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Witchcraft Revisited

History speaks

Until the eighteenth century, the Paganism which had excited the imaginations of those seeking a return to the Elder Faiths was the Paganism familiar to people educated in the Classics – the Gods of Greece and Rome. From the eighteenth century onwards, western and northern Europeans began to look not only to the Mediterranean for their Pagan revival, but to their own roots – to the Celtic and Norse-German Gods of their ancestors.

In Britain, Stonehenge and other Neolithic monuments were thought to be the work of the Druids and much speculation began in England about Celtic practices. Many of the ideas were romantic and historically doubtful. Just as Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century had decided that Britons were descended from the Trojans, so people began to speculate that they were descended from lost Atlantis. However, what these visions represented was a yearning for a genuine Pagan spirituality. A positive outcome of people’s interest in their native Paganism was a growing interest in folklore and folk custom.

The folklore revival also awakened a new interest in the Witch persecutions of a few hundred years earlier. There were three major stances: the Christian religious approach – Witches existed and were in league with the Devil; the psychological – there were no Witches and the whole thing was a crazed fantasy dreamed up by churchmen with psychopathological tendencies; and the sociological – the persecutions were a way of consolidating the Church’s power and oppressing the peasants. However, from the nineteenth century onwards a number of European researchers challenged these views. Another theory was put forward: that Witchcraft was a religion, the remnants of the Old Religion of Europe, the indigenous Paganism that Christianity had suppressed.

The first modern scholar to put forward the theory that Witches were Pagans was Karl Ernst Jarcke,¹ a professor of criminal law at the University of Berlin. From studying the records of a seventeenth-century German Witch trial Professor Jarcke argued that Witchcraft was a Nature religion and a survival of pre-Christian Pagan beliefs. Another slightly more complex theory was put forward a little later in 1839 by an historian, Franz Josef Mone.² Mone, who was director of the archives of Baden in Germany, also believed that Witchcraft was an underground Pagan religion. Mone believed that the German tribes who had once populated the north coast of the Black Sea came into contact with the cults of Hecate and Dionysus. They had absorbed the ecstatic religious practices of Hecate and Dionysus into a cult which worshipped the Horned God. Mone believed that this religion had survived into Medieval times until its adherents were persecuted as Witches. A more romantic view of the Pagan cult is portrayed by a French historian, Jules Michelet, in his book La Sorcière³ published in 1862. Michelet’s speculations are based on earlier accounts of Goddess worship in France such as those of John of Salisbury⁴ who, writing between 1156 and 1159, said:

… they assert that a certain woman who shines by night, or Herodias, … summons gatherings and assemblies, which attend various banquets. The figure receives all kinds of homage from her servants …

While many harked back to the ways of Paganism, those European scholars who had re-appraised the Witch trials generally believed that the Craft had died with the fires of the Inquisition. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a book emerged which suggested that Goddess worship had not been completely suppressed in Europe. In 1886, the American folklorist Charles Leland met an Italian fortune-teller and Witch from Florence called Maddalena. Leland claimed that as his friendship with Maddalena grew, she gradually imparted to him secrets that had remained hidden for centuries. These were the beliefs of the Italian Witch tradition that the Witches called the Old Religion.

In 1899, these were published in a book called Aradia or The Gospel of the Witches.⁵ Charles Leland claimed that not only were the Italian Witches practising magical arts and preserving interesting pieces of folklore, they were also practising a Pagan religion – a Goddess religion. The Italian Witches’ beliefs owed much to the Gods of Classical Rome and the Etruscan civilization that preceded it. The chief Deities were Diana and her daughter, Aradia or Herodias. These two Deities were seen as being two aspects of the one Goddess and their names were used fairly interchangeably. It appeared that through all the centuries of persecution, the Goddess still lived.

The ideas of other European scholars about Witchcraft excited the interest of the English anthropologist, Egyptologist and folklorist Margaret Murray. Margaret Murray’s contribution was important in the development of modern Wicca and we owe much to this fascinating woman who lived to the grand age of 100. In 1921, she published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology.⁶ In this, she analyzed the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Witch persecutions and concluded that the inquisitors were persecuting an underground Pagan religious movement that worshipped the Horned God. To Margaret Murray, the followers of the Old Religion were those who had secretly kept the older faith throughout centuries of Christian persecution. In remote villages, people met together in small groups – covens – and practised in secret the rites of their ancestors. They had also preserved the lore of herbs and plants, which was the traditional craft of the village wise woman and cunning man.

The new interest in the religious practices of European Witchcraft went hand in hand with a parallel development, a longing for a return to a Nature-based religion and also to a religion of the Goddess. Wicca was to fulfil this longing. From the nineteenth century onwards, many thinking and spiritual people had grown to believe that society was declining because of an over-emphasis on the masculine at the expense of the feminine. They saw this imbalance as encouraged by monotheistic, male-based religious thinking which distorted the world-view of Western society. From the late eighteenth century onwards, rapid industrialization and the rape of Europe’s natural scenery and resources caused many people to feel that the time was out of joint; that common sense was being sacrificed to material progress with potentially disastrous results. This feeling increased after the horrors of the First World War.

Some found their religious answers in the East. An effect of the European countries’ urge for colonies was to create a continual traffic of ideas to and fro between Europe and Asia. Just as the Crusaders had returned from the East infected with heretical thoughts, so too did Europeans return with new religious visions. At the end of the first World War, the colonial magistrate Sir John Woodroffe writing under the name of Arthur Avalon published his influential book on Tantra and Goddess energy, Shakti and Shakta.⁷ In this, he called for a restoration of the equality of the sexes in outer society and a return to the worship of the Divine Mother and Divine Father. Sir John believed that all things were possible when the supreme personifications of the Divine were God and Goddess who:

… give and receive mutually, the feminine side being of equal importance with the masculine. On the knees of the Mother, as the author puts it: All quarrels about duality and nonduality are settled. When the Mother seats herself in the heart, then everything, be it stained or stainless, becomes but an ornament for her lotus feet.⁸

The call for a return to a Pagan religion was woven into literature for public consumption by writers such as Dion Fortune, whose novels described the religion of the Great Goddess and Horned God. Dion Fortune appealed to the Horned God:

Shepherd of Goats, upon the wild hill’s way,

lead thy lost flock from darkness unto day.

Forgotten are the ways of sleep and night –

men seek for them, whose eyes have lost the light.

Open the door, the door which hath no key,

the door of dreams, whereby men come to thee.⁹

Although Leland’s Aradia hinted that Witches in Italy were worshipping the Goddess and still practising the Old Religion at the end of the nineteenth century, it was not until the 1950s that there was any indication that the Craft was being practised by organized covens in England. The tide changed with the initiation into Wicca of Gerald Brousseau Gardner. Gerald Gardner was a former colonial administrator who had been practising ritual magic, but this was not what he sought. He had experienced mystical visions of the Goddess and male-oriented ritual magic did not fulfil his religious longings. In the late 1930s, Gerald met the Witch Dorothy Clutterbuck through the Rosicrucian Theatre. Despite her quaint English surname, Dorothy Clutterbuck, or Old Dorothy as she was known, was not a traditional village Witch. She was a wealthy lady who lived in the south-coast seaside town of Bournemouth, which is close to the New Forest, an area with long associations with the Craft. Dorothy Clutterbuck had been born in India in the days of the British Raj and it appeared that she never married, but returned at some point to England. Whether Dorothy Clutterbuck came from a Witch family herself or was able to join a coven as an outsider is not known, but in 1939 she was sufficiently senior to initiate Gerald Gardner. In Wicca, Gerald Gardner found what he sought – a Goddess-oriented religion which preserved the remnants of traditional village Wise-craft with the Pagan traditions of Europe’s past. Wicca also offered more. Its members were familiar with the Classical Pagan Mysteries, ritual magic, the Paganism of Greece and Rome, and, from their days in the Raj, they had a knowledge of Eastern traditions of Goddess worship and the use of etheric energy. This produced a dynamic cross-fertilization of ideas that transformed Wicca from a religion of the past, into a religion for the future.

Gerald Gardner had very different ideas from other Witches practising the Craft at that time. While they harked back to the persecutions of the past, believing that the Craft would best endure by remaining a secret and closed movement, Gerald believed that the Craft had the potential to fill what he saw would be the religious and spiritual needs of many in the generations to come. However, the Craft could only fulfil this role if enough information was published for people to know about its existence and for the persistent to access it. Like all religious visionaries, Gerald found that his enthusiasm for new ideas did not always find favour with his elders. Dorothy Clutterbuck was not keen on publicity, but two years before her death Gerald managed to give out some information under the guise of a novel, High Magic’s Aid.¹⁰ This was published in 1949 under his Latin Witch name of Scire, To Know.

Old Dorothy’s death in 1951 coincided with the repeal in Britain of the Witchcraft Act. Gerald now felt free to publish a non-fiction work and in 1954 Witchcraft Today¹¹ appeared, the first account of modern-day Wicca. Margaret Murray wrote the introduction. Within the Craft there has often been speculation that Margaret Murray was herself a Witch, but in any event she was keen to support Gerald Gardner’s book and wrote that he had shown that Witchcraft was descended from ancient rituals and that it had nothing to do with evil practices. It was:

… the sincere expression of that feeling towards God which is expressed perhaps more decorously, though not more sincerely, by modern Christianity in church services. But the processional dances of the drunken Bacchantes, the wild prancings round the Holy Sepulchre as recorded by Maundrell at the end of the seventeenth century, the jumping dance of the medieval Witches, the solemn zikr of the Egyptian peasant, the whirling of the dancing dervishes, all have their origin in the desire to be ‘Nearer, my God, to Thee’, and to show by their actions that intense gratitude which the worshippers find themselves incapable of expressing in words.¹²

The religion of Wicca which emerged from Gerald Gardner’s books is a religion based on initiation into a Mystery tradition which practised rites based on the seasonal cycle, out of doors, often skyclad or in naturist fashion, using the Wise-craft of our ancestors and giving honour to the female Divine – the Goddess. Three major strands of belief and practice had merged: the Dionysian ecstatic and shamanistic practices of the Paganism of the woods and groves; the more Apollonian temple religions of later Paganism; and magic. In the twentieth century the word Witchcraft had come to mean not just a particular form of magic using incantations and spells, but a whole system of religious philosophy and belief. Wicca worked within groups called covens with three degrees of entry, but the degrees were marked by initiation rites which had been elaborated using concepts from the magical societies such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasons, who had themselves harked back to the rites of Isis and the Eleusian Mysteries when devising their ceremonies. The ancient idea of dancing in a circle to raise power was as old as the Stone Age and was a known Witch practice, but Witches did not traditionally use a magic circle cast with a sword. This concept had however merged into the Witchcraft tradition and circle dancing now took place in cast and consecrated circles with guardians at each of the four cardinal points. The use of magic and spells was still part of the tradition, but now these were set into a religious framework that stood halfway between the Apollonian and Dionysian forms of Paganism. The orgies that had appealed to our ancestors were not needed in an age which was moving towards greater sexual freedom in everyday life and where population control rather than fertility was the problem that faced society.

Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today was followed in 1959 by The Meaning of Witchcraft.¹³ On the premise that all publicity is good publicity, he decided to make himself available to the media. This resulted in the 1950s and 1960s in a spate of articles about Wicca that informed those whose religious and spiritual ideas were sympathetic of the continued existence of the Old Religion. Gradually people began to find their way to covens, not only those which Gerald was rapidly founding based on the New Forest tradition he had inherited, but also to other covens who were willing to accept outsiders.

Gardnerian Witches initiated by Gerald and his initiates have become one of the major branches of Wicca. Another major branch is the Alexandrian tradition whose members derive their initiation from Alex and Maxine Sanders via a Gardnerian initiatory line. After Gerald’s death in 1964, Alex took over the role of media Witch and successfully publicized the existence of the Craft, not only in England, but also elsewhere in Europe. The two traditions use more or less the same ritual material and have been steadily converging in recent years. The differences are more in ritual style and outlook than anything else. Loosely speaking, the Gardnerians are more Low Church and the Alexandrians more High Church. Alexandrian Witches tend to be more interested in ritual magic than in folk Paganism.

As well as Gardnerian and Alexandrian Craft, there are other traditions that have brought in outsiders. Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca are derived largely from one particular tradition, based in the New Forest area of the South of England; although this has been cross-fertilized by contact with other British traditions. Another important branch of the Craft springs from the Witch known as Robert Cochrane who claimed to have been initiated into a hereditary coven at the age of five and to have become a Magister at the age of 28. He traced his Witchblood back to 1734 and a Traditional coven in the Warwickshire area. In the 1960s he came to know a number of Gardnerian Witches and in the early 1960s he formed a coven with a number of leading occultists of the day. His ideas about the Craft featured in Justine Glass’ book Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense.¹⁴ The Cochrane tradition was more male-oriented than Gardnerian Craft and had a stronger emphasis on the agricultural cycle and links with the land.

Gardnerian and Alexandrian Craft have been taken to both the United States and to Canada. The Gardnerian Tradition was taken to the United States in 1964 by Rosemary and Raymond Buckland who founded a flourishing branch of the movement. Some of the ethos of the Gardnerian Tradition evolved differently in the United States than in its English birth-place, in that there has been stricter adherence to the Book of Shadows than is found in English covens. This formalism has had the effect of creating a strong and powerful Gardnerian Wiccan tradition in the United States, something that is not easy to do when transplanting from Europe a tradition rooted in the land. Gardnerian and Alexandrian Craft in Canada has had more contact with English covens and has evolved slightly differently from the United States.

Robert Cochrane died in June 1966, reputedly from an accidental overdose of the amanita mushroom, but covens in Britain and, in the United States, the Roebuck coven, have continued working in the Cochrane tradition. Evan John Jones and Doreen Valiente, authors of Witchcraft: A Tradition Renewed¹⁵ and The Rebirth of Witchcraft¹⁶ have published work derived from Robert Cochrane but this is rather different from the original and has evolved into a more Goddess-oriented tradition.

America has also developed its own Craft traditions. With its larger population and willingness to try anything new and different, Wicca, like other religious groups in the US, tends to have more sects than in the UK. As well as the Gardnerian, Alexandrian and other traditional groups, new groups appear all the time as people start their own covens and decide to call their particular interpretation of Gardnerian, Alexandrian or other Wicca by a new name. For those who are interested, Margot Adler, a Wiccan priestess and the grand-daughter of the founder of Adlerian psychology, has published a book entitled Drawing Down the Moon¹⁷ which gives a comprehensive account of Wicca in the US.

One branch of Wicca that began in the United States is the Dianic Craft which was developed by Morgan McFarland and Hungarian Witch, Zsuzsanna Budapest. This was inspired by the Women’s Movement. Dianic covens have a matriarchal focus. Many exclude men and see their tradition as a sisterhood, as wimmin’s religion. Others work with men, but see their role as less important than that of women. Many Dianic groups worship only the Goddess and those that acknowledge the God see the male deity as a part of the mystery of the Goddess.

A related movement is the feminist Craft, one of whose principal exponents is the American Witch Starhawk. On Samhain (Hallowe’en) 1979 her book The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess¹⁸ was published in California. This stimulated the founding of thousands of covens, primarily though not exclusively of women, in the United States and other parts of the world. Starhawk approached the Craft from a different stance to British Wicca which was rooted in both natural magic and in the occult traditions. Starhawk had been initiated into the American Faery Tradition founded by poet Victor Anderson and the bard Gwydion Pedderwen. This borrowed much from Gardnerian Craft practice but favoured a spontaneous ritual approach.

From here, Starhawk’s approach took another turn. Guardianship of the land was a philosophy that the Craft has always espoused. With its roots in an agricultural cycle, the Craft recognized that the survival of humanity depended on the continuing plenitude of the land. The relationship between the Earth and her inhabitants is one of mutual protection and love. This was a very different attitude from that of Christianity and other Near Eastern monotheisms. The Craft, with its emphasis on the Goddess, the Earth, empowerment of women, reverence for the reproductive process and honouring the body, had great appeal for many women, for whom masculine monotheisms seemed anti-feminine, narrow and unwelcoming. The feminist Craft looked outward to the political realm and in particular to two aspects of politics that had become very important in the 1970s onwards – the peace movement and the ecological crisis. The eco-feminist approach has drawn many women and men interested in Green politics to take up Wise-Craft and Goddess religion.

Both the Gardnerian and Alexandrian Traditions have been developed in Continental Europe by people who have sought initiation into the British traditions and have then transplanted them into their own countries, combining the Witch lore which has been preserved in Britain with their own local Wise-craft and Pagan traditions. To seek for esoteric knowledge in the misty isles of the Western seas has a long historical precedent in Europe. Britain, and Ireland beyond, have been considered sacred isles since ancient times and some of the major Druid training colleges in Celtic times were in the British Isles.

In Europe, Wicca spread first to Northern Europe. In Ireland, this was stimulated by the Wiccan authors Janet and Stewart Farrar who settled there some years ago. Gardnerian Wicca was taken to the Netherlands in the 1970s by the Silver Circle, followed by Alexandrian Wicca and the Wiccacentrum Aradia in the 1980s. From the Netherlands, groups have been set up in nearby Belgium. In Germany, although there were Witches before the 1970s, the Craft became more active from the 1970s on, stimulated by German Witches who had contact with Gardnerian covens in England and by American Witches in the US armed forces who were stationed in Germany. Later, in the 1980s, the German Craft movement received new impetus from a series of seminars and lectures given by Alex Sanders in the last years before his death. This resulted in Alex initiating a number of German Witches into the Alexandrian Tradition. Starhawk’s book The Spiral Dance was published in German in 1983¹⁹ and many eclectic feminist groups sprang from this. The German Craft development was also aided by the publication of Das Hexenbuch²⁰ by a group of Alexandrian initiates. There are now representatives of Alexandrian, Gardnerian, and most of the other large branches of Wicca in Germany. Across Scandinavia, there are flourishing combined Gardnerian and Alexandrian covens, and in France, there is now a small but growing Wiccan movement.

In the Southern hemisphere, there are covens in New Zealand and Australia. There are also Witches in Japan. Australia has the wider selection of groups, with Gardnerian and Alexandrian covens and some covens with other traditional origins. Practising Wicca in New Zealand seems to be relatively straightforward in that the seasonal cycle is not unlike that of Europe. The Australian climate, however, particularly in the Tropical zone, makes following a sabbat cycle developed in Northern Europe rather difficult. Other problems arise in the Southern Hemisphere. Do you celebrate Yule when everyone else in the country is celebrating Christmas or do you celebrate on the shortest day in June? Considerable thought has to be put into making a sensible interpretation of the Sabbat round. An additional problem in both Australia and New Zealand is that Wiccan circles are cast sun-wise or deosil. In the Northern hemisphere, the sun appears to move clockwise, but in the Southern hemisphere it appears to move anti-clockwise. Magical groups in Australia and New Zealand tend to follow the Northern hemisphere practice and to work clockwise, but in Wicca where attuning ourselves to the forces of nature is more important, then the issue is more problematic. Different groups have come to different solutions, but I found it impossible to cast a clockwise Wiccan circle in Australia and to me the flow of the power seemed to be definitely anti-clockwise, the Australian direction of the sun.

Since 1939 when Gerald Gardner was initiated and the early 1960s when Alex Sanders launched the Alexandrian branch of the Craft, thousands of people have been initiated into Wicca all over the world. People often ask me how large Wicca is and I have to reply that I have no idea! Wicca has no central organization which can do a headcount, but it is certainly large and growing. So how is this religion practised today?