Lethbridge never forgot that inexplicable episode of the ‘poltergeist’ that hurled him on his face near the ruins of the ancient church on Skellig Michael. A decade later, after he had given a radio talk, he received a letter from the owner of the island, who told him that Skellig Michael had once been a pagan sanctuary before the monks took it over; his theory was that the ‘powers of darkness’ had again taken control after the departure of the holy men. Lethbridge disagreed; apart from his unwillingness to equate paganism with the devil, he had an inkling of a stranger and more complex explanation. He suspected that the force that threw him down might be connected with the place itself Many Christian churches are built on the site of pagan temples. And the ancients believed that such places are permeated by certain non-human forces. Dowsing itself is a response to energies that are unrecognised by science. Could the poltergeist be such a force—perhaps triggered by the violent emotions of the shipwreck? Lethbridge felt the dim outlines of an explanation begin to take shape.
Shortly after the Lethbridges moved to Devon, another curious episode seemed to point in the same direction. They saw a large white dog looking at them through the gate. Tom asked a local farmer who owned it, and the farmer told them there was no such dog for miles around. They learned later that the lane outside Hole House is reputed to be haunted by the ghost of a white dog—at least four other people had seen it.
The story has a sequel. Clearing the undergrowth in the slope below the house, Tom found that someone had dug a trench as the foundation for a shed. With the natural instinct of an archaeologist, he clambered into it and examined its sides; sticking out of the earth, he found a fragment of a glazed floor tile dating from the fourteenth century. Further excavations produced most of the rest of the tile. It had probably come from the floor of a small chapel and it contained pictures of a white hare and a white dog, as well as symbols of the sun and moon. By this time, Lethbridge had reason to believe that these symbols were associated with ancient pagan religion. So again there seemed to be a tenuous connection between this religion and a ‘supernatural’ occurrence, the ‘ghost’ of a white dog.
In order to understand the reasons for Lethbridge’s absorbing interest in the ancient religion of pre-Christian Britain, it is necessary to go back to 1954, three years before Tom and Mina left Cambridge for Devon. It was on a damp autumn afternoon of the year that Tom began his search for a giant. The search was the beginning of a curious detective story, and of a train of events that led him to abandon his academic career.
The giant was called Gog, and Tom was fairly certain that he lay beneath the turf of Wandlebury Camp, an Iron-Age hilltop fort built by the Celts about 400 BC.
He first came across his trail in a legend recounted by a dubious cleric named Gervase of Tilbury, who was born around 1150. For a priest, Gervase was an unpleasant character—in one of his works he boasts that he told lies about a girl who spurned his advances and got her burnt as a heretic. In 1212, Gervase wrote a book to flatter his patron, the Emperor Otto IV. In this book, he describes Wandlebury Camp (‘Wandlebiria’), and tells the legend of a ghostly warrior on horseback. If a knight should ride up to the entrance of Wandlebury Camp on a moonlit night, and shout a challenge, the phantom guardian of the camp would appear, also on horseback, and engage him in battle. Gervase goes on to tell how Osbert, son of Hugh, conquered the phantom knight and led away his magnificent black horse. As the sun rose, the horse broke its tether and galloped away, never to be seen again. But the spear wound made by the phantom knight re-opened every year on the anniversary of the fight.
A century ago, historians would have dismissed such a legend as a fairy tale invented by superstitious countrymen. Nowadays, students of folklore realise that most of them are based on some core of historical fact. And in this case, Lethbridge had a clue to what it was. One of his colleagues at the Museum of Archaeology was an old man called Sammy Cowles, an expert in restoring broken pots. And when Sammy was a child—say around 1870—he had met an old man who told him that there used to be a giant cut into the hillside near Wandlebury. Sammy knew nothing about a horse, or, for that matter, a legendary chariot of gold that is supposed to be buried in the same area. But about the giant he was positive.
Significantly, the range of hills that includes Wandlebury is called the Gogmagog hills. Magog was a legendary giant, and his story is told in the History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a bishop who died in 1155. Geoffrey’s History is best known as one of the chief sources of the legends of King Arthur and the knights of the round table. It begins by explaining how, when the Trojan War came to an end, Aeneas and his companions fled to Italy, and became the founders of Rome. Another Trojan warrior named Brutus came to an island in the western ocean, ‘twixt Gaul and Ireland’, and named it after himself—Britain. The island was shared out among his companions, among whom was one called Corineus. He became lord of the peninsula that forms the westernmost tip of Britain, which became known as Corinea, or Cornwall. Cornwall was peopled with giants, and the largest and fiercest was Goemagot, or Gogmagog, who was twelve cubits tall (about eighteen feet). All the giants were killed in a great battle, and Gogmagog was slain by Corineus, who hurled him from a clifftop on to the rocks below. Later tradition turns Gogmagog into two giants, Gog and Magog, who were brought to London, and forced to work as porters at the royal palace. Their effigies can still be seen outside the Guildhall. And the giant figures of Gog and Magog were once carved into the turf at Plymouth Hoe—between Devon and Cornwall—although they vanished in the time of Queen Elizabeth I.
Now the giant Gogmagog may or may not have existed. But the giant hill figures are certainly one of the great historical mysteries of Britain. I possess a pleasant illustrated book, published in the 1920s, called Lovely Britain, and the article on Dorset contains the following comments: ‘On the hill slope north of Cerne Abbas, outlined in the turf, sprawls the famous giant. A mighty man is he, 180 feet high, carrying in his hand a massive club nearly as tall as himself. He was there before the Romans came; but who carved him there, and for what purpose, no one knows, though many have made guesses.’ These statements reflect the current state of knowledge about the giant. What the author of the piece—a Miss Joyce Reason—omits to mention is that the Cerne Abbas giant displays a monstrous erect penis. Not far away are the immense earth ramparts of Maiden Castle, site of a Stone-Age town that was used as a fort until Roman times. Taken in conjunction, these facts suggest that the giant could be a fertility figure whose origin may stretch back far beyond the fall of Troy. Significantly, the Benedictines built a monastery at the foot of the giant.
Near Wilmington, on the Sussex downs, there is an even larger figure carved into the chalk. His anatomy displays no embarrassing features; he simply stands upright, his arms spread apart, between two parallel lines that seem to suggest he is opening a vast pair of doors. Again, the Benedictines built an abbey by his feet.
Then there are the white horses. The Berkshire White Horse, near Westbury (actually in Wiltshire), is supposed to have been carved in 878, to celebrate King Alfred’s victory over the Danes. It looks like a good, solid cart horse; but then, it has been changed in recent centuries by interfering landscape gardeners, and we do not know what it looked like originally. But the immense White Horse of Uffington, 374 feet long, retains its primitive shape, and there can be no doubt that it looks more like a dragon; in fact, a nearby hill is called Dragon Hill. Local legend insists that the Uffington Horse was also cut to celebrate King Alfred’s victory, and G. K. Chesterton’s long narrative poem The Ballad of the White Horse describes King Alfred’s battle with King Guthrum. But Chesterton knew—or guessed—that this white horse was far older than Alfred:
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
Within easy walking distance is Wayland’s Smithy, actually a Neolithic burial chamber, more than five thousand years old. Wayland (or Wieland) was also a giant who was lamed and made to work as a blacksmith. Altogether, it seems a safe guess that giants and white horses—or dragons—played a considerable part in the beliefs of the primitive occupants of the British Isles.
When Lethbridge announced that he intended to look for the Wandlebury giant, he encountered a certain scepticism among his colleagues. To begin with, no one was certain where to start looking. The giant had been mentioned by various long-dead historians, but none of them specified which hill. Sammy Cowles had told him that it was visible from the village of Sawston. But beech woods had been planted on the lower slopes of Wandlebury Hill. And there were buildings inside the earthwork of the Iron-Age site, where one Elizabethan historian said the figure was located. It might well be inaccessible. But even if it hadn’t been covered over, how could it be located once the turf had grown over it?
Tom reasoned that if the figure had been exposed and re-cut for many centuries, then its chalk must be eroded. In that case, the turf above would be deeper than elsewhere on the slopes of the hill. This is why, on that autumn afternoon in 1954, he carried a stainless steel bar as he investigated the hillside below Wandlebury Camp. Above the beech trees there was a space of about two hundred yards of exposed hillside. He walked across this in a straight line, pausing every nine inches to drive the heavy bar into the wet turf. On average, it proved to be about a foot thick. Mina walked behind him, carrying a bundle of sticks of equal length, and pushing one into each hole. Some of the soundings were almost two feet deep, and they showed that there were two hollows in the chalk. That seemed to be promising.
In fact, with the incredible luck that seems to attend certain archaeological ventures—or perhaps with his instinctive dowsing ability—Lethbridge had not only selected the right patch of hillside, but had traced his line straight across the missing giant. His luck did not end there. He decided to concentrate on the second hollow area, and proceeded to make soundings around it. A few more days of patient work revealed that two different outlines passed through this second hollow. There was not one ‘giant’, but two. And if Lethbridge had concentrated on the first hollow, he would have discovered only one of them.
It was a long, slow business. His hands became blistered from driving the bar into the turf; winter rains turned the hillside into squishy mud, after which it froze solid. Covering five thousand square yards with sticks at nine-inch intervals requires over a hundred thousand sticks; fortunately intelligent guesswork was able to reduce the number considerably. And it gradually became clear that Lethbridge was dealing with at least three separate figures. The central one was a woman on horseback, with a chariot behind her, and the symbol of the waning moon above her. To the right of the chariot there was a giant warrior, a sword raised above his head. To the left was another giant figure of a man, with white rays emanating from his forehead—Lethbridge assumed him to be the sun god. An object like a giant cloak billowed behind him.
And so the investigation had justified the assumption that old ‘fairy stories’ may contain a core of truth. Here was the origin of the legend of the buried golden chariot, and the warrior with his phantom horse. Careful excavation of the turf soon brought to light the face of the ‘goddess’—a great round moon-face, with goggling eyes and perfunctory nose and mouth. Her ‘horse’ is a curious monstrosity, not unlike a dragon with a bird’s beak. In fact, both the goddess and her mount look like science fiction monsters. The White Horse of Uffington has this same stylised, surrealistic quality.
Understandably, the excavations became one of the chief subjects of gossip in Cambridge, and Lethbridge became aware that he had achieved a kind of dubious celebrity. Most of his academic colleagues seemed to feel that the whole thing was a hoax, or at least, a piece of unconscious self-deception. To Lethbridge, the outlines in the chalk were perfectly clear; there was an obvious difference between the eroded chalk of the figures and the untouched chalk around them. Some of his colleagues professed to be unable to see the difference—or they suggested it had been made by Lethbridge himself as he excavated the figure. Fortunately, he was not the type to be unduly worried by hostility. He disliked what he called ‘academic trade unionism’, and his private income had allowed him to remain aloof from university rivalries. He had always gone his own way; the few colleagues he respected regarded him as a brilliant archaeologist, and these were the only opinions he cared about. So he continued to excavate the giants, and to ponder on the problem of who made them, and why.
To begin with, the answer looked as if it might be fairly straightforward. At an early stage in the investigation, his colleague, Sir Cyril Fox, had suggested that the female figure was Epona, the Celtic horse goddess, said to be the result of a union between a man and a supernatural mare. This was a logical guess, for the style of the figures was Celtic, and all the evidence suggested that the people who carved them were the Celtic invaders who came to Britain sometime after 600 BC.
The Celts were one of the most remarkable races in European history—as remarkable, in their way, as the Greeks and Romans; if historians have shown less interest in them, it is because of the absence of written records. (The Celts acquired writing only around 500 AD.) They originated somewhere in central Europe, probably in the regions that are now Czechoslovakia and Bavaria. It has been suggested that they may have settled in Ireland as early as 1500 BC. But the great Celtic ‘explosion’ occurred after 500 BC, at the end of the Bronze Age. In fact, it was the Celts who were responsible for the end of the Bronze Age, since they brought the use of iron to the countries they conquered. They invaded Gaul (France), Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, and spread along the Danube as far as the Black Sea. Their warriors were tall and fair, although another variety of Celt was dark-haired and round-headed. The historian Lewis Spence describes them as ‘that race of artists, poets and aristocrats’. They were formidable fighters but, as the Greek historian, Strabo, pointed out, ‘boasters and threateners, and given to bombastic self-dramatisation’. They were also dreamers, intelligent, temperamental and pessimistic; Plato mentions that they were inclined to drunkenness. It can be seen that the Celtic character has changed very little in three thousand years.
The religion of the Celts was Druidism. This seems to have been a form of nature worship; their sacred places were groves of trees. Wells and rivers were also worshipped. Their chief deities were Lug, probably a fertility god, and Matrona, the nature goddess and earth mother. But there were some four hundred gods and goddesses in all, including Epona (or Eoponos), the horse goddess, Moccos, the boar god, Taruos, the bull god, and Cernunnos, the horned stag god. The oak was their sacred tree (the word druid probable comes from the Greek drus, an oak). So was the mistletoe. The latter is, of course, a parasite that usually grows on apple trees; when Druids found mistletoe growing on an oak, they regarded it as a gift of the gods, and cut it with a golden sickle. It was then used in their religious rituals.
One of the great linguistic discoveries of the nineteenth century was that most European languages had their origin in Sanskrit, the language of the primitive tribes of India, who began to break up around 2000 BC. Celtic is in many ways close to Sanskrit, and the Celts belong to the racial group known as Indo-Europeans. So it is highly probable that the gods of the Celts derive from the gods of India, and that Druidism is a descendant of the old Hindu religion expressed in the Vedic hymns. The archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie points out in his book Hill Figures that India also has its giants carved on hillsides. Like the Hindus, the Druids firmly believed in life after death and in the transmigration of souls.
Lethbridge reasoned that the female giant of Wandlebury with her golden chariot is the mother goddess Matrona; and since the hills are traditionally known as the Gogmagog hills, it seemed a reasonable assumption that she was locally known as Magog, or Ma-God, mother god. The cloaked figure on her right is therefore likely to be her consort Lug, here presumably called Gog. As to the swordwaving warrior, Lethbridge concluded that he is the god Wandil, after whom Wandlebury is named. An ancient legend declares that Wandil stole the spring time, so that the winter became longer and longer; the gods finally compelled him to give it back, and threw him into the sky, where he became the constellation Gemini. And what is Wandil doing in the picture with Gog and Magog? The answer, Lethbridge thought, is that he was the local Druidic equivalent of the devil. (Celtic religion is full of local deities.) What is more natural than that the devil should appear with mother goddess and her consort?
Now if Lethbridge had confined himself to these theories about the meaning of the figures, it is probable that his book Gogmagog would have been politely received, and the controversy would have died away. But he had a feeling that he was on to something far bigger, something of greater importance than a few local deities drawn on a hillside. The Celts were pantheists; they worshipped Nature and the universe. Their Druids were skilled in philosophy and astrology. Perhaps Lethbridge’s own dowsing ability predisposed him in favour of a people who worshipped the forces of the earth and the universe.
In brief, Lethbridge was inclined to accept the theory of his friend Margaret Murray, that the pre-Christian world was permeated with a fertility religion known as ‘wicca’, which has descended to modern times in the form of witchcraft. According to Margaret Murray, this religion was far older than the Celts. Lethbridge believed that his Wandlebury giants were living symbols of this religion, and that sacred rituals were probably performed within their outlines.
At this early stage, he had still not made a connection between this religion and his own experiences of the ‘paranormal’, such as the Skellig Michael poltergeist. This would have to wait another five years, until he wrote Witches: Investigating an Ancient Religion. Even so, the views he put forward in Gogmagog: The Buried Gods (1957) struck his colleagues as wildly speculative and caused a small-scale intellectual war in Cambridge. Lethbridge was startled by the bitterness he aroused. For many years his attitude to Cambridge had been ambivalent; he disliked the cliquishness, and hated the gradual erosion of old traditions. The Gogmagog controversy settled his decision to leave. The results of that decision have been recounted in the previous chapter.
In order to understand the development of his later views, it is necessary to digress for a moment, and say something about the origin of this theory of the ‘Old Religion’.
In 1890, the science we now know as anthropology was hardly out of its infancy. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s monumental study of the American Indian appeared in 1851. Sir Henry Maine’s Ancient Law, McLennan’s Primitive Marriage, Sir Edward Tylor’s Primitive Culture, Robertson Smith’s Religion of the Semites, were all early classics of this new science. But in 1890, there appeared a two-volume work wider in scope, bolder in conception, more startling in its implications, than anything that had gone before. It was written by a small, neatly dressed Scotsman of conservative tastes, James Frazer, and its title was The Golden Bough.
The bough referred to in the title is the mistletoe—which turns golden after it has been plucked. Frazer begins with a famous description of Turner’s painting ‘The Golden Bough’, showing the woodland grove at Nemi in Italy. In Roman times, a man with a sword walked around a tree in this sacred grove. He was the priest of Diana, the earth and moon goddess, and he held the title of King of the Wood. He had achieved this position by killing the previous holder, and he would, in due course, be killed by his successor. A runaway slave could achieve a precarious kind of freedom by fleeing to the sacred grove above Lake Nemi. If he could pluck a branch from the sacred tree, he could fight the priest; if he killed him, he himself became sacred and ran no risk of incurring the usual penalty for runaway slaves—crucifixion.
Frazer started with the apparently modest aim of wanting to know how this curious custom came about. The Golden Bough eventually expanded into thirteen large volumes, and they constitute an elaborate treasure hunt, a search through the mythologies and religions of the whole world. (Frazer did little ‘field work’, but he kept up a vast correspondence with hundreds of missionaries, traders and travellers in remote parts of the globe.)
Frazer’s central explanation sounds plausible enough to us; but in 1890, it was as disturbing as the theories of Freud. Frazer was one of the first anthropologists to lay major emphasis on the element of fertility in primitive religions. His friend and mentor, Robertson Smith, had written of early Semitic fertility gods in The Religion of the Semites, and other anthropologists had discussed this element in primitive religion; but for Frazer, the desire to induce fertility was the mainspring of all such religions. The king, he said, embodied the powers of nature; one of his chief tasks was rain-making. Since he was an intermediary of the gods, it was important that his powers should not weaken, otherwise the harvest might fail. Ancient man was accustomed to offer sacrifices to the gods to ensure their favour. And if the king’s powers began to fail, what better sacrifice could be offered? Then he could go to intercede directly for his people. It followed that if the king was killed in his prime, before his powers began to fail, the sacrifice would be even more effective.
The chief problem here, of course, is that the king himself can be expected to take a dim view of the custom. In primitive tribes, the basic sense of unity would over-rule his objection. But as civilisation progressed, the sacrifice would become symbolic. In Babylonia, there was an ancient custom of dethroning the king for one day and killing his substitute king. Then there were the many gods and heroes of mythology who must be sacrificed ritually to ensure good harvests—the Babylonian Tammuz, the Egyptian Osiris, the Greek Attis and Adonis. In these cases, the god—or hero—is resurrected, symbolising the spirit of nature, which revives every spring. In the Lebanon, the River Adonis became red every autumn as the red soil was washed down by the rains; this, said his followers, was because Adonis had been slain by the wild boar. They went into the mountains looking for the ‘corpse’, and, having found a figure like a man, held funeral lamentations in which they sobbed with genuine grief. When the hero was resurrected, this was celebrated by wild orgies.
With examples like this—literally hundreds of them—Frazer built up his case. John Barleycorn is cut off at the knees and buried in the earth, yet he appears again in the spring, bearing no resentment. Frazer even pointed out that the Christian rituals involving the death and resurrection of Jesus have much in common with these pagan festivals and may derive from them—the kind of observation that struck the Victorians as blasphemous. (Frazer’s friend Robertson Smith had been deprived of his chair at the University of Aberdeen for suggesting that the Bible should be examined with the same critical detachment as any other historical document; his opponents declared that his writing ‘tended to create the impression that Scripture does not present a reliable statement of truth and that God is not the author of it’.) Frazer’s implication was clear, even if he never stated it in so many words: we think of ourselves as highly civilised, but our religious beliefs are probably as unsophisticated and absurd as those of any primitive tribe. It was this unstated suggestion that was responsible for the impact of The Golden Bough. It is significant that The Golden Bough, and Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (an anthropological study of the Grail Legend) play a central part in T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land, the poem that expressed the religious despair of the 1920s.
Frazer went on to point out the importance of fire in these myths of sacrifice. The Druids burned their human sacrifices—criminals or enemies—alive in wicker baskets. Midsummer fires—in which John Barleycorn is burnt—are a worldwide custom. People leap through the flames for good luck. The flames represent the sun, the power that arouses life from the earth.
In the thirteenth volume, Frazer moves towards the conclusion of his argument. He examines the myth of Baldur, the Scandinavian god who is killed by a sprig of mistletoe. Most schoolchildren have heard the story and been troubled by it. The goddess Fricka made all creatures promise they would not harm Baldur the beautiful, but she overlooked the mistletoe. The mischievous god Loki noted the omission. When the gods held a celebration, in which they all pelted Baldur with every conceivable object to demonstrate his immunity, Loki handed the mistletoe to the blind god Hodur, who threw it at Baldur and killed him. This sounds slightly illogical; if the sprig would not harm Baldur normally—being too light—why should it kill him? Frazer’s guess is that the mistletoe is supposed to embody the life of Baldur—in fact, is a symbol of life and fertility. Its milky berries have the colour of male semen. We all know the custom of kissing girls under the mistletoe at Christmas—which probably originated in something altogether more orgiastic. And this may also explain the second of the two mysteries connected with the sacred grove at Nemi—why the challenger had to pluck a branch from the tree before he could challenge the priest-king to battle. Could it be that the branch was the mistletoe, and that the ancients thought it embodied the life of the god or priest? So the challenger had made the priest mortal by plucking the bough; now he was allowed to kill him in combat.
Anyone who has ever tried to read The Golden Bough—even in its abridged one-volume edition—must have felt that it is ultimately unsatisfactory. The descriptions of the various folk beliefs and customs are fascinating, but the whole thing seems to spread out sideways in both directions, until you are no longer sure what is being argued. Frazer has remained a tremendous influence, because of the imaginative scope of his work, but few anthropologists now regard his central arguments as sound. Andrew Lang pointed out that Frazer is able to produce only one example of an actual king who was slain as a sacrifice—the Babylonian ‘king for a day’. And this is a poor example, since he was really a slave.
Another of Lang’s criticisms is perhaps more important. Tylor and Frazer both treated magic as crude superstition. But as a child in Scotland, Lang had known people with second sight, and people who had seen ghosts. He pointed out that most such people are not imaginative hysterics, but ‘steady, unimaginative, unexcitable people with just one odd experience’. He quotes Professor Charles Richet: ‘There exists in certain persons, at certain moments, a faculty for acquiring knowledge which has no relation to our normal faculties of this kind.’ And this may be stronger in savages than in civilised men. ‘We hold that very probably there exist human faculties of unknown scope: that these conceivably were more powerful and prevalent among our very remote ancestors who founded religion; [and] that they may still exist in savage as in civilised races …’ These words were written in 1898, at the height of the age of rationalism, and they led some critics to conclude that Andrew Lang had an old-fashioned streak of Celtic superstition. Nearly a century later, it is Lang who strikes us as balanced and open-minded, and the critics who seem old-fashioned.
At the end of the first section of The Golden Bough, Frazer wrote: ‘Reviewing the evidence as a whole, we may conclude that the worship of Diana in her sacred grove at Nemi was of great importance and immemorial antiquity; that she was revered as the goddess of woodlands and of wild creatures, probably also of domestic cattle and of fruits of the earth; that she was believed to bless men and women with offspring and to aid mothers in childbed …’ Diana is, of course, also the moon goddess—the Roman equivalent of the Celtic goddess on the Wandlebury hillside.
In 1894, four years after Frazer’s book appeared, an upper-class young Englishwoman named Margaret Alice Murray decided to go to University College, London, to attend lectures on Egyptology by the famous Sir Flinders Petrie. It was not her own choice; her elder sister made up her mind for her. In due course, Margaret Murray would become even more controversial than James Frazer; all her later work would develop from the paragraph quoted above.
Margaret Murray was fairly old to begin university studies; at the age of thirty-one, she had already made two false starts in life—first as a nurse, then as a social worker. Neither appealed to her as a vocation. Egyptology was a different matter. It seems probable that Flinders Petrie became a kind of father figure to her (although only ten years her senior). He was already famous as the explorer of the Valley of the Kings and had actually lived in a pyramid while he conducted his researches. Now, with Petrie’s encouragement, Margaret Murray studied the language of the ancient Egyptians and learned to read hieroglyphics. By the outbreak of the First World War, when she was fifty, she had become a well-known archaeologist in her own right, and was the author of half a dozen books. In 1915, during a period of illness, she stayed in Glastonbury and became—inevitably—interested in the legend of the Holy Grail. She turned from the archaeology of the Middle East to write a paper on Egyptian Elements in the Holy Grail Romance. Then, feeling at a loose end, she decided to devote the war years to the study of witchcraft. In her autobiography My First Hundred Years, she explains that someone once told her that witches had their special form of religion, and that they danced around a black goat.
I had started with the usual idea that witches were all old women suffering from illusions about the Devil and that their persecutors were wickedly prejudiced and perjured. I worked only from contemporary records, and when I suddenly realised that the so-called Devil was simply a disguised man I was startled, almost alarmed, by the way the recorded facts fell into place, and showed that the witches were members of an old and primitive form of religion, and the records had been made by members of a new and persecuting form.
Unfortunately, she fails to explain how this revelation came about. All we know is that she became increasingly convinced that the witches were members of Frazer’s ‘immemorial fertility-cult’ of Diana, the moon goddess, and that ritual sacrifices of kings and priests had continued well into the Christian era, the victims including William Rufus, King John, Edward II, Richard II, Thomas à Becket, Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais, and two wives of Henry VIII. When she wrote The Witch Cult in Western Europe, which appeared in 1921, some of her more startling views were undeveloped; even so, the book caused a sensation. What is perhaps more surprising is that it convinced a large number of serious scholars and historians. Her theory quickly became ‘respectable’, and for the next four decades the article on Witchcraft in Encyclopaedia Britannica was by Margaret Murray, and stated her theories as if they were proven fact.
Her views were not entirely original. Since 1739, when an Italian cleric named Tartarotti-Servato had written Nocturnal Meetings of Witches, many scholars had pointed out that certain witch practices—notably the Witches’ Sabbath—bore some resemblance to pagan religious rituals. Yet, oddly enough, Margaret Murray never mentioned the book that is by far the most convincing piece of evidence for her theory. In Italy in the 1880s, a swashbuckling American lawyer named Charles Godfrey Leland became friendly with an Italian fortune-teller named Maddalena, a hereditary witch. In Italy, witchcraft is often referred to as ‘la vecchia religione’—the old religion—and Maddalena confirmed that it was precisely that. She gathered together various fragments of poetry and witch-lore, which Leland published in 1899 in a book called Aradia: the Gospel of the Witches. This book bears all the hallmarks of authenticity, and it is difficult to see why anyone should have concocted it; it is short, unsensational, and its material would be of interest only to a folklorist. In fact, it went out of print almost as soon as it was published and has remained out of print until recent years. And if Aradia is genuine, then it would be fair to say that Margaret Murray’s theory rests on a very solid foundation.
According to Aradia, the goddess Diana had an incestuous affair with her brother Lucifer—the light-bringer—and gave birth to a daughter named Aradia, or Herodias. There came a period of great social oppression, when many slaves were treated so cruelly that they fled to the wilderness and became robbers. Diana thereupon ordered Aradia to go down to earth and teach these oppressed people the arts of poisoning, ruining crops and casting spells on the aristocracy and the priests. And if the priests anathematised her in the name of God, Jesus and Mary, she was to reply: ‘Your God, Jesus and Mary are Devils.’ Obviously, the Italian witches saw themselves as revolutionaries, the equivalent of today’s left-wing guerrilla organisations; or at least, as a peasant’s protest movement. (The French historian Michelet had stumbled on the same idea. He suggested that witches were poor peasants who came together at night to perform pagan rituals as a protest against the Church and the aristocracy.) The remainder of the book is a compilation of rituals, legends and witch-lore.
Like Frazer—and unlike Andrew Lang—Margaret Murray had no belief in the supernatural as such. She tried Frazer’s explanation on her witchcraft material, decided that it fitted, and wrote her epochmaking book. Her thesis is simple. Old religions are never totally replaced by new ones: they continue to exist, often side by side with the new religion. She cites many laws against pagan practices that prove that it still existed long after the coming of Christianity, and that the Church regarded it as a menace. She considers various witch trials and insists that the magical practices described are not nightmares of a fevered imagination but perfectly credible descriptions of pagan fertility ceremonies, in which the high priest dressed up like the nature god Pan, with goat’s feet and horns. (This, she says, is the origin of the Christian idea of the Devil.) Perhaps the most startling assertion in the book is that Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, the sadist executed for the murder of more than a hundred children, were both leaders of a witch cult and died for their faith. Gilles’ murders were the human sacrifices of the ‘old religion’. (In fact, both Joan and Gilles were accused of witchcraft.)
Margaret Murray’s second book on the subject, The God of the Witches, appeared in 1933; it aims at presenting a popular account of her theory. In this book she lays rather more emphasis on ‘the horned god’, pointing out that ancient shamans dressed up in animal skins, and that there are many modern survivals of ancient fertility dances in which the men wear horns or antlers. This book was largely ignored when it appeared; there were more pressing problems to think about in the mid-thirties than witches and fertility cults. Republished after the war, it became a best-seller—an early sign, perhaps of the ‘occult revival’ that became so widespread in the sixties.
Perhaps emboldened by her sudden fame, Margaret Murray produced her third and most controversial volume in 1954. The Divine King in England offers a bewildering list of English kings and substitute victims who have been killed as ritual sacrifices. She manages to give the general impression that practically every famous murder in English history was connected with the witch cult. The book was generally dismissed as a crank aberration (after all, she was over ninety years old when it appeared), but the first two books continued to be highly regarded by scholars.
Tom Lethbridge knew Margaret Murray at Cambridge; he liked her personally, and was inclined, on the whole, to accept her views on the ‘ancient religion’. His attitude was not shared by many of his colleagues—he has described how various petty indignities were visited on her at Cambridge. Gogmagog, like the later Witches, takes it for granted that Margaret Murray is fundamentally correct. This was why the controversy around Gogmagog became so acrid.
Lethbridge concludes that the central figure on the Wandlebury hillside—the woman surmounted by the crescent moon—was the moon goddess and the earth mother. Gog, her consort, is the sun god. (In Leland’s Aradia, the moon goddess’s consort is Lucifer, the light-bringer.) He goes on to argue that in Celtic and many other ancient religions, the oak tree is the symbol of the sun. Hence its importance for the Druids. The berries of the mistletoe symbolise the moon, because they look like small moons. The Druids cut them with a golden sickle, symbolising the sun, when they found them growing on an oak tree. What could be a better augury of fertility than the symbol of the earth goddess growing on the tree of the sun god?
Although Druidism came to England around 600 BC with the Celts, Lethbridge believed that other forms of the ‘ancient religion’ existed here for centuries before that. We know that the Druids on the Continent sent their novices to study with the English Druids, which suggests that an older and purer form of the religion existed in England. We know the Druids claimed magical powers, to foretell the future, change bodily shape, cast spells to cause death and lunacy (‘moon-sickness’), and induce invisibility, in fact, most of the powers that witches were later believed to possess. The human sacrifices were almost certainly fertility rituals, with the firelight symbolising sunlight, as Frazer suggested. For the ancients, sunlight was all important, the source of fertility. Darkness was evil. When eclipses of the sun and moon occurred, primitive man believed the powers of darkness were attempting to destroy the powers of light, and the earliest religious rituals were intended to aid the sun against his enemy. (Some African tribes still beat pots to aid the sun during an eclipse.)
This explains why the ‘old religion’ was so indestructible in country areas. It was not simply a matter of loyalty to old gods, but of genuine belief that if they ceased to perform the fertility ritual, there would be no crops. Even today, many country folk believe that crops can be improved or blasted by witchcraft.
Gogmagog is the only one of Lethbridge’s later books that contains no reference to ‘occult’ matters; he seems tacitly to accept Margaret Murray’s view that the magical side of witchcraft is pure superstition. If he had remained at Cambridge, he might well have continued to accept this view, in spite of his experience of ghosts, ‘ghouls’ and poltergeists. But when the Lethbridges moved to Hole House in Devon, the first person they met was the ‘witch’ who lived next door.
Then there was the interesting coincidence that the moor above Hole House was called Lugmoor. Lug, or Lugh, was the Celtic sun god, whose name is obviously related to Lucifer. Even the name ‘Bran’ in Branscombe was another name for Lugh, after he had changed himself into a raven (that famous witches’ bird).
It is interesting to wonder why Lucifer, the angel of light, should have been identified with the devil. The story is not—as most people assume—in the Bible. Isaiah 14 contains the well-known lines: ‘How are you fallen to earth, O day star, son of the dawn’ (in Hebrew, helel ben shahar), but Isaiah is jeering at the King of Babylon, and the legend of a falling star on which the insult is based obviously refers to a meteor. Milton’s story of the war of the rebel angels against God is based on a short reference in Revelation 12 to the ‘Dragon’ who raised an army to challenge God. It was the early Christian theologians who identified this beast—Satan—with Lucifer or Lugh, the sun god. Even more significant, in the next chapter of Revelation, Gog and Magog arc referred to as the enemies of the kingdom of God. (Ezekiel also has a reference to the ‘hordes of Gog and Magog’.) There can be little doubt that Lethbridge is correct when he says that when a new religion conquers, the gods of the old religion are turned into devils. Even the word devil is derived from the Hindu deva, meaning a god. When Christianity ousted the religion of Lugh and Matrona, the old gods were promptly demoted to the rank of unsuccessful rebels.
When Saint Augustine landed in England in 597 AD, he found an island covered with pagan temples dedicated to the sun god and the earth mother. We know that many churches are built on pagan sites. What names, Lethbridge wondered, would the Christians choose in re-dedicating these sites? A tenable assumption is that Magog—or Matrona—would be replaced by Mary, the Mother of God, and Lucifer by his legendary adversary, the Archangel Michael. By way of checking this hypothesis, Lethbridge looked through Crockford’s clerical directory, and picked out all churches dedicated to the Virgin and to St Michael in the south-west, and marked them on an ordnance survey map. The result was as he had expected. Where there were old Iron-Age forts, there were plenty of Michaels and Marys; where there were no Iron-Age forts, Michaels and Marys became infrequent. He also observed a high percentage of St Andrews in these areas, which seemed to confirm another of his theories—that St Andrew had ousted the Welsh sun god Mabon.
According to Lethbridge, Mary, Michael and Andrew not only replaced Magog, Lugh and Mabon; they finally became these gods. Pope Gregory the First advised St Augustine to ‘accommodate the Christian ceremonies as much as possible to those of the heathen’. The result was that many pagan ceremonies—such as slaughtering oxen on feast days—were simply incorporated into the Christian religion. (The mistletoe under which we kiss at Christmas is another example.) And in country areas, where the old religion was still observed, St Michael was worshipped as the bringer of light and fertility, and Mary as the earth mother herself.
Lethbridge was also a step nearer to explaining the force that knocked him down on Skellig Michael. It was at least, a fair assumption that the monastery of St Michael had been built on a site dedicated to the pagan sun god, a spot in which the forces of the earth had been invoked for centuries in pagan ceremonies. Ten years later, in one of his most controversial books, Legend of the Sons of God, he was to carry the argument a significant stage further.
When Witches appeared in 1962, Margaret Murray’s theory of witchcraft had been losing ground for more than two decades. But the turning point seems to have been the year 1954. Even her most devoted followers were embarrassed by The Divine King in England. In the same year, she wrote an approving introduction to Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today, a book that quickly acquired an unsavoury notoriety. Gardner was an eccentric masochist and voyeur who not only claimed to be a member of a witch coven, but insisted that such covens still flourished all over Europe. The book inaugurated the modern ‘witchcraft revival’, with its emphasis on sexual rites. Gardner identified the modern cult of ‘wicca’ with Margaret Murray’s ancient fertility religion of Diana. And Margaret Murray apparently agreed with him. Understandably, historians began to feel she could no longer be taken seriously.
But guilt by association is no argument against the basic soundness of her views. The question that concerns us here is: how far are these views supported by historical evidence?
The most devastating—and carefully documented—attack so far appeared in Norman Cohn’s book Europe’s Inner Demons (1975). Professor Cohn seemed to have no doubt that Margaret Murray either distorted or invented most of her ‘evidence’. He reached this conclusion after studying the original documents that she cites in her books. Her main argument was that nothing very extraordinary happened at the Witches’ Sabbaths, and that the descriptions of the witches themselves fitted the view that the Sabbaths were pagan fertility rites. Cohn quickly discovered that where she had left rows of dots, to indicate something left out, there were often descriptions of the most wildly improbable events—such as the devil having sex with all the women present, who in due course gave birth to toads and serpents. In a subsequent chapter, Cohn demonstrates that some of the most convincing documents about early witchcraft were forgeries—a brilliant display of historical detective work. He concludes that the witch craze of the late Middle Ages began with the persecution of the heretical sect called the Waldenses, and snowballed from there.
Cohn’s personal assessment of Margaret Murray seems correct. He says:
Her knowledge of European history, even of English history, was superficial, and her grasp of historical method was non-existent. In the special field of witchcraft studies, she never seems to have read any of the modern histories of the persecution; and even if she had, she would not have assimilated them. By the time she turned her attention to these matters she was nearly sixty, and her ideas were firmly set in an exaggerated and distorted version of the Frazerian mould. For the rest of her days (and she lived to be a hundred) she clung to these ideas with a tenacity that no criticism, however well informed or well argued, could ever shake.
All of which leaves untouched Lethbridge’s central thesis: that there was an ancient fertility religion, probably far older than Druidism, which, in spite of the persecution of the Christian Church, survived into modern times. Lethbridge rightly felt that Leland’s Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches was the most convincing evidence for his argument. Cohn doesn’t even mention Aradia. His chief aim is to prove that the witch craze grew from the persecution of the Waldenses—which began in 1487—and not, as many scholars have always believed, from the persecution of another heretical sect, called the Cathars, two centuries earlier. This matter is hardly as crucial as Cohn seems to think; it scarcely matters which outbreak of persecution triggered the witch craze, and there is no good reason why both the Cathars and the Waldenses should not have been involved. (In the Pyrenees, witches are called gazarii, which sounds as if it derives from Cathar.)
Cohn’s own position is less unbiased than it looks. He is the author of two earlier books on irrational cults: Warrant for Genocide, dealing with a notorious forgery called Protocols of the Elders of Zion that has inspired many anti-Jewish pogroms, and The Pursuit of the Millennium, a study of various strange sects of the Middle Ages. Cohn is centrally concerned with persecution and with the persistent myth that society at large is threatened by a small secret society that rejects its laws and practises horrible abominations: the accusation that has so often been brought against the Jews. He is naturally inclined to see the witch craze in similar terms—an irrational outbreak of hysteria against innocent people—and tends to ignore evidence that fails to fit his thesis—like Leland’s Aradia.
So if we decline to be sidetracked by Margaret Murray’s sins as a historian, the evidence for the existence of the witch cult is surprisingly convincing, considering that we are dealing with bits of broken tile and pottery, old coins, and gods who change their names every hundred years or so. The evidence lies all around us—particularly in country districts—in old churches, in curious festivals associated with May Day, Midsummer Eve and harvest time. In his book The Roots of Witchcraft, Michael Harrison mentions a discovery made by Professor Geoffrey Webb, when he was Secretary of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. After the Second World War Webb was assigned the task of surveying ruined churches with a view to restoration. Looking inside an altar whose top slab had been removed by a bomb blast, he found a male sexual organ carved in stone. This led him to look in other altars. Webb concluded that similar phalluses could be found inside the altars of ninety per cent of churches built up to the time of the Black Death (1348)—that is, shortly before the great witch craze.
Harrison also mentions an event documented in the Bishop’s Register of Exeter in the fourteenth century: it states that the Bishop of Exeter caught the monks of Frithelstock Priory (in Devon) worshipping a statue of ‘the unchaste Diana’ in the woods, and made them destroy it. No punishment is mentioned. The monks themselves probably knew so little about theology that they were hardly aware that Diana was a pagan goddess.
Again, anyone who has studied old churches will have seen examples of the curious carvings known as Sheila-na-gigs, showing a female squatting with her thighs open, exposing her genitals. Many Sheila-na-gigs were placed in prominent positions—above church doors or windows—suggesting that there was a time when churchgoers took them as much for granted as they took statues of the Virgin. Sheila-na-gig is usually translated ‘lady of the breasts’, but many such figures have hardly any breasts; Lethbridge suggests it should be Sheila-na-gog—lady of the god, or mother goddess.
This view is convincingly argued by Michael Dames, a senior lecturer at Birmingham Polytechnic, in his book The Silbury Treasure,1 and subtitled The Great Goddess Rediscovered. Silbury Hill, near Avebury in Wiltshire, is a vast prehistoric mound whose purpose has puzzled historians for centuries. The most popular theory is that it is a Bronze-Age barrow—a mound of earth raised above a burial site—although it is vastly larger than any known barrow. And careful excavations have revealed no grave inside it. The legend that it was the grave of a certain King Sil, who was entombed upright on his horse, clearly has no foundation.
A flint discovered inside the hill suggested that it was far older than the Bronze Age (1000–2000 BC). Since then, radiocarbon dating has proved that the hill is some 5,000 years old, pre-dating the oldest part of Stonehenge by a century or more. Yet the most recent excavations (1967) still revealed no clue to its purpose.
Michael Dames concluded that the mystery of Silbury can be explained only when we recognise that the hill itself is intended to represent the womb of a pregnant woman. Seen from above, with its oddly-shaped surrounding moat, Silbury resembles a Sheila-na-gig seen in profile—a woman squatting in the birth position, with her legs open. (Many primitive people still give birth in this position.) Dames believes that Silbury was the scene of a Stone-Age religious rite. At harvest time, when the corn was ready to be cut, country people would climb to the terrace just below the summit of the hill, to watch the spectacle of the goddess giving birth, with the aid of Diana, the moon. At eight o’clock on Lammas Eve (August 7th), the moon rises over Waden Hill; it falls across the thigh of the mother and indicates the vulva; at ten o’clock it touches the left knee, and at eleven thirty, the baby’s head—the reflection of the moon in the moat—appears to emerge from between the mother’s legs. A few hours later it falls on the breast, and the reflection of moon in the water simulates flowing milk. (A legend reported by Aubrey says that the hill was raised ‘while a posset of milk was seething’.) The child held on the belly is now feeding, and the corn can be cut. The earth mother has given birth.
Predictably, Dames’s theory has aroused bitter opposition from the ‘experts’, who nevertheless admit that they have no idea of why Silbury Hill was raised. But it supports, in every particular, the views advanced by Lethbridge. The Sheila-na-gigs are images of a religion far older than Christianity, older than the Druids and the warriors who beseiged Troy. And no clear distinction was made between the earth goddess and the moon goddess; like the Italian Diana, they blended into one. This is the religion of Magog, whose symbols are carved into the Wandlebury hillside.
At this point, I should admit that my own attitude towards these matters was distinctly sceptical, until I began to look into it for myself. Cornwall, where I live, is full of survivals of the ‘old religion’, and a little research soon revealed many more.
At Helston, in Cornwall, the May Day celebration takes placed on May 8 (the date has probably been displaced over the centuries because of changes in the calendar). The people of Helston dance through the streets to a tune called the Floral Dance. But the dance itself is called the Furry, not the Floral, Dance. From the time of the Stone Age shamans, fertility ceremonies have been performed by men dressed up as animals. The other song that is sung during the celebrations concerns Robin Hood and Maid Marian; Robin Hood has been shown by the folklorist Lord Raglan to be a Celtic horned god. Even the name of the town, Helston, seems to be a version of Hele stone, the stone of the sun god. (The same is true of the Heel Stone of Stonehenge.) Its patron saint is, of course, St Michael.
The ceremony that takes place at Padstow, in Cornwall, on May Day is generally acknowledged to be a survival of an ancient fertility rite. It is known as the Festival of the Hobby Horse (pronounced Obby Oss). The horse is the most important of Celtic animal gods, hence the various white horses portrayed on hillsides. In Padstow, the horse parades through the streets surrounded by dancers. Claude Berry has described the scene in Portrait of Cornwall: ‘Although the Hobby Horse is the principal figure in the festivities, scarcely less important is the man who, with mask and club, “dances before” the horse the day long through …’ The ‘horse’ occasionally darts at a girl and bumps her, or takes her under its skirts; custom has it that the girl will become pregnant within the year.
The article on ‘Curious Customs and Ceremonies’ by I. O. Evans in Romantic Britain is full of reference to rites involving fertility and animals. The ceremony of the Deermen is held at Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire every September 4. The Deermen, dressed in antlers, escort Robin Hood and Maid Marian across the town; Robin Hood sits astride a hobby horse. The Deermen carry clubs with deers’ heads on them. And—significantly—the antlers are kept in the local church, like the stone phalluses discovered by Professor Webb.
At Hungerford, in Berkshire, two men known as Tuttimen parade through the streets on the second Tuesday after Easter, demanding a kiss from every girl and a coin from every man. They knock on doors and demand a kiss from every woman in the house. Again, this seems to be a survival of a fertility ritual whose origin was less restrained: the girls are made to give themselves, the men to offer tribute. Like the Deermen, the Tuttimen carry wands or staffs of office. Lethbridge suggests that the ceremonial staffs (like the Mace in the House of Commons) originate in Gog’s club. (The discoverer of ‘leys’, Alfred Watkins, had another explanation, as we shall see in the next chapter.)
The name Tuttimen puzzled me until I consulted a dictionary of non-classical mythology, and discovered that Teutates was the Celtic god of war. The ceremony takes place at Hocktide, which suggests Hogtide. The Gogmagog Hills were known until a century ago as the Hogogmagog Hills, and Hog is one of the many forms of Gog discovered by Lethbridge in his researches.
A photograph in Evans’ article shows the Christmas mummers in the village of Marshfield, in Oxfordshire; they are dressed in strange, shaggy garments, with masks over their faces and again look like the shamans in Palaeolithic drawings. Evans mentions that in Wales, mummers carry a horse’s head, and the plays they perform include one about Robin Hood. He suggests that the term ‘horse play’ originates in the rough antics around the hobby horse.
Evans notes of the Morris dancers:
Dressed in white, girt with brightly coloured ribbons on which tiny bells jingle, their heads covered with braid-brimmed or flower-decked hats, the Morris dancers stamp and kick and bound, wave their handkerchiefs or clash with their staves … So they danced long ago, it is said, to influence the corn and make it grow …
He also speaks of ‘Bale fires’ that used to burn at the four seasons of the year to mark the turning of the sun in the heavens. And here again, we are plunged into Druidic mythology. Lethbridge devotes a whole chapter of Witches to the god Baal, or Bel, who became Beelzebub or the Devil in Christian mythology. Bel actually means beautiful, as in Baldur. What everyone remembers about the priests of Baal in the Bible is that they performed human sacrifice by throwing their victims into a fire—the method of the Druids. Baal was a fertility god who originated in Palestine; he wore bull’s horns, and his wife was Astarte (or Ashtoreth) the moon goddess. (She became Diana of the Ephesians.) Here again we have an example of the conquering religion turning into the gods of the old religion into devils. The four seasons at which Bale fires are burnt are the four Druidic festivals. May 1st is actually called Beltane.
In connection with Cornish giants, Evans quotes an interesting little rhyme:
Here I am, old Hub-bub-bub,
And in my hand I carry a club,
And on my back a frying pan,
Am I not a valiant man?
Hub-bub-bub sounds like the giant Gogmagog, formerly portrayed on Plymouth Hoe. Evans’ chapter was written in 1920, before publication of The Witch Cult in Western Europe; yet most of it sounds as if it had been written specifically to support Margaret Murray and T. C. Lethbridge.
All this discussion of witch cults, pagan gods and legendary giants may strike the reader as a diversion. What has it to do with Lethbridge’s theories of ghosts, ghouls and other dimensions? The answer begins to emerge towards the end of Witches. Speaking of Aradia, queen of the witches, he observes that she was sent to earth to teach men magic, and comments: ‘Magic has an ugly name to those who have seen black magic at work among primitive people. Others think that it is completely bogus and no such powers exist. But magic is simply the use of powers of the mind that are not yet understood by science.’ And by way of illustration, he cites his own ability to locate volcanic dykes on Lundy while blindfolded.
In the last chapter of Witches he writes:
Magic was the great object to be obtained through the witch ritual, and their way to obtain it was by the simple expedient of working up mass excitement. The stone rings on our hills and the wild dances of the witches were all designed for this great purpose. All over the ancient world it was the same. The magic power was generated, or so it was thought, by these dances, and it was kept in and directed to its object by the stone circles, which were put there so that the power should not drift away and be lost in the countryside.
In short, Lethbridge became convinced that the stone circles that can be found all over the British Isles were some kind of storage battery for this power. His experiments with pendulums had convinced him that a stone could hold an impression made on it three thousand years ago by the anger of the man who used it in his sling. So why should it not be used as a storage battery for some kind of ‘mind power’?
Lethbridge’s view of magic is close to that of two of the most important representatives of the modern magical tradition: Eliphaz Levi and Aleister Crowley. Both believed that ‘magic’ is simply an unexplored power of the mind, and that the purpose of ritual magic is to direct the will, to focus the ‘true will’. In his everyday life, man scarcely makes use of his will; he seldom wants anything sufficiently long or sufficiently intensely to summon his ‘true will’. But when a man wants something deeply, and believes he can achieve it, he directs all his will towards it; this is the basic act of summoning ‘magical’ powers. Levi wrote: ‘Would you reign over yourselves and others? Learn to will…’ And, like most magicians, Levi believed that there is some form of intangible ‘ether’ that carries the impulses of the will in the way that the ‘luminiferous ether’ carries electromagnetic vibrations. (It is difficult to see how the poltergeist can be explained without some such assumption.) Levi called this ether ‘the Astral Light’, and explains that it is a plastic medium upon which thoughts and images can be imprinted. (This is why the training of the imagination is so important in ritual magic.) Theosophical tradition speaks of an ‘akashic ether’ which serves the same function, and asserts that everything that has ever happened is imprinted on the ‘akashic records’, some form of cosmic memory. The astral light and akashic ether are obviously related to Lethbridge’s ‘fields’ that can record strong emotions, and play them back in the form of ghosts and ghouls. Lethbridge took no interest in occult tradition, and deliberately avoided reading books on parapsychology, so he was unaware that he had discovered for himself some of the basic principles and traditions of the Hermetic Art.
What is perhaps more surprising is that he seems to have been unaware of Robert Graves’s theories of the moon cult, outlined in The White Goddess. Graves had been pondering a series of riddles in a medieval Welsh poem, and concluded that the answers were connected with a secret Druidic alphabet—an alphabet whose letters were the names of trees. It also served as a sacred calendar describing positions of the sun. This calendar, Graves believed, had been in use since the New Stone Age, from Palestine to Ireland. Further research into the Druidic religion led him to the conclusion that the moon goddess is central to a whole range of pre-Christian cultures and mythologies; that it is, in fact, the fundamental Ur-religion of the whole world. The moon goddess was the goddess of poetry and magic and the irrational; and she was gradually supplanted by the sun god, the god of light and rationality. As the mystical Druidic alphabet gave way to the commercial Phoenician alphabet, the age of magic gave way to the age of science, with its emphasis on the physical world and ‘daylight’ knowledge.
But the white moon goddess stands for a different kind of knowledge, a knowledge as real and logical in its way as our intellectual rationalism. Science is based on man’s view of himself as a curiously limited creature, trapped in a purely physical universe; ‘Lunar knowledge’ recognises that the universe of mind intersects the physical universe at right angles, and stretches into a different dimension. Lunar knowledge is concerned with what we would now call magic or the ‘supernatural’. Primitive people make no such distinction; for them, such things are as natural as harvest or childbirth—or as mysterious. Lethbridge’s study of the mother goddess, and his recognition of the power of the pendulum led him to the same conclusion.
After Witches, he wrote no more about the ‘old religion’. But he continued to meditate on the problems it had raised, particularly in the storage of ‘mind power’. These reflections were to lead him to some of his most bizarre and original conclusions.