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The Roots of Wicca

Early religion

The Gods of Wicca are those of our earliest ancestors. In Europe, from the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age around 12,000 years ago onwards, we find paintings on the walls of secret caves that are difficult to access and many of which have been only recently discovered. These are paintings in glowing colours of the Horned Lord of the animals, God of the hunt and God of the hunted, who controlled the movements and fertility of the herds of deer, wild bison and larger, fiercer game, on which our ancestors depended. We also find crude images with the bulging bellies of pregnancy, great breasts and vaginas. These are images of the Great Mother Goddess, She who brings fertility to the people. This is no prettified Virgin Goddess, but the Earth Mother, strong and raw in her power.

With the Neolithic or New Stone Age, there were changes in our ideas about Goddess and God. With the development of agriculture, a settled way of life, and the recording of time, our ancestors noticed the effect of the Moon on women’s menstrual cycles, on the gestation of seeds and on plant growth. The Moon, agriculture, the Earth in which the crops were planted, womanhood and motherhood became associated with the Goddess who was depicted now not just as Earth Mother, but also as the Moon. The phases of the Moon were notched in deer antlers in Europe from as early as 7500 BCE.¹

The Moon has three major aspects – waxing, full and waning. Woman’s life could also be seen as having three major aspects – pre-fertile, fertile, and post-fertile or menopausal. The Goddess too was perceived as having three stages – Virgin, Mother and Wise One or Crone, representing the three main phases of the life cycle, youth, marriage and death. The Gods too evolved. As well as being the Lord of the Animals, the God became associated with all that sprung from the Mother Goddess – the green vegetation which waxed and waned in the Spring and Autumn of the year, and with agricultural crops sown by the people themselves. The recording of time brought people a new realization, the link between sexuality and birth. They came to understand the male role in procreation. Women were not impregnated by the Moon as had been thought by earlier generations, but by man. The God was now seen as the Father God, Lover of the Great Goddess. The God of the Hunt became a phallic God.

These early ideas of the Gods evolved throughout the millennia. Tribes merged with others through conquest and marriage. New Gods were adopted and rationalization occurred. The principal Gods and Goddesses were married to one another. Other Gods were thought of as their children. Human societies discovered new and not always desirable needs. As societies became more complex, they needed more resources. Organized warfare emerged which called for different Goddesses and Gods from those of field and hunt.

The Celts

Wicca is greatly influenced by the religion and culture of the Celts who, by 500 BCE, had become one of the dominant races of Europe. Unfortunately, much of what we know about the Celts is from the writings of their enemy, the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar, who was not an unbiased source. However, we know that although the Celtic priesthood, the Druids, had an alphabet called Ogham, they favoured an oral tradition. The Druids believed in reincarnation and the Celts had little fear of death. There were few monsters and demons in their mythology and they were not preoccupied with the idea of evil. They had no concept of sin and punishment and believed that when they died they went to the Summerland, where they were renewed and made ready for rebirth.

The four major festivals of Wicca are derived from Celtic festivals. Since the Celts were a pastoral herding people, their festivals revolved around necessary events in the herder’s year. At Samhain (pronounced Sow’in) or Hallowe’en on the last evening of October, those animals that could not be kept through the winter were slaughtered and their meat salted to keep the tribe. This festival was therefore a feast of death. Imbolc or Oimelc, which is also known as Candlemas, took place on the first day of February. It celebrated the first lambing; for as the Celts became a more settled people and began to inhabit the mountainous areas of Scotland and Wales, they became dependent on sheep as well as cattle for their livelihood. Imbolc was also in Scotland and Ireland the festival of the Goddess Bride or Brigid. At Imbolc, she returned to Earth from her winter’s rest and blessed and made fertile the land for the coming year. The early spring flowers – snowdrops, crocuses – were signs that the Goddess had walked the land. At Beltane or Bright Fire on May Eve, fires were lit on hills all over the land to symbolize the waxing power of the Sun. Cattle were blessed and driven through the fire to clean their hides of ticks and the people would dance deosil round the fire. Lughnasadh, the festival of Lugh, God of Light, was held on the last evening of July and first day of August. Lugh is a brilliant and many-skilled God whose weapon is the spear. Amongst other things, he is a harper, hero, poet, healer and magician. His festival was a great summer celebration with games and feasting. In the modern Wiccan calendar, this festival is also known as Lammas, originally Loaf Mass, a festival of the corn harvest.

The Celts had two other religious concepts which Wicca retains – outdoor worship (modified for reasons of climate and privacy) and Goddess worship. Goddesses and women were very important in Celtic society. Goddesses presided over poetry and the arts, the important trade of smithcraft, and in the case of the Morrigan, over war. Women were warriors and queens and from Julius Caesar’s writings we know that disputes of law were settled by the Celtic women.

After contact with the Romans, the Celts began to build temples, but the early Celts believed that the Gods were best worshipped in their natural environment; outside beneath the Sun and stars, at sacred wells and springs, and on hilltops beneath the sky. Altars were erected in sacred groves where none might fell a tree. All over Europe, groves were protected in this way until Christian missionaries wanting to destroy the ancient Pagan temples began to fell the groves.

Mediterranean Paganism

Other strands of Paganism that have been absorbed by Wicca were developed not in Northern and Western Europe, but around the Mediterranean and Near East where, around the time of Christ, there was a desire to unify the many Gods and Goddesses into a trinity of Mother, Father and Child. Over a thousand years later, Egypt saw another religious reform. Alexander the Great had conquered Egypt during his great sweep eastwards and on to India. When one of his generals inherited Egypt after Alexander’s death in 305 BCE and became Pharaoh Ptolemy I, he was keen to establish a faith which would be acceptable both to the Egyptians and to the Greek newcomers. A triad of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses was to be established who could be equated with a matching triad of Greek Gods and Goddesses. Two priests were commissioned with the task. Manetho, the Egyptian priest, was a specialist in Egyptian history. Timotheus, the Greek priest, was descended from an Athenian family who had emigrated to Egypt and was familiar with the Greek Eleusian Mysteries of Demeter and Kore.

Ptolemy’s new system was that the chief Deities of Egypt would be the Goddess Isis, her husband Sarapis and their child Horus. Isis’ nephew Anubis, son of her sister Nephthys, became Guardian of the Dead. Isis’ original husband and brother, the more well-known Osiris, was dropped. His attributions were too complex to fit into the new scheme and the incestuous nature of Isis and Osiris’ relationship was unlikely to find favour with Greeks raised on the Oedipus myth. In theory, Sarapis was to be chief God, but Osiris retained his hold on the Egyptian population. He also retained his place in the Initiation Mysteries of Isis. Presumably, the initiates could understand the symbolic meaning of a brother/sister marriage.

Isis and Sarapis became both immanent and transcendent. They were rulers in the Underworld, Earth and Heaven. The reformed religion also made Isis not just one of many Egyptian Goddesses, but The Goddess:

Queen of the stars,

Mother of the seasons,

and Mistress of the universe.²

On a statue to the Egyptian Goddess Neith, who in the reformed religion was also identified with Isis, was the inscription:

I am all that has been, and is, and shall be

and my robe has never yet been uncovered by mortal man.³

This is the Goddess as worshipped in Wicca; immanent, transcendent and mysterious.

The religion of Isis spread rapidly across the Mediterranean capturing the imagination not only of the Greeks, but also of the Romans. Evidence of Isis worship has been found as far away from Egypt as Britain, with London and York being principal centres. The religion of Isis contained many of the features of Wicca today. The Isis religion was a Mystery religion which promised the initiate inner transformation and expansion of consciousness. As in Wicca, there were three levels of initiation. The Goddess Isis was also a patron of magic. Often, she was paired not with her original husband Osiris, or the newer Sarapis, but with Asclepius, the Greek God of healing. Her temples, rites and initiatory system therefore combined religion, magic, the processes of spiritual growth and healing.

Another important development in Mediterranean Paganism at this time came from Greek Neoplatonist philosophers whose ideas have influenced the Western Mystery Tradition to the present day. The Neoplatonists too were moving away from the idea of Gods and Goddesses as separate entities towards a more unified concept. The different Deities were seen as different personifications of the One, the ultimate Divine force that is beyond male and female.

The aim of the Neoplatonists was spiritual development either through the study of philosophy, or by awakening the higher intuitive faculties through theurgy. Theurgy was a system of ritual magic involving invocations to the Gods. The Neoplatonists had great respect for all the ancient Pagan traditions. Care was taken to reconcile their more sophisticated religious thinking with traditional practices. Like the followers of Isis, many Neoplatonists were vegetarians, but they did not condemn those who continued to perform the traditional animal sacrifices.

While the Neoplatonists saw the Divine as being outside the created world or transcendent, the Stoics believed that the universe was itself Divine and that human beings were part of this Divinity. In other words, the Divine was immanent or indwelling in the universe. The Stoics had high moral principles and believed that:

For mortal to aid mortal – this is God,

and this is the road to eternal glory.⁴

The Stoics’ view that the universe is Divine and that the Gods are in-dwelling in Nature is very important within Wicca.

Paganism and Witchcraft

The stately world of the priests and priestesses of Isis and the thoughts of Greek philosophers poring over the mysteries of the Universe seem far removed from the traditional image of Witchcraft – the Witch with her cauldron and broomstick. What is the connection between the Goddess worshippers of the New Stone Age, the priesthood of Isis in their beautiful temples by the banks of the Nile, and the wizened crone of a Witch stirring her cauldron in the rural villages of Medieval England?

Long before Christianity, there was a division in the most urban part of Europe, Greece and Rome, between the Paganism of the temples and the Paganism of the woods and groves. Indoor temple Paganism took an Apollonian approach; the Greek God Apollo being a God of music and intellectual pursuits. This was a Paganism of stately ceremonies in clean white robes. It was religion which focused on the conscious rational mind and symbols of Light and Sun; of this Neoplatonism was a part. The Dionysian approach, named after the Greek God of wine Dionysus, was a Paganism of ecstatic vision, of trance, of the loss of individual consciousness and its merging into Nature. The rites of Dionysus were the rites of drumming and darkness, the rites of the Moon. They celebrated individual freedom rather than control by the state and a return to Nature, rather than seeking to evolve beyond it.

In Roman times, many of the practices of earlier Dionysian Paganism were thrust out of the mainstream of religion and became associated with Witchcraft. Witches were described as drawing down the Moon, or in other words Moon worship, and as going out in the darkness to collect herbs with bare feet, loose hair, their robes pulled up around their waists and armed with bronze sickles. On the dates of the larger festivals they went out on the hills to dance and chant and to tear apart a sacrificial victim, a black lamb. On the feast of Lupercalia on February 15, young men also took part, covering their bodies with goat skins and their faces with masks. Goats were sacrificed and people whipped with straps made from their hides to raise magical power. These practices were not favoured by the state, but were incorporated into Mystery Traditions such as that of Bacchus, God of Wine.

The devotees of Bacchus soon fell foul of the law. They were accused of plotting against the state in much the same way as medieval Witches were later seen as plotting the downfall of James I of England. In Rome decrees were made against the Bacchanalia and the God’s adherents were imprisoned or executed.

The stately and controlled approach to religion favoured by the urban cultures of Greece and Rome was a necessary stage in the development of our human intellect. However, while this type of religion appeals to the conscious mind, it does not satisfy the larger part of the human psyche that is not intellectual. For some the gap between the solar and lunar oriented aspects of religion was bridged by the Mysteries of Isis and of Eleusis. These rites, like those of Dionysus, took place by night, but their aim was not to lose the sense of individuality and to enter ecstasies, but to awaken higher consciousness. The Mysteries were a middle way which combined the best of Apollonian and Dionysian Paganism; for we must have both Sun and Moon, light and dark, conscious and unconscious, if we are to find our spiritual destiny. The Mysteries were very beneficial, but in many cases they were not available to the majority of people. Only those rich enough to pay the fees and buy the necessary ritual clothing, and well-educated enough to understand the complex rites, could take part. The Mediterranean world was in a spiritual void and the time was ripe for the new religion of Christianity to step in to fill the gap.

The rise of Christianity

Initially, the growth of Christianity was slow. By the beginning of the third century CE, it was so torn by schisms that it seemed unlikely to survive as one religious entity. All this changed with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine. In 324 CE, he declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Empire. Paganism was not immediately suppressed but now that Christianity had harnessed the powerful political force of the Roman Empire behind it, Paganism’s days were numbered.

Unlike the religious tolerance which had marked the Pagan religions around the Mediterranean, Christianity was true to its Judaic parent. It was an intolerant masculine monotheism. There could be no question of co-existence alongside the older religions. Christianity took the uncompromising view that it was right and all other interpretations of the Divine were wrong. Satan was the ruler of all those who had not espoused the Christian religion. Other Gods were not Gods, but demons and servants of the arch-demon, Satan. The fate of some Gods and Goddesses was kinder than others. In the Mediterranean, the local deities tended to become absorbed into Christianity as saints. However, many Gods, including the Goddess Diana and, in most areas, the Horned God, were relegated to the status of demons. Christianity succeeded, for a time, in making the Gods of the old religion the Devil of the new.

The European Pagan religions already condemned the practice of magic for evil social intent; but beneficial magic was widely accepted. Christianity condemned all magic – spells, incantations, herbalism, divination, weather lore – the whole gamut of activities by which human beings sought to control their environment. The Christian attitude was that these activities were not the prerogative of ordinary men and women, but the prerogative of the Church with its monopoly on the line to God.

Christianity was a missionary religion and over a period of a thousand years it became the dominant religion of Europe. Far to the north-east in the Baltic States, Paganism remained the predominant religion, but various political manoeuvres meant that by the fifteenth century, the last Pagan country in Europe, Lithuania, had succumbed to Christianity. The conversion of kings and nobles to the new faith did not, however, mean an instant conversion of their peoples. Enforcement of Christianity was difficult and frequently followed the pattern of its younger brother in masculine monotheism, Islam, of conversion by the sword. The Scandinavian king St Olaf made his subjects choose between baptism or death. Such forced allegiance can have been nothing but nominal. In Germany, the Emperor Charlemagne conducted mass baptisms of Saxons by driving them at sword point through rivers blessed further upstream by his bishops. Others such as Redwald, King of the East Saxons, whilst adhering to Christianity, had not quite grasped the principles of monotheism. Redwald kept two altars, one for the new God and one for the Gods of his fathers. Many felt that in such tricky matters as Gods, it was best to play safe.

What the Church later lumped together as Witchcraft had two elements – Pagan worship and magic. Pagan worship included man-worshipping (i.e. invoking the Gods into a priest or priestess) and the worship of the Divine in Nature, especially in evocative objects such as wells, trees and standing stones. Magic involved spell-making, divination, and healing. The concept of there being two types of religion: intellectual, solar-oriented, Apollonian religion which appeals to the conscious mind, and lunar, intuitive, ecstatic Dionysian religion which appeals to the unconscious, is important for understanding why Paganism continued to appeal. While Christianity could accommodate the Apollonian side of religion, a religion which emphasized the control of the unconscious by the conscious mind and the suppression of sexuality could not accommodate the joy to be gained through the celebration of Dionysian-type rites.

In Britain, the old Pagan ways died hard. Following the conversion of the Saxon kings, bishops produced a steady flow of books of penances condemning those who practised Paganism. In the middle of the eighth century, Archbishop Ecgbert of York⁵ wrote condemning making offerings to devils, i.e. the Old Gods; Witchcraft; divination; swearing vows at wells, trees and stones; and gathering herbs using non-Christian incantations. The penances imposed for disobeying were not very severe and do not seem to have discouraged the errant Pagans. Little had changed by the eleventh century when King Canute issued laws against Heathenism or Paganism.

We earnestly forbid every Heathenism: Heathenism is, that men worship idols; that is, that they worship Heathen Gods, and the Sun or the Moon, fire or rivers, water-wells or stones, or forest trees of any kind; or love Witchcraft.⁶

In other parts of Europe, it was the Goddess who proved hard to suppress. To satisfy those who leaned towards the female aspect of the Divine, in the fifth century the Christian Church authorized the veneration of the Virgin Mary. She was neither Goddess nor entirely human, but something in between, the Panagia Theotokus or Mother of God. This did not satisfy those of a more Pagan outlook. Bishops complained that the Goddess continued to be worshipped under the names of Diana and Herodias. In the tenth century the Bishop of Verona in Italy complained that many people were claiming Herodias as their Queen or Goddess and declaring that a third of the world worshipped her.⁷

Church and Devil

Initially, the penalties for Witchcraft were relatively mild. The picture began to change in the thirteenth century when the Church formally declared Witchcraft to be a heresy. As all good Christians knew, the heretics were worshippers of the Devil. All the religious and magical practices on which the Catholic Church did not bestow its blessings – other Christian sects, Paganism and magic – were now lumped together. Whatever their aims and virtues, they were declared to be Devil worship. The Christian Church was Devil-obsessed. Despite some setbacks, the first 1,000 years of the Church’s history had been a story of success and increasing power. Now, with the rise of Islam in the East and growing intellectual scepticism in the West, the Christian Church was losing its grip. If the Church’s power was being challenged, there could only be one challenger, for the Church was the Church of God.

All rural communities had their wise women and cunning men who would act as doctors and midwives, who would cure a sick cow, solve the love problems of young men and women, advise those in distress and perform weather magic. Until officialdom espoused the cause of Witch-hunting, any actions against Witches tended to be local activities of the spontaneous, lynch-mob sort which occur when times are hard or when things go wrong in people’s lives and they want someone to blame. Psychologists talk about locus of control. Locus is Latin for place. People with an external locus of control will tend to attribute the causes of their good and bad fortune to people or things outside themselves. Those with an internal locus of control tend to think that they make their own destiny. If things go wrong, it is their own fault and if things go well, it is because they have talent or have worked hard.

Simple peoples tend to have an external locus of control. They ascribe the good and bad things that happen to them, not to their own actions, but to the actions of outside forces – spirits, angels, saints, Gods, demons, ghosts. Medieval Christians tended to ascribe good events in their lives to the work of God and bad events to the work of the Devil. The Devil was believed to need human servants to effect his unscrupulous desires. When something went wrong in people’s life, they looked for someone who could be acting as the Devil’s agent – a practitioner of maleficium, a Witch.

In the main, the accusations made against Witches are those which express the fears of a largely agricultural society – blighting crops; causing animals to die or miscarry; causing illness, miscarriage and death in human beings; and raising storms. These are the negative uses of the powers of the Witch that on the other hand could be used beneficially to produce good harvests, cure sick animals and people, increase fertility of animals and humans, and produce rain in drought. From the fifteenth century on, however, there were also political accusations. Witches were accused of undermining Church and state.

Despite fierce attempts to persecute those Christians whose views did not accord with Catholicism, the heretical sects which later transmuted into the Protestant movement flourished and grew strong. Nowhere was Protestantism stronger than in Germany. In the sixteenth century Martin Luther, an ex-monk, nailed to his church door a list of accusations against the corruption of a Church which took money from people to buy time off from Hell in a form of after-death insurance. It was in strife-ridden Germany that the evil madness of the Witch-hunts began. In 1484, eight years before Christopher Columbus sailed westward to find America, Pope Innocent III issued a Papal Bull⁸ denouncing Witchcraft and declaring that Witches were blighting fertility by associating with demons. The Bull authorised the Dominican priests Heinrich Kramer and James Sprengler to prosecute Witches throughout Northern Germany. This was followed in 1486 by the publication by Kramer and Sprengler of what became the bible of the inquisitors, the infamous Malleus Maleficarum or Hammer of Witchcraft. This was an evil-minded diatribe against women, who were seen as more likely to be Witches, and was full of the sadistic pornographic fantasies of two celibates. It ends with recommendations on how to conduct judicial proceedings against Witches which are nothing less than an official blueprint for torture and murder. These were the opening moves which led to the insanity of the persecutions which swept Europe and later America. The Malleus Maleficarum was translated from Latin into a number of European languages and was an immediate best-seller across Europe. There were nine reprints before 1500, a further five by 1520, and a further 16 editions by 1669.

Church approval made Witch denouncement and Witch persecutions a worthy activity. The fact that the property of condemned Witches was confiscated and distributed to the accusers and persecutors was another incentive. In England, Witch-hunting was a less popular pastime than in mainland Europe. English Witch persecutions, although bad, never reached the severity of their Continental or Scottish counterparts. In most European countries, the penalty for Witchcraft was burning at the stake and confessions were extracted by horrendous torture. In England, death was by hanging. Officially, physical torture was illegal, although the English magistrates did permit more sophisticated forms of psychological torture such as sleep-deprivation. Another saving factor was that the English Protestant Church had broken away from the Catholic Church in the mid-sixteenth century and was less affected by Papal pronouncements. The English attitude to Witches was also influenced by rationalists who did not subscribe to the devil-mongering theories of the Continent. No English edition of Malleus Maleficarum appeared until 1584 and, in the same year, an altogether more psychologically healthy work was published by the Englishman Reginald Scot – The Discoverie of Witchcraft.⁹ This was an unusual book for the time, written from the point of view of a sceptic. Scot’s book made explicit the connection between ritual magic and Witchcraft and included both Witchcraft practices and magical rites. It also includes some amusing accounts of conjuring tricks.

Overall in Europe, between 150,000 and 200,000 people were executed as Witches; of these around 100,000 came from Germany. The extent to which those accused in the Witch trials were practising ancient forms of Paganism or were village wise women or cunning men is impossible to estimate. It is likely that the majority of those tortured and killed were the victims of the fears and fantasies of a superstitious age – the unusual, the eccentric, those with enemies wanting to settle old scores, and those whose names were blurted out by pitiful torture victims in their desperation to bring an end to their pain.

Fortunately, the New World largely escaped this madness. It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that the evil of the Witch-hunts crossed the Atlantic to America. It was in the Puritan settlement of Salem, Massachusetts, that the greatest outbreak of Witch hunting began. Most of those accused were the victims of maliciousness and hysteria. Altogether 141 people were arrested, of whom 19 were hanged. One, 81-year-old Giles Corey, who refused to confess to Witchcraft, was crushed to death beneath a wooden plank piled with rocks.

Giles Corey died a martyr, not for Wicca, for this does not seem to have been his faith; but to the powers of irrationality and hate. These powers are still all too alive in the world today.

The Return of the Pagan

Although Pagan religion had been suppressed by the Christian Church, Pagan culture had not. This was preserved in the culture of the country people. Their shrines had been made over to another God, but folk customs of Pagan origin such as May Day celebrations, the bringing of an evergreen tree into the house at Yule, the making of Bride’s bed by Scottish Highland cottagers at Imbolc, customs for corn harvest, well-dressing and others meant that Paganism was embedded in the life of the land.

Paganism was also embedded in the life of the mind. The ancient Greek scholar Euhemerus, whose book was one of the first to be translated from Greek to Latin, had argued that originally the ancient Pagan Gods were worthy men and women who had been made Gods by their grateful communities. Euhemerism, as it came to be known, enjoyed a revival in the Christian period. Isis was accredited with teaching the ancient Egyptians the letters of the alphabet, Minerva, the Roman Goddess of wisdom, with inventing the art of working in wool, and Mercury was seen as the first musician.¹⁰ Euhemerism provided a cover under which mythology could be preserved. Rather than demonizing the Gods as earlier Christians had wished, their qualities were venerated and set up as models for human behaviour.

The influence of Paganism became more active from the fifteenth century on. In the fifteenth century a Renaissance began, a rebirth of knowledge and scholarship that had been suppressed by Christianity. Developments in intellectual thought made people question Christian dogmas, a process hastened by the corruption into which the Church had fallen. For some of the disaffected, the solution was to adopt one of the new brands of Christianity. For others who were looking for something which orthodox Christianity could not offer, there were other avenues to explore.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, adventurous European nobles had ridden to the Popes’ summons to the Crusades. Ostensibly worthy enterprises to defend Christian shrines in the Near East from the onslaught of Islam, the Crusades proved to be a rallying call for hundreds of thousands of European nobles and not-so-noble. Those whose forefathers had leapt from longboats shouting the name of Odin were now happy to don the Crusader’s cross and perform rape, pillage and plunder in the name of Christ.

The Crusaders’ armies marched eastwards and met their match. Their attempts to stop Islam were a failure. Instead, they brought back to Europe plunder, disease, heretical ideas and, most precious of all, ancient Pagan manuscripts which had been forgotten or destroyed in the West. The next 300 years saw a Renaissance in Pagan thought.

One of the most influential of the rediscovered books was the Corpus Hermeticum¹¹ or Works of Hermes. The Corpus Hermeticum was mistakenly believed to be of very ancient origin, the work of a mythical magician Hermes Trismegistus, thrice-greatest Hermes. However, in reality the writings dated from the first to third centuries CE and were primarily Neoplatonist in outlook. One of the most well-known of the works is the Emerald Tablet which contains the words familiar to many Witches and Pagans:

That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above, to achieve the wonders of the one thing.¹²

In other words, the microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm. This is the basis of all astrology and divination: the patterning of the heavens, the runes, the tarot, is a reflection of what is or will come to be.

In 1450, the Italian nobleman Cosimo de’ Medici purchased the Corpus Hermeticum, installed the priest and philosopher Marsilio Ficino in the Villa Carregi in Florence and commissioned him to begin the work of translation. The translation overthrew Ficino’s Catholic ideas and he found himself more and more convinced of the truth of the Pagan religious vision. The universe was a visible manifestation of the Divine and the same Divine force lay behind all religions. Each religion was but a manifestation of a higher truth. Marsilio Ficino had the natal chart of a dedicated occultist: Sun and Mercury in Scorpio, with Aquarius rising and a practical streak of Moon in Capricorn. He was interested in practice as well as theory and did not stop at translation, but started to experiment with magic. Ficino was interested in magic as theurgy or spiritual development. His magic involved the use of chanting and music in order to achieve higher states of consciousness. Ficino was careful to try and keep on the right side of the Church by emphasising that his magic was natural magic dealing with the powers of the planetary spheres upon earthly things, rather than more dubious dealings with angels and demons.

Marsilio Ficino’s religious and magical ideas were taken up by others, many of whom were less cautious in their approach. A notable successor was Pico della Mirandola. Where Ficino had gone no farther than trying to use natural (i.e. non-Divine and non-angelic) forces, Pico della Mirandola favoured the use of magical ceremonies to contact aspects of Deity or angelic forces. Pico della Mirandola also had the advantage of knowing Hebrew and he was able to introduce concepts from the Jewish mystical and magical system known as the Qabalah into the framework of the Corpus Hermeticum. The Church reacted: anyone found reading Pico della Mirandola’s works would be excommunicated.

Magical ideas continued to evolve throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1531, Cornelius Agrippa, a native of Cologne in Germany, published his De Occulta Philosophia, On Occult Philosophy, which contained more lists of magical correspondences between the planets, earthly activities and objects such as precious stones. Agrippa’s ideas about magic are near to those of modern Witches. Agrippa maintained that magic depended not on dealing with demons, but on natural psychic gifts. Agrippa led an adventurous life travelling around Europe in frequent conflict with the Church. One of the highlights of his career was in Metz in Germany when he successfully defended a woman accused of Witchcraft and got her acquitted. Later in life, he was banned from his native Cologne and eventually from all of Germany. He had a number of spells in prison when his writings were judged as heretical and offensive.

The study of the Corpus Hermeticum and of the Qabalah, with its ten emanations of the Divine to which all Deities could be related, encouraged a new line of thought amongst some of Europe’s intellectuals: belief that behind the cloak of different religious traditions lay common truths. Thus by the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the German humanist Conrad Ruth¹³ could declare that:

There is but one God and one Goddess,

but many are their powers and names:

Jupiter, Sol, Apollo, Moses, Christus,

Luna, Ceres, Proserpina, Tellus, Maria.

But have a care in speaking these things.

They should be hidden in silence

as are the Eleusinian Mysteries;

sacred things must needs be wrapped in fable and enigma.¹⁴

The Church was fighting a losing battle in trying to hold back those developments in human thought which led on the one hand to that empirical study of the world around us which is modern science and on the other to the empirical study of the human mind and spirit which gave rise first to the study of magic and later to the development of the science of psychology. Scientific revolutions are both caused by and in their turn precipitate breakthroughs in thought. One of the most radical discoveries or rediscoveries of the sixteenth century was that the Sun did not revolve around the Earth; something which was known by the ancient Greeks. The Earth and human beings were not the centre of the universe. In fact, the Earth revolved around the Sun. This discovery was made by the Polish physician and astronomer Copernicus. It is hard for us today to understand the impact it made. The whole world-view of Christian Europe – that we lived in a static unevolving universe created by an anthropomorphic male God in seven days – was totally undermined. Once the nature of the cosmos was questioned, the floodgates were opened. A new vision of the universe began to come into being, a vision which was Pagan and pantheistic.

Although few magicians were burned at the stake and there was no systematic persecution, some, such as Giordano Bruno, did die for their faith. As a child, he had mystical experiences and saw spirits on the hills beneath the beech and laurel trees of his native Italy. He found himself agreeing with the Pagan view: the Divine was to be found in Nature. Bruno became a Dominican but his ideas did not find favour with his superiors. He fled his monastery, hiding a heretical book he had been reading down the lavatory. The book was discovered and the Inquisition ordered his arrest. Bruno fled to Switzerland, France and finally to England where he lectured at Oxford University and was received by Queen Elizabeth I. He also visited the great English magician Dr John Dee, who shared his religious ideas. Bruno was an adventurous or a foolhardy man, depending on one’s perspective. He was not content to pay lip service to Christianity and believed that a new religion should be formed which would overthrow the corruption into which Christianity had fallen. His excursions into magic led him to develop a religious and magical system based on the religion of ancient Egypt. With a naiveté verging on lunacy, he attempted to convince the Pope of the merits of his new ideas. On February 17 1600, he paid the price for his impetuosity and was burned at the stake, having declared to his judges:

Perhaps you who bring this sentence against me are more afraid than I who receive it.¹⁵

Solo magicians and Pagan thinkers were many, but the more liberal and open intellectual climate of the eighteenth century saw a new phenomenon: magicians banding together in magical societies, such as the Martinists, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. Their members were some of the most advanced thinkers of their age and it is rumoured that American statesman Benjamin Franklin was a member of the Illuminati. The formation of the magical societies marked a new openness. While the practices of the societies were secret, their existence was not. For the first time in many centuries the magical arts were being taught in an organized fashion. An important magical book which appeared at turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was The Magus by Francis Barrett. This consisted of a magical compendium of correspondences, talismans, various aspects of natural magic, astrology, alchemy and Qabalah, but its most unusual aspect was what was in effect a coven advertisement.

The Author of this work respectfully informs those who are curious … that, having been indefatigable in his researches into those sublime Sciences, of which he has treated at large in this Book, that he gives private instructions and lectures upon any of the above-mentioned Sciences … Those who become Students will be initiated into the choicest operations of Natural Philosophy, Natural Magic, the Cabala, Chemistry, the Talismanic Art, Hermetic operations of Natural Philosophy, Astrology, Physiognomy, & co, & co. Likewise they will acquire the knowledge of the Rites, Mysteries, Ceremonies, and Principles of the ancient Philosophers, Magi, Cabalists, Adepts, & co. – The purpose of this school (which will consist of no greater number than Twelve Students) [i.e. thirteen including Barrett] being to investigate the discovery of whatever may conduce to the perfection of Man; to bring the Mind to a contemplation of the Eternal Wisdom; to promote the discovery of both in respect of ourselves and others; the study of religion here, in order to secure to ourselves felicity hereafter; and finally, the promulgation of whatever may conduce to the general happiness and welfare of mankind.¹⁶

These were worthy aims indeed and, although couched in language of an earlier age, they are not dissimilar to those of us who teach the Mysteries today. The tide was turning.