in Europe. She felt the Craft was connected to horticulture and that its origins were pre-Germanic and pre-Celtic.

Gardnerian priestess Theos told me:

“I do not personally subscribe to the idea that cavemen were Witches, as many seem so eager to attempt to prove. Nor do I feel that those many later societies who related to those forces were Witches; nor am I certain that those who were accused of being Witches in the seventeenth century were into the same thing we are into in modern Wicca.”

Carl Weschcke, a Craft priest in the American Celtic Tradition and the publisher of Llewellyn Press, told me that the universal Old Religion may not have existed geographically, but it existed in the Jungian sense that people were tapping a common source. “We are reaching back; we’re trying to rediscover our roots. Nobody I’ve met seems to have a truly living tradition. Everyone seems impoverished. But it’s coming to life, coming to life.”

Moria, a priestess from northern California, told me:

“What good is a lineage? You either have the energy or you don’t.

“I’ve seen a lot of people in the Craft get hung up on fragments of ritual and myth. Some people accept these fragments as a dogma. And dogma is the worst thing you can have in the Craft. The Craft has to be a living, breathing religion, something that is alive, and growing.”

Many Witches expressed these same feelings. Dianic priestess Morgan McFarland of Dallas said that goddess worship had “an ancient universality about it,” but that it had appeared in different places at different times, changing from place to place. Still, she said, “at this point it really doesn’t matter whether or not it existed. If not, invent it! The people I know in the Craft are so desperate to bring back some balance to the Mother before she is totally raped and pillaged that we are, through that desperation, creating it or re-creating it.”

The late priestess Alison Harlow took a similar position. “It doesn’t matter if the Craft is ancient. What does matter is learning to accept the process of intuition that occurs, that rings a bell. When you are doing a ritual and you suddenly get the feeling that you are experiencing something generations of your forebears experienced, it’s probably true.

“I don’t think we will ever find a true history of the Craft, simply because too much time has gone by and all history is lies, often received second or third hand.”

Leo Martello put it this way: “Let’s assume that many people lied about their lineage. Let’s further assume that there are no covens on the current scene that have any historical basis. The fact remains: they do exist now. And they can claim a spiritual lineage going back thousands of years. All of our pre-Judeo-Christian or Moslem ancestors were Pagans! ”

A few Witches were downright cynical. Herman Slater, formerly a Craft priest in New York City and the proprietor of the occult shop The Magickal Childe told me a number of years before he died:

“I have been initiated into several traditions. All their origins are questionable. The coven I practice with now is democratic. We are oriented toward celebration. We are Gardnerian in outline of rituals with a lot of bullshit thrown out. We are Welsh in background and mythology. Personally, I think Murray and Lethbridge were pretty good propagandists for the movement, but that’s as far as it goes.”

Almost all Witches stressed the value of creating new rituals as opposed to being handed a lot of old ones on a plate. “I always stress very strongly the improvisational part of the Craft,” Z Budapest said to me. “It’s not rigid. Our Book of Shadows is a pattern for others to get inspired and create their own books.” A Witch from Minneapolis began to describe to me “the beautiful creativity which is happening in us, which is more important than all the old texts.” She said thoughtfully, “If we could really get hold of an old Book of Shadows, it probably wouldn’t fit where we’re at now. Today, when we have a festival, we first sit down and talk about what that festival means and how can we apply it in terms of how we live now. It makes you think. Those groups that go strictly by somebody’s book are really very impoverished.”

Glenna Turner, priestess of NROOGD, said, “Following traditions may be a mistake. It’s more important for the Craft to answer needs we have today.” And Tony Andruzzi, a Sicilian Witch from Chicago, mused, “Yes, my mother taught me a few things. But maybe she got them out of the blue! Who knows if she got these things from her grandmother. The important thing is that I’m working with a fragment. I’m not just accepting it, putting it in my pocket, burning a candle to it, or wearing it around my neck on a gold chain.”

One of the most impressive statements came from the late Gwydion Pendderwen, songwriter, bard, and Craft priest. He said, “We make up all of our grandmothers. We make them up whether or not we actually had a grandmother who taught us anything or not. It doesn’t matter whether the grandmother was a physical reality, or a figment of our imagination. One is subjective, one is objective, but we experience both.”

Gwydion said that he did not feel the Craft was ever a single entity. “What has come down is so minimal, it could be thrown out without missing it. Objectively, there’s very little that has gone from ancient to modern in direct succession. But subjectively, an awful lot is ancient. It is drawn from ancient materials. It represents archetypal patterns.”

As I talked to Gwydion and heard him sing some of his songs, I remembered the long piece by him that had appeared in Hans Holzer’s The Witchcraft Report⁶⁷ several years ago. It was on the traditions of Coeden Brith, the two hundred acres of land held by the Neo-Pagan group Nemeton. I had read those pages and had known from my own experiences there that parts of the essay were pure fantasy. “What about that fantasy?” I asked. “What do you feel about that essay now? Does it bother you? Was it a lie?”

Gwydion replied, “Yes, I wrote a fantasy. It was a desire. It was something I wished would happen. Perhaps that’s why there are so many of these fantasies running around in the Craft today, and people trying to convince other people that they’re true. It is certainly so much more pleasant and ‘magical’ to say ‘It happened this way,’ instead of ‘I researched this. I wrote these rituals. I came up with this idea myself.’

“So I sent it to Hans Holzer and I didn’t think he would print it without checking the facts. And then I began to regret it. And when it came out, I regretted it again. And I began to get inquiries from sincere people and from friends.

“Then I had a long talk with Aidan Kelly. I told him I shouldn’t have done it—that Holzer was a fool and a bad journalist for not even checking the facts. But then Aidan said a most extraordinary thing. He said it didn’t really matter because the vision I had had was a valid Craft tradition.”

About thirty years ago, the sociologist Marcello Truzzi wrote:

Basically, witchcraft constitutes a set of beliefs and techniques held in secret which the novice must obtain from someone familiar with them. The normal, traditional means for obtaining such information is through another witch who knows these secrets. Traditionally, this can be done through initiation into an existing witch coven or by being told the secrets of the Craft by an appropriate relative who is a witch. Any other means of obtaining the secrets of witchcraft, such as through the reading of books on the subject or obtaining a mail-order diploma, is not a traditional means and is not considered to be legitimate by traditional witches. Because most witches today have not been traditionally initiated into the Craft, they often create other links to the orthodox as a means of gaining legitimacy. Thus, many of today’s witches claim hereditary descent from some ancient witch or claim to be the current reincarnations of past witches.

In general, ascertaining the source of legitimacy in witchcraft groups is very difficult, especially since almost all claim ancient, traditional origins. However, intense investigation usually reveals that the group’s secret sources are not as claimed.⁶⁸

But just a few years later one priestess told me, “It’s better to get training from experienced people, but lacking that, we just stole it out of every book we could!” And another Witch observed, “Recently, I’ve begun to see personalities which were once dominant in the Craft recognizing their own inadequacies, being able to admit them and become students again.”

Traditionally, religions with indefensible histories and dogmas cling to them tenaciously. The Craft avoided this through the realization, often unconscious, that its real sources lie in the mind, in art, in creative work. Once people became comfortable in the Craft, the old lies began to dissolve. That they did so quickly is an insight into the flexibility of Wicca.

In a brief period many Craft leaders did complete turnarounds. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these leaders is Raymond Buckland, who, along with his wife, Rosemary, brought the Gardnerian tradition to the United States in the 1960s. In 1971 Buckland published Witchcraft from the Inside. Speaking as a Witch, he snubbed all “homemade” traditions:

It says much for the success of Gerald Gardner in obtaining recognition for the Craft as a religion, for its imitators are those who, unable to gain access to a coven, have decided to start their own. These do-it-yourself “witches” would, on the face of it, seem harmless but on closer scrutiny are not so. They are causing considerable confusion to others who, seeking the true, get caught up in the false. The majority of these latter-day “witches” have usually read, or heard of, at least two books—Gardner’s Witchcraft Today and Leland’s Aradia. From these they pick out as much information as they feel is valid and make up whatever is missing. . . .

Why do people start such “covens”? Why not wait and search? For some it is just that they have no patience. They feel so strongly for the Craft that they must participate in some way. By the time they eventually do come in contact with the true Craft it is too late.⁶⁹

A mere two years later Buckland, in conflict with his own tradition, his marriage broken, created a new tradition—Seax Wicca or Saxon Wicca, a tradition that would be accessible to anyone who opened his new book, The Tree (1974). He now believed that there were many valid paths and that he had been guilty of a limited view “in earlier days.” Writing in Earth Religion News, Buckland said, “While others fight over which is the oldest tradition, I claim mine as the youngest!”⁷⁰ And when The Tree: The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft appeared, it contained these words:

Those searching for the Craft can have ready access to at least one branch, or tradition, of it. . . . With this, and the explanatory material, it is now possible to do what I just said, above, cannot generally be done: to initiate yourself as a Witch, and to start your own Coven.⁷¹

As Buckland later developed it, Seax Wicca became an accessible tradition available to anyone, and it was the first book of public Craft rituals to appear since Lady Sheba had published what were essentially (with a few modifications and a number of omissions) the Gardnerian rituals. Sheba had said the Goddess told her to do it. Her action was greeted with intense anger by many Witches, particularly Gardnerians. Reaction to Buckland’s action ranged from pleasure (expressed by those who had fruitlessly searched for admittance into an existing tradition) to indifference (by most others).

Buckland wrote in Earth Religion News that the new tradition was created as an answer to internal conflicts in the Craft. Since most Wiccans were “tradition-oriented,” he had given his tradition some historical background, a Saxon background. But: “By this I most emphatically do not mean that there is any claim to its liturgy being of direct descent from Saxon origins! As stated above, it is brand new.”⁷²

Buckland was just one example of the trend away from musty old Books of Shadow and dubious claims of ancient lineage. It could be said that he was following the most authentic and hallowed Gardnerian tradition—stealing from any source that didn’t run away too fast.