MAGIC
Many people, and perhaps especially educated people, have an entirely wrong conception of what magic is. They think of it as something which miraculously violates the laws of Nature. Therefore, they say, it is absurd and impossible. But magic does not work like this at all.
Aleister Crowley defined magic as: “The Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will”.
S. L. MacGregor Mathers, who was one of the founders of that famous magical order, The Golden Dawn, gave his definition of magic as: “The Science of the Control of the Secret Forces of Nature.”
It will be seen that both these definitions differ radically from the popular idea of magic. These definitions apply as much to witches’ magic as they do to other forms of magic.
A third definition of magic is found in the famous grimoire called The Lemegeton, or Lesser Key of King Solomon, which states: “Magic is the Highest, most Absolute, and most Divine Knowledge of Natural Philosophy, advanced in its works and wonderful operations by a right understanding of the inward and occult virtue of things; so that true Agents being applied to proper Patients, strange and admirable effects will thereby be produced. Whence magicians are profound and diligent searchers into Nature; they, because of their skill, know how to anticipate an effect, the which to the vulgar shall seem to be a miracle.”
Again, there is no suggestion that magic acts by anything other than the forces of Nature, being understood and used by one whose knowledge penetrates to the hidden side of Nature, and to the workings of those powers commonly called occult.
Magic is generally regarded as being of two kinds, designated as white or black; though much confusion reigns as to how these categories may be defined.
I remember once discussing this matter with a lawyer in connection with a certain case into which allegations about various occult matters entered. He had not had much contact with such things before; and after considering a good deal of information about magical practices and practitioners, he said to me, “Well, I’ve come to one conclusion—black magic can be defined as what the other fellow does!”
In the world of present-day occultism, this remark certainly very often applies. However, it should not be assumed that the distinction between black and white magic has no validity. If people misuse occult powers, sooner or later they will pay the penalty; no matter how high-sounding their pretensions may be. Black magic is the wrongful use of occult powers; and it is generally coupled with the use of repulsive means, such as blood sacrifice, to attain one’s ends.
The word ‘magic’ is from the Greek Magikē technē, meaning the art of the Magi, or priests of Ancient Persia, from whence the Greeks believed magic to have originated. (However, the magic arts were being practised in Ancient Egypt, long before the days of the Persian Magi.)
It seems that the Magi belonged to the oldest stock of Persia, rather than to the orthodox followers of the religion of Zoroaster, some of whom regarded the doctrines of the Magi with suspicion, as being heretical. They seem to have borne some resemblance to the Druids, as they are said to have worn white robes and favoured a simple mode of life and a vegetarian diet. They worshipped no idols, choosing rather as their symbol the Divine and Sacred Fire, which burned in their sanctuaries and was never allowed to go out.
There were also Magi in Chaldea and Babylon; and, again like the Druids, they studied astronomy. In Chapter 39 of the Book of Jeremiah, we find one “Nergal-sharezer, Rab-Mag” as one of the princes who attended upon the King of Babylon when he captured Jerusalem. The words “Rab-Mag” are a title and mean ‘Great Magus’.
The town of Hamadan, in Persia (nowadays called Iran), was known to the Greeks in ancient times as ‘Ecbatana of the Magi’. The Three Wise Men of the East, who brought gifts to the infant Jesus, are generally regarded as having been of the Magi. This mysterious caste of initiated priest-magicians, who have given their name to the magic art itself, is one of the enigmas of history.
But how does one become a magician? What is the secret that separates a magician from the rest of mankind? According to many of the old magical texts, a person has to be born a magician; though his powers can be developed by study and practice. One of the first requisites, of course, is psychic sensitivity; but this must be coupled with strength of character and self-control. One sees in the accounts of the rites of the primitive tribes, how many of these ceremonies are evidently designed to discover and develop these qualities. The methods may be crude; but they work.
In our own society, such rituals are paralleled by those of occult groups, more or less secret, which confer degrees of initiation. The most famous one of these in modern times is the Order of the Golden Dawn, which was formed in London in 1887 from sources which claimed descent from the even more famous Rosicrucians of the Middle Ages. A number of well-known people belonged to this order, which included W. B. Yeats, Wynn Westcott, Allen Bennett, Arthur Machen, Florence Farr, Brodie Innes, Algernon Blackwood, A. E. Waite, MacGregor Mathers and his wife (who was a sister of Henri Bergson the philosopher) and Aleister Crowley.
The rites and teachings of the Order of the Golden Dawn, which have been published in our own day by Dr. Francis Israel Regardie (The Golden Dawn, Two vols., Hazel Hills Corporation, Wisconsin, 1969), are of a most elaborate and elevated character; yet their basic principles are simple, and rest upon the same age-old philosophy from Nature which has characterised genuine magical thinking throughout the ages.
One sees this process at work, both in the ceremonial magic of our own and previous times, and in the practices of witchcraft. The rites of the ceremonial magician may be much more complicated than those of the witch; but the principles involved are very similar, if not identical.
Witchcraft, however, is the Old Religion of the common people. So the witch uses in her magical arts the things of everyday life, unlike the elaborate armoury of the ceremonial magician. Such things, for instance, as the broomstick, the knotted cord, the cauldron, and the black-hilted knife, which were simply the household articles of any woman’s home; together with the herbs which she grew in her cottage garden, or culled from the woods and hedgerows. Her pentacle was of wax or wood, instead of the metal, or even gold or silver, of the wealthy occultist; and the waxen or wooden pentacles had the advantage that they could be quickly destroyed in the kitchen fire at any alarm of danger.
In the present-day ceremonies of Freemasonry, we can see a reflection of this process, whereby the simple tools of an ancient and highly skilled craft are taken and made to symbolise the highest concepts and ideals. The Operative Mason of the medieval craftsmen’s guild has become the Speculative Mason of the Lodge. And, like the witch, he has been abused and vilified by those who just cannot believe, or do not want to believe, that there is no sinister ‘devil worship’ or mystery of iniquity in his brotherhood.
What, however, is the true object of magic? Is it to foretell the future, to gain power over others, to make talismans to work one’s will for various ends, to communicate with spirits, and so on?
No; to the true magician, these things are incidentals. They can be done; but to pursue them as ends in themselves is to fall into the trap of black magic. They should be regarded rather as means to an end. By developing their powers, the magician or witch develop themselves. They aid their own evolution, their growth as a human being; and in so far as they truly do this, they aid the evolution of the human race.
The human race, after all, consists of individuals; and evolution, like charity, begins at home. Before people set out to reform the world, they need to take a good look at their own defects. Magic, if they take up the study of it seriously, will force them to do this. Perhaps the most famous injunction of the old temples of the Mysteries was “Know thyself”.
MANDRAKE
So many strange legends have gathered about the mandrake root that people often doubt whether such a plant actually exists. It is, however, a genuine inhabitant of the vegetable kingdom; specimens of very curious mandrake roots may sometimes be seen in museums.
The true mandrake, Atropa mandragora, belongs to the Solanaceae, that order of plants which has contributed so much to witchcraft and sorcery. Among the Solanaceae also are the henbane, the deadly nightshade and the thornapple, all plants of sinister reputation.
The mandrake was believed by sorcerers of the Middle Ages to be a kind of half-way creature between the vegetable and the human kind. Its leaves shone by night with a baleful glow. Its flowers and fruits gave forth a narcotic, stupefying scent. Its root was in the shape of a tiny human figure, an homunculus, alive with a weird and devilish life of its own—ready to become the familiar of the daring mortal who could possess himself of it.
This enterprise, however, was fraught with peril; because the mandrake, on being torn from the earth, gave forth such a fearful and deadly cry that he who heard it would either go mad or fall dead upon the spot.
Accordingly, the sorcerer who wished to possess himself of a mandrake had to follow a curious ritual. Having found the plant, which usually grew at the foot of a gibbet, upon which the remains of an executed criminal hung, the operator had to go there at sunset.
By the light of the dying sun’s last rays, he must draw three circles round the mandrake with his magical sword; but he must first have taken the precaution of stopping his ears with wax, so that he could not hear the mandrake’s cry; and he must be sure that the wind was not blowing in his face, or he would be overcome by the narcotic odour of the plant.
He would have brought with him a hungry dog, and some tempting meat, with which the dog could be enticed. He was also to be armed with an ivory staff, wherewith he was to loosen the earth carefully around the mandrake root. Then he had to tie the unfortunate dog securely to the root, retire to a distance, and show the dog the food. The dog would leap at the meat, and thus pull the mandrake from the earth; and the dog, it was believed, would die on the spot.
MANDRAKE. Strangely-shaped roots, reproduced from old prints which declared them to be genuine.
As an extra precaution, the operator was advised to blow loudly upon a horn, as soon as he saw the plant begin to lift from the earth, to drown its hideous scream as much as possible.
Then the sorcerer, having taken up the fearful plant, and wrapped it in a white linen cloth, could hurry away with his prize through the shadows of the gathering darkness.
Fantastic as it may sound, some of these old beliefs about the mandrake are based upon fact. The plant does have a large, fleshy root, which bears a rough resemblance to the human form. It does have a strange scent, which some find pleasant and some much the reverse; and it certainly has narcotic properties. In fact, the mandrake is probably man’s oldest anaesthetic.
In the very early days of surgery, it was used to put patients into a deep drugged sleep, during which operations could be performed on them. The root was steeped or boiled in wine, and a little of this given to the patient to drink; but primitive surgeons had to be careful with the dose, as too much would cause a sleep from which there was no waking. Sometimes the mandrake was combined with other narcotics, and used to impregnate a sponge, which could be applied to the patient’s nostrils until he fell asleep; thus probably giving a lighter state of somnolence than when taken internally.
Perhaps strangest of all, the belief that the mandrake shines at night has a basis of fact. For some reason, its leaves are attractive to glow-worms, and it is these little creatures, whose greenish luminescence is quite remarkable, that make it glow in the darkness. Anyone who did not know this could certainly be startled by the plant’s appearance after dark, and think the old legends about its devilish powers might be true. It is from this circumstance that the mandrake gets its name of ‘the Devil’s candle’.
Even the story about the mandrake screaming as it is pulled from the earth could have at least a grain of truth in it, from which the legend has grown. Plants with large fleshy roots usually grow in damp places; and when pulled slowly from the earth, they are quite likely to make a squeaking sound. The timid mandrake-seeker would have waited for no more than the first squeak!
Of course, all the horrific details of the mandrake legend were kept alive by those who had mandrakes for sale. People paid high prices for a good, life-like mandrake, and valued it highly as a talisman. It was believed to bring luck to its owner in all departments of life, but especially in matters of love and fertility. This latter belief was general throughout the ancient world, as the story in the Bible about Rachel, Leah and the mandrakes shows; and it has persisted right down to the present day. Whole mandrakes are sometimes offered for sale, imported into this country, at high prices; and some occult herbalists sell pieces of mandrake root for people to carry as lucky charms.
To possess a mandrake which housed a familiar spirit, was one of the practices of witches in old-time Europe. In 1603 a woman was hanged as a witch at Romorantin near Orleans, for the alleged crime of keeping a familiar spirit in the form of a mandrake. She was the wife of a Moor, and had probably obtained the root from the Middle East, where the drying and shaping of mandrake roots was carried on almost as a profession by some specialists in the art.
When Joan of Arc was tried as a witch, one of the accusations brought against her was that she had a mandrake, which she carried in her bosom as a familiar; but she denied this. In 1630, three women were executed in Hamburg, accused of witchcraft and possessing mandrakes.
One of the ways in which the mandrake familiar was used, was for the witch to put it under her pillow at night, so that the spirit of the mandrake might instruct her in dreams. The mandrake had various other names by which it was known: ‘the earth-mannikin’, ‘the little gallows-man’ (alluding to its being found beneath the gibbet), or the ‘alraun’. This word seems originally to have meant a witch, and eventually changed its implication to mean a witch’s familiar. It was especially used in Germany, where the ‘alraun’ was a prized possession, handed down very secretly as a family heirloom. It had to be kept in a box, wrapped up in silk, and bathed four times a year, probably in wine or brandy. The liquid which had served to bathe it would have magical virtues, and might be sprinkled round the house to bring good luck, using a sprinkler of fragrant herbs.
The true mandrake, Atropa mandragora, is not indigenous to Britain, but grows in the warmer countries around the Mediterranean Sea and in the Near East. However, the wonders and virtues of the mandrake are extolled in old English herbals dating from the eleventh century, so it may have been imported. In the time of Henry VIII, roots purporting to be mandrakes were being sold in boxes for magical purposes.
Francis Bacon alludes in his works to witchcraft and the mandrake: “Some plants there are, but rare, that have a mossie or downie root and likewise that have a number of threads like beards as mandrakes, whereof witches and impostours make an ugly image, giving it the form of a face at the top of the root, and these strings to make a beard down to the foot.”
Poor country witches in Britain, who could not afford or obtain the true mandrake root, made use of the roots of white and black briony, two hedgerow plants which have very big fleshy roots. Hence these plants have come to be called English mandrake. (In the United States, a medicinal plant called Podophyllum peltatum is known as American mandrake; but it is quite a different plant from any of the above.)
The early herbalists, Gerarde, Parkinson and Turner, denounced the lifelike mandrake mannikins as being a counterfeit, produced by art rather than Nature, to get money out of credulous people. An old book called A Thousand Notable Things (by Thomas Lupton; first published London, 1579, many subsequent editions) tells in quaint language how it was done:
Take the great double root of briony newly taken out of the ground, and with a fine sharp knife, frame the shape of a man or woman (the woman-drake of our rustics), with his stones and cods and other members thereto, and when it is clean done, prick all these places with a sharp steel, as the head, the eyebrows, the chin and privities, and put into the said holes the seeds of millet or any other that brings forth small roots that do resemble hairs (which leek seed will do very well, or else barley). After this, put it into the ground and let it be covered with earth until it hath gotten upon it a certain little skin, and then thou shalt see a monstrous idol and hairy, which will become the parts if it be workmanlike or cunningly made or figured.
To assume, however, that the only reason for “witches and impostours” to do this was to impose upon the credulous, would be incorrect. Some people sold these things at a profit, certainly; but witches made a mandrake to house a familiar spirit, giving an elemental an effigy in which it might take up its dwelling, if the work was performed with proper ceremony. The virtue of using a root for this purpose, was that the root had life in it, and this living essence would help towards the ends required.
The right time to dig up the briony root was on the night of the full moon. Then the necessary shaping, etc., was done, and the root reburied until the next full moon, by which time the skin would have grown over it again, so that it looked natural. The straggling threads of ‘hair’ were trimmed, and the root was carefully and slowly dried; usually over a fire upon which the magical herb vervain was burned, to bathe the mandrake in its smoke. Some, however, dried the mandrake in a bath of hot sand, the Balneum Arenae of the alchemists; and this operation bore some resemblance to the legendary making of a homunculus, or artificial man. Indeed it may have been the origin of the legend.
Once the mandrake was dried, it was wrapped in a white silk cloth, and kept in a box. Sometimes the mandrake was dressed in a little red cloak, embroidered with magical figures; red being the colour of life. Then, on some propitious night, such as that of one of the Great Sabbats, the mandrake would be formally consecrated, and a helpful spirit invited to take up its abode in the figure, and ensoul it.
This may account for some of the old stories of the Devil giving familiar spirits to witches. What he really gave them was either a small living creature, which would sometimes be possessed by a spirit, or else something like the mandrake, which a spirit could ensoul.
When dawn broke over Los Angeles, California, on 9th August 1969, it revealed a scene of macabre horror. In a luxurious Hollywood mansion five people, the film star Sharon Tate and four house guests, had died in what seemed to be a ritual murder, carried out in the dark of the moon. It was apparently quite motiveless, and the victims had been shot and stabbed repeatedly, with a degree of ferocity that caused even veteran police officers to blench.
The strangest feature of the case was the way in which the bodies of Sharon Tate and her friend Jay Sebring, an internationally famous hair stylist, had been posed in death. Looped around Miss Tate’s neck was a nylon rope. The rope had been slung over a ceiling beam, and the other end of it tied around Sebring’s neck, while his head had been muffled in a hood. Yet neither of them had died from hanging.
Two days later, another very similar discovery again shook an already terrified city. Two more wealthy people, Mr and Mrs La Bianca, were found dead in their Los Angeles home. They had been tied up and stabbed repeatedly, and Mr La Bianca’s head was hooded in a white pillowcase.
On account of their bizarre nature, and the social eminence of the people involved in them, the killings received world-wide publicity. The term ‘ritual murder’ was used from the start to describe them, and possible connections with the occult were probed. It was recalled that Miss Tate’s husband, Roman Polanski, had been the producer of the sensational film about Satanism, Rosemary’s Baby. It was rumoured that this film had angered some secret groups because of the matters it dealt with, and that Mr Polanski had received threats. He himself had escaped the massacre by sheer luck; he had been filming in London when it occurred.
It seemed that some element of impersonal hatred was involved; at the scene of each crime, references to ‘pigs’ had been daubed in letters of blood. By another strange twist of fate, Sharon Tate was eight months pregnant when she died, and the name of the woman victim in the second killings was Rosemary.
Sharon and her husband were admittedly interested in the occult; and she had made her film debut in a picture called 13, a story about a girl with the powers of a witch. She also made a picture called Evil Eye.
California is well known as a centre for occult groups and orders of all kinds, some of them internationally respected, others strange and fantastic in the extreme. As police pursued their enquiries, many cultists were interviewed, but without significant results.
Eventually, however, a girl hippie, while detained in prison on another charge, boasted to her cell-mates that she had been one of the killers at the Sharon Tate mansion. The authorities were told; and as a result a communal group of hippies, who had been living on deserted ranches in the vicinity of Los Angeles, was closely investigated, and six of them, four girls and two men, were charged with the murders. Police stated that they believed this hippie clan to be responsible for a number of other unexplained killings as well, and to have planned more.
So the world came to hear the name of Charles Manson, leader of the hippie ‘family’ which called itself Satan’s Slaves. His lean, bearded face, with hypnotic eyes, stared disturbingly from every newspaper. The disquieting facts that black magic and ritual murder were poisonously alive in the modern world could no longer be ignored.
Two of his girl followers, Susan Atkins and Linda Kasabian, gave chilling descriptions of how the murders took place. Both said that the killings were done under Manson’s hypnotic influence; he gave the orders to kill, and his followers carried them out. Susan Atkins later tried to retract her testimony, and say that Manson knew nothing about the murders; but it was too late and the court had heard too much for this to be accepted. Linda Kasabian, who took no part in the actual killings, was granted immunity from prosecution in return for her evidence. Manson’s lieutenant, Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, suffered a mental breakdown while in custody, and was detained in a hospital. The other two girls accused were Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten.
The motive for the murders was twofold. Firstly, to express hatred for what Manson called ‘the piggy world’, that is, the world of established wealth and convention, the world of non-hippies; secondly, to strike terror into that world, and so precipitate what Manson believed was the coming revolution, when the white Establishment and the black militants would fight each other to extinction, and only hippies would be left. He thought that the killings would be blamed upon negro militants.
It seems incredible that a man should have been able to make others follow him blindly in such a scheme. But Manson and his devotees lived in a world of their own, out in the California desert; a world distorted by drugs, especially LSD. His followers regarded him as a man with divine powers. They recounted in court how they had seen him work miracles, such as charming snakes, healing sick animals and birds, and making old people become young again. Even after he was arrested, groups of his followers sat outside the court house day after day, confident that he would be triumphantly released. When Los Angeles was shaken by an earthquake while the trial was proceeding, some of them took it for a sign. Where they thought the ‘sign’ came from, however, is not clear; because Manson regarded himself as being a combination of both Christ and Satan. Where he derived this belief from is not known, but the idea that God was manifest in three aspects, those of Lucifer, Jehovah and Satan (all three of whom should be worshipped) had already been put forward, and Manson may have come across it.
Manson was born on 11th November 1934, an illegitimate child in poor circumstances. At the time of the murders he was in his thirty-fifth year; and twenty-two of those years had been spent in various prisons, on a variety of charges none of which involved violence.
Manson’s birth-sign is Scorpio, one of the most complex signs in the whole Zodiac. It is the fixed sign of water; the still water which runs deep. Ruled by Mars, it is a sign associated with sex, death, and the unseen worlds. Its natives have a magnetic personality, and a strange ability to bend others to their will. They often have remarkable psychic gifts, and are naturally drawn towards occultism and mysticism. They have a powerful sexual drive, and strong emotions.
The complexity of Scorpio is shown by the fact that it has three different symbols: the Scorpion, the Serpent and the Eagle. Its natives can soar to the heights and also plumb the depths. The serpent is an emblem of occult wisdom; the eagle soars above all other birds, and signifies sublimation; the scorpion personifies lust and cruelty, and is a creature of the sun-scorched desert, as Manson was.
Manson boasted that he lived like a king among his hippie followers and at one time had fifteen girls to wait on him and minister to his every wish. On moonlight nights, he presided over rites of orgiastic sex. The eye-witness descriptions given of these show that he did indeed have some knowledge of magical sex rituals. He was described as standing in the centre of a circle of men and girls. When he signalled the rite to commence, the girls would surround him, kissing his feet and treating him as an incarnate god. Meanwhile, the men sat back in meditation, while the drugs they were using took effect. When Manson judged the time was right, all joined in communal sexual acts, passing round the circle from one partner to another until they were too exhausted to continue. These practices were supposed to raise magical power, and produce dreams and visions.
Manson seems to have pictured himself as being something like the Devil of a medieval witches’ coven—regarded as an incarnate god, having power of life and death over his devotees, rewarding his female followers with his sexual favours or punishing them with beatings, and having a male officer who carried out his orders.
According to Linda Kasabian’s testimony, the men of Manson’s clan called themselves witches, and “Charlie called all the girls witches”. He told them to make “witchy things” to hang in the trees, marking the way to their camp site—signs made of weeds, stones and branches, held together with wire. According to the same witness, before the party of killers set off for Sharon Tate’s house, all of them dressed eerily in black, Manson told them to “leave a sign—something witchy”. He himself did not accompany them, but awaited their return, confident that his orders would be obeyed.
However, there is no evidence that Manson was a witch in anything except his own fantasy. He seems to have gathered his followers together originally in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco, birthplace of the hippie dream, and travelled with them through California on a dilapidated school bus. He may have derived some mystic ideas from his name: Manson, the Son of Man.
The trial of Manson and the others accused lasted nine months, and cost an estimated one million dollars. The only one of them to express any regret for the killings was Linda Kasabian. The rest made it plain that they regarded the trial as a mockery, and treated it accordingly. This led to bizarre court-room scenes, reminiscent of the behaviour of the supposedly bewitched girls at Salem in the seventeenth century.
The three girls, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, acted throughout as if Manson had them under a spell. Whatever he did, they copied. When he laughed, they laughed; when he got angry, they got angry; when he appeared in the courtroom with a shaven head, they shaved their heads also. Manson made his appearance like this, sacrificing his long hair and beard, after he had been found guilty. Through his lawyer, he said, “I did it because I’m the Devil, and the Devil always has a bald head.” Together with Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten were found guilty, and all four were sentenced to death in the gas chamber.
Manson claimed that he took the people whom society had cast aside as human garbage, and gave them love, forming them into his ‘family’. But his mind had been twisted by twenty-two years in American jails. The ‘love’ had an opposite side—hatred for the ‘straight’ people, the ‘piggies’; and he infected his followers with his own ruthless hate.
Maybe if society had more compassion for its human garbage, if it could have found something better to do with the young Charles Manson than to lock him up in one jail after another, then the hideous events of August 1969 in Los Angeles might never have happened.
MOON WORSHIP
“If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness;
“And my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand:
“This also were an iniquity to be punished by the judge: for I should have denied the God that is above.”
These words from the Book of Job, believed to be the oldest book in the Bible, testify to the antiquity of moon worship. Moreover, they bear witness to the enticement of the moon and to the writer’s fear of arousing the jealous wrath of Yahweh by carrying out the old rite of saluting her.
As the most conspicuous luminary of the night, and the nearest heavenly body to our earth, the moon has hung like a shining magic mirror, reflecting man’s dreams. From the Stone Age to the age of space travel, she has bewitched and allured mankind.
The moon has always been primarily regarded as feminine, although there are many moon gods as well as moon goddesses. Psychology has confirmed this; the moon in man’s dream-life is a symbol of feminine influence, and especially of the mother. The moon gods, of whom our old storybook ‘Man in the Moon’ is a last vestige, represented the positive powers of the moon, when she is waxing or increasing in light.
The moon’s relation to human fertility, in that she revolves around the Earth in about twenty-eight days, the time of a woman’s menstrual cycle, was noted by our distant ancestors; and this was another reason for regarding the moon as feminine. However, she also rules the fluid secretions of the body, in astrological parlance; and these include the seminal fluid, white and pearl-like. So semen and menstrual blood, the signs and essentials of human fertility, are alike ruled by the moon.
She also rules the tides, which are highest at new moon and full moon. To old-time fishing communities this was very important. But even more important is the age-old belief in the influence of the moon upon the tides of psychic energy and those of human affairs.
Today, there is a difference of opinion about this. Some authorities aver that the old belief in the phases of the moon influencing human behaviour is all nonsense. Others declare with equal assurance that this supposed influence is a fact, and they say that anyone brought into contact with human nature in all its strange vagaries, can vouch for this. Policemen all over the world, they say, recognise full moon as the time when unusual things are likely to happen; not merely the ordinary sorts of crime, but bizarre acts, especially those with a sexual bias. Many slayers of women have, by the press at any rate, been dubbed “moon-murderers.”
The light of the full moon, and especially the midsummer moon, has for so long been believed to have an unsettling effect upon the mind, that it has given us the word ‘lunatic’ for the mentally disturbed. Again, some people agree with this belief, saying that crises of mental illness coincide with the full moon; while others scoff at it as an old wives’ tale. However, the writer can testify to having known a successful businessman, otherwise quite normal, whose speech was affected at the time of the full moon. His way of stumbling over words at this time of the month was so well known to his family that they used to call it “the moons.”
Old almanacks, on which country people put great dependence, used to give whole lists of things to do and not to do, with regard to planting crops, cutting timber, and so on, according to the different phases of the moon. In general, the rule was to use the increase of the moon for those matters which you wished to increase, and the waning of the moon for clearing away things you wanted to get rid of.
The waning of the moon, too, was a time of sinister magic, as the waxing of the moon was of beneficent magic. This is why ‘wanion’ is an old word for a curse, because it was put on in the waning of the moon.
All these things are part of the antique lore of moon worship and moon magic. As the old rhyme has it:
Pray to the Moon when she is round.
Luck with you will then abound.
What you seek for shall be found,
On the sea or solid ground.
One of the traditional Bardic Triads, said to be handed down from the Druids, tells us: “Three embellishing names of the Moon: The Sun of the Night, the Light of the Beautiful, and the Lamp of the Fairies.”
The rays of the moon are indeed “The Light of the Beautiful”; whether they are stealing through the branches of some woodland scene, or silvering the roofs of a city, or making a pathway of light across the waves of the sea. Things tend to look quite different by moonlight; and it has called to lovers through the ages, since before the Pyramids were built. The moon goddess was the love goddess, and also the lady of enchantment and mystery, in all the lands and cities that flourished when the world was young. Beautiful women of Ancient Egypt hailed her as Queen Isis, The moon rays were the arrows of white Artemis, shot through the murmuring trees in the forests of Greece. The wild and joyous festivals of Ishtar were held in her honour. She was Diana of the oak groves of Nemi; and Lucius Apuleius in his magical vision beheld her rising at midnight from the enchanted ocean.
To the occult philosophers of the Middle Ages, the moon was alchemical silver, as the sun was alchemical gold. Those who would work magic of any kind, observed the moon; and particularly witches, skilled in the works of both the waxing and the waning moon. From the thirteen lunar months of the year, their revered and dreaded number of thirteen was taken.
Today, for the first time in history, man has fulfilled one of his oldest dreams. He has journeyed to the moon and set foot upon the lunar surface. Some people—I think rather devoid of imagination—have cried out that this has robbed the moon of her ancient splendour; that her glamour and magic are dissipated. Nothing, in my opinion, could be further from the truth. The flight to the moon, the quest of the White Goddess, has been one of man’s greatest adventures, and one of the most magical.
It had no common reason to it; any more than did the ascent of Everest or Columbus’s crazy voyage across the Atlantic, with his sailors in constant fear lest they fall over the edge of the world—the voyage that discovered a New World by mistake. Of course, the money could more reasonably have been spent on social services or famine relief; but man is sometimes led by feelings much deeper than those of the reasoning mind. The urge of an ancestral magic lured his ship to that truly unearthly realm; that shining mirror that hangs in space; that crescent-argent upon the shield of night.
The first samples of moon-rock to be examined proved to be coated and fused with a glass-like substance, presumed to be volcanic in origin. So the moon’s surface is indeed mirror-like and reflecting, even as the old occultists claimed its function to be, namely, that of gathering and reflecting the rays of the sun and the stars and planets on to the earth, but infused with the peculiar magnetism of the moon’s own influence.
No intelligent pagan was ever silly enough to think that the moon he saw in the sky was a goddess. On the contrary, the planets and the luminaries were named after the gods, and not vice versa. It was the great powers of Nature, personified as gods and goddesses, whose influences manifested through the heavenly bodies. This, at any rate, was and is the initiates’ conception of astrology.
The same power that ruled the sun, ruled fire. The power that ruled the moon, ruled water. The sun was basically masculine; the moon basically feminine. All of manifested Nature was force incarnating in form; and so that men might come closer to these forces, which are not blind, but of intelligence beyond that of humanity, they built images for the ‘powers that be’ to ensoul, and bestowed upon them the names of gods and goddesses. “For by Names and Images are all Powers awakened and re-awakened,” as one great rubric of the Western tradition of the Mysteries tells us.
A great part of genuine witchcraft is moon magic, derived from the age-old lore of moon worship. In spite of the large number of books that have been written about witchcraft in modern times, in response to renewed public interest in the subject, very little has been said about this aspect of it.
One of the very few people who have ever written with an inside knowledge of witchcraft is Charles Godfrey Leland; and he tells us a good deal about moon magic in his books. Another writer who evidences unusual knowledge on this subject is the late Dion Fortune. While not dealing specifically with witchcraft, two of her occult novels, The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic (both re-issued in recent years by the Aquarian Press), contain much curious lunar lore.
From being a widely popular religion which spread all over the Roman Empire, the cults of such moon goddesses as Isis and Diana eventually sank into forced obscurity, with the take-over by Christianity. Contrary to general belief, the pagan religious Mysteries did not die out. They were forcibly suppressed; but in a clandestine and underground form they continued to live, because of their emotional appeal, especially to women. One form they eventually took was that of the Old Religion, the cult of witchcraft.
MOTHER SHIPTON
It is not always realised that the famous prophetess, Mother Shipton, was a witch. At her birthplace, Knaresborough in Yorkshire, there is no doubt of it. She is depicted there on an inn sign, which is more than 200 years old, and painted on copper. The picture shows her as the traditional wise old woman, with a black cat by her side, and in her hand a broomstick with a curious forked top to the handle. Behind her is Knaresborough’s famous Petrifying Well, near which she was born, in the year 1488.
Her mother’s name was Agatha Sontheil, a poor girl who was left an orphan at the age of 15, and was reduced to begging in order to live. The story goes that Agatha one day met in a wood a handsome, welldressed young man. She asked him for alms, which he gave her; and he persuaded her to meet him again in the wood the next day. Their acquaintance ripened into a love affair, and Agatha found herself pregnant.
When she told her lover of her predicament, he revealed to her that he was the Devil. He told her that if she would be faithful to him, he would give her supernormal powers, including the ability to raise storms and tempests, and to foretell the future.
Agatha travelled about the countryside with her mysterious lover, sometimes being away for several days at a time. The local busy-bodies became very curious, especially when they saw that the poor beggar girl now seemed to have a sufficiency of money. So on her return, on one occasion, a number of them came to her house to question her.
Angry at their impertinence, Agatha showed her new-found powers by invoking the wind. A violent storm of wind sprang up, and blew the inquisitive neighbours back to their own homes.
Of course, the talk about this and similar incidents soon reached the ears of the authorities, and Agatha was brought before the local magistrates on a charge of witchcraft. However, she was by some means acquitted.
She may have been spared because she was pregnant, as soon afterwards her child was born. It was a girl, and the mother named it Ursula. This baby was the future Mother Shipton. It was a strange, misshapen infant, ugly and deformed, but strong and healthy.
Not long afterwards, Agatha Sontheil died—“in peace, in the shelter of a convent”, says the legend. One wonders what really happened to her, and how voluntary the “shelter” was. The baby was given to the parish nurse to bring up; but the little girl turned out to be such a handful that the old dame could not cope with her. So she was sent to a school.
Here Ursula began to display the unusual powers that might have been expected from her ancestry. When her fellow pupils teased her about her deformities, something invisible pulled their hair, beat them and knocked them to the ground. Ursula was sent away from the school, and never went to another, although she had been a bright pupil and surprised her teachers by her ability.
Not much is known of her early life; but at the age of 24 she married a man called Toby Shipton. She soon made a reputation for herself as a seer, and many people came to consult her. As Mother Shipton, she became widely known; and although she was generally regarded as a witch, she seems to have been held in so much esteem in Yorkshire that the authorities never molested her.
She foretold her own death some time before it happened; and in 1561, the year in which she had said her time would come to depart from this world, she took leave of her friends, lay down on her bed and died peacefully.
A memorial stone was erected to her memory near Clifton, about a mile from York. It bore this inscription:
Here lies she who never ly’d,
Whose skill so often has been try’d,
Her prophecies shall still survive,
And ever keep her name alive.
This has certainly proved true; because a good deal of prophecy in doggerel verse, ascribed at any rate to Mother Shipton, has long been extant. Of course, as usual in these matters, the problem is to know just how much is genuine, and how much was forged by other people after her death. If we were to accept the authenticity of all the verses that are credited to her, then Mother Shipton predicted practically the entire course of English history, from her time to the present day. However, some are admitted forgeries, and a good deal of her supposed writings sound nothing like the idiom of her time, 1488–1561.
Mother Shipton became famous in her own day by predicting the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, who died in 1530. She called him ‘the Mitred Peacock’ because of his pride. This was also a play upon words because of the splendour of the peacock’s train and the ‘train’ of Cardinal Wolsey, a showy retinue of some 800 followers.
This prophecy is quoted in an old book, The Life, Prophecies and Death of the Famous Mother Shipton, which is said to have been first printed in 1687 and reprinted ‘verbatim’ in 1862. It reads as follows: “Now shall the Mitred Peacock first begin to plume, whose Train shall make a great show in the World for a time, but shall afterwards vanish away, and his Honour come to nothing, which shall take its end at Kingston.”
The old book continues: “The Cardinal being told of this prophecy, would never pass through the town of Kingston, though lying directly in the road from his own house to the Court; but afterwards being arrested for high treason by the Earl of Northumberland and Sir Anthony Kingstone, the Lieutenant of the Tower, sent unto him, his very name (remembering the prophecy) struck such a terror to his heart that he soon after expired.”
The story about Mother Shipton being the Devil’s daughter becomes understandable when we remember that ‘the Devil’ was the title given to the male leader of a witches’ coven.
MURRAY, MARGARET ALICE
One of the world’s most famous and original writers on witchcraft, Margaret Alice Murray, was born in Calcutta on 13th July 1863. She lived to be over 100 years old and published a lively auto-biography, My First Hundred Years (William Kimber, London, 1963)—a remarkable literary feat in itself.
I only met Margaret Murray once; but I remember her as a very little old lady, bright-eyed and alert, and with a mischievous sense of humour.
She claims in her autobiography that her life had no adventures. However, she disguised herself as a visiting artist when she went to the Cotswolds to investigate the mysterious ‘witchcraft murder’ at Meon Hill. (See COTSWOLDS, WITCHCRAFT IN THE.) She braved a storm of adverse criticism when her first book about witchcraft, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, was published in 1921. She studied anthropology in the early days, when this was considered a subject ‘not quite nice’ for ladies to take up. She was a pioneer Suffragette. She worked on archaeological excavations in Egypt; and on one occasion there, she underwent a magical ceremony to preserve her from rabies, after being bitten by a dog that might have been mad. One wonders what Miss Murray would have counted as adventures!
Margaret Murray was a shrewd and critical scholar, and by no means credulous. Her main career was in Egyptology, and her interest in witchcraft was really a side-line; though, curiously enough, it is for the latter that she became best known.
She was not, however, as popularly supposed, the first person to advance the idea that witchcraft is the Old Religion, or to call it “the Dianic cult”. Both these ideas had been advanced previously by Charles Godfrey Leland. (See LELAND, CHARLES GODFREY.)
In her autobiography, Miss Murray tells us rather frustratingly little about her researches into witchcraft, except to reveal that the idea of witchcraft being really a secret religion was suggested to her by another person. She started to investigate for herself, working from the contemporary records of witches and witchcraft; and when she realised that the so-called ‘Devil’ who appeared at the witches’ Sabbats was actually a man in a ritual disguise, she tells us that she was “startled, almost alarmed” by the way in which the recorded details she had been reading fell into place and made sense.
Later, in 1933, she published a second book on witchcraft, The God of the Witches. The book was almost ignored when it first appeared; but after the Second World War, when interest in witchcraft had reawakened, it was republished and became a best seller. Miss Murray followed it in 1954, with her third and perhaps most controversial book on this subject, The Divine King in England (Faber and Faber, London).
In this book, she advanced the idea that many early English sovereigns had died by ritual murder; and that the concepts of royalty and kingship were inextricably bound up with the human sacrifice of the Sacred King, demanded by primitive religion.
Although sceptical of the highly-coloured stories of occult happenings connected with Egyptian relics, Margaret Murray was interested in the phenomena of telepathy and apparitions. She advanced a theory that ghosts were really a kind of photographic image, somehow recorded upon the atmosphere of a place, and becoming visible under certain circumstances.
In her autobiography, she also records her firm faith in the human soul and its survival of bodily death, and her belief in reincarnation.
During her long career, Margaret Alice Murray received many academic honours. She was Assistant Professor of Egyptology at University College, London, from 1924 to her retirement in 1935; and from 1953 to 1955 she was President of the Folk-Lore Society. She never married, though her photographs show her to have been most attractive in her youth, and still very good-looking at the age of 50. She was undoubtedly one of the most remarkable women of her generation.