Drawing Down the Moon

“THE CANDLES, the incense, and the images are props,” the woman wrote to me. The spells, the chants, the dances are props. These things are not magic. The magic is the art (or science) of using the props. But to say this implies that magic and ritual have some purpose beyond the aimless activities of the ignorant, uneducated, and superstitious. Bonewits observes that “as intellectuals, we have been raised to have a kneejerk reaction to such terms as ‘magic,’ ‘the occult,’ ‘ritualism,’ ‘the supernatural,’ etc., so that we can only think about these subjects in the ways that we are supposed to.”³

I am hoping that most readers will adopt, at least temporarily, a more open position: a position that assumes that most of what has been written about magic is nonsense and that the truth about psychic realities lies under a thick web of ignorance, passivity, and conditioning. Perhaps the best approach is to allow yourself to play with the idea of magic in the way that Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson in their book Illuminatus allowed themselves to play with the idea of Eris, the Goddess of Chaos, letting her lead them in some unexpected directions. According to Wilson, that’s precisely how magic works.

Bonewits calls magic “a combination of an art and a science that is designed to enable people to make effective use of their psychic talents. These techniques have been developed for centuries all over the globe.”⁶ While “paranormal” events are extremely difficult to chart, or to repeat under laboratory conditions, much recent research has shown that the chances these events will occur increase dramatically during altered states of consciousness—in dreams, hypnosis, drugged states, sensory deprivation, deep meditation, and highly emotional experiences. Those who do magic are those who work with techniques that alter consciousness in order to facilitate psychic activity.

In Real Magic, one of the most intelligent explorations of this topic, Bonewits writes that the only real difference between magic and science is that magic is an art and a science that “deals with a body of knowledge that, for one reason or another, has not yet been fully investigated or confirmed by the other arts and sciences.” He adds:

The physical Universe (assuming it’s there) is a huge Web of interlocking energy, in which every atom and every energy wave is connected with every other one. The farthest star in the sky has some influence on us, even if only gravitational; the fact that this effect is too small to measure with present equipment is totally irrelevant.⁷

Bonewits also points out that all the traditional definitions of magic have been well in accord with natural philosophy. The popular belief that magic comes from a source alien and outside the natural contradicts the opinions of all the practitioners of the art throughout history. Bonewits gives copious examples, including S. L. Magreggor Mathers, one of the founders of the Order off the Golden Dawn, who wrote that magic is “the science of the control of the secret forces of nature,” and Aleister Crowley, who called it “the Art and Science of causing changes to occur in conformity with Will.” In fact, almost all definitions of magic seem to use the word in connection with “will,” “concentration,” and “attention.” The English Witch Doreen Valiente said that magic resides in “the power of the mind itself,” and that “the mind, then, is the greatest instrument of magic.”⁸ And the noted scholar of religions Jacob Needleman wrote that “attention is the key to magic, both as deception and as real power.” Needleman observed that most people’s entire lives are characterized by misdirection and suggestibility, the very traits that are manipulated so successully by the stage magician. This passivity of attention, said Needleman, may be the most important human failing. In contrast, almost all who study real magic work vigorously to strengthen their attention.⁹

Some occultists say that there is really no need to talk about any “sixth sense,” that the truly awakened use of the five senses by themselves produces what we think of as “paranormal” activity. Colin Wilson implies this in his lengthy study The Occult. Wilson talks about “Faculty X,” which is not a “sixth sense” nor an “occult” faculty, but an ordinary potentiality of consciousness. “It is the power to grasp reality, and it unites the two halves of man’s mind, conscious and subconscious.” “Faculty X” is latent within everyone; it is the key to all poetic and mystical experience. It is “that latent power that human beings possess to reach beyond the present.”¹⁰ Doreen Valiente states a similar idea in Natural Magic: “By using our five senses rightly, the inner sixth sense is added to them.”¹¹ A training manual put out by the Dianic Covenstead of Morrigana in Dallas says:

Before you begin to doubt my use of the word magic, let me describe a study that was done on the Aborigines of Australia. . . . It was verified that they really knew where a herd of game was though it grazed beyond the horizon; knew when a storm was approaching; and knew where water was—though it lay some 10 feet below the surface. These are abilities that our society calls “magic.” . . .

These talents are achieved, not by any sixth sense, but by using the five senses to their full capacity. The native of Australia is no more supernatural than your dog. Keep your dog out in the woods long enough without access to water. . . . Your dog will scout around a bit, then dig a hole. As a reward for his efforts and his ability to smell, he’ll receive a puddle of water. We accept this as a natural ability in a dog but think it’s impossible for a human because, too often, we relate to cement and steel as our natural habitat. It becomes possible once we recognize our real environment and begin to regain our kinship with it. The Aborigines knew about the distant animals because they heard them. In the same, but more obvious way, Amer-Indians heard distant sound by placing an ear to the ground. The Aborigine knows when a storm is forming through a very important sense. The aware native feels the storm, feels the change of barometric pressure. That same highly developed sense of feeling can also . . . increase the odds for the storm to bring rain.¹²

This definition equates magic with those techniques that lead to an awakened, attentive, attuned sense of being.^m Seen in this light, the various fads for meditative disciplines, the weekend courses in “Mind Control,” “Mind Dynamics,” and other brand-name growth programs are, quite simply, brief magical-training courses that attempt (with more or less success and with a greater or lesser use of unnecessary and even harmful dogmas) to reawaken imaginative faculties, to increase concentration, attention, and self-confidence, and to facilitate a student’s ability to enter altered states of consciousness at will. The wide interest in these programs can be explained as part of the contemporary search for self-mastery, initiation, growth, and change. The regenerative aspects of such programs should be applauded while the dogmas that grow out of them should be opposed.

Just as Neo-Pagans and Witches define magic in a pragmatic way, the trappings surrounding Witchcraft and other magical systems can also be understood without mystification. Chants, spells, dancing around a fire, burning candles, the smoke and smell of incense, are all means to awaken the “deep mind”—to arouse high emotions, enforce concentration, and facilitate entry into an altered state. Again, Bonewits has said some of the most sensible words on this subject, observing that “mandalas,” “sigils,” “pentacles,” and “yantras” are all pictures to stimulate the sense of sight; “mudras” or “gestures” stimulate the kinesthetic sense; “mantras” or “incantations” stimulate the sense of hearing. The use of props, costumes, and scenery can also be seen as a method of stimulating the senses. In addition, drugs, alcohol, breathing exercises, and sexual techniques can serve to alter one’s state of consciousness. According to Bonewits, these techniques function in the same way for a Witch or a ceremonial magician as for a Native American shaman or a Catholic priest. To say that these methods never cause psychic and psychological changes in the people involved is as absurd as other common attitudes—that certain religions have a monopoly on these experiences and that certain religions worship “God” while others worship “demons.” These techniques have existed for thousands of years and were developed by human beings for the purpose of widening their perceptions of reality and changing their relationship to the world. They can be used creatively or destructively, for the enhancement of self or the destruction of self.¹³

Often our conceptions of psychic reality and the magical techniques we might use are simply a function of the particular culture we live in. Robert Wilson humorously observes:

Modern psychology has rediscovered and empirically demonstrated the universal truth of the Buddhist axiom that phenomena adjust themselves to the perceiver. . . .

Take Uri Geller as a case in point. . . . Geller saw, probably, the Looney Tunes in which wizards bent metals and he saw, probably, class B Hollywood Sci-Fi in which interstellar beings had names like “Spectre.” Mr. Geller can now bend metal by thinking of bending it and gets messages from interstellar beings named “Spectre.”. . .

The fairy-folk are like that. They come on as Holy Virgins to the Catholics, dead relatives to the spiritualist, UFO’s to the Sci-Fi fans, Men in Black to the paranoids, demons to the masochistic, divine lovers to the sensual, pure concepts to the logicians, clowns from the heavenly circus to the humorist, psychotic episodes to the psychiatrist, Higher Intelligences to the philosopher, number and paradox to the mathematician and epistemologist.

They can even become totally invisible to the skeptic. For nearly 200 years all transmissions were cut off to the university-educated portion of European-American civilization. (It is doubtful that the Hottentots, the ants, the fish or the trees have ever been cut off for even 200 seconds.)¹⁴

Many people mistakenly identify magic with its opposite—religious dogma, or what some have called “failed magic.” The concept of “failed magic” is often expressed by both scholars and Neo-Pagans. Jane Ellen Harrison, in her monumental Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, writes that the dancer who plays a god in a sacred rite “cannot be said to worship his god, he lives him, experiences him.” Only later, when the god is separated from the worshipper and magic is seen to fail, is religion born, and later, doctrine and dogma.¹⁵ Robert Wilson expresses it this way:

Most of humanity, including the theologians of all faiths from Catholicism to Mechanistic Scientism, represent a point where magic stopped, i.e., where the results of previous research inspired no further investigation but instead solidified into dogma.¹⁶

Another way of looking at magic and at psychic reality would be to use the image of the ceremonial magician’s circle with its “demon” as a metaphor. The circle is the microcosm of the universe, a place apart from the world and protected. It is a positive environment in which the serpents of one’s own psyche can reveal themselves creatively. Within the circle the psychic barriers we erect to survive in the world can be eased down and those parts of ourselves that we seldom confront in daily life can be brought to the surface—here we face Graves’s azoological creatures who “come to be questioned, not to alarm.” Traditional warnings against the use of magic and occultism suddenly seem similar to warnings against the use of psychedelic drugs. Certain strengths are necessary before using both—a knowledge of oneself, a correct environment—so that these new perceptions can come to us in a manner that encourages our growth rather than our harm.

While it is generally and rightly stressed that rituals in the Craft and other Neo-Pagan religions are quite different from those of ceremonial magic, some of the same ideas apply. A Witch’s circle generally serves as a reservoir to hold group energy, which is then directed. No “demons” or “angels” or other thought forms from a Judeo-Christian context are used. But psychic barriers do fall, energy is “felt” and exchanged, and azoological creatures do occasionally appear.

A beautiful description of psychic reality appeared in NROOGD’s journal, The Witches’ Trine. The art of divination, one writer observed, is “a process by which the conscious and unconscious minds of a particular person . . . cooperate to draw relevant information out of chaos, in answer to a question posed.” The author describes this experience as “allowing one’s mind to float upon the stream of the Tao, and observe the patterns of the current and the shapes they form.” He then describes psychic reality:

I am an unabashed Jungian in regarding the mind and the personality as if it were an island in a psychic sea: what we perceive of ourselves, the conscious mind and the will, is like that part of an island above water; the edges and margins, outlines and heights, are pretty clear, but vary somewhat with the tides and waves on the surrounding ocean. . . .

Lying below this area, there is a vast and swarming depth of mystery which Jung calls the “collective unconscious,” and it is from this deep and awe-full sea that the powerful, compelling archetypes rise up in their magical majesty, like a great whale or sea monster broaching the surface of consciousness, sending ripples and waves of change and renewal across the becalmed surface.

It is precisely these dwellers in the psychic deeps, with their protean shape-shiftings and vast power and numinosity, which are the gods and the powers consulted in divination. Their essence is perhaps objective—we cannot see to say—but their appearance is certainly subjective, moulding and shaping the stuff of an individual’s mind into shapes which have meaning for her, and which she must, in turn, try to signal other islands. ¹⁷

Bonewits, Aidan Kelly, and Wilson each approach magic from very different perspectives. Bonewits is a magician and Druid priest, Aidan’s approach has been in terms of poetry and the Craft, and Wilson seems to combine his own iconoclasm with the theories of Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley. Despite this, they all seem to agree that Neo-Pagan magical systems are “maps” for learning about what appears to be an objective reality but often defies analysis. This reality lies within the unconscious mind, although, Aidan observes, “Actually, it’s not unconscious at all; it is you and I who are unconscious of it, but it is definitely real.”¹⁸

“No one really knows. It’s a wide open question. Most theorizing that goes on about ritual goes on in a Christian context and Christians tend to be very heady people. The theories focus on what people ‘believe.’ But you do not understand the religion of a culture unless you know what people do, and what people do is their ritual. Why do you do a ritual? You do a ritual because you need to, basically, and because it just cuts through and operates on everything besides the ‘head’ level. And in this culture, this heady, agnostic, Christian, scientific, materialist culture, ritual is ignored. And since ritual is a need, and since the mainstream of Western civilization is not meeting this need, a great deal of what’s happening these days is, simply, people’s attempts to find ways to meet this need for themselves.”

Bonewits has defined ritual as “any ordered sequence of events or actions, including directed thoughts, especially one that is repeated in the ‘same’ manner each time, and that is designed to produce a predictable altered state of consciousness within which certain magical or religious results may be obtained.”¹⁹ The purpose of a ritual is to put you into this altered state “within which you have access to and control over your psychic talents.” He has also written that magical rituals are psychodramas, “designed to facilitate the generation of psychic energy and the focused disposition of that energy, in order to accomplish a given result.”²⁰

From my own experiences of Neo-Pagan rituals, I have come to feel that they have another purpose—to end, for a time, our sense of human alienation from nature and from each other. Accepting the idea of the “psychic sea,” and of human beings as isolated islands within that sea, we can say that, although we are always connected, our most common experience is one of estrangement. Ritual seems to be one method of reintegrating individuals and groups into the cosmos, and to tie in the activities of daily life with their ever present, often forgotten, significance. It allows us to feel biological connectedness with ancestors who regulated their lives and activities according to seasonal observances. Just as ecological theory explains how we are interrelated with all other forms of life, rituals allow us to re-create that unity in an explosive, nonabstract, gut-level way. Rituals have the power to reset the terms of our universe until we find ourselves suddenly and truly “at home.”

NROOGD is an entirely self-created Craft tradition.ⁿ The inception of NROOGD is revealing. It began not with one person’s vision, but with a ritual experience that happened to a group of people almost by accident. Aidan Kelly, a founder of the group, described the event in an issue of The Witches’ Trine.²⁴ He calls his account “true to the spirit, fictive like all human craft, and, like anything that has ever been written, incomplete.” A woman called Morgana was taking an arts class in ritual at San Francisco State College. After the professor told the class that “the only way you can learn anything important about rituals is by doing them,” she decided, having read Robert Graves’s The White Goddess many times already, to attempt a Witches’ sabbat. She invited a few close friends, including Aidan Kelly and Glenna Turner. Aidan composed a ritual outline after combing through his notes on the writings of Robert Graves, Margaret Murray, T. C. Lethbridge, and Gerald Gardner. He wrote:

Reading through them, I began to feel intrigued and challenged. All I had was fragments, hints, innuendos, a riddle, a puzzle. But I also had some ideas about what general principles might weld these fragments into a whole. . . .

However, Aidan noted, “a subtle change came over us.” And the meetings of friends that had once been for games and gossip turned into an informal occult study group. And the ritual “refused to fade into the past; we found ourselves talking about it again and again.” In the summer of 1968 the group decided to do the ritual again, this time as part of a wedding, a genuine participatory celebration rather than a performance, and this time something did happen. “As we lay around on the grass afterward, . . . some singing, some listening, and talking about the ritual, a comment kept cropping up, in one form or another, until it finally dawned on us that we were all saying: this time I felt something.” As a result, the group decided to do the ritual again, with a few changes, but this time on a true sabbat, Lammas, on August 1, 1968, in a grove of redwood trees. Again the group—this time numbering over forty—experienced a change.

As Glenna began the opening conjuration of the ritual, a silence fell over the circle. Through the castings and chargings of the circle, through the invocations of the Goddess, it grew, and as Albion and Loik and Joaquin Murietta hammered out a dancing rhythm on their drums, as we whirled in a double sunwise ring, that silence swelled into waves of unseen lightness, flooding our circle, washing about our shoulders, breaking over our heads.

Afterwards we wandered about the gardens, laughing and clowning, drunk on the very air itself, babbling to each other: it worked!

“We were hooked,” Aidan told me. “And the thing has been going strong ever since.” In the written account he added:

I had already hoped, of course, but that day I became sure that the Craft could be religion for us skeptical middle-class intellectuals: because it did not require us to violate our intellectual integrity, because it operated nonintellectually, striking deep chords in our emotional roots, because it could alter our state of consciousness. Thus, that day began our actual evolution toward becoming a coven.

By the end of 1969 the members of NROOGD knew that what they were doing was, in fact, their religion. They initiated each other, began to have meetings (esbats) during the full moon, and declared themselves a potential coven. Then, during the Fall Equinox, during that time when, traditionally, the Eleusinian Mysteries were held, Aidan broke the usual order of the ritual and led the group in a torchlight procession through a state park, crying the ancient words, “Kore! Evohe! Iakkhos!”

. . . down the hillside, across the wooden bridges, down to a spring, where, as I recall, I first spoke the myth of Kore’s gift, then back to the circle, where with nine priestesses, we invoked the full Ninefold Muse, whom I, as Orpheus, audaciously led in a chain dance about the fire; then all joined the chain, and we danced until all but Isis and I had dropped from exhaustion, until again that silent energy rose and lapped its waves around us filling the entire campground with a warm mistiness that was everywhere except where I was looking.

All Craft groups talk about this “raising of energy” or “raising the cone of power.” But how is this done? And what does it mean in terms of ritual? Since the methods used by a particular group are usually considered part of the “secrets” of a tradition, and methods vary, this information is often unavailable. But one of the best published explanations I have seen comes, again, from NROOGD:

The coven, holding hands, and alternating male and female as closely as possible, dances sunwise, at first slowly, then gradually faster, perhaps singing, perhaps chanting a spell made up for the specific purpose the energy is to be used for, perhaps with music, perhaps silently. When the Goddess is the one who has been invoked, the Priestess stands in the center of the circle, in the persona of the Goddess, holding the appropriate tool. When she feels the energy reach its peak she calls out or signals a command to drop, which all in the circle do, letting go of the energy which the Priestess then directs onward to its intended goal. . . .²⁵

Many Craft rituals—NROOGD’s included—are primarily religious and mythical. The rituals touch on the mythic themes of birth, death, and regeneration and assert the unity of mortals and deities. It is these aspects that seem to link the Craft (as well as a number of other Neo-Pagan religions) to the mystery traditions. What is striking about both Neo-Paganism and the mystery traditions (from our limited information about them) is that both assume that human beings can become as gods. In some traditions (as with the Church of All Worlds concept of “Thou Art God”)^o the idea expressed is that we are the gods, only some of us (perhaps all of us) have not realized it. In other traditions the idea expressed is that we are gods in potential. Many Western magical traditions have thus sought a path to the divine by strengthening the self rather than by obliterating the ego. And many Neo-Pagan groups have kept to this tradition, which is one reason why most of them have been blessed by a relative absence of authoritarianism, as well as a lack of “gurus,” “masters,” and so forth. The entire shamanistic tradition seems to assume that humans can, as I. M. Lewis has written, “participate in the authority of the gods.”²⁶

The dance begins with all facing outward, alternating male and female, and holding hands. We begin dancing withershins, the direction of death and destruction, singing, “Thout, tout a tout, tout, throughout and about,” which are the words the Witches of Somerset used to begin their meetings. The men dance with the left heel kept off the ground, in the hobbling gait of the bullfooted god, the lamed sacred king. The Priestess who leads the dance lets go with her left hand, and leads the dance in a slow inward spiral: Ariadne leading Theseus into the labyrinth to face the sacred bull; Arianrhod leading Gwydion into Spiral Castle, where his soul will await rebirth. When the spiral is wound tight, the Priestess turns to her right and kisses the man next to her, as the Snow-White Lady of the Briar Rose kisses the prince who sleeps in the Glass Castle, to awaken him to a new life. The Priestess leads the new spiral outward, sunwise, the direction of birth and creation, and she (and each other lady) kisses each man she comes to. The spiral thus unwinds into an inward-facing circle, dancing sunwise. In this dance, withershins is transformed into sunwise, destruction into creation, death into rebirth, and those who dance it pass symbolically through Spiral Castle: here all the traditions and myths of the Craft are pulled together into a single, moving symbol. In a very real sense, all the other rituals of the Craft are merely “explanations” of this dance.²⁷ ^p

Another point where initiatory symbolism occurs in many covens is during the invocation of the “Lords [although they may as easily be Ladies] of the Watchtowers.” Aidan observes that these “Lords of the Towers”—the Craft may have stolen the term from Masonry—are archetypes, both human and immortal, who serve to remind coveners that they have “risen through the spiral of life and death and rebirth,” and who thus represent “the goal toward which the spiral of reincarnation strives: to become both fully human and fully divine.” An invitation for these “beings” to join the coveners and aid them in their work comes near the beginning of most modern-day Craft rituals, particularly those in the Gardnerian, Alexandrian, and other British Craft traditions. These archetypes are also called “the Mighty Ones.”

Most covens operating in these ways also have a ceremony of “cakes and wine,” during which the ritual dagger or athame is lowered into the cup and the cakes and the wine are consecrated. Aidan writes out of his experience with NROOGD:

This is the sacred marriage, the “great rite” of fertility, in a single image. . . . But notice, then, that the sacred marriage is not just between male and female, but also between “spirit” and matter, between the heavens and earth, between the worlds of gods and men, between death and birth. What is being said by the symbols is therefore something like “Sex is a true vehicle for the spiritual evolution of humankind for death and rebirth are the two halves of the cycle that drives us up the spiral to the Goddess’s realm. ”²⁸

It was Aidan Kelly who first made me aware that the phrase “Drawing Down the Moon” originates in antiquity. “The Drawing Down of the Moon” and the “Drawing Down of the Horned God” are, perhaps, the two most extraordinary parts of Craft ritual, as performed in the covens of the revival. For here, in true shamanistic tradition, the Priestess (or Priest) can become the Goddess (or God) and function as such within the circle. Aidan notes that:

The Priestess may begin by standing in the arms-crossed position called “Skull and crossbones” which symbolizes death, then later move to the arms-spread position called the “Pentacle,” which symbolizes birth. She may also dance sunwise around the circle, from the quarter corresponding to death, to that corresponding with birth, and, back again. . . . What is thus symbolized, as in the Meeting Dance, is the Goddess’s gift of immortality through reincarnation.

What the Priestess does internally during this process is—either purposely or “instinctively”—to alter her state of consciousness, to take on the persona of the Goddess, whom she will represent (or even, in some senses, be) for the working part of the ritual.²⁹

This is another key to the distinction we have been making between belief and ritual experience. The prosaic and poetic ways of looking at the world are different. But within the polytheistic framework of multiple realities, both can be maintained in a single individual. Once one comprehends this, much else becomes clear. One understands why the theories of Robert Graves have remained so popular throughout Neo-Paganism, despite the many criticisms of the scholarship in The White Goddess. One understands that it is precisely this visionary aspect of the Craft, with its emphasis on poetry and ritual, that is responsible for the creation of a group like NROOGD. Glenna Turner, a former atheist, described to me how she once told a newcomer to her coven (to his apparent shock) that she remained quite skeptical about all gods, goddesses, and psychic reality. This, however, had nothing to do with the fundamental reasons for her being in the Craft.

Aidan and Glenna are not alone in stressing the relationship of poetry and art to the Craft. Almost half of all Neo-Pagans and Craft members interviewed for this book told me, unasked, that they wrote poetry and created rituals. Many of them have had their work published, at least in the pages of Neo-Pagan journals. It is no accident that those who are most respected within the Neo-Pagan movement are the poets, bards, and writers of rituals. These include, first and foremost, the late Gwydion Pendderwen, whose extraordinary Songs of the Old Religion are used throughout the Neo-Pagan movement; the late Victor Anderson, the blind poet and shaman; and Ed Fitch, the creator of an enormous number of Pagan and Craft rituals used in both this country and England. But these are not all. The poems of Penny Novack (writing often under the name of Molly Bloom), Caradoc, Aidan Kelly, Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, Isaac Bonewits, and now countless new and younger poets fill the pages of Neo-Pagan magazines. Some of these people were always poets, but others told me that Neo-Paganism had opened a wellspring within them and led them to write poetry for the first time since childhood.

During much of the 1980s and early 1990s Aidan Kelly was in the curious role of theologian (or, more correctly, thealogian) in a most nontheological religion. His writings on the Craft seem to show more clearly than others the strongly antiauthoritarian nature of the Craft, since “No one has to believe anything” and “There is no authority in the Craft outside each coven.” And if this were not so, we “would never have touched it with a ten-foot broom. We value freedom above all.”³² Aidan has said that the Craft, unlike Christianity and other world religions, is totally defined in terms of ritual—of what people do—and not what people believe. The religion therefore demands a creative response from people.

“It’s a religion of ritual rather than theology. The ritual is first; the myth is second. And taking an attitude that the myths of the Craft are ‘true history’ in the way a fundamentalist looks at the legends of Genesis really seems crazy. It’s an alien head-space. This is one of the ways in which the Craft is a type of mystery religion, because the classical mysteries functioned similarly. The promise of the mystery religions in the classical world was that of immortality and regeneration, something like that. And in one of the associated legends, after death the soul confronts the Guardian of the Portals and is asked the question, ‘Who are you?’ The reply given was never, ‘I believe in such and such,’ but a statement like: ‘I have eaten from the drum. I have drunk from the cymbal. I have tasted the things within the holy basket. I have passed within the bridal chamber.’ These are statements of having passed through certain experiences. And this seems to be very much the Gestalt and tradition of the Craft as well. . . . What makes a person a Witch is having passed through certain experiences, experiences that happen down on a subconscious level and bring about a type of transmutation.”

This emphasis on ritual rather than creed makes the Craft a “shrew,” not a “dinosaur.” It is small, but can adapt and survive. It is not encumbered by those structures that have characterized the major religions of the last five thousand years. Aidan contends that the major religions evolved to rationalize an agriculturally based civilization, a civilization that has been breaking down for the past two hundred years. The Craft never developed in cities where complicated religious structures evolved; it operated out in the country among people who were close to the land and “who were still, in effect, living in villages like the first villages that evolved ten thousand years ago.” And, ironically, considering the many pronouncements against Witchcraft as a threat to reason, the Craft is one of the few religious viewpoints totally compatible with modern science, allowing total skepticism about even its own methods, myths, and rituals. This ability to coexist with modern science, writes Aidan, is a great strength, since “for many reasons one can strongly suspect that any belief system incapable of such coexistence has no future.”³⁴

A major reason why the Craft is reviving now is that it depends on an “open” metaphysics, the only kind that can work in this century. The explanation I have evolved of such an “open” system is this: Reality is infinite. Therefore everything you experience is, in some sense, real. But since your experiences can only be a small part of this infinity, they are merely a map of it, merely a metaphor; there is always an infinity of possible experiences still unexplored. What you know, therefore, may be true as far as it goes, but it cannot be Whole Truth, for there is always infinitely further to go. In brief: “It is all real; it is all metaphor; there is always more.” Everything in the Craft, no matter how useful, no matter how pleasing, even the Great Metaphor of the Goddess, is still only a metaphor.

Knowing that all truths are merely metaphors is perhaps the greatest advantage you can have at this point in history. Thinking that you know the “Whole Truth” keeps you from learning anything more; hence you stagnate; hence you die. But knowing that every truth is merely a metaphor, merely a tool, leaves you free to learn and to grow, by setting aside old metaphors as you learn or evolve better ones.³⁵

If you asked Aidan, “Is the Goddess ‘real’ ?”, he would reply that She is real “because human energy goes into making Her real; She exists as a ‘thought form on the astral plane,’ yet She can manifest physically whenever She wants to. She does not exist independently of mankind, but She is most thoroughly independent of any one person or group.” And yet, he continues, “She is a metaphor because, great though she may be, She is finite, like any other human concept, whereas reality is infinite.”

Why do we need such a concept? “Because the human mind seems unable to grasp an undifferentiated infinity,” he continues. “By creating our own divinities we create mental steps for ourselves, up which we can mount toward realizing ourselves as divine.”³⁶ But he cautions that any such name for this reality “is an attempt to map (part of ) psychic reality that seems all too willing to accommodate itself to any map you use, and you will get nowhere in trying to understand that reality if you don’t keep its plasticity firmly in mind. The reason that dogmatism about magical systems is so poisonous is that everyone seems to live in a unique psychic universe. The magical system that works for one person may be totally contradictory to the system that works for another.”

As of 2006, there are about fifteen NROOGD covens active in California, Oregon, Washington, and Michigan. Covens in the San Francisco area cooperate to host seven or eight public sabbats each year and to provide local and national leadership in the Covenant of the Goddess. As this edition goes to press, NROOGD was in the early stages of planning a fortieth anniversary ingathering for initiates and dedicants to take place in 2007 or 2008. As for Aidan Kelly, he has had a long and complex journey, and has dealt with a number of personal problems.

In 1974, Kelly received copies of some Book of Shadows materials written by Gerald Gardner. These were owned by Carl Weschcke of Llewellyn Publications, and were sent to him by Isaac Bonewits, who first recognized their importance. Kelly also visited Ripley’s in Toronto in 1975. It was there where he first saw the manuscript entitled “Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical,” and deduced that it was the prototype of Gardner’s Book of Shadows. He wrote a manuscript, “The Rebirth of Witchcraft,” for Llewellyn. Kelly says it was too scholarly for Llewellyn’s market and Carl Weschcke declined to publish it. Kelly used it to satisfy some requirements in his doctoral program, which he completed in 1980.

In 1976 Aidan realized that he had a serious personal problem and began seeking ways to deal with it. At the time the Pagan movement was not a mature enough movement to have its own resources for counseling, or twelve step programs, although some of these programs exist today. Unable to see how to use Craft methods to help him, in 1978 he rejoined the Catholic Church in order to cope with his problem. Aidan’s memoir, Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches, covers the period of his life from 1953 to 1977. In 1978 he wrote me:

Very few people have noticed that I’m primarily a poet and that I am in no way a true believer in anything, neither the Craft nor in Christianity.

But in 1988, along with a second marriage, he returned to the Craft, joining a Gardnerian coven. His book Crafting the Art of Magick was published in 1991, and his Religious Holidays and Calendars in 1993. After that marriage ended and another began, Kelly and his present wife began to work in a 1734 tradition coven. (See “Traditions” in Chapter 5). Now living in Tacoma, Washington, and married, with a number of children, Kelly has made his living teaching at various colleges and high schools, as well as working in the computer industry. He has still been beset with a number of psychological problems, although he has conquered the problems that plagued him in earlier years. And perhaps, showing that things do come full circle at times, he and his current wife, Melinda Taylor-Kelly, founded Witch Grass Coven in 2000. It is a NROOGD-based coven with 1734 influence.