CANON EPISCOPI
This important document in the history of witchcraft is at least as old as the beginning of the tenth century A.D. and may be older. It was published by Regino (circa A.D. 906) in his De Ecclesiastica Disciplinis (quoted in The Geography of Witchcraft by Montague Summers, Kegan Paul, London, 1927), as being part of the Canon Law of the Church. Regino ascribed it to the Church Council of Ancyra, which met in A.D. 314; but modern authorities doubt this. At any rate, the Canon Episcopi, as it was known, was for centuries the official teaching of the Christian Church about witchcraft.
Its importance lies in the fact that it describes witches as deluded heretics, who worship “Diana, the goddess of the pagans”; not, as the Church later alleged, the Devil or Satan. However, says the Canon Episcopi, it is the Devil who seduces them into doing this. Furthermore, the witches’ meetings, and their supposed flying by night to such meetings, are all mere hallucinations.
This is the exact opposite of what the Church later taught, in such literature as the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (translated by Montague Summers, Pushkin Press, London, 1948), the witch-hunters’ handbook published in 1486. The previous dogma evidently had not availed to root out the heresy of witchcraft; so the Church had to change it and bring in all the horrific allegations of devil worship and of real Sabbats where all sorts of horrors and abominations took place, in order to light the fires which would effectively, as the witch-hunters thought, burn out witchcraft for ever.
From the first, the Church persecuted witches, not because they were wicked but because they were heretics. The Canon Episcopi shows plainly that the witches were accused of being pagans; and it is also evidence of their devotion to Diana, the moon goddess, just like that of the pre-Christian Christian witches described in classical literature, and those of La Vecchia Religione whom Charles Godfrey Leland found in modern Italy. (See ARADIA.)
The following is an extract from the Canon Episcopi. Its description of witches has a certain echo of poetry, as if the good Churchman who wrote it had himself felt the dangerous glamour of the moonlight and the night wind:
It is also not to be omitted that some wicked women perverted by the devil, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess themselves, in the hours of night, to ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of the dead of night, to traverse great spaces of earth, and to obey her commands as of their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on certain nights. But I wish it were they alone who perished in their faithlessness, and did not draw many with them into the destruction of infidelity. For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true and, so believing, wander from the right faith and are involved in the error of pagans when they think that there is anything of divinity or power except the one God. Wherefore the priests throughout their churches should preach with all insistence to the people that they may know this to be in every way false and that such phantasms are imposed on the minds of infidels and not by the divine but by the malignant spirit.
In some later versions of the Canon Episcopi, the name of Herodias is given, as well as that of Diana. This again links this very old document (whatever its actual date) with Charles Godfrey Leland’s discoveries; because Aradia and Herodias are evidently one and the same. Herodias may be simply a monkish rendering of Aradia, confusing her with the Herodias of the Bible. It may be also, that the name Herodias is in fact the name of an ancient goddess, similar to Lilith, after whom the lady who enchanted King Herod was named.
CATS AS WITCHES’ FAMILIARS
The cat, especially the black cat, is a creature of witchcraft, in all popular belief. No artist’s conception of a witch’s cottage of the olden time could possibly be complete without Baudrons or Grimalkin, sleek and purring by the fire, watching with glowing eyes over all that takes place.
The witch’s cat, however, did not have to be black in colour. In Macbeth it is a brindled cat which mews significantly, and the name ‘Grimalkin’ means a grey cat. Indeed, the whole royal feline race of cats have something about them which is magical and uncanny.
They probably inherit this quality from Ancient Egypt, where they were sacred beasts. The Egyptian cat goddess Bast seems to have been a feline form of Isis. Bubastis was her sacred city; and there and at other places in Egypt thousands of carefully mummified and reverently interred bodies of cats have been found. The British Museum possesses a number of beautiful relics of the cat cult of Ancient Egypt; notably the hollow sarcophagi, or statues in the lifelike forms of cats, inside which the mummified bodies of deceased pets were placed.
Cats have been known in Britain from early times. The domesticated cat was brought from Ancient Egypt and introduced to Britian by the Romans. A certain Welsh prince, Hywel, passed special laws for the protection of cats. He was evidently a cat lover; but the cats depicted in old churches are usually of sinister aspect. Feline demons carved in stone glare grotesquely at the worshipper, especially in some of our churches which date from the Norman period. This is another instance of the gods of the old religion becoming the devils of the new.
CATS AS WITCHES’ FAMILIARS. “A Male Witch and his Familiar”, a print after the seventeenth-century picture attributed to Jordaens.
A famous weird carving connected with witchcraft is the one in Lyons Cathedral, which depicts a naked witch holding up a cat by its back legs, as she rides upon a goat, which has formidable horns but a human face. Her only garment, a cloak, streams behind her in the wind; with one hand she clings to the goat’s horns, while she grasps the cat in the other.
Witches were often accused of changing themselves into cats for the purpose of molesting people, or for running swift-footed by night upon some uncanny errand. The cat’s nocturnal habits, its moon-like eyes and horrid midnight caterwauling, all contributed to its sinister reputation. So also did the electric nature of its fur, from which visible sparks of static electricity can sometimes be stroked in a dark room.
The Devil was sometimes said to appear at the Sabbat in the form of a huge black cat. One wonders whether this was a far-off reminiscence of ancient cat worship. The pagan gods were sometimes believed to appear as animals. Diana took the form of a cat, and Pan of a goat. The deities of the witches were in fact aspects of Pan and Diana, the Horned God and the Moon Goddess; and the cat and the goat are the animals most associated with witchcraft, in popular legend and belief.
To this day, there are people who fear to have a black cat cross their path; though they probably do not realise the origin of this belief, namely that the animal might be a witch in cat form. Others, however, regard the black cat as a symbol of good luck. The old folk rhyme tells us:
Whenever the cat of the house is black,
The lasses of lovers will have no lack.
People wear black cat charms and brooches; and in the nineteen-twenties and thirties there was quite a vogue for teapots in the form of black cats, as there is today for table-lamps in the same shape.
There are innumerable stories of cats being able to see things which are invisible to human eyes. Indeed, there is hardly a confirmed cat lover to be found, who cannot tell some anecdote of their pet having psychic or telepathic powers. The writer has heard of two cases (one observed by her own mother) of cats which were capable of astral projection; that is, their forms were seen in one place when it was proved that their sleeping bodies were in another.
It has also been a matter of my own observation, that cats definitely enjoy Spiritualist seances. A Spiritualist friend of mine tried her best to exclude her cat from the room where seances were held, because she believed that the cat ‘took the power’. I am not quite sure what she meant by this; but the cat refused to accept this exclusion, and would try every trick he knew (and cats know plenty) to slip into the room and take part in the sitting.
Some other Spiritualist friends, however, accepted their cat’s desire to be present at seances; and this particular cat, a huge black neutered tom, would stalk majestically into the seance room and preside over the meeting. Either of these cats, had they lived a few centuries ago, would have been highly valued as witches’ familiars. The belief in occult powers associated with the cat is one of the strongest survivals of the old witch lore.
CAULDRON
The cauldron, like the broomstick and the black cat, is one of the features of any scene of witchcraft as pictured in the popular mind. Some of the belief derives from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, where the witches’ cauldron is introduced on the stage, with its accompanying dances and incantations. Actors regard Macbeth, because of the witch-scenes in it, as an unlucky and uncanny play.
However, the connection between the cauldron and witchcraft dates back to a long time before Macbeth; back, in fact, to the days of Ancient Greece. Greek legend contains the story of Medea, the witch of Colchis, whom Jason married in the course of his search for the Golden Fleece. Medea was a priestess of Hecate, the goddess of the moon and of witchcraft; and not only did she have a cauldron, she had a coven too. According to Robert Graves in his Greek Myths (Penguin Books, London, 1957 and Baltimore, Maryland, 1955), Medea was attended by twelve Phaeacian bond-maidens, who assisted her in her horrible plot to kill King Pelias with the aid of her magic cauldron.
In Ancient Britain and Ireland magical cauldrons featured largely in religious mysteries. Heroes went into strange enchanted realms of the Other World to win a wonderful cauldron as a prize for their adventures. It is the writer’s belief that a far-off echo of this survives in folk-memory as the custom of giving ornamental cups, usually of gold or silver, as the reward for sporting contests. The delirious excitement of the Cup Final, when the victorious team raises the great, shining, hard-won Cup to the cheering crowd, has its origin far off in ancient myth.
The transformation of the cauldron into a cup is evidenced by the legends of the Holy Grail, which has its roots in pre-Christian Celtic myth. With the coming of Christianity, the Cauldron of Inspiration and Rebirth, for which Arthur and his followers sought in perilous and uncanny realms of the shades, as sung of in bardic poetry, became the Holy Grail, for which the Knights of the Round Table rode forth upon the quest.
The witches, however, kept the old pagan version, and the cauldron, originally that of the Druidic moon goddess Cerridwen, became their symbol. A cauldron is an all-embracing symbol of Nature, the Great Mother. As a vessel, it represents the feminine principle. Standing upon three legs, it recalls the triple moon goddess. The four elements of Life enter into it, as it needs fire to boil it, water to fill it, the green herbs of earth to cook it, and its fragrant steam arises into air.
The cauldron in fact represented a great step forward in civilisation. Before men were able to make metal cooking pots, which would withstand fire, they had to be content with thick earthenware pots, which were heated by the laborious process of dropping very hot stones into them. The metal cauldron, over which the woman as head of the household presided, gave men better cooked food, more plentifiul hot water to cleanse themselves, and herbal medicines which could be decocted by boiling or infused in boiling water. Hence the cauldron became an instrument of magic, and especially of women’s magic.
The cauldron also took on a sexual significance, as evidenced in the saucy old ballad about the lady and the wandering tinker, who offers to “clout her cauldron”, should she stand in need of his services.
Such have been the transformations of that which is itself the vessel of transformation, because it takes raw uneatable things and transforms them into good food; makes herbs and roots into medicines and potent drugs; and is the emblem of woman as the greatest vessel of transformation, who takes the seed of man and transforms it into a child. In a sense, to the pagans all Nature was a cauldron of regeneration, in which all things, men, beasts, plants, the stars of heaven, the lands and waters themselves, seethed and were transformed.
“We claim the cauldron of the witches as, in the original, the vase or urn of the fiery transmigration, in which all things of the world change.” (Hargrave Jennings, The Rosicrucians, Their Rites and Mysteries, London, 1870.)
The ancient British goddess Cerridwen, whom the Druids regarded as presiding over the Mysteries, brewed a Cauldron of Inspiration with magical herbs, which had to boil and bubble for a year and a day. At the end of that time, out of it flew the Three Drops of Wisdom, the mystical Awen. This word is pronounced AH-OO-EN, which is reminiscent of the Eastern Aum. The Three Drops are identical with the Three Rays, or Tribann, which is one of the most important symbols of Druidic lore, and means Divine Inspiration. (See DRUIDS.)
CAVE ART, RELIGIOUS AND MAGICAL
The depths of a cave were man’s first sanctuary. In deep, silent inaccessible places, away from the surroundings of their everyday life, the Stone Age hunters worshipped and practised magic.
We know this today, because the carvings and paintings of those men of the dawn, men separated from us by a veritable gulf of time, have been found in caves which were evidently chosen for their secrecy. The art of the painted caves of France and Spain, from which we have gained a certain insight into the mind of Stone Age man, is a religious and magical art.
Painted caves have been found which were far from the places actually inhabited by primitive man, and which were evidently set apart as shrines. Some of them display such a variety of art that they seem to have been used in this way for several thousand years.
Among the great beasts depicted on their walls some are shown wounded, or being struck by weapons. A figure of a mammoth has a heart indicated by a blob of red ochre, within its outline. By drawing the pictured ‘heart’, perhaps man could, in his belief, gain power over the mighty beast, and slay it. By carefully representing a bison struck by spears, the artist intended not only a picture, but a magical ritual to ensure that his hunting would be fortunate, and his spears hit their target. This was the beginning of sympathetic magic.
The magic of the caves was concerned with primal things: life and death. In order to live, primitive man had to master the great beasts, to hunt and kill them. But unless there were many young born to the beasts, the herds would fail, and man would go hungry. Unless the women of his tribe were fertile, in those days when life was precarious and its expectation short, man’s species too would lose its hold upon the world.
So man made magic for life as well as hunting. For instance, he fashioned figures of animals mating. Two clay figures of bison, a bull and a cow, were found in a deeply hidden cave at Tuc d’Audoubert, near St. Girons in France. Nearby were found interlacing footmarks on the floor of the cave, thought to be the traces of ritual dancing. This cave had been blocked by a landslide untold centuries ago; and the traces of primordial magic had lain hidden here, in the silence and the darkness, until three young men in 1912 took a boat up a subterranean river and explored through caverns of stalactites until they found another way in, and stood beside the prints of naked feet that had been dust since the dawn of time.
Some of the most remarkable and beautiful of early man’s works of art are his figures of women. They are not portraits, but impersonal characterisations of female fertility, of woman as the vessel of life, with pregnant womb and swelling breasts. Some of these so-called ‘Venus figures’ are quite small, beautifully carved from soapstone or mammoth ivory. Other larger figures of the same kind are drawn or sculpted on the walls of caves. A particularly interesting find is that made at Angles-sur-l’Anglin, of a triple representation, three life-size goddesses, at a place significantly named Roc aux Sorciers, ‘Witches’ Rock’.
A wonderful Palaeolithic carving, which is certainly fit to represent a goddess, is the so-called ‘Venus of Laussel’. This was carved in basrelief on the wall of a rock shelter in the Dordogne, and it also showed traces of red pigment, symbolic of blood to give it life. The figure is that of a naked woman with long hair hanging over her shoulders, holding in one hand a drinking horn. The latter is perhaps a very early version of the Horn of Plenty.
Male figures are sometimes depicted also. The ones given most importance are those of men wearing a ritual disguise, the skin and horns of a bull or a stag. In Britain, a small example of such a figure has been found, in the Pin Hole Cave at Cresswell Crags on the border of Not-tinghamshire and Derbyshire. A bone was found, beneath 3 inches of stalagmite deposit, and on it was carved a little figure of a man, ithyphallic, and wearing an animal mask. Incidentally, the Pin Hole Cave got its name because it contained a water hole into which people dropped pins to gain wishes—a long continuity of magical use which seems almost incredible but is nevertheless true.
The most numinous of these male maskers is the famous ‘Sorcerer’, or Horned God, of the Caverne des Trois Frères, in Ariège. This cave was found by the same three interpid brothers, the sons of Count Bégouen, who discovered Tuc d’Audoubert, and it is named after them. The figure is that of a dancing man wearing an animal’s skin and tail, and a mask crowned with the antlers of a stag. The impression of movement, and of the human limbs beneath the animal skin, is skilfully conveyed.
It is a very fortunate thing that this masterpiece of Stone Age art was not discovered until the beginning of the twentieth century. Had it come to light in the days of the great witch persecutions, the Church would have ordered its destruction, as a figure of the Devil, and sprinkled the place with holy water afterwards.
Undoubtedly, in these motifs of Stone Age art, the Naked Goddess and the Horned God, we have the very deities of the witches. The claim of the witch cult to be the oldest religion in the world is justified.
Not only the deities, but the ritual of the witches is depicted, in the round dance of women portrayed in a cave-painting from Cogul in Spain. Also, it is evident from the foregoing that the processes of imitiative or sympathetic magic, ‘raising the power and showing it what to do’, are of great antiquity. Yet magic on these lines is still practised today. The unknown person who nailed two thorn-pierced human effigies, and a sheep’s heart also transfixed with thorns, to the door of the old castle at Castle Rising, Norfolk, in September 1963, was attempting the same sort of magic as was used by the shamans of the Stone Age. This is only one of many such evidences of magic ritual that have been found in Britain in recent years.
The cave itself conveys to man’s mind the idea of the womb of the great Earth Mother; the place of birth and also, as a sepulchre, the place of death. It represents the Round of Life: birth, death and the possibility of rebirth. Thus the dead were ceremonially interred in a way that would aid the great magic of rebirth. Bones found in caves where Stone Age man buried his dead have been stained with red ochre, showing that this was sprinkled abundantly over the dead to simulate blood, the fluid of life. Shells have often been found buried with the dead, as a female symbol, the emblem of the portal of birth. Cowrie-shells, which especially resemble this, were possibly man’s oldest talisman; and they are still valued in Africa today. Even though the graves were many miles from the sea-coast, the body would still be accompanied by shells.
Other valuable things, such as flint tools, would also be buried with the dead; the archaeological term for these deposits is ‘grave goods’. Even Neanderthal Man, the mysterious primitive species now vanished from the earth, buried his dead ceremonially, with grave goods. It is strange that this creature, with receding forehead and body matted with hair, should have had more faith in his own immortal soul than many civilised men today. He sent his dead into the Beyond with tools and weapons and with meat for their journey. The bones of food animals have been found in Neanderthal graves, as in those of other types of primitive man.
A very old practice which definitely connects with the magic of rebirth is that of so-called ‘crouched burial’. This means that the body was buried in a position like that of a child in the womb, lying on its side with knees drawn up. In dying, man returned to the womb of the Great Mother, his first idea of divinity; in due course, he would be born again. The cave was his shelter, his birth-place, his dwelling, his temple and his sepulchre.
The tradition of sacred caves still survives all over the world; sometimes in connection with witchcraft. Wookey Hole in the West Country is famous as the legendary dwelling-place of the ‘Witch of Wookey’; and remains found there, including a primitive gazing-crystal, confirm that it was in times long past inhabited by a woman recluse who practised magic. Deep caves at Eastry, in Kent, have in one part a kind of chapel, ornamented with pairs of stags’ antlers, evidently of considerable age; and vague stories claim that this was once the scene of secret rituals.
Present-day witch covens sometimes use caves for their rites. The occult magazine, New Dimensions, published in November 1964 a remarkable article called “Witches’ Esbat”, by a coven leader who used the pen-name of ‘Robert Cochrane’. It gave a vivid description of a rite in a West Country cave, when chanting and dancing took place round a fire, until a spiritual presence, that of a master witch of long ago, manifested itself. The identity of the author of this article is known to the writer.
In modern times also, the aborigines of Australia have used caves as the scene of magical and religious art. They paint figures of deities whom they invoke to send rain, and they also depict animals whose numbers they hope to increase. If a painting becomes dimmed with the passage of time, they touch it up with fresh colours, in order to maintain its magical potency. By our observation of how living tribes of primitive people do things like this, we can achieve some further insight into the thoughts and feelings of the artist of the Palaeolithic days.
So far as our present knowledge goes, the time-span covered by Palaeolithic art in Western Europe extends over some 18,000 years, from about 30,000 B.C. to about 12,000 B.C. After that time, man’s culture merged into the Middle Stone Age conditions, when the climate became warmer, and he became more a food-gatherer and fisherman, and less dependent upon hunting; and the brilliance of cave art seems to have died away. In the New Stone Age, man discovered agriculture, and evolved new kinds of magic connected with the growth of crops and the fertility of the earth. But the Horned God and the Naked Goddess, the magical images of the primordial cave, continued to appear and reappear in man’s religious conceptions, and to be invoked in his magic.
CEREMONIAL MAGIC, ITS DIFFERENCE FROM WITCHCRAFT
It is the custom of some writers upon the occult, notably the late Montague Summers, to lump together indifferently both witchcraft and ceremonial magic, and to label them both as ‘devil worship’. This is completely misleading.
The magic of the grimoires, such as the Key of Solomon, the Lemegeton, the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, etc., is something entirely different from the old pagan traditions of witchcraft. Ceremonial magic is the magic of learned men, and even of priests. It has a strongly religious tinge, of both Christianity and Judaism, and has mostly been derived from the Hebrew Qabalah and given a Christian veneer.
Its method of working is to control the powers of nature, which are conceived of as being either angelic or demonic, by the powerful Divine Names which form the words of conjuration. Such words, for instance, as Agla, Adonai, Tetragrammaton, Sabaoth, Anaphaxeton, Primeumaton, Sother, Athanatos; words which are a mixture of Hebrew and Greek, and are all names of God.
Its instructions are usually complicated and exacting, and require the magician to purify himself by fasting, taking baths, and dressing in clean and consecrated robes before he enters the magic circle. He uses pentacles and consecrated tools, as does the witch, but all of a more elaborate kind. He prays at length, in the forms of either Judaism or Christianity, for power to perform this magical operation, by compelling the spirits of either heaven or hell to do his bidding.
The witch’s method of proceeding is simpler and more direct. In fact, the people who practised witchcraft could be and often were illiterate; while the ceremonial magician had to be more or less a ‘learned clerk’.
His arts were officially forbidden by the Church, but not in practice with such severity as those of the witch; because the witch was a pagan heretic, while the ceremonial magician, even when he set out to evoke demons, considered himself to be within the Church’s pale.
He would indignantly deny that he was a Satanist or a devil worshipper. Indeed, the alleged cult of Satanism is, in the writer’s opinion, something of fairly modern and mainly literary origin. The Black Magic novels of Mr Dennis Wheatley, while first-rate entertainment as imaginative thrillers, bear little relationship to the real traditional practices of either ceremonial magicians or witches.
The witch’s origins and practices go back to the dawn of time. She keeps pagan festivals and invokes pagan gods; and while there is much common ground between witchcraft and ceremonial magic, this is the main and essential difference.
CHANCTONBURY RING
In England Chanctonbury Ring is one of the time-honoured meeting-places of the Sussex witches. A well-known landmark and local beauty-spot, it is a green, rounded height, crowned by a fine clump of trees.
Newcomers often believe these trees to be the ‘ring’ of Chanctonbury. However, they were planted in the eighteenth century; the real ‘ring’ is a prehistoric bank and ditch, of which traces can still be found.
Many legends cluster round Chanctonbury. The local people call the spot ‘Mother Goring’; and at one time there was a custom of coming up to the Ring to see the sun rise on the morning of May Day. The Ring is said to be haunted by the apparition of a man on horseback. Ghostly hoofbeats are heard, and then the rider comes galloping past—and vanishes.
The main local legend, however, is the one that connects Chanctonbury with witchcraft. Go to the Ring at midnight, says the story, and run round it seven times. Then the Devil will appear, and offer you something to eat or drink. “A bowl of soup,” says one version; which sounds rather prosaic, unless the contents of the witches’ cauldron are intended. But if you accept what the Devil offers, you are his for ever.
It will be seen how this legend, and the custom of seeing the sun rise from the Ring on May morning, both tie up with the Ring’s being used for the witches’ Sabbats. To see the sun rise on May morning means that you have been out all night on May Eve, the old Walpurgis Night and one of the four Great Sabbats.
In modern days, archaeologists have examined Chanctonbury Ring, and found it to be the site of a Romano-British temple. So the old sacred place of the pagan gods became the meeting-place of the witches.
CIMARUTA
The cimaruta, or cima di ruta, is an unusual and beautiful amulet, pertaining to Italian witch lore. A fine example of the cimaruta is reproduced as an illustration in this book.
The name of this amulet means ‘a sprig of rue’. The herb rue (Ruta graveolens) is sometimes called Herb of Grace; and rue and vervain are supposed to be the two plants most pleasing to the goddess Diana, the queen of Italian witches.
CIMARUTA. This Italian witch amulet, representing a sprig of rue, is surrounded here by other amulets from the author’s collection.
The cimaruta must be made of silver, because that is Diana’s metal. As well as the representation of the sprig of rue, it also contains the five-petalled flower of vervain, the waning moon to banish evil, the key which is the attribute of Hecate, and a fish, which is a phallic symbol.
Fairly common in the nineteenth century, the cimaruta is not so well known in modern Italy. At least, the writer has shown this example of it to Italians, and they did not know what it was; though perhaps they did not care to identify it, on account of its association with witchcraft, ‘La Vecchia Religione’, or the ‘Old Religion’.
The purpose of the cimaruta is to show oneself a votary of the witch goddess, by wearing her favourite herbs; and in general, to bring good luck and ward off evil. It also protects against the much-dreaded malocchio, or power of the Evil Eye, a matter which is seldom discussed, but still strongly believed in.
CIRCLE, MAGIC
The circle has long been regarded by occult philosophers as being the perfect shape. It is the symbol of infinity and eternity, because it has neither beginning nor ending. The early astronomers were much misled by their idea that the heavenly bodies must move in circles, on account of the circle’s meaning as the figure of perfection.
The magic circle is part of the general heritage of magical practice, which is world-wide and of incalculable age. Magic circles have varied from the elaborate spiritual fortress of divine names, which may be used by the ceremonial magician, to the simple round drawn by the witch.
One sometimes sees dramatic pictures made by artists, depicting magical ceremonies, which show an impressively-robed magus raising a spirit within a circle, while he himself stands outside it. This is, however, quite the reverse of the real way in which a magical circle is used.
The circle is drawn to protect the operator from potentially dangerous or hostile forces without, and to concentrate the power which is raised within. The latter, arising from the magic circle, is called the Cone of Power. It is this Cone of Power that the traditional pointed hat of the witch, or the tall pointed cap of the magus, is symbolical of. People who are clairvoyant have claimed to be able to see the Cone of Power arising from the magic circle in the form of silvery-blue light.
The magic circle is carefully orientated to the cardinal points, by having a light, or some symbolic object, placed at the east, west, south and north. For white magic in general, movements within the circle should always be deasil, that is, sunwise. The widdershins movement, or tuathal, is a movement of averse magic and cursing.
The circle may be drawn upon the ground in various ways; e.g., marked out with chalk. But in order to give it power, it has to be traced round with the Athame, or consecrated ritual knife. Ceremonial magicians sometimes use a sword for this purpose. Very precise details about making a magic circle may be found in Gerald Gardner’s occult novel High Magic’s Aid (Michael Houghton, London, 1949), and in Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice (privately printed, Paris, 1929, and Castle books, New York).
In order to have a permanent magic circle in a convenient form, some magical practitioners make use of a large square of plain carpet or felt, upon which the circle has been painted. This can be rolled up and hidden when not in use. Occult lodges often adopt this method; though of course the circle should be ceremonially reconsecrated with the magical weapon, as described above, each time it is used.
A small table or pedestal stands in the centre of the circle, to serve as an altar. On it are placed the various requirements of the ritual, such as a lighted candle, a censer of incense, etc.
According to tradition, the most effective size for a magic circle is one having a diameter of 9 feet. Outside this is sometimes drawn another circle, one foot larger all round; and between the two circles, at the four cardinal points, pentagrams are drawn. The lights, etc., which mark the four quarters, are placed within these pentagrams. However, some magicians have used much more elaborate circles than this, of which many illustrations can be found in the old books of magic called grimoires.
The great age of the concept of the magic circle is shown by the fact that it is described in the writings of the ancient Assyrians, which have been translated from their tablets of baked clay. The magicians of Assyria called the magic circle usurtu. In ancient India also, the practitioners of magic made use of consecrated circles, which they marked out in red lead or black pebbles.
It will be seen that the figure of the magic circle, oriented to the four cardinal points and with the altar in the middle, is precisely similar to that of the mandala, which Carl Gustav Jung regards as of deep significance to the collective unconscious of mankind. Jung has written extensively of the symbolism of the mandala, as an archetypal figure which conveys the idea of spiritual balance, and right relationship between God, Man and the universe. According to the theory of high magic, it is only when such balance and relationship exist that man can become a true magician.
COTSWOLDS, WITCHCRAFT IN THE
The area of the Cotswold Hills has long been famous as a centre of witchcraft lore. In modern days two events have brought this fact to notice: the so-called ‘Witchcraft Murder’ on Meon Hill in 1945, and the opening of Mr. Cecil H. Williamson’s witchcraft museum at Bourton-on-the-Water at Easter 1956, which aroused considerable controversy in the area at the time. The museum closed about ten years later, Mr. Williamson having opened another at Boscastle in Cornwall.
During the years it remained at Bourton-on-the-Water, this witchcraft museum, arranged in a picturesque fifteenth-century Cotswold stone house, provided a fascinating panorama of objects connected with magic and witchcraft. When I visited it in 1961, it contained, among innumerable other exhibits, an indoor shrine used by a witch for thanksgiving to the Old Gods in recognition of spells successfully accomplished, and a life-size representation of a scene in an old-time witch’s cottage, showing how a ‘divining familiar’ worked.
A wax figure of a witch sat before a big old-fashioned table, on which was a skull draped with a black shawl; also on the table were a black-hilted knife, and four candles in crude, home-made candlesticks of bone. Specimens of different herbs were displayed before the familiar, a small animal (a weasel, I think). It was explained that the animal became possessed by a god or a spirit, and indicated the right herb to use in a particular case.
This was in fact a correct representation of a ‘divining familiar’. I have known a cat to be used in the same way, to divine by selecting cards from an outspread pack with its paw.
The exhibit which aroused most controversy, however, was a life-size wax figure of an almost nude witch-priestess lying upon an altar. She was described as a priestess of Tanat, the Phoenician moon goddess, whose worship, it was claimed, was still carried out in Cornwall and the West of England, being celebrated by ritual bonfires on the old pagan festival dates.
In June 1956 someone hanged a cat from a beam outside the museum. Mr. Williamson interpreted it as a ‘death warning’, from one who objected to the museum’s being opened.
Mr. Williamson’s museum would have been controversial anywhere. It was doubly so in the Cotswolds, where fear of witchcraft as a sinister influence is still lively today. The events of the Meon Hill murder have not been forgotten; nor how the famous anthropologist, the late Dr. Margaret Murray, spent a week in the area of the murder, ostensibly as an artist with a sketch-book, but actually carrying out her own investigation. Later, she stated publicly that she believed the murder victim, an old man named Charles Walton of the village of Lower Quinton, had been killed because of the local belief in witchcraft.
Walton was found dead under a tree on Meon Hill, on 14th February, 1945. His body was pinned to the ground by a hayfork, and his throat and chest had been slashed in the form of a cross. Police investigating the murder came up against a wall of silence, and no arrest was ever made. February 14th is Candlemas by the Old Calendar, which is twelve days behind the present dating; and Candlemas is one of the Great Sabbats of the witches.
Recently another investigation into this mysterious killing has been carried out by Donald McCormick, who published his findings in his book Murder by Witchcraft (John Long, London, 1968). Mr. McCormick has uncovered new facts about the man who was killed, which have convinced me personally that witchcraft, or rather the fear of witchcraft, was the motive for this murder; Charles Walton was slain because someone feared his powers as a witch.
He was slain bloodily, because to spill a witch’s blood destroyed their influence. In 1875 an old woman named Anne Turner had been killed in a similar manner, in another Cotswold village, Long Compton, by a man who believed her to be a witch. He was influenced by an old local saying: “There are enough witches in Long Compton to draw a waggon-load of hay up Long Compton Hill.”
The traditional meeting-place of the Cotswold witches is the Rollright Stones, a prehistoric stone circle between Long Compton and Chipping Norton. Outside the circle and across a road is a big standing stone called the King Stone, strangely weathered by the passing centuries; and nearby in a field is a cromlech of big stones called the Whispering Knights.
On 12th May 1949, a witches’ Sabbat was held at the Rollright Stones which was observed by two independent witnesses, whose stories got into the local and national press. It was the night of the full moon, and May Eve by the Old Calendar. The latter, as stated above, is twelve days behind the New, or Gregorian Calendar, which was adopted in Britain in 1752; but traces of the old reckoning can still be found in custom and folklore.
The man who witnessed the rites had gone there because he had heard rumours of witch meetings there before, and curiosity attracted him. He was unable to get very close, but he saw a number of people, both men and women, performing a ritual round the King Stone, with chanting and dancing. The leader wore a disguise, which the observer thought was a goat-headed mask. The other eye-witness, a woman, was afraid to remain, and fled from the scene.
Since this time, traces of bonfires have been found at the Rollright Stones on various occasions; but since the newspaper publicity, witches have tended to avoid using the Stones for their meetings. However, the magazine Life International, in its issue dated 18th May 1964, carried a detailed article about witchcraft in Britain, which included photographs of a special meeting at the Rollright Stones organised by a London coven under the leadership of Mrs. Ray Bone, whose witch-name is Artemis.
She invoked the Old Gods of the witches, and the coven joined hands to dance round a bonfire lit within the circle of stones. Then the witches jumped over the flames of the fire, which according to their ritual symbolised the life-giving properties of the sun. The rite was held to celebrate May Eve, the traditional beginning of summer.
A remarkable historical novel, based upon fact, and dealing with witchcraft in the Cotswolds in the seventeenth century, is The Silver Bowl, by Hugh Ross Williamson, first published in 1948 (Michael Joseph, London). It deals particularly with Chipping Campden, and the strange events known as the Campden Wonder, when three witches, Joan Perry and her two sons, were hanged for the supposed murder of a man who had disappeared, but who later returned alive to the village. It mentions Seven Wells, within a circle of trees on a hill south of Chipping Campden, as the meeting-place of the seventeenth-century coven, and contains many unusual details about witchcraft, which it calls “the Craft of the Wise”.
I can add to the evidence of witchcraft in the Cotswolds a story of my own. About fifteen years ago an uncle and aunt of mine came to see me, and talked about a motoring tour they had enjoyed. They had passed through the Cotswolds, and been to see the Rollright Stones. They were very conventional people, who knew nothing about witchcraft or my interest in it.
My aunt said that they had seen a woman dancing slowly round the King Stone, “waving her hands in strange gestures”. Then she had knelt down in front of the stone and seemed to be praying. My uncle had been inclined to jeer, but my aunt had restrained him; because, she said, “You could see she was quite serious, and believed in what she was doing.” They hadn’t known what to make of it; and I didn’t tell them.
At the old Fleece Inn at Bretforton, near Evesham, on the edge of the Cotswolds, the custom is kept up of drawing three white circles on the hearth, “to stop witches from coming down the chimney”. This derives from the old idea that the influence of witchcraft could enter a house through the windows, the doors, or the chimney; and protective amulets were hung or placed in these locations to prevent it. The number three has always been sacred and magical, while the circle was anciently regarded as the symbol of perfection and eternity, and whiteness as the colour of purity. Hence the protective magic of this traditional rite.
COVEN
The traditional number of persons to form a witches’ coven is thirteen. Ideally, they should consist of six men, six women and a leader.
This does not mean, however, that a witches’ cult-group cannot function unless it comprises thirteen persons. Less than this number can form a coven; but the members of a coven should not exceed thirteen. When the membership goes above this figure, the coven should divide itself, and form a new coven. Thus the Craft spreads and continues.
There is an old witch law that the meeting-place of a coven should be at least a league (3 miles) from the meeting-place of any other coven, to avoid any clashes of interest. It is also a traditional rule that covens should not know too much about the private business of other covens or their members. Only the leaders should keep in touch with each other. The reason for this was, that in the times of persecution, what people did not know they could not be made to tell.
The practice of using ‘eke-names’, or nicknames, for members of the coven, arose partly from the same source; though this is also an old and world-wide custom, that people going through a significant religious ceremony take a new name, to signify a permanent change of personality. We can even see a reminder of this in the Christian Church, where people are allowed to change their Christian names at Confirmation, if they wish to do so.
The coven of thirteen is the best-known of the witches’ cult groups; but there is also a lesser-known coven of eight. This consists of more experienced initiates than the coven of thirteen. In fact, the latter might be called the fertility coven, invoking and worshipping the powers of life and luck in a general way; whereas the coven of eight is the magical coven, which concentrates on deeper things, and is especially interested in achieving the higher states of consciousness. The people comprising a coven of eight are likely to be generally older, and much more reserved and secretive, than those who belong to a coven of thirteen.
Apart from these two kinds of coven, there are individual witches who are not organised into any coven, and prefer to work on their own. Such witches are generally elderly, and often possess a good deal of experience, and more potent occult powers than those who are members of covens. It will generally be found, however, that they have been trained in a coven in their earlier years; and they usually know the whereabouts of other witches, and will occasionally join forces with them for some special purpose.
In recent years various estimates have been made of the number of witch covens operating in the British Isles. Most of these have been merely fanciful guesses; as not all witches by any means belong to the same rule of witchcraft. Owing to the years of persecution, the craft has become fragmented, and different branches of it follow their own ramifications, ‘keeping themselves to themselves’.
The well-meaning activities of the late Gerald Gardner, in publicising witchcraft, aroused strong indignation among many of the old practitioners. In fact, they would agree with the person who said that today there were three kinds of witches—white witches, black witches, and publicity witches! They regard the activities of people who call themselves ‘Kings’ and ‘Queens’ of the witches as being just showmanship. Nor do these oldsters view with favour the version of witchcraft practised in the covens Gerald Gardner founded, which they feel to be more ‘Gardnerian’ than traditional.
To this, the ‘Gardnerians’ retort that Gerald Gardner’s motives for publicising witchcraft were good and sincere, and that thanks to him the old Craft of the Wise has experienced a veritable renaissance in the present day. They claim that their practices are as traditional as anyone else’s, and that their beliefs and philosophy have brought happiness to many people, who, were it not for Gerald Gardner, would never have heard of witchcraft as a religion and a way of life.
They agree that publicity was a break with the old custom; but they say that times have changed, and that public discussion of witchcraft has enabled old traditions to be gathered together and preserved, that might otherwise have died out and been lost.
They agree, too, that the renewal of public interest in witchcraft and the occult generally has brought a good deal of highly dubious activity in its train. However, they point out that this is a perennial problem for all serious occultists, and that time eventually sorts out the good from the bad, and the genuine from the bogus.
The number thirteen has long been regarded as having peculiar magical properties, which are reflected in the cult-group of twelve people and a leader. In astrology, which goes back far into the pre-Christian era, we have the sun and the twelve signs of the zodiac. Also, and this is the thing which most probably applies to witchcraft, there are thirteen lunar months to the year; an older time measure than the twelve calendar months we now have. Thus there were thirteen full-moon Esbats to each year, as celebrated by the witches.
Throughout history, we find cult groups of thirteen people; that is, twelve and a leader. Romulus, the hero who founded Rome, had twelve companions, called lictors. The ancient priesthood of the Arval Brethren were twelve, who danced round the statue of Dea Dia, representing the thirteenth. The Danish hero Hrolf, was followed by his twelve Berserks. Some versions of the Arthurian legends say that King Arthur’s Round Table consisted of the king and twelve of his principal knights. In medieval legend, King Charlemagne had his twelve Paladins. Robin Hood’s band in Sherwood Forest, according to some stories, consisted of twelve men and one woman, Maid Marian.
The old Celtic stories tell us of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain, which Merlin the wizard took with him when he vanished from among men. The same concept of the sacred thirteen appears in the legends of the Northmen, who pictured Odin as ruling in Asgard over a company of twelve principal gods and goddesses.
We have a survival of the sanctity and potency of thirteen in our system of trial by jury, which calls for twelve people, presided over by the judge, to return their verdict. There is also the old belief, often encountered in English ghost lore, that twelve clergymen acting together could banish a troublesome spirit, or at any rate, bind it to trouble the living no more. In this case the ghost is the thirteenth.
From its associations with witchcraft, the number thirteen came to be called the ‘Devil’s Dozen’. Old pictures of witches’ meetings often depict twelve people and a thirteenth. There is, for instance, a very charming fifteenth-century French miniature from the Rawlinson MS in the Bodleian Library, which depicts a witches’ meeting just outside a village. In the foreground, three women and a man are adoring a goat, with lighted candles in their hands. Behind them, two couples are embracing. Three witches mounted on broomsticks fly merrily overhead, and another witch is just emerging from the chimney of the nearest house. Thus there are twelve witches in the picture, and the Goat God is the thirteenth.
Margaret Murray, in her book The God of the Witches (Faber, London, 1952), reproduces a picture of a witches’ dance from an old black-letter ballad of “Robin Goodfellow”. There are shown eleven witches dancing in the ring, man and woman alternately. Outside the circle of dancers, a twelfth witch plays on some musical instrument, probably a recorder. The thirteenth figure is Robin Goodfellow, dancing in the circle, horned and hoofed, and carrying a lighted candle and a broomstick. He is either the Old God himself or his earthly representative in ritual disguise. There is another version of this picture which shows six men and six women in the circle, plus the figure of Robin Goodfellow and the musician outside the circle. It is curious that these two versions exist and it may have some significance.
One of the earliest witchcraft trials in the British Isles of which full details have survived, is that of Dame Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny in 1324. The names of the accused are recorded, and they total twelve. The thirteenth was one Robin Artisson, the ‘Devil’ of the coven, who escaped (as eventually did Dame Alice). (See KYTELER, DAME ALICE.)
Two more covens of thirteen are described by Joseph Glanvil in his Sadducismus Triumphatus, published in 1681. Glanvil was Chaplain to King Charles II, and he deplored the growing scepticism of the times, or ‘Sadducism’ as he called it, and he wrote his book to confute it. He recounts a number of interesting tales to prove the reality of witchcraft and the supernatural. Among them is the story of the Somerset witches who were tried in 1664. There were two covens of thirteen people each, one at Wincanton and the other at Brewham. They were governed by a mysterious ‘Man in Black’, whose identity was never revealed. Again, this is a case in which the actual names of the two covens of thirteen are preserved in legal records.
A Scottish witch, Isobel Gowdie of Auldearne, for some reason gave herself up to the authorities in 1662 and made the longest and most detailed confession which has come down to us from a witch trial in Britain. In the course of this, she stated that the witches were organised in covens, and that there were thirteen people in each coven.
Dr. Russell Hope Robbins, in his Encyclopaedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (Crown Publishers Inc, New York, 1959), scorns the idea of the real existence of witch covens, and says that the word ‘coven’ first appeared in 1662, as a result of Isobel Gowdie’s confession, which he calls “these meanderings of an old woman”. But according to Christina Hole, in her Witchcraft in England (Batsford, London, 1945 and Collier Macmillan, New York, 1966) Isobel Gowdie was “a pretty, red-haired girl, the wife of a farmer”, and her name is still remembered among the people of Morayshire. She was hanged at the West Port of Elgin, and her body was afterwards burned to ashes, in the belief that this was the only way a witch’s power could be really banished. Why she sacrificed herself has never been discovered.
Chaucer uses the word ‘covent’ in his Canterbury Tales, meaning an assembly of thirteen people. It is actually a variant of the word ‘convent’, and survives to this day in London in the name of Covent Garden. The Latinised spelling ‘convent’ was introduced about 1550, and gradually superseded the older form. A poem of the early fourteenth century, called “Handlyng Synne”, tells of a ‘coveyne’ of thirteen people who impiously held a dance in the churchyard while the priest was saying Mass, and were duly punished for their sinful ways.
Evidently the ‘covent’, ‘coveyne’ or ‘coven’ (there are a number of variant spellings) was a group of thirteen people. They might be Christians, as in a book of Ecclesiastical Memorials (quoted by the Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1933), written in 1536, which speaks of houses of religion “whereof the number in any one house is or of late hath been less than a covent, that is to say under thirteen persons”. But the naughty people of the ‘coveyne’ who danced in the churchyard were certainly not religious persons.
Eventually, the word ‘coven’ came to be used exclusively of the witches’ cult group; and so it has come down to our day.
The traditions of heraldry embody much curious lore and symbolism, some of which contains hints of the occult. It is notable that the old constitution of the College of Heralds consists of thirteen persons: three Kings of Arms, namely Garter, Clarencieux and Norroy; six Heralds, Somerset, Richmond, Lancaster, Windsor, Chester and York; and four Pursuivants, called Rouge Dragon, Blue Mantle, Portcullis and Rouge Croix.
CROSSROADS AS WITCHES’ MEETING PLACES
Ever since the days of Diana Trivia, or Diana of the Three Ways, crossroads have been traditional meeting-places of witches. This may be the origin of the custom, observed up to comparatively recent years, of burying the bodies of suicides and executed criminals at the crossroads, with a stake through the heart. The latter was to prevent the ghost from walking. The body, having been denied Christian burial, was symbolically abandoned to the pagan powers.
Statues of Diana Trivia, or of the triple moon goddess Hecate, both of whom were divinities of witchcraft, were erected by the Greeks and Romans at places where three or more roads met. This is why, in later years, witches chose crossroads for their rendezvous. It was a place sacred to the moon goddess of witchcraft.
In Ashdown Forest, Sussex, there is a place where three roads meet, called Wych Cross. In past years, this place-name was spelt ‘Witch Cross’, because it was the meeting-place of the local witches.
Another forest crossroads where witches used to meet is Wilverley Post, in the New Forest in Hampshire, near the old oak-tree called the Naked Man.
CROWLEY, ALEISTER
Aleister Crowley earns a place in this book, not because he was a witch, but because he was not! This, of course, does not stop Crowley’s name being dragged into every Sunday newspaper’s latest “Exposure of Witchcraft and Black Magic” (they seldom know the difference). But perhaps if a brief sketch of Crowley’s life is given here, it may help to a better understanding of what this very remarkable man really stood for.
Crowley was a pagan, a poet, a mountaineer, a magician and a prophet. He was also a world traveller and an all too daring explorer of the dangerous inner world of hallucinatory drugs. But the magic he practised—or ‘Magick’ as he preferred to call it—was the Qabalistic magic taught by the Order of the Golden Dawn, the famous occult brotherhood which claimed descent from the original Rosicrucians. In Crowley’s eyes at any rate, it was very definitely white ‘Magick’; and it was not witchcraft of any description.
As a matter of fact, Crowley was rather afraid of witchcraft, judging from some of the references to it in his works. This was probably because he recognised the strong feminine influence in witchcraft; and Crowley distrusted and professed to despise women. There was a pronounced homosexual bias in his nature, and his deepest and most significant relationships were with men.
As a poet, Crowley has never yet received the recognition he deserves. Like Oscar Wilde, his love of shocking the smug bourgeoisie rebounded upon him, to rob his work of the praise it merited. Today, however, in more broad-minded times, more and more of Crowley’s books are being reprinted and made available, so that people can appreciate his strange genius for themselves, instead of only being able to read shocked (and usually inaccurate) accounts of how ‘wicked’ he was.
For such a flamboyant character, Crowley had a surprising home background. He was the son of two devout members of the Plymouth Brethren sect, a wealthy brewer called Edward Crowley and his wife Emily. They lived at Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, in the utmost Victorian respectability; and there Aleister Crowley was born, on 12th October 1875.
Perhaps they were rather too devout and respectable. Their talented little son stifled and suffered in an atmosphere of narrow-minded creedalism; and when he rebelled, his mother told him that he was as bad as the Great Beast in the Book of Revelations! This seems to have stuck in Crowley’s mind; because when he became a man he took the title of the Great Beast—even to the extent of having it printed on his visiting cards.
His whole life was a revolt against his parents and everything they stood for. They must have made him very unhappy—no doubt with the best of intentions.
Crowley inherited a substantial fortune from his father. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge; and having utterly rejected his parents’ religion, he became interested in the occult. Eventually he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which numbered many distinguished people among its initiates. He also travelled extensively in the East, learning Eastern systems of Yoga and occultism.
The leader of the Golden Dawn was another remarkable personality, S. L. MacGregor Mathers; and he and Crowley ended by quarrelling bitterly. Crowley thereafter went his own way and founded his own order, the Argentinum Astrum or Silver Star, abbreviated to A.A.
Crowley had married Rose Kelly, the sister of Sir Gerald Kelly, the artist. While on holiday in Egypt with his young wife, Crowley took part with her in magical rituals, as a result of which he received what he considered to be a message from the gods who rule the destiny of this planet. This message was dictated to him by what he called “a praeter-human intelligence”. He wrote down three chapters of a manuscript, which he named Liber Legis, the Book of the Law.
From the Book of the Law Crowley took his famous dictum: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love under Will”. Upon this manuscript Crowley based all of his subsequent life and teachings.
Liber Legis is an extraordinary document. However much it may be argued that it actually emanated from Crowley’s subconscious mind, nevertheless it is undeniable that this book contained prophecies, both about Crowley’s own personal life and about world events, which have been fulfilled.
Crowley received the Book of the Law in April 1904. The world was then in the palmy days of the British Empire, the lower classes knew their place, and all was peace, prosperity and croquet on the lawn. The Book of the Law proclaimed that all this was going to dissolve into war and chaos, out of which a new Aeon was to arise. The orthodox religions of the world would become discredited; the accepted moral codes would be despised. A new order of things had begun. It was the Equinox of the Gods.
The new Aeon would be called the Aeon of Horus, because it was going to be an Aeon of youth. Horus is the Egyptian god who was the child of Isis and Osiris. The law set forth in Liber Legis would be the guiding light of the new Aeon; and Crowley was to proclaim it.
Crowley has often been called a charlatan; but he undoubtedly devoted the rest of his life to playing out his role of the Logos of the Aeon of Horus. He believed in what he was doing; and no amount of personal misfortune, loss, or the alienation of his friends and those dear to him, would turn him from his path. Crowley was a figure of fate; he has made his mark upon the world, and particularly the world of the occult.
The press denounced him as “The Wickedest Man in the World”, because of what they alleged went on in his notorious ‘Abbey of Thelema’ which he established at Cefalu in Sicily. It is now known that a good deal of the allegations made were false. However, Mussolini, who was then ruler of Italy, expelled him from Sicily, and he returned to Britain.
Here he became involved in a famous and sensational libel case. He sued Nina Hamnett, the sculptress, alleging that in her book of reminiscences, Laughing Torso (Constable and Co., London, 1932), she had libelled him by saying that he practised black magic. The case was heard in April 1934 before Mr. Justice Swift. The other side was able to produce such extraordinary evidence of Crowley’s bizarre life and scandalous writings, that the judge was horrified. Of course, Crowley lost the case, amid a new furore of press publicity, and was forced into bankruptcy.
A number of disciples, however, remained loyal to him and helped him in his declining years. He ended his stormy life quietly in retirement at Hastings, in Sussex; unrepentant and unbowed. He died peacefully in his bed on 1st December 1947.
His remains were cremated at Brighton, and the ashes sent to his disciples in America. To the horror and indignation of Brighton councillors, Crowley’s “Hymn to Pan” had been proclaimed from the pulpit of the crematorium chapel, with other extracts from his writings, instead of the usual religious service.
The worst charge that can be levelled against Crowley concerns the effect that he had upon some of his close associates. There were cases of mental collapse, alcoholism, broken lives and suicide among his devotees. His ‘Magick’ was strong and dangerous stuff. But he meant it to be white Magick; and although it was paganism, it was not witchcraft.
An excellent biography of Aleister Crowley is The Great Beast by John Symonds (Riders, London, 1931 and St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1972). A shorter, but also very enlightening book about him, is Aleister Crowley by Charles Richard Cammell (New English Library, London, 1969, and by Hill and Wang, New York, 1970). Still more recently, Dr. Francis Israel Regardie, who at one time was Crowley’s personal secretary, has written The Eye in the Triangle; An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley (Llewellyn, U.S.A., 1970).
