The Rebirth of Witchcraft E-Book

Doreen Valiente

• Herausgeber: Robert Hale Non Fiction
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 427

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

This classic work is now available for the first time in paperback. Since 1951, when the last of the Witchcraft Acts was repealed, many books have been written about the reappearance of witchcraft and the development of a pagan theology. Churchmen have denounced it. Sociologists have wondered at it. Journalists have penned sensational stories about it. But until the publication of this book, no one had told the real story of it from the inside as frankly as it is told here. Doreen Valiente, one of witchcraft's most widely known figures, was a close friend of the late Gerald Gardner, generally regarded as the founder of present-day witchcraft. Initiated by him and for a time High Priestess of his coven, Doreen Valiente helped him rewrite his seminal Book of Shadows. She records the break with Gardner that split his coven, the controversy surrounding Alex Sanders, 'King of the Witches' and memories of many other witches whom she has known, including the lady called 'Dafo', Robert Cochrane, Leslie Roberts and Sybil Leek. Doreen Valiente took part in many witchcraft rituals and had strange psychic experiences as a result. Described here are the clairvoyant communications she received purporting to come from 'John Brakespeare', an eighteenth-century witch. The Rebirth of Witchcraft traces the lineage of the present-day witchcraft from its forerunners through to modern feminist neo-paganism and the new wave of interest in ecology and holistic medicine.

Leseprobe

TheRebirth ofWitchcraft

DOREEN VALIENTE

ROBERT HALE

First published in 1989 by Robert Hale, an imprint of

The Crowood Press Ltd, Ramsbury, Marlborough Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2017

Paperback edition 2007

© Doreen Valiente 1989

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 071982 693 1

The right of Doreen Valiente to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

List of illustrations

1Why Then?

2The Forerunners

3Gerald Gardner

4Working with Gerald

5Fleet Street Attacks

6Traditional Witchcraft?

7A Voice from the Past?

8Robert Cochrane, Magister

9Leslie Roberts, Investigator

10The Kingdom of Alex Sanders

11Feminist Witchcraft

12The Pickingill Material

13Into the Age of Aquarius

Night in the New Forest

Index

Illustrations

Between Chapters 4 and 5

1Portrait of the author in witch costume

2The witch’s cottage where Gardner’s coven met

3The Witches’ Mill and Museum, Castletown, Isle of Man

4Gerald Gardner

5Exhibits loaned by ‘The Southern Coven of British Witches’

6An equal-armed cross showing two naked female figures

7The Witches’ Memorial

8The Magician’s Room at Castletown

9The Witch’s Cottage at Castletown

10-11 Pages from Gerald Gardner’s original ‘Book of Shadows’

12A page from Gardner’s first draft of ‘Ye Booke of Ye Art Magical’

13The original dust-jacket of High Magic’s Aid

14A present-day male witch in full ceremonial regalia

Between Chapters 8 and 9

15Drawing down the Moon. A sketch by Gardner

16Initiation scenes from the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii

17The author standing by the tree stump known as the Naked Man

18A Sussex white witch at the Long Man of Wilmington

19The Goddess as the Spinner of Destiny

20The signs of John Brakespeare’s ritual knife

21‘Maddalena’, C.G. Leland’s Italian witch friend

22Drawing by C.G. Leland

23Implements of ceremonial magic

24‘The Wheel of Hecate’

25A witch’s shrine arranged by the author and representing the four elements

26Rosaleen Norton’s witch’s shrine

27Three different forms of the Horned God

PICTURE CREDITS

Ron Cooke: 1, 17. Nigel Holland, Brighton Evening Argus: 14. Jeff Overs, Brighton Evening Argus: 18. Doreen Valiente: 20, 23-5, 27. All other illustrations in the collection of the author. The author has made every effort to identify copyright holders and to obtain their permission but would be glad to hear of any inadvertent errors or omissions.

1Why Then?

If the average person were asked, ‘When was the last big witch trial in Britain?’, they would probably reply, ‘Oh, I suppose about two or three hundred years ago.’ They would be wrong. It took place at the Old Bailey in 1944. The accused was a Spiritualist medium, Helen Duncan. She was charged under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, found guilty after a trial which lasted for eight days and sentenced to nine months imprisonment.

The recorder’s summing-up of the case lasted nearly two hours, and in the course of it he is reported as saying: ‘If Mrs Duncan, by going into a trance or simulating a trance, pretended to hold communion with the spirits, that was the kind of conjuration which is referred to in the Witchcraft Act. The emphasis is on the word “pretend” and the offence, if there was an offence, began as soon as it was claimed to do that kind of thing.’

In spite of the recorder’s assurance that, ‘This prosecution does not involve any attack on Spiritualism’, it became very obvious throughout the trial that it did. Spiritualists found themselves in a situation in which they could not defend themselves from prosecution whenever the authorities chose to make a target of them. Saying that they were not ‘pretending’ but that their seances were genuine was no defence. Abundant evidence of that kind had been offered on behalf of Mrs Duncan. It had been brushed aside. Her offer to give a test seance had been refused. Evidently, the law was out to get her.

Why? Why was this middle-aged Scotswoman so obnoxious to the powers that be when, as the journalist Hannen Swaffer pointed out at the time, Lord Dowding, who had led the Air Force in the Battle of Britain, was an open supporter of Spiritualism and had spoken publicly about the seances he had attended? Why were other distinguished people who made no secret of their attendance at seances or their Spiritualist beliefs not put in the dock? Under the law as it stood, they were equally guilty.

The answer may lie in the words reported as being spoken by Chief Constable A.C. West of Portsmouth, where the seance that was raided by the police took place: ‘In 1941 Mrs Duncan was reported for having transgressed the security laws when she foretold the loss of one of His Majesty’s ships before the fact was made public. She is an unmitigated humbug and pest.’

According to the book The Two Worlds of Helen Duncan by her daughter Gena Brealey, it was in 1944, shortly before her arrest, that at one of Helen Duncan’s seances a young sailor had manifested and spoken to his mother, telling her that his ship, HMSBarham, had been sunk with a great loss of life. His mother protested that this could not be true or she would have been notified. ‘You will be, mother, three weeks from now,’ came the reply.

This prediction proved to be correct to the day. Mrs Duncan may have been a pest to the authorities, but she was evidently not a humbug.

However, times had changed since 1735, the date of the Act under which Helen Duncan was prosecuted. There were now bodies such as the Spiritualists’ National Union, who, as soon as Helen Duncan was released from prison, began to organize a campaign to get the law reformed. They issued a statement which included the words: ‘Helen Duncan was charged under an Act which is antiquated and obsolete. In the course of the case, rules relating to procedure and evidence were laid down which, in our view, render inevitable the conviction of any innocent person similarly placed.’ Even such journals as The Police Review and The Solicitor expressed disquiet about the implications of the verdict.

Eventually, after World War II had ended, sympathetic Members of Parliament agreed that the situation for Spiritualists and students of psychic and occult matters generally was intolerable in a free society. In June 1951 the Fraudulent Mediums Act became law, and the old Witchcraft Act was finally repealed. It was an historic moment. The new Act stated:

The following enactments are hereby repealed, that is to say –

(a) The Witchcraft Act, 1735, so far as still in force, and

(b) section four of the Vagrancy Act, 1824, so far as it extends to persons purporting to act as spiritualistic mediums or to exercise any powers of telepathy, clairvoyance or other similar powers, or to persons who, in purporting so to act or to exercise such powers, use fraudulent devices.

The only circumstances in which a prosecution could be brought under the new Act were those in which a deliberate fraud was perpetrated for gain. Even then, such proceedings could be brought only by or with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Act did not apply to anything done solely for the purpose of entertainment.

At long last, witches were free to practise and openly acknowledge the Old Religion. Whether or not the legislators realized this when they passed the Act is doubtful. It was generally believed that witchcraft, if it had ever really existed, was dead. Anyone who thought this, however, was rapidly to be undeceived.

On 29 July 1951 a popular newspaper, the Sunday Pictorial, carried a remarkable story by Allen Andrews with the headline ‘CALLING ALL COVENS’. It referred to the forthcoming opening of what was described as ‘The Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft’ founded by Mr Cecil H. Williamson at Castletown in the Isle of Man. The opening was to be performed by ‘the resident witch’ – one Dr Gerald B. Gardner, who was described as ‘a member of the Southern Coven of British Witches’.

Mr Williamson’s plans for a witchcraft centre at the old windmill in Castletown had first been noticed by the press back in April of that year, when the Sunday Pictorial published a story about it by Barrie Harding entitled: ‘HE PLANS A JAMBOREE FOR THE WITCHES OF THE WORLD.’ At that time, however, such a gathering of witches would, strictly speaking, have been illegal, as the new Act had not yet come into force; but by July all was different. Freedom had been gained.

According to the little brochure issued by Gerald Gardner at a later date, after he had taken over the Witches’ Mill from Mr Williamson:

The exact age of the old windmill at Castletown, Isle of Man, known as ‘The Witches’ Mill’, is uncertain; but we know that it was there in 1611, as it is mentioned in a court record of that date.

The Mill got its name because the famous Arbory witches lived close there, and the story goes that when the old mill was burned out in 1848 they used the ruins as a dancing-ground, for which, as visitors may see, it was eminently suited; being round inside to accommodate the witches’ circle, while the remains of the stone walls screened them from the wind and from prying eyes.

After being abandoned for many years, the large barns of the Mill were taken in 1950 to house the only Museum in the world devoted to Magic and Witchcraft … The only recorded execution of a witch in the Isle of Man took place within a short distance of the old Mill, when in 1617 Margaret Ine Quane and her young son were burned alive at the stake near the Market Cross in Castletown … A memorial to Margaret Ine Quane, and to the victims of the witch persecutions in Western Europe, whose total numbers have been estimated at nine millions, is in the Museum.

This account is a little disingenuous, as it does not mention Cecil Williamson at all. In fact, however, it was Mr Williamson who put up the memorial to the victims of the great witch persecutions, and it was from him that Gerald Gardner subsequently purchased the museum and its contents, although Gardner added his own collection to them.

According to the press stories, Cecil Williamson claimed to be on friendly terms with at least a dozen practising witches in Britain. When his preparations at the old mill in Castletown were complete, he was proposing to send out a call to a coven of witches somewhere in the south of England, inviting them to come and perform their rites there. One of these witches was a woman schoolteacher, another a Civil Servant. They were concerned solely with calling upon spirits who could bring good will and with carrying out rituals at certain times of the year which were connected with fertility. These rituals involved dancing in the nude.

Gerald Gardner was a retired Civil Servant, and his partner, a lady whose witch name was Dafo, was a schoolteacher; so it is evidently their coven that Mr Williamson was referring to. Evidently, also, the invitation was accepted, as we find Gerald Gardner performing the opening ceremony.

‘Of course I’m a witch,’ he told his interviewer. ‘And I get great fun out of it.’

This was a picture very different from people’s conceptions of witchcraft at that time. A witch who got fun out of it was something new. Witches were all supposed to be evil-doers who delighted in putting on spells and curses. They worshipped Satan and recited the Lord’s Prayer backwards. They flew on broomsticks. They crouched over bubbling cauldrons full of poisonous brews. And, of course, they had all been burned at the stake years ago, and serve them right. Whatever was happening now?

What was happening, as we now know, was the phenomenon of the rebirth of witchcraft in modern times, something which has now spread world-wide. But why did it happen then?

Society in the 1950s was very different from the way things are today. We had just come out of the darkness and horror of the Second World War. We had picked up the pieces and were starting again. Atomic power was a new and frightening development. But, at the same time, people had just fought a terrible combat for the preservation of liberty – or so they were told. The rather dangerous idea had entered many people’s heads that perhaps they were entitled to have some of this liberty they had heard so much about. The permissive society, however, was still a long way off in the future. People were very much what the sixties would describe as ‘uptight’.

This particularly applied to anything to do with the occult. The witch who, according to Gerald Gardner, had implored him not to publicize the coven he had discovered in the area of the New Forest, because ‘Witchcraft doesn’t pay for broken windows’, knew what she was talking about. Books on the occult were difficult to find. Even asking for them in shops earned one some odd looks. As for Tarot cards, outside London they were practically unobtainable. The same applied to crystal balls and other occult paraphernalia. The shops which specialize in selling such things today would have been unthinkable then. They would probably have been closed down by the police in their first week.

Feminism, too, had never been heard of in its modern sense. Women were supposed to be sweet, submissive and generally subservient to their male lords and masters – and to like it that way. If anyone had seriously suggested that one day Britain would have a woman Prime Minister, they would have been laughed at. Of course, women had shown courage and capability during the late war; but that was soon conveniently forgotten, as it had been after the First World War. They had grudgingly been given the vote; but any real change in their status or role in society was not even under consideration. Now suddenly we were hearing about a pagan cult which had priestesses!

Moreover, these people were not ashamed to tell reporters that at their ceremonies they danced in the nude – naked! The impact of this frightful revelation can hardly be understood by a generation which has become accustomed to page three of the popular newspapers, with its display of topless models. (The joke is that it was the predecessors of these very papers which were most vociferous in denouncing this shocking cult which was soon to be described as ‘sweeping the country’.)

Nudity was considered to be obscene. True, there were some dreadful people about called ‘nudists’, but no one would admit to knowing one, still less being one. And, of course, when it came to sex, nice girls not only didn’t, they weren’t even supposed to know how to. Now here was this strange man, Gerald Gardner, saying these awful things and, worse still, saying that they were fun! Religion wasn’t supposed to be fun. Everyone knew that.

People began to talk about these matters. Attention was directed to them as it had not been before. With the fear of the old Witchcraft Act lifted, holiday-makers flocked to the Isle of Man to see Cecil Williamson’s witchcraft museum. The popular magazine Illustrated, in its issue dated 27 September 1952, had a long article entitled ‘Witchcraft in Britain’. In it Mr Williamson gave many more details about the Old Religion of the witches. He told about the four Great Sabbats of Hallowe’en, Candlemas, May Eve and Lammas. He described the gods whom the witches worshipped – not Satan, but the oldest gods of all, the powers of fertility and death. And he revealed how, on the night of 1 August 1940, the Sabbat of Lammas, seventeen men and women had gathered in a clearing in the New Forest to raise a ‘cone of power’ to prevent Hitler from crossing the Channel and invading Britain.

There was one person who read that article with fascination. That person was myself. I wrote to Mr Williamson, who passed on my letter to Gerald Gardner – but that’s another story, to be told later. I have that old press cutting beside me as I write. It is strange to look again at something which changed one’s life.

Before this, however, another event had happened, in 1951. On 1 November that year (appropriately the day after Hallowe’en) a remarkable book had been published which attracted much comment. It was the first edition of The Great Beast, John Symonds’ biography of Aleister Crowley. Nothing like it had been published before. It was the story of a man often previously written about in the press and usually represented as a kind of human fiend, ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’ or ‘The King of Depravity’ being typical titles bestowed on him by journalists. In some quarters of the occult world, however, he was referred to with bated breath as ‘The Master Therion’ (the Great Beast) and regarded as the supreme magician of modern times. He himself revelled in both descriptions and is said to have been the author of the following limerick:

My name it is Aleister Crowley.

I’m master of magick unholy,

Of wand, sword and pentacle,

Coven, conventicle,

Nightshade and mandrake and moly.

Crowley had died in 1947, quite peacefully in a private hotel in Hastings at the age of seventy-two. He had been cremated at Brighton, where he had managed to raise one last scandal by having one of his friends, the novelist Louis Marlow, read Crowley’s ‘Hymn to Pan’ from the pulpit of the crematorium chapel instead of a Christian funeral service. His ashes were sent to his followers in America.

Most people thought he would soon be forgotten, a mere left-over from the days of the Roaring Twenties, as that rather flamboyant decade had come to be called before the shadow of a really wicked man, Adolf Hitler, had begun to fall over Europe. However, Crowley had taken the precaution of naming a very readable author, John Symonds, as his literary executor. Mr Symonds was neither an awe-stricken devotee nor a terrified believer in the powers of darkness. Hence he was well able to handle the material which he duly inherited and to produce a book which was the first real study of one of the most remarkable personalities of the twentieth century.

Here for the first time people could read the real-life story of a man who had believed in magic (or ‘Magick’ as he preferred to spell it) and who had lived his belief without any death-bed disillusion or repentance. Some readers were shocked, but many more were fascinated – and visitors to the Witches’ Mill in the Isle of Man looked with particular interest at the contents of one of the show-cases, which contained a charter granted by Aleister Crowley to Gerald Gardner to operate a lodge of Crowley’s magical fraternity, the Ordo Templi Orientis. This charter (which is now in the hands of a private collector in the USA) was mainly in Gerald Gardner’s handwriting, but it bore Crowley’s signature and a large seal.

It has been said, however, that nothing can stand in the way of an idea whose time has arrived. In 1951 there was a feeling of the immanence of a new era. We had entered upon the second half of the century. The next year was to see the beginning of a new reign, that of Queen Elizabeth II, when people began to talk about ‘the new Elizabethans’. Ideas which would not have got a hearing before were now ready to be given one. Books which would not have been published before, like The GreatBeast, were being read. Moreover, its readers were learning that the magical rituals conducted by Aleister Crowley and his followers were not mere senseless depravity. They had a purpose and a meaning. Behind them, moreover, were a theory and a technique which had been handed down over many years. ‘Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,’ said Crowley – a definition which at once removes it from the realm of superstition and folklore. Instead it becomes something living and relevant to the present day, something age-old and yet new and exciting. People felt this and wanted to know more.

These, then, were in my opinion the three factors which concurred in the year 1951 to begin the rebirth of witchcraft in modern times: firstly, the repeal of the Witchcraft Act; secondly, the opening of the Witches’ Mill at Castletown, Isle of Man; thirdly, the renewed interest in magic and the occult generally which was stirred up by the publication of John Symonds’ book The Great Beast. Three has from time immemorial been a magical number. The triangle is a symbol of manifestation and hence is drawn outside the circle of the magician in order to provide a place for the evoked spirit to manifest ‘unto visible appearance’, as the old rituals say. The visible appearance had begun; but there had been preparation for that appearance beforehand. By whom and in what way, we shall examine in the next chapter.

2The Forerunners

Coming events, they say, cast their shadows before them. The rebirth of witchcraft had been foreshadowed by the appearance of a number of writers on the subject who had something new to say about it. The lineage of modern witchcraft is traceable. Probably the first major influence in relatively modern times is that of Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903).

Leland was a splendid, larger-than-life character who was one of the great pioneers of the study of folklore. He was born in Philadelphia but travelled extensively and was equally at home in Germany, France, Britain and Italy. He could mix with Red Indians or gypsies as easily as with the learned savants who attended the International Folklore Congresses of Paris, London and Rome. His own life was an adventurous one. He was in Paris in 1848 and took an active part in the revolution of that year, when he was a romantic, swashbuckling young student at the Sorbonne. Later, in his own country, he saw more serious military service in the American Civil War and was present at the Battle of Gettysburg. After the war he went prospecting for oil in what was then very wild country in Tennessee. He wrote of this episode: ‘My war experience had made me reckless of life, and speculation was firing every heart.’ However, no great find of oil ensued, only further wanderings into what was then the Wild West, a meeting with the famous General Custer at Fort Harker and initiation into the tribe of the Kaw Indians. By this time he had found his real business in life as a writer and journalist. Leland’s book of comic verse, The Breitmann Ballads, made him famous; but he wrote prolifically upon many subjects. There are fifty-five entries in the bibliography of his published books. Those most relevant to the study of witchcraft are: Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling (1891), Etruscan-Roman Remains in PopularTradition (1893), Legends of Florence (1895-6), and Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899).

This last book has probably been the most influential and most remarkable of all his writings. How it came to be written is as follows, according to his own account and that of his biographer and niece, Elizabeth Robins Pennell. It was in 1888, when Charles Godfrey Leland was living with his wife Isabel in Florence, that:

He was initiated into the Witch-Lore of the Romagna, an initiation that was to bear fruit in a whole series of books … In his prowls about Florence he had met, by chance, a woman whom he always called Maddalena when he wrote of her, so that I hesitate to give her real name, and Maddalena she will remain … Among his manuscript notes I find a description of Maddalena as ‘a young woman who would have been taken for a Gypsy in England, but in whose face, in Italy, I soon learned to know the antique Etruscan, with its strange mysteries, to which was added the indefinable glance of the Witch. She was from the Romagna Toscana, born in the heart of its unsurpassingly wild and romantic scenery, amid cliffs, headlong torrents, forests and old legendary castles. I did not gather all the facts for a long time, but gradually found that she was of a witch family, or one whose members had, from time immemorial, told fortunes, repeated ancient legends, gathered incantations and learned how to intone them, prepared enchanted medicines, philtres or spells. As a girl, her witch grandmother, aunt, and especially her stepmother brought her up to believe in her destiny as a sorceress, and taught her in the forests, afar from human ear, to chant in strange prescribed tones, incantations or evocations to the ancient gods of Italy, under names but little changed, who are now known as folletti, spiriti, fate, or lari – the Lares or household goblins of the ancient Etruscans.’

Just what Leland’s relations with Maddalena were has been a subject of speculation among subsequent writers. He himself says that he became ‘intimately acquainted’ with her, a remark which has caused some to suggest that she was his mistress. However, Leland was in his sixties and happily married, nor is there any suggestion in his biography that he was ever a womanizer (though admittedly it was written by his devoted niece). I do not think that Leland intended by this phrase the implication that has been read into it. A study of his life and writings shows that he was fascinated by everything strange and unknown, by all the byways of human life and their inhabitants, such as gypsies, witches and vagabonds of all kinds and the colourful legends and beliefs they treasured up as traditional lore. This is what charmed him about Maddalena, while she in her turn was pleased to find an educated man who did not mock at her beliefs or try to convert her to his religion, but treasured the old lore as she did and wanted to record it, so that it should not be lost.

Leland himself says of the manuscript of Aradia: ‘So long ago as the year 1886 I learned that there was in existence a manuscript setting forth the doctrines of Italian witchcraft, and I was promised that, if possible, it should be obtained for me. In this I was for a time disappointed. But having urged it on Maddalena, my collector of folklore, while she was leading a wandering life in Tuscany, to make an effort to obtain or recover something of the kind, I at last received from her, on January 1st, 1897, from Colle, Val d’Elsa, near Siena, the MS. entitled Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches.’

The manuscript was in Maddalena’s handwriting. Leland says: ‘I do not know definitely whether my informant derived a part of these traditions from written sources or oral narration, but believe it was chiefly the latter … I have not seen my collector since the “Gospel” was sent to me. I hope at some future time to be better informed.’ However, it does not seem that he ever saw Maddalena again. By 1897 his health was failing, though his mind was as bright as ever. But he was no longer capable of the wanderings in search of strange things and unusual people that had been his delight. He saw Aradia and four other books appear in print, with another in the hands of the publisher, before his death in March 1903.

We have, therefore, to take Aradia as we find it, as recorded by Maddalena with Leland’s comments. Although Maddalena could read and write, she can have had little opportunity for education. Hence the manuscript is a strange and jumbled mixture – sometimes, indeed, one wonders if the jumbling is deliberate. Nevertheless, a picture emerges from it of an ancient and secret cult, La Vecchia Religione, ‘the Old Religion’, with its distinctive beliefs and practices, time-worn until it has become like some ruined building of olden days with its last remaining stones gilded by the setting sun.

The basic belief of this religion was that the first and most powerful deity was feminine – the goddess Diana. ‘Diana was the first created before all creation; in her were all things; out of herself, the first darkness, she divided herself; into darkness and light she was divided. Lucifer, her brother and son, herself and her other half, was the light.’ This might be called the key sentence of the whole teaching; and students of comparative religion will recognize at once its great antiquity, of much greater age than Christianity. Yet it was written down by a semi-literate Italian peasant woman at the end of the nineteenth century.

The word Lucifer is simply Latin for ‘light-bearer’. Yet it has evidently become confused with the Christian idea of Satan, represented as a rebel archangel who fell from Heaven. This concept is, I think, something that has become grafted on to a much older story. ‘The god of the old religion becomes the devil of the new.’ The Christian Devil, with his horns, hoofs and tail, is simply another version of the great and ancient god Pan, who in his turn was derived distantly from the old Horned God of the painted caves. He is the male element in nature, the principle of fire, the sun and the phallus. It will be seen how the two original principles of light and darkness in the witches’ legend correspond to the Chinese concept of the primordial Yang and Yin in the I Ching. They are also akin to Chokmah and Binah upon the Qabalistic Tree of Life.

The legend goes on to say that Diana had by her brother Lucifer ‘who had fallen’, a daughter whom she named Aradia. Pitying the sufferings of the poor and oppressed at the hands of their masters, she sent Aradia upon earth to be the first witch and to teach witchcraft to those who would learn, thus setting up a secret cult in opposition to Christianity. This represents witchcraft as the religion of the peasants, the pagani or country-folk, while the Christian Church of that day was quite definitely on the side of the feudal lords and the upper classes generally – the situation which actually existed in the Middle Ages.

Aradia told her followers that, after she had departed from this world, ‘once in the month, and when the moon is full’ they should hold a secret meeting to worship Diana. At this meeting both men and women should be naked, ‘as the sign that ye are truly free’. They should dance and sing and then extinguish the lights and make love in the darkness, ‘the game of Benevento’. This is the meeting which became known elsewhere in Europe as the Esbat, from the old French word s’esbattre, meaning ‘to frolic’.

At this merry meeting, a sacred meal was to be eaten consisting of cakes and wine. The cakes were to be made of flour, wine, salt and honey. All the ingredients were first to be consecrated, then mixed and formed into the shape of crescent moons and baked, with a final incantation to Diana. (At this point I think the text of the Witches’ Gospel has become jumbled, perhaps even deliberately ‘pied’, because the consecrations given also contain an old Italian nursery rhyme about the Queen of the Fireflies and a long conjuration to Cain, who is supposed to be imprisoned in the moon. This is a very old folk-tale, alluded to by Dante in his Divine Comedy, that the figure of a man carrying a bundle of sticks may be seen upon the face of the full moon. He is the original ‘Man in the Moon’ and is identified with Cain, though the story is probably pre-Christian.)

More legends and folk-magic follow, telling how to make charms for good luck and to avert the evil eye. The whole manuscript is a fascinating collection of scraps of folklore, evidently by different hands originally and from various sources, yet all with the same theme: La Vecchia Religione, the Old Religion, which evidently really is a religion and not merely a collection of superstitions. Its female Messiah, Aradia, is identified by Leland with Herodias, though in his book Etruscan-Roman Remains in Popular Tradition he suggests that there was an older Herodias, the counterpart of Lilith, the legendary first wife of Adam, after whom the Herodias of the New Testament, the wife of King Herod, was named. A church decree of the tenth century, attributed to the Council of Ancyra, mentions Diana and Herodias as the goddesses of the witches. Leland quotes Paulus Grillandus in his Treatise on Witches (1547) as saying that witches’ … think that Diana and Herodias are true goddesses, so deeply are they involved in the error of the pagans’.

Remarkable as Leland’s discoveries were, they created no great interest in 1899, the year in which Aradia was first published. The two great interests in occultism then were the Theosophical Society, with its emphasis on the wisdom of the East, and the Order of the Golden Dawn, which claimed descent from the Rosicrucians. The members of these fraternities were educated people of the leisured classes. The men were usually Freemasons. The ladies were cultured and artistic. They would not have mingled with gypsies on some wind-swept heath in the way Leland was accustomed to do. Moreover, they were extremely concerned to avoid the label of witchcraft being placed upon the occult sciences; and with good reason, in view of its illegality.

It was not until the twentieth century had begun and the world had seen the great and catastrophic changes brought about by the First World War that a society very different from that of Leland’s day was shown a new concept of the real meaning of witchcraft. It came from the pen of a remarkable woman, Margaret Alice Murray of University College, London. Dr Murray’s main career was that of an Egyptologist, and her interest in witchcraft was really a sideline. She happened to be staying at Glastonbury when someone – she never revealed who – suggested to her that witchcraft was really the remains of a pre-Christian religion concerned with fertility. Dr Murray was intrigued by this idea from the point of view of her other great interest, anthropology. She began to examine the evidence and in 1921 published a book which stirred up a good deal of controversy. It was called The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.

In brief, Dr Murray discarded all the old notions which had identified witchcraft with Satanism and devil-worship. Instead, she referred to witchcraft as the Dianic cult, pointing out that the name Diana was found throughout Western Europe as being that of the female deity of the witches. Curiously enough, however, she does not mention Leland’s works but goes further back to the early Church decree attributed to a General Council of Ancyra (sometimes called the Canon Episcopi) which eventually became a part of the Church’s Canon Law. Its actual date is doubtful, but for many years it represented the Church’s official teaching about witchcraft. It seems to have been first published circa AD 906 and refers to the heretical beliefs of ‘certain wicked women’ who were deluded by Satan into believing that on certain nights they rode through the sky with Diana, the goddess of pagans, whom they worshipped and obeyed as their mistress. Later, the name of Herodias was added to that of Diana.

This old piece of Canon Law shows two things. Firstly, that the deity of the witches was not Satan but Diana and later her daughter Herodias, probably a younger version of herself. Secondly, that there were certain fixed festivals of the witch religion. Dr Murray quoted these as May Eve and November Eve and what she called ‘the cross-quarter-days’, 2 February and 1 August. These dates are known to us as Walpurgis Night (30 April) and Hallowe’en (31 October), both traditionally associated with the festivals of witches. The other two days are Candlemas (2 February) and Lammas (1 August). May Eve is also known as Beltane, from Celtic words meaning ‘bright fire’, as it was traditionally celebrated with bonfires, though this name is also given to Midsummer in Celtic countries for the same reason. Present-day witches observe all four of these ritual occasions as their Great Sabbats.

The witch traditions of Italy as recorded by Charles Godfrey Leland say nothing about these four Great Sabbats, recording only the full moon meetings. These meetings are also referred to by Margaret Murray, who calls them Esbats. She regarded them as being the small meetings of the local coven, whereas the Sabbats might be the occasion of a gathering of several covens. However, she does not mention any connection between the Esbat and the full moon, seeming to regard them as being held at any time that suited the witches.

The main emphasis of Dr Murray’s book was on the importance in the cult of the idea of the periodic sacrifice of a human representative of the witches’ god. The male leader of the coven was regarded as being such a representative. On the occasion of the Great Sabbats he appeared before his followers dressed in his ‘grand array’ of animal skins and a horned helmet or mask, recalling the very ancient pictures found in the painted caves of the Stone Age. Dr Murray later developed this theme further in her subsequent book The God of the Witches (1931).

This suggestion that the ‘Devil’ who was supposed to appear in person at the witches’ Sabbats was really a man in a ritual disguise was one of the pointers given to Dr Murray by her unknown informant at Glastonbury. It proved to be a key which unlocked the door of the whole mystery. The Christians called him the Devil and the witches seem eventually to have accepted this term also. It is notable in this connection that the Romany gypsy word for God is Devel or Duvel, according to the gypsy expert George Borrow, who compares it with the Sanskrit Deva, meaning ‘God’. Chambers’ Twentieth Century Dictionary derives our word ‘deity’ from the Latin Deus and the Sanskrit Deva. The latter word is given as meaning ‘a shining one, a god’. We recall Lucifer, the consort of Diana, in Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches.

The sacrifice of the Divine King, or human representative of the god of a particular cult, was a theme much written about by anthropologists ever since Sir James Frazer’s great work The Golden Bough. It had long been recognized that the stories of the death of such divine figures as Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis were myths of such ritual slayings, which were believed in more ancient and barbaric times to renew the life-power and fertility of the earth. It had even been daringly (for those days) suggested that the story of the crucifixion of Jesus was also the story of the ritual death of the god-man. In 1925 the distinguished Masonic writer J.S.M. Ward, presented in his intriguing and now rare book Who was Hiram Abiff? the idea that the central figure of the Masonic legend about the murdered Master Mason was also derived from this primordial ritual of human sacrifice.

However, when Dr Murray suggested that the deaths of actual historical personages such as Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais and (later, in The God of the Witches) the English king William Rufus were examples of such sacrificial killings, the reaction was mainly one of derision and outrage. In 1954, she developed this theme even further in her last book on the subject, The Divine King in England. In this she suggested that the tradition of periodic sacrifice, derived from the old religion of the witch cult, had continued in the English royal family down to about the time of James I. This, she believed, was the real explanation for many episodes in English history; for instance, the death of Thomas à Becket, who had died as a substitute for the king himself.

Another suggestion that aroused much controversy and opposition was Dr Murray’s idea that the witch cult in Britain was organized into covens of thirteen people, the traditional ‘devil’s dozen’. This, it seemed, might well be the real reason for the superstitious dread of the number thirteen. The number was actually twelve persons and their leader. This was not, as had been suggested before, a mockery of Jesus and his twelve disciples. The peculiar sacredness of the number thirteen was pre-Christian. Just why Dr Murray’s insistence that the witch cult was organized, however fragmented such organization may have become in later years, should have aroused the ire of other scholars to such an extent is hard to see. She gives a number of historical instances of groups of thirteen people in the history of British witchcraft. But, of course, organization implies the possibility of survival. Perhaps people found this disturbing.

Another sidelight on the argument is provided by a comment made by Richard Deacon in his book Matthew Hopkins: Witch Finder General: ‘But while it is doubtful whether witchcraft in East Anglia, or in most other parts of England, was ever as organised as Dr Margaret Murray suggests, it is equally certain that the negative attitude of some of her critics is too dogmatic and lacking in imagination. The truth is that Dr Murray’s anthropological and sensitive approach to the subject, allied to some genuine “field-work", caused some jealousy among her male colleagues in the academic sphere.’

The next major influence upon the revival of interest in British witchcraft, after Margaret Murray, was the 1946 publication of a strange and fascinating book by the poet Robert Graves, called The White Goddess. Since its first publication amended and enlarged editions have appeared to satisfy the considerable interest it aroused; an interest which seems rather unusual for what its author described as ‘A historical grammar of poetic myth’. It does not sound like an epoch-making book, but it was.

In this book, Robert Graves’ main contention is that the original deity worshipped in Europe and the countries around the Mediterranean was not a god but a goddess. She was the goddess of the moon and of poetry; hence the language of poetic myth was originally hers. The original poetic theme was the story of the birth, life, death and rebirth of the god of the waxing year, the sun in springtime, who contended with his brother, the god of the waning year, the power of darkness, for the love of the great goddess of nature who was at once their mother, their bride and she who received them in death, bringing them in turn to rebirth again. The goddess was personified as appearing in triple form like the moon which represented her in the sky. She was the young maiden of the new moon, the glorious lady of the full moon and the wise old crone of the waning moon. The evidence given in a Scottish witch trial in 1597, which Graves quotes, described her very well, though it actually refers to her human representative, the Queen of Elphen, who had ‘a grip of all the craft’. In other words, she was the female leader of the coven, the high priestess, and the record says of her: ‘The queen is very pleasant and will be old and young when she pleases; she makes any king whom she pleases and lies with any she likes.’

This is, in fact, the description of the free, independent woman so detested by patriarchal morality throughout the ages, right back to the Sumerian goddess Lilith who became in Jewish legend the she-devil who was the first wife of Adam and left him because she refused to obey him. It is not the ‘liberated’ woman, because women had not yet been enslaved. The archetypal Great Goddess reigned before any male gods were recognized. The subsequent history of religious thought, as Robert Graves made clear in his book, is that of the take-over by patriarchy as humanity became more and more warlike and less devoted to being at peace with nature.

Throughout the book, Graves accepts the witch cult as being the remains of the primitive goddess-worshipping religion, just as Margaret Murray did. It will be remembered that she described witchcraft as ‘the Dianic cult’. Like Margaret Murray also, he recognizes the part played in primitive society (and in some societies which were not so primitive) by the sacrifice of the god’s representative, the Divine King.

Graves traces the origin of the witches’ magical number thirteen to the fact that there are thirteen lunar months of twenty-eight days each to a solar year, with one day over. Hence there are roughly thirteen full moons to each year and thus thirteen full moon Esbats. Twenty-eight is the usual number of days in a woman’s menstrual cycle, which in olden times was regarded as sacred rather than ‘unclean’ as it later became under the rule of patriarchal religion. In primitive thought, women, menstruation and the moon were linked together in a subtle, magical manner. The word ‘menstruation’, is derived from the Greek mene, the moon.

The way in which Robert Graves came to write this book, according to him, was unusual. It took the form of ‘a sudden overwhelming obsession’ which compelled him to suspend work on the historical novel he had set out to write, in favour of discovering the inner meaning of a mysterious old Welsh poem called The Battle of the Trees. In three weeks, he tells us, he had written a 70,000-word book, called at first The Roebuck in the Thicket but which eventually became The White Goddess. His mind worked so furiously, he says, under the influence of this inspiration, that his pen could scarcely keep pace with it. There seems to be something here involving psychic powers, although Graves assures his readers: ‘I am no mystic: I avoid participation in witchcraft, spiritualism, yoga, fortune-telling, automatic writing and the like … I belong to no religious cult, no secret society, no philosophical sect.’

This happened in 1944, when Graves was living in the Devonshire village of Galmpton, instead of his usual residence in Majorca, which he had left on account of the war. It seems to have been a place where witchcraft traditions still lingered, because in the book Graves refers to the powers of the black rod made of blackthorn wood which was carried as a walking-stick by local witches. One wonders about the possibility of a poet’s sensitivity tuning in, without his conscious realization, to the lingering psychic traces of the Old Religion in Devonshire.

While public attention was being drawn to the survival of the Old Religion by writers such as Robert Graves, Margaret Murray and Charles Godfrey Leland, something secret and magical was going on in certain private circles. These were the occult fraternities which had derived their existence from the Order of the Golden Dawn, already referred to. The most influential of these was that which was founded by Violet Firth, later known as Mrs Penry-Evans and still better known by her pen-name, Dion Fortune. Her magical order was called the Fraternity of the Inner Light. Founded in 1927, it still exists, although after Dion Fortune’s death in 1946 it became ‘under new management’ and nowadays bears little resemblance to what it was in the days of its founder.

In recent years, a good deal more has become known about Dion Fortune and her fraternity, now called the Society of the Inner Light. Two biographies of her have recently been published: Priestess: The Life and Magic of Dion Fortune, by Alan Richardson (1987) and The Story of Dion Fortune, as Told to Charles Fielding and Carr Collins (1985). Alan Richardson has also edited and published a remarkable book of great importance in understanding the working of a real magical fraternity, entitled Dancers to the Gods: The Magical Records of Charles Seymour and Christine Hartley, 1937-1939 (1985).

From these books we have been able to learn what really went on behind the closed doors of an occult order which was devoted to a potent form of white magic and which believed itself to be in touch with the group soul of the British nation. The members of the Fraternity of the Inner Light also believed themselves to be guided by a number of powerful discarnate entities, whom they regarded as ‘Masters’ dwelling upon the Inner Planes and taking a benevolent interest in the progress of humanity. These, however, were not the mysterious Oriental adepts beloved of the Theosophical Society but such known historical personages as Thomas More and Lord Eldon, who had been Chancellor of England in the reign of George III and George IV.

The question of the reality of guidance by ‘Masters’ and of who or what such ‘Masters’ really are is still a very vexed one among occultists. I do not propose to go into it here, though I cannot refrain from recalling how in my early days as a student of the occult I rendered myself persona non grata to a Theosophical group by asking why they were all Masters – why weren’t there any Mistresses? I regret that I have never yet received a satisfactory answer to this question, though I find it hard to believe that sexism exists upon the Inner Planes.