History of Witchcraft
A TRUE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT by Allen Greenfield
“The fact is that the instincts of ignorant people invariably
find expression in some form of witchcraft. It matters little
what the metaphysician or the moralist may inculcate; the animal
sticks to his subconscious ideas…”
Aleister Crowley
The Confessions
“As attunement to psychic (occult) reality has grown in
America, one often misunderstood and secretive branch of it has
begun to flourish also — magical religion…”
J. Gordon Melton
Institute for the Study of
American Religion, Green Egg, 1975
“Curse them! Curse them! Curse them!
With my Hawk’s head I peck at the eyes of
Jesus as he hangs upon the cross
I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed &
blind him
With my claws I tear out the flesh of the
Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol and
Din…”
Liber Al Vel Legis 3:50 – 53
“If you are on the Path, and see the Buddha walking towards
you, kill him.”
Zen saying, paraphrased slightly
“Previously I never thought of doubting that there were many
witches in the world; now, however, when I examine the public
record, I find myself believing that there are hardly any…”
Father Friedrich von Spee, S.J. , Cautio Criminalis, 1631
Having spent the day musing over the origins of the modern
witchcraft, I had a vivid dream. It seemed to be a cold January
afternoon, and Aleister Crowley was having Gerald Gardner over
to tea. It was 1945, and talk of an early end to the war was
in the air. An atmosphere of optimism prevailed in the “free
world” , but the wheezing old magus was having none of it.
“Nobody is interested in magick any more!” Crowley ejaculated.
“My friends on the Continent are dead or in exile, or grown old;
the movement in America is in shambles. I’ve seen my best
candidates turn against me….Achad, Regardie — even that
gentleman out in California, what’s – his – name, AMORC, the
one that made all the money..”
“O, bosh, Crowley,” Gardner waved his hand impatiently, “all
things considered, you’ve done pretty well for yourself. Why, you’ve
been called the `wickedest man in the world’ and by more than a
few. And you’ve not, if you’ll pardon the impertinence, done
too badly with the ladies.”
Crowley coughed, tugged on his pipe reflectively. “You know” he
finally ventured, “it’s like I’ve been trying to tell this
fellow Grant. A restrictive Order is not enough. If I had it
all to do over again, I would’ve built a religion for the
unwashed masses instead of just a secret society. Why, the
opportunities! The women!”
Gardner smiled. “Precisely. And that is what I have come to
propose to you. Take your BOOK OF THE LAW, your GNOSTIC MASS.
Add a little razzle-dazzle for the country folk. Why I know
these occultists who call themselves `witches’. They dance
around fires naked, get drunk, have a good time. Rosicrucians,
I think. Proper English country squires and dames, mostly; I
think they read a lot of Frazier and Margaret Murray. If I could
persuade you to draw on your long experience and talents, in no
time at all we could invent a popular cult that would have
beautiful ladies clamoring to let us strip them naked, tie them
up and spank their behinds! If, Mr. Crowley, you’ll excuse my
explicitness.”
For all his infirmity, Aleister Crowley almost sprang to his
feet, a little of the old energy flashing through his loins. “By
George, Gardner, you’ve got something there, I should think! I
could license you to initiate people into the O.T.O. today, and
you could form the nucleus of such a group!” He paced in
agitation. “Yes, yes,” he mused, half to Gardner, half to
himself. “The Book. The Mass. I could write some rituals. An
`ancient book’ of magick. A `book of shadows’. Priestesses,
naked girls. Yes. By Jove, yes!”
Great story, but merely a dream , created out of bits and
pieces of rumor, history and imagination. Don’t be surprised,
though, if a year or five years from now you read it as
“gospel” (which is an ironic synonym for `truth’) in some new
learned text on the fabled history of Wicca. Such is the way
all mythologies come into being.
Please don’t misunderstand me here; I use the word `mythology’
in this context in its aboriginal meaning, and with considerable
respect. History is more metaphor than factual accounting at
best, and there are myths by which we live and others by which
we die. Myths are the dreams and visions which parallel
objective history. This entire work is, in fact, an attempt to
approximate history.
To arrive at some perspective on what the modern mythos called,
variously, “Wicca”, the “Old Religion”, “Witchcraft” and
“Neopaganism” is, we must firstly make a firm distinction;
“witchcraft” in the popular informally defined sense may have
little to do with the modern religion that goes by the same
name. It has been argued by defenders of and formal apologists
for modern Wicca that it is a direct lineal descendent of an
ancient, indeed, prehistoric worldwide folk religion.
Some proponents hedge their claims, calling Wicca a “revival”
rather than a continuation of an ancient cult. Oddly enough,
there may never have been any such cult! The first time I met
someone who thought she was a “witch,” she started going on
about being a “blue of the cloak.” I should’ve been warned
right then and there. In fact, as time has passed and the
religion has spread, the claims of lineal continuity have
tended to be hedged more and more. Thus, we find Dr.
Gardner himself, in 1954, stating unambiguously that some
witches are descendants “… of a line of priests and
priestesses of an old and probably Stone Age religion, who have
been initiated in a certain way (received into the circle) and
become the recipients of certain ancient learning.” (Gardner,
WITCHCRAFT TODAY, pp 33-34.)
Stated in its most extreme form, Wicca may be defined as an
ancient pagan religious system of beliefs and practices, with a
form of apostolic succession (that is, with knowledge and
ordination handed on lineally from generation to generation), a
more or less consistent set of rites and myths, and even a
secret holy book of considerable antiquity (The Book of
Shadows).
More recent writers, as we have noted, have hedged a good deal
on these claims, particularly the latter. Thus we find Stewart
Farrar in 1971 musing on the purported ancient text thusly:
“Whether, therefore, the whole of the Book of Shadows is post-
1897 is anyone’s guess. Mine is that, like the Bible, it is a
patchwork of periods and sources, and that since it is copied
and re-copied by hand, it includes amendments, additions, and
stylistic alterations according to the taste of a succession of
copiers…Parts of it I sense to be genuinely old; other parts
suggest modern interpolation…” (Farrar, WHAT WITCHES DO, pp
34-35.) As we shall discover presently, there appear to be no
genuinely old copies of the Book of Shadows.
Still, as to the mythos, Farrar informs us that the “two
personifications of witchcraft are the Horned God and the Mother
Goddess…” (ibid, p 29) and that the “Horned God is not the
Devil, and never has been. If today `Satanist’ covens do exist,
they are not witches but a sick fringe, delayed-reaction
victims of a centuries-old Church propaganda in which even
intelligent Christians no longer believe…” (ibid, p 32).
One could protest:, “Very well, some case might be made for
the Horned God being mistaken for the Christian Devil (or should
that be the other way around?), but what record, prior to the
advent 50 years ago of modern Wicca via Gerald Gardner, do we
have of the survival of a mother goddess image from ancient
times?”
Wiccan apologists frequently refer to the (apparently
isolated) tenth century church document which states that “some
wicked women, perverted by the Devil, seduced by the illusions
and phantasms of demons, believe and profess themselves in the
hours of the night to ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the
goddess of pagans, or with Herodias, and an innumerable
multitude of women, and in the silence of the dead of night to
traverse great spaces of earth, and to obey her commands as of
their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on certain
nights.” (Quoted in Valiente, WITCHCRAFT FOR TOMORROW, Hale,
1978, p 32.) I do not doubt that bits of pagan folklore survived
on the Continent through the first millenium — Northern Europe
remained overtly pagan until the High Middle Ages. But what has
this to do with Wicca?
Farrar, for his part, explains the lack of references to a
goddess in the testimony at the infamous witch trials by
asserting that “the judges ignored the Goddess, being
preoccupied with the Satan-image of the God..” (WHAT WITCHES DO,
p 33). But it is the evidence of that reign of terror which
lasted from roughly 1484 to 1692 which brings the whole idea of
a surviving religious cult into question. It is now the
conventional wisdom on the witchburning mania which swept like a
plague over much of Europe during the transition from medieval
world to modern that it was JUST that; a mania, a delusion in the
minds of Christian clergymen and state authorities; that is, there
were no witches, only the innocent victims of the witch hunt.
Further, this humanist argument goes, the `witchcraft’ of
Satanic worship, broomstick riding, of Sabbats and Devil-marks,
was a rather late invention, borrowing but little from
remaining memories of actual preChristian paganism. We have
seen a resurrection of this mania in the 1980s flurry over
`Satanic sacrificial’ cults, with as little evidence.
“The concept of the heresy of witchcraft was frankly regarded
as a new invention, both by the theologians and by the public,”
writes Dr. Rossell Hope Robbins in THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
WITCHCRAFT & DEMONOLOGY, (Crown, 1959, p.9)”Having to hurdle an
early church law, the Canon Episcopi, which said in effect that
belief in witchcraft was superstitious and heretical, the
inquisitors cavilled by arguing that the witchcraft of the Canon
Episcopi and the witchcraft of the Inquisition were
different…”
The evidence extracted under the most gruesome and repeated
tortures resemble the Wiccan religion of today in only the most
cursory fashion. Though Wicca may have been framed with the
“confessions” extracted by victims of the inquisitors in mind,
those “confessions” — which are more than suspect, to begin
with, bespeak a cult of devil worshipers dedicated to evil.
One need only read a few of the accounts of the time to
realize that, had there been at the time a religion of the
Goddess and God, of seasonal circles and The Book of Shadows,
such would likely have been blurted out by the victims, and more
than once. The agonies of the accused were, almost literally,
beyond the imagination of those of us who have been fortunate
enough to escape them.
The witch mania went perhaps unequaled in the annals of crimes
against humanity en masse until the Hitlerian brutality of our
own century. But, no such confessions were forthcoming, though
the wretches accused, before the torture was done, would also be
compelled to condemn their own parents, spouses, loved ones,
even children. They confessed, and to anything the inquisitors
wished, anything to stop or reduce the pain.
A Priest, probably at risk to his own life, recorded testimony
in the 1600s that reflected the reality underlying the forced
“confessions” of “witches”. Rev. Michael Stapirius records, for
example, this comment from one “confessed witch”: “I never
dreamed that by means of the torture a person could be brought
to the point of telling such lies as I have told. I am not a
witch, and I have never seen the devil, and still I had to
plead guilty myself and denounce others….” All but one copy
of Father Stapirius’ book were destroyed, and little wonder.
A letter smuggled from a German burgomaster, Johannes Junius,
to his daughter in 1628, is as telling as it is painful even to
read. His hands had been virtually destroyed in the torture,
and he wrote only with great agony and no hope. “When at last
the executioner led me back to the cell, he said to me, `Sir, I
beg you, for God’s sake, confess something, whether it be true
or not. Invent something, for you cannot endure the torture
which you will be put to; and, even if you bear it all, yet you
will not escape, not even if you were an earl, but one torture
will follow another until you say you are a witch. Not before
that,’ he said, `will they let you go, as you may see by all
their trials, for one is just like another…’ ” (ibid, pp 12-13)
For the graspers at straws, we may find an occasional line in a
“confession” which is intriguing, as in the notations on the
“confession” of one woman from Germany dated in late 1637.
After days of unspeakable torment, wherein the woman confesses
under pain, recants when the pain is removed, only to be moved
by more pain to confess again, she is asked: “How did she
influence the weather? She does not know what to say and can
only whisper, Oh, Heavenly Queen, protect me!”
Was the victim calling upon “the goddess”? Or, as seems more
likely, upon that aforementioned transfiguration of all ancient
goddesses in Christian mythology, the Virgin Mary. One more
quote from Dr. Robbins, and I will cease to parade late medieval
history before you.
It comes from yet another priest, Father Cornelius Loos, who
observed, in 1592 that “Wretched creatures are compelled by the
severity of the torture to confess things they have never done,
and so by cruel butchery innocent lives are taken…..” (ibid,
p 16). The “evidence” of the witch trials indicates, on the
whole, neither the Satanism the church and state would have us
believe, nor the pagan survivals now claimed by modern Wicca;
rather, they suggest only fear, greed, human brutality carried
out to bizarre extremes that have few parallels in all of
history. But, the brutality is not that of `witches’ nor even of
`Satanists’ but rather that of the Christian Church, and the
government.
What, then, are we to make of modern Wicca? It must, of
course, be observed as an aside that in a sense witchcraft or
“wisecraft” has, indeed, been with us from the dawn of time,
not as a coherent religion or set of practices and beliefs, but
as the folk magic and medicine that stretches back to early,
possibly paleolithic tribal shamans on to modern China’s socalled
“barefoot doctors”.
In another sense, we can also say that ceremonial magick, as I
have previously noted, has had a place in history for a very
long time, and both these ancient systems of belief and practice
have intermingled in the lore of modern Wicca, as apologists are
quick to claim.
But, to an extent, this misses the point and skirts an
essential question anyone has the right to ask about modern
Wicca — namely, did Wicca exist as a coherent creed, a
distinct form of spiritual expression, prior to the 1940s; that
is, prior to the meeting of minds between the old magus and
venerable prophet of the occult world Aleister Crowley, and the
first popularizer, if not outright inventor of modern Wicca,
Gerald Brosseau Gardner?
There is certainly no doubt that bits and pieces of ancient
paganism survived into modern times in folklore and, for that
matter, in the very practices and beliefs of Christianity.
Further, there appears to be some evidence that `Old George’
Pickingill and others were practicing some form of folk magick
as early as the latter part of the last century, though even
this has recently been brought into question. Wiccan writers
have made much of this in the past, but just what `Old George’
was into is subject to much debate.
Doreen Valiente, an astute Wiccan writer and one-time intimate
of the late Dr. Gardner (and, in fact, the author of some
rituals now thought by others to be of “ancient origin”), says of Pickingill that so “fierce was `Old George’s dislike of Christianity
that he would even collaborate with avowed Satanists…”
(TOMORROW, p 20). What George Pickingill was doing is simply not clear.
He is said to have had some interaction with a host of figures
in the occult revival of the late nineteenth century, including
perhaps even Crowley and his friend Bennett. It seems possible
that Gardner, about the time of meeting Crowley, had some
involvement with groups stemming from Pickingill’s earlier
activities, but it is only AFTER Crowley and Gardner meet that
we begin to see anything resembling the modern spiritual
communion that has become known as Wicca.
“Witches,” wrote Gardner in 1954, “are consummate leg-pullers;
they are taught it as part of their stock-in-trade.” (WITCHCRAFT
TODAY, p 27) Modern apologists both for Aleister Crowley AND
Gerald Gardner have taken on such serious tones as well as
pretensions that they may be missing places where tongues are
firmly jutting against cheeks.
Both men were believers in fleshly fulfillment, not only as an
end in itself but, as in the Tantric Yoga of the East, as a
means of spiritual attainment. A certain prudishness has crept
into the practices of postGardnarian Wiccans, especially in
America since the 1960s, along with a certain feminist
revisionism. This has succeeded to a considerable extent in
converting a libertine sex cult into a rather staid
neopuritanism.
The original Gardnarian current is still well enough known and
widely enough in vogue (in Britain and Ireland especially) that
one can venture to assert that what Gardnerian Wicca is all
about is the same thing Crowley was attempting with a more
narrow, more intellectual constituency in the magickal orders
under his direct influence.
These Orders had flourished for some time, but by the time
Crowley ` officially’ met Gardner in the 1940s, much of
the former’s lifelong efforts had, if not totally disintegrated,
at least were then operating at a diminished and diminishing level.
Through his long and fascinating career as magus and
organizer, there is some reason to believe that Crowley
periodically may have wished for, or even attempted to create a
more populist expression of magickal religion. The Gnostic Mass,
which Crowley wrote fairly early-on, had come since his death
to somewhat fill this function through the OTO-connected Gnostic
Catholic Church (EGC).
As we shall see momentarily, one of Crowley’s key followers
was publishing manifestos forecasting the revival of witchcraft
at the same time Gardner was being chartered by Crowley to
organize an OTO encampment. The OTO itself, since Crowley’s
time, has taken on a more popular image, and is more targeted
towards international organizational efforts, thanks largely to
the work under the Caliphate of the late Grady McMurtry. This
contrasts sharply with the very internalized OTO that barely
survived during the McCarthy Era, when the late Karl Germer was
in charge, and the OTO turned inward for two decades.
The famous Ancient and Mystic Order of the Rose Cross
(AMORC), the highly successful mail-order spiritual fellowship,
was an OTO offspring in Crowley’s time. It has been claimed
that Kenneth Grant and Aleister Crowley were discussing relatively
radical changes in the Ordo Templi Orientis at approximately the
same time that Gardner and Crowley were interactive.
Though Wiccan writers give some lip service (and, no doubt,
some sincere credence) to the notion that the validity of Wiccan
ideas depends not upon its lineage, but rather upon its
workability, the suggestion that Wicca is — or, at least,
started out to be, essentially a late attempt at popularizing
the secrets of ritual and sexual magick Crowley promulgated
through the OTO and his writings, seems to evoke nervousness, if
not hostility.
We hear from wiccan writer and leader Raymond Buckland that
one “of the suggestions made is that Aleister Crowley wrote the
rituals…but no convincing evidence has been presented to back
this assertion and, to my mind, it seems extremely unlikely…”
(Gardner, ibid, introduction) The Wiccan rituals I have seen DO
have much of Crowley in them. Yet, as we shall observe
presently, the explanation that `Crowley wrote the rituals for
Gardner’ turns out to be somewhat in error. But it is on the
right track.
Doreen Valiente attempts to invoke Crowley’s alleged infirmity
at the time of his acquaintance with Gardner:
“It has been stated by Francis King in his RITUAL MAGIC IN
ENGLAND that Aleister Crowley was paid by Gerald Gardner to
write the rituals of Gardner’s new witch cult…Now, Gerald
Gardner never met Aleister Crowley until the very last years of
the latter’s life, when he was a feeble old man living at a
private hotel in Hastings, being kept alive by injections of
drugs… If, therefore, Crowley really invented these rituals in
their entirety, they must be about the last thing he ever wrote.
Was this enfeebled and practically dying man really capable of
such a tour de force?”
The answer, as Dr. Israel Regardie’s introduction to the
posthumous collection of Crowley’s late letters, MAGICK WITHOUT
TEARS, implies, would seem to be yes. Crowley continued to
produce extraordinary material almost to the end of his life,
and much of what I have seen of the “Wiccan Crowley” is, in any
case, of earlier origin.
Gerald Gardner is himself not altogether silent on the subject.
In WITCHCRAFT TODAY (p 47), Gardner asks himself, with what
degree of irony one can only guess at, who, in modern times,
could have invented the Wiccan rituals. “The only man I can
think of who could have invented the rites,” he offers, “was
the late Aleister Crowley….possibly he borrowed things from
the cult writings, or more likely someone may have borrowed
expressions from him….” A few legs may be being pulled here,
and perhaps more than a few.
As a prophet ahead of his time, as a poet and dreamer,
Crowley is one of the outstanding figures of the twentieth (or
any) century. As an organizer, he was almost as much of a
disaster as he was at managing his own finances…and personal
life. As I understand the liberatory nature of the magical
path, one would do well to see the difference between Crowley
the prophet of Thelema and Crowley the insolvent and inept
administrator.
Crowley very much lacked the common touch; Gardner was above
all things a popularizer. Both men have been reviled as
lecherous “dirty old men” — Crowley, as a seducer of women and
a homosexual, a drug addict and `satanist’ rolled together.
Gardner was, they would have it, a voyeur, exhibitionist and
bondage freak with a `penchant for ritual’ to borrow a line from
THE STORY OF O. Both were, in reality, spiritual libertines,
ceremonial magicians who did not shy away from the awesome force
of human sexuality and its potential for spiritual
transformation as well as physical gratification.
I will not say with finality at this point whether Wicca is an
outright invention of these two divine con-men. If so, more
power to them, and to those who truly follow in their path. I
do know that, around 1945, Crowley chartered Gardner, an initiate
of the Ordo Templi Orientis, giving him license to organize an
OTO encampment.
Shortly thereafter, the public face of Wicca came into view,
and that is what I know of the matter: I presently have in my
possession Gardner’s certificate of license to organize said
OTO camp, signed and sealed by Aleister Crowley. The
certificate and its import are examined in connection with my
personal search for the original Book of Shadows in the next
section of this narrative.
For now, though, let us note in the years since Crowley
licensed Gardner to organize a magical encampment, Wicca has
both grown in popularity and become, to my mind, something far
less REAL than either Gardner or Crowley could have wanted or
foreseen. Wherever they came from, the rites and practices which
came from or through Gerald Gardner were strong, and tapped
into that archetypal reality, that level of consciousness
beneath the mask of polite society and conventional wisdom which
is the function of True Magick.
At a popular level, this was the Tantric sex magick of the
West. Whether this primordial access has been lost to us will
depend on the awareness, the awakening or lack thereof among
practitioners of the near to middle-near future. Carried to its
end Gardnerian practices, like Crowley’s magick, are not merely
exotic; they are, in the truest sense, subversive.
Practices that WORK are of value, whether they are two years
old or two thousand. Practices, myths, institutions and
obligations which, on the other hand, may be infinitely ancient
are of no value at all UNLESS they work.
The Devil, you say
Before we move on, though, in light of the furor over real and
imagined “Satanism” that has overtaken parts of the popular
press in recent years, I would feel a bit remiss in this
account if I did not take momentary note of that other strain of
left-handed occult mythology, Satanism. Wiccans are correct
when they say that modern Wicca is not Satanic, that Satanism is
“reverse Christianity” whereas Wicca is a separate,
Non Christian religion.
Still, it should be noted, so much of our society has been
grounded in the repressiveness and authoritarian moralism of
Christianity that a liberal dose of “counter Christianity” is to
be expected. The Pat Robertsons of the world make possible the
Anton LeVays. In the long history of repressive religion, a
certain fable of Satanism has arisen. It constitutes a mythos
of its own. No doubt, misguided `copycat’ fanatics have
sometimes misused this mythos, in much the same way that Charles
Manson misused the music and culture of the 1960s.
True occult initiates have always regarded the Ultimate
Reality as beyong all names and description. Named `deities’
are, therefore, largely symbols. “Isis” is a symbol of the
long-denied female component of deity to some occultists. “Pan”
or “The Horned God” or “Set” or even “Satan” are symbols of
unconscious, repressed sexuality. To the occultist, there is no
Devil, no “god of evil.” There is, ultimately, only the Ain Sof
Aur of the Cabbalah; the limitless light of which we are but a
frozen spark. Evil, in this system, is the mere absence of
light. All else is illusion.
The goal of the occult path of initiation is BALANCE. In
Freemasonry and High Magick, the symbols of the White Pillar and
Black Pillar represent this balance between conscious and
unconscious forces.
In Gardnarian Wicca, the Goddess and Horned God – and the
Priestess and Priest, represent that balance. There is nothing,
nothing of pacts with the “Devil” or the worship of evil in any
of this; that belongs to misguided exChristians who have been
given the absurd fundamentalist Sunday school notion that one
must choose the Christian version of God, or choose the Devil.
Islam, Judaism and even Catholicism have at one time or another
been thought “satanic,” and occultists have merely played on
this bigoted symbolism, not subscribed to it.
As we have seen, Wicca since Gardner’s time has been watered
down in many of its expressions into a kind of mushy white-light
`new age’ religion, with far less of the strong sexuality
characteristic of Gardnerianism, though, also, sometimes with
less pretense as well.
In any event, Satanism has popped up now and again through
much of the history of the Christian Church. The medieval
witches were not likely to have been Satanists, as the Church
would have it, but, as we have seen, neither were they likely to
have been “witches” in the Wiccan sense, either.
The Hellfire Clubs of the eighteenth century were Satanic, and
groups like the Process Church of the Final Judgement do,
indeed, have Satanic elements in their (one should remember)
essentially Christian theology.
Aleister Crowley, ever theatrical, was prone to use Satanic
symbolism in much the same way, tongue jutting in cheek, as he
was given to saying that he ” sacrificed millions of children
each year, ” that is, that he masturbated. Crowley once called a
press conference at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, where he
announced that he was burning his British Passport to protest
Britain’s involvement in World War One. He tossed an empty
envelope into the water. He was dead serious, though, about the
“Satanism” of Miltonian eternal rebellion, and the “Satanism” of
fundamentalism’s dark fear of sexuality. The Devil, however; the
Satanic “god of evil” was an absurdity to him, as to all thinking
people, and he freely said so.
The most popular form of “counter Christianity” to emerge in
modern times, though, was Anton Szandor LaVey’s San Francisco based
Church of Satan, founded April 30, 1966. LaVey’s Church
enjoyed an initial burst of press interest, grew to a
substantial size, and appeared to maintain itself during the
cultural drought of the 1970s. But LaVey’s books, THE SATANIC
BIBLE and THE SATANIC RITUALS, have remained in print for many
years, and his ideas seem to be enjoying a renewal of interest,
especially among younger people,
punks and heavy metal fans with a death-wish mostly, beginning
in the middle years of the 1980s. By that time the Church of
Satan had been largely succeeded by the Temple of Set. This is
pure theatre; more in the nature of psychotherapy than
religion.
It is interesting to note Francis King’s observation that
before the Church of Satan began LaVey was involved in an occult
group which included, among others, underground film maker
Kenneth Anger, a person well known in Crowlean circles. Of the
rites of the Church of Satan, King states that “…most of its
teachings and magical techniques were somewhat vulgarized
versions of those of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis.”
(MAN MYTH AND MAGIC, p 3204.) To which we might add that, as
with the OTO, the rites of the Church of Satan are manifestly
potent, but hardly criminal or murderous.
LaVey, like Gardner and unlike Crowley, appears to have “the
common touch” — perhaps rather more so than Gardner.
I determined to trace the Wiccan rumor to its source. As we
shall see, in the very year I “fell” into being a gnostic
bishop, I also fell into the original charters, rituals and
paraphernalia of Wicca.
THE CHARTER AND THE BOOK
Being A Radical Revisionist History of the Origins of the Modern
Witch Cult and The Book of Shadows.
“It was one of the secret doctrines of paganism
that the Sun was the source, not only of light, but of
life…The invasion of classical beliefs by the religions of
Syria and Egypt which were principally solar, gradually affected
the conception of Apollo, and there is a certain later
identification of him with the suffering God of Christianity,
Free – masonry and similar cults…”
Aleister Crowley in Astrology, 1974
“…if GBG and Crowley only knew each other for a short year or
two, do you think that would be long enough for them to become
such good friends that gifts of personal value would be
exchanged several times, and that GBG would have been able to
aquire the vast majority of Crowley’s effects after his death?”
Merlin the Enchanter, personal letter, 1986
“…On the floor before the altar, he remembers a sword with a
flat cruciform brass hilt, and a well-worn manuscript book of
rituals – the hereditary Book of Shadows, which he will have to
copy out for himself in the days to come…”
Stewart Farrar in What Witches Do, 1971
“Actually I did write a scholarly book about the Craft; its
title was Inventing Witchcraft. . . But I spent most of the last
fifteen years failing to persuade Carl Weschcke of Llewellyn or
any other publisher that there was a market for it.”
Aidan A. Kelly, Gnosis, Winter, 1992
“…the Gardnerian Book of Shadows is one of the key factors
in what has become a far bigger and more significant movement
than Gardner can have envisaged; so historical interest alone
would be enough reason for defining it while first-hand evidence
is still available…”
Janet and Stewart Farrar in
The Witches’ Way, 1984
“It has been alleged that a Book of Shadows in Crowley’s handwriting
was formerly exhibited in Gerald’s Museum of Witchcraft
on the Isle of Man. I can only say I never saw this on either
of the two occasions when I stayed with Gerald and Donna Gardner
on the island. The large, handwritten book depicted in
Witchcraft Today is not in Crowley’s handwriting, but
Gerald’s…”
Doreen Valiente in
Witchcraft for Tomorrow, 1978
“Aidan Kelly…labels the entire Wiccan revival `Gardnerian
Witchcraft….’ The reasoning and speculation in Aidan’s book
are intricate. Briefly, his main argument depends on his
discovery of one of Gardner’s working notebooks, Ye Book of Ye
Art Magical, which is in possession of Ripley International,
Ltd….”
Margot Adler in
Drawing Down the Moon, 1979
PART ONE
WAITING FOR THE MAN FROM CANADA
I was, for the third time in four years, waiting a bit
nervously for the Canadian executive with the original Book of
Shadows in the ramshackle office of Ripley’s Believe It or Not
Museum.
“They’re at the jail,” a smiling secretary-type explained, “but
we’ve called them and they should be back over here to see you
in just a few minutes.”
The jail? Ah, St. Augustine, Florida. “The Old Jail,” was the
`nation’s oldest city’s’ second most tasteless tourist trap,
complete with cage-type cells and a mock gallows. For a moment
I allowed myself to play in my head with the vision of Norm
Deska, Ripley Operations Vice President and John Turner, the
General Manager of Ripley’s local operation and the guy who’d
bought the Gerald Gardner collection from Gardner’s niece,
Monique Wilson, sitting in the slammer. But no, Turner apparently had
just been showing Deska the town. I straightened my suit for the
fiftieth time, and suppressed the comment. We were talking BIG
history here, and big bucks, too. I gulped. The original Book
of Shadows. Maybe.
It had started years before. One of the last people in America
to be a fan of carnival sideshows, I was anxious to take another
opportunity to go through the almost archetypally seedy old home
that housed the original Ripley’s Museum.
I had known that Ripley had, in the nineteen seventies,
acquired the Gardner stuff, but as far as I knew it was all
located at their Tennessee resort museum. I think I’d heard
they’d closed it down. By then, the social liberalism of the
early seventies was over, and witchcraft and sorcery were no
longer in keeping with a `family style’ museum. It featured a
man with a candle in his head, a Tantric skull drinking cup and
freak show stuff like that, but, I mean, witchcraft is
sacrilegious, as we all know.
So, I was a bit surprised, when I discovered some of the
Gardner stuff – including an important historical document, for
sale in the gift shop, in a case just opposite the little
alligators that have “St.Augustine, Florida – America’s Oldest
City” stickered on their plastic bellies for the folks back home
to use as a paper-weight. The pricetags on the occult stuff,
however, were way out of my range.
Back again, three years later, and I decided, what the hell, so
I asked the cashier about the stuff still gathering dust in the
glass case, and it was like I’d pushed some kind of button.
Out comes Mr. Turner, the manager, who whisks us off to a store
room which is filled, FILLED, I tell you, with parts of the
Gardner collection, much of it, if not “for sale” as such, at
least available for negotiation. Turner told us about acquiring
the collection when he was manager of Ripley’s Blackpool
operation, how it had gone over well in the U.S. at first, but
had lost popularity and was now relegated for the most part to
storage status.
Visions of sugarplums danced in my head. There were many
treasures here, but the biggest plum of all, I thought, was not
surprisingly, not to be seen.
I’d heard all kinds of rumours about the Book of Shadows over
the years, many of them conflicting, all of them intriguing.
Rumour #1, of course, is that which accompanied the birth (or,
depending on how one looked at it, the revival) of modern Wicca,
the contemporary successor of ancient fertility cults.
It revolved around elemental rituals, secret rites of passage
and a mythos of goddess and god that seemed attractive to me as
a psychologically valid alternative to the austere, antisexual
moralism of Christianity. The Book of Shadows, in this context,
was the `holy book’ of Wicca, copied out by hand by new
initiates of the cult with a history stretching back at least to
the era of witch burnings.
Rumour number #2, which I had tended to credit, had it that
Gerald Gardner, the `father of modern Wicca’ had paid Aleister
Crowley in his final years to write the Book of Shadows, perhaps
whole cloth. The rumour’s chief exponent was the respected
historian of the occult, Francis King.
Rumour #3 had it that Gardner had written the Book himself,
which others had since copied and/or stolen.
To the contrary, said rumour #4, Gardner’s Museum had contained
an old, even ancient copy of the Book of Shadows, proving its
antiquity.
In more recent years modern Wiccans have tended to put some
distance between themselves and Gardner, just as Gardner, for
complex reasons, tended to distance himself in the early years
of Wicca (circa 1944-1954) from the blatant sexual magick of
Aleister Crowley, “the wickedest man in the world” by some
accounts, and from Crowley’s organization, the Ordo Templi
Orientis. Why Gardner chose to do this is speculative, but I’ve
got some idea. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
While Turner showed me a blasphemous cross shaped from the body
of two nude women (created for the 18th century infamous
“Hellfire Clubs” in England and depicted in the MAN MYTH AND
MAGIC encyclopedia;I bought it, of course) and a statue of
Beelzebub from the dusty Garderian archives, a thought occurred
to me. ” You know,” I suggested, “if you ever, in all this
stuff, happen across a copy of The Book of Shadows in the
handwriting of Aleister Crowley, it would be of considerable
historical value.”
I understated the case. It would be like finding The Book of
Mormon in Joseph Smith’s hand, or finding the original Ten
Commandments written not by God Himself, but by Moses, pure and
simple. (Better still, eleven commandments, with a margin note,
“first draft.”) I didn’t really expect anything to come of it,
and in the months ahead, it didn’t.
In the meantime, I had managed to acquire the interesting
document I first mistook for Gerald Gardner’s (long
acknowledged) initiation certificate into Crowley’s Thelemic
magickal Ordo Templi Orientis. To my eventual surprise, I
discovered that, not only was this not a simple initiation
certificate for the Minerval (probationary-lowest) degree, but,
to the contrary, was a license for Gardner to begin his own
chapter of the O.T.O., and to initiate members into the O.T.O.
In the document, furthermore, Gardner is referred to as “Prince
of Jerusalem,” that is, he is acknowledged to be a Fourth Degree
Perfect Initiate in the Order. This, needless to say would
usually imply years of dedicated training. Though Gardner had
claimed Fourth Degree O.T.O. status as early as publication of
High Magic’s Aid,(and claimed even higher status in one edition)
this runs somewhat contrary to both generally held Wiccan and
contemporary O.T.O. orthodox understandings that the O.T.O. was
then fallow in England.
At the time the document was written, most maintained, Gardner
could have known Crowley for only a brief period, and was not
himself deeply involved in the O.T.O. The document is undated
but probably was drawn up around 1945.
As I said, it is understood that no viable chapter of the
O.T.O. was supposed to exist in England at that time; the sole
active chapter was in California, and is the direct antecedent
of the contemporary authentic Ordo Templi Orientis. Karl Germer,
Crowley’s immediate successor, had barely escaped death in a
Concentartion Camp during the War, his mere association with
Crowley being tantamount to a death sentence.
The German OTO had been largely destroyed by the Nazis, along
with other freemasonic organizations, and Crowley himself was in
declining health and power, the English OTO virtually dead.
The Charter also displayed other irregularities of a revealing
nature. Though the signature and seals are certainly those of
Crowley, the text is in the decorative hand of Gerald Gardner!
The complete text reads as follows:
Do what thou wilt shall be the law. We
Baphomet X Degree Ordo Templi Orientis
Sovereign Grand Master General of All
English speaking countries of the Earth
do hereby authorise our Beloved Son Scire
(Dr.G,B,Gardner,) Prince of Jerusalem
to constitute a camp of the Ordo Templi
Orientis, in the degree Minerval.
Love is the Law,
Love under will.
o
Witness my hand and seal Baphomet X
Leaving aside the misquotation from The Book of the Law, which
got by me for some months and probably got by Crowley when it
was presented to him for signature, the document is probably
authentic. It hung for some time in Gardner’s museum, possibly
giving rise, as we shall see, to the rumor that Crowley wrote
the Book of Shadows for Gardner. According to Doreen
Valiente,and to Col. Lawrence as well, the museum’s
descriptive pamphlet says of this document:
“The collection includes a Charter granted by Aleister Crowley
to G.B. Gardner (the Director of this Museum) to operate a Lodge
of Crowley’s fraternity, the Ordo Templi Orientis. (The Director
would like to point out, however, that he has never used this
Charter and has no intention of doing so, although to the best
of his belief he is the only person in Britain possessing such a
Charter from Crowley himself; Crowley was a personal friend of
his, and gave him the Charter because he liked him.”
Col. Lawrence (”Merlin the Enchanter”), in a letter to me dated
6 December, 1986, adds that this appeared in Gardner’s booklet,
The Museum of Magic and Witchcraft. The explanation for the
curious wording of the text, taking, as Dr. Gardner does, great
pains to distance himself from Crowley and the OTO, may be
hinted at in that the booklet suggests that this display in the
“new upper gallery” (page 24) was put out at a relatively late
date when, as we shall discover, Gardner was making himself
answerable to the demands of the new witch cult and not the
long-dead Crowley and (then) relatively moribund OTO.
Now, the “my friend Aleister” ploy might explain the whole
thing. Perhaps, as some including Ms. Valiente believe, Aleister
Crowley was desperate in his last years to hand on what he saw
as his legacy to someone. He recklessly handed out his literary
estate, perhaps gave contradictory instruction to various of
his remaining few devotees (e.g. Kenneth Grant, Grady McMurtry,
Karl Germer), and may have given Gardner an “accelerated
advancement” in his order.
Ms. Valiente, a devoted Wiccan who is also a dedicated seeker
after the historical truth, mentions also the claim made by the
late Gerald Yorke to her that Gardner had paid Crowley a
substantial sum for the document. In a letter to me dated 28th
August, 1986, Ms. Valiente tells of a meeting with Yorke “…in
London many years ago and mentioned Gerald’s O.T.O. Charter to
him, whereon he told me, `Well, you know, Gerald Gardner paid
old Crowley about ($1500) or so for that…’ This may or may not
be correct…” Money or friendship may explain the Charter.
Still, one wonders.
I have a Thelemic acquaintance who, having advanced well along
the path of Kenneth Grant’s version of the OTO, went back to
square one with the unquestionably authentic Grady McMurtry OTO.
Over a period of years of substantial effort, he made his way
to the IVo `plus’ status implied by Gardner’s “Prince of
Jerusalem” designation in the charter, and has since gone
beyond.
I am, myself, a Vo member of the OTO, as well as a chartered
initiator, and can tell you from experience that becoming a
Companion of the Royal Arch of Enoch, Perfect Initiate, Prince
of Jerusalem and Chartered Initiator is a long and arduous task.
Gardner was in the habit, after the public career of Wicca
emerged in the 1950s, of downgrading any Crowleyite associations
out of his past, and, as Janet and Stewart Farrar reveal in The
Witches’ Way (1984, p3) there are three distinct versions of the
Book of Shadows in Gerald Gardner’s handwriting which
incorporate successively less material from Crowley’s writings,
though the last (termed “Text C” and cowritten with Doreen
Valiente after 1953) is still heavily influenced by Crowley and
the OTO.
Ms. Valiente has recently uncovered a copy of an old occult
magazine contemporary with High Magic’s Aid and from the same
publisher, which discusses an ancient Indian document called
“The Book of Shadows” but apparently totally unrelated to the
Wiccan book of the same name. Valiente acknowledges that the
earliest text by Gardner known to her was untitled, though she
refers to it as a “Book of Shadows.”
It seems suspicious timing; did Gardner take the title from his
publisher’s magazine? Ms. Valiente observed to me that the
“…eastern Book of Shadows does not seem to have anything to do
with witch-craft at all….is this where old Gerald first found
the expression “The Book of Shadows” and adopted it as a more
poetical name for a magical manuscript than, say `The Grimoire’
or `The Black Book’….I don’t profess to know the answer; but I
doubt if this is mere coincidence….”
The claim is frequently made by those who wish to `salvage’ a
preGardnarian source of Wiccan materials that there is a `core’
of `authentic’ materials. But, as the Farrars’ recently
asserted, the portions of the Book of Shadows “..which changed
least between Texts A, B and C were naturally the three
initiation rituals; because these, above all, would be the
traditional elements which would have been carefully preserved,
probably for centuries….” (emphasis added)
But what does one mean by “traditional materials?” The three
initiation rites, now much-described in print, all smack heavily
of the crypto-freemasonic ritual of the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn, the OTO, and the various esoteric neorosicrucian
groups that abounded in Britain from about 1885 on, and which
were, it is widely known, the fountainhead of much that is
associated with Gardner’s friend Crowley.
The Third Degree ritual, perhaps Wicca’s ultimate rite, is,
essentially, a nonsymbolic Gnostic Mass, that beautiful,
evocative, erotic and esoteric ritual written and published by
Crowley in the Equinox, after attending a Russian Orthodox Mass
in the early part of this century. The Gnostic Mass has had
far-reaching influence, and it would appear that the Wiccan
Third Degree is one of the most blatant examples of that
influence.
Take, for example, this excerpt from what is perhaps the most
intimate, most secret and most sublime moment in the entire
repertoire of Wicca rituals, the nonsymbolic (that is, overtly
sexual) Great Rite of the Third Degree initiation, as related by
Janet and Stewart Farrar in The Witches’ Way (p.34):
The Priest continues:
`O Secret of Secrets, That art hidden in the being of all lives,
Not thee do we adore, For that which adoreth is also thou. Thou
art That, and That am I. [Kiss] I am the flame that burns in the
heart of every man, And in the core of every star. I am life,
and the giver of life. Yet therefore is the knowledge of me the
knowledge of death. I am alone, the Lord within ourselves, Whose
name is Mystery of Mysteries.’
Let us be unambiguous as to the importance in Wicca of this
ritual; as the Farrars’put it (p.31) “Third degree initiation
elevates a witch to the highest of the three grades of the
Craft. In a sense,a third-degree witch is fully independent,
answerable only to the Gods and his or her own conscience…”
In short, in a manner of speaking this is all that Wicca can
offer a devotee.
With this in mind, observe the following, from Aleister
Crowley’s Gnostic Mass, first published in The Equinox about 80
years ago and routinely performed (albeit ,usually in symbolic
form) by me and by many other Bishops, Priests, Priestesses and
Deacons in the OTO and Ecclesia Gnostica (EGC) today. The
following is excerpted from Gems From the Equinox, p. 372, but
is widely available in published form:
The Priest. O secret of secrets that art hidden in the being of
all that lives, not Thee do we adore, for that which adoreth is
also Thou. Thou art That, and That am I.
I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the
core of every star. I am Life, and the giver of Life; yet
therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death. I am
alone; there is no God where I am.
So, then, where, apart from the Thelemic tradition of Crowley
and the OTO, is the “traditional material” some Wiccan writers
seem to seek with near desperation? I am not trying to be
sarcastic in the least, but even commonplace self – references
used among Wiccans today, such as “the Craft” or the refrain
“so mote it be”are lifted straight out of Freemasonry (see, for
example, Duncan’s Ritual of Freemasonry). And, as Doreen
Valiente notes in her letter to me mentioned before, “…of
course old Gerald was also a member of the Co-Masons, and an
ordinary Freemason…” as well as an OTO member.
PART TWO
THE REAL ORIGIN OF WICCA
We must dismiss with some respect the assertion, put forth by
Margot Adler and others, that “Wicca no longer adheres to the
orthodox mythos of the Book of Shadows.”
Many, if not most of those who have been drawn to Wicca in the
last three decades came to it under the spell (if I may so term
it) of the legend of ancient Wicca. If that legend is false,
then while reformists and revisionist apologists (particularly
the peculiar hybrid spawned in the late sixties under the name
“feminist Wicca”) may seek other valid grounds for their
practices, we at least owe it to those who have operated under
a misapprehension to explain the truth, and let the chips fall
where they may.
I believe there is a core of valid experience falling under
the Wiccan-neopagan heading, but that that core is the same
essential core that lies at the truths exposed by the dreaded
boogy-man Aleister Crowley and the` wicked’ pansexualism of
Crowley’s Law of Thelema. That such roots would be not just
uncomfortable, but intolerable to the orthodox traditionalists
among the Wiccans, but even more so among the hybrid feminist
“wiccans” may indeed be an understatement.
Neopaganism, in a now archaic “hippie” misreading of ecology,
mistakes responsible stewardship of nature for nature worship.
Ancient pagans did not `worship’ nature; to a large extent they
were afraid of it, as has been pointed out to me by folk
practioners. Their “nature rites” were to propitiate the
caprice of the gods, not necessarily to honor them. The first
neopagan revivalists, Gardner, Crowley and Dr. Murray, well
understood this. Neopagan wiccans usually do not.
In introducing a “goddess element” into their theology, Crowley
and Gardner both understood the yin/yang, male/female
fundamental polarity of the universe. Radical feminist
neopagans have taken this balance and altered it, however
unintentionally, into a political feminist agenda, centered
around a near-monotheistic worship of the female principle, in a
bizarre caricature of patriarchal Christianity. Bigotry, I
submit, cuts both ways.
I do not say these things lightly; I have seen it happen in
my own time. IF this be truth, let truth name its own price. I
was not sure, until Norm and John got back from the Old Jail.
A couple of months earlier, scant days after hearing that I was
to become a gnostic bishop and thus an heir to a corner of
Crowley’s legacy, I had punched on my answering machine, and
there was the unexpected voice of John Turner saying that he had
located what seemed to be the original Book of Shadows in an
inventory list, locating it at Ripley’s office in Toronto.
He said he didn’t think they would sell it as an individual
item, but he gave me the name of a top official in the Ripley
organization, who I promptly contacted. I eventually made a
substantial offer for the book, sight unseen, figuring there was
(at the least) a likelihood I’d be able to turn the story into
a book and get my money back out of it, to say nothing of the
historical import.
But, as I researched the matter, I became more wary, and
confused; Gardner’s texts “A” “B” and “C” all seemed to be
accounted for. Possibly, I began to suspect, this was either a
duplicate of the “deThelemized” post1954 version with segments
written by Gardner and Valiente and copied and recopied (as well
as distorted) from hand to hand since by Wiccans the world
over.
Maybe, I mused, Valiente had one copy and Gardner another,
the latter sold to Ripley with the Collection. Or, perhaps it
was the curious notebook discovered by Aidan Kelly in the
Ripley files called Ye Book of Ye Art Magical, the meaning of
which was unclear.
While I was chatting with Ms.Deska, Norm returned from his
mission, we introduced in best businesslike fashion, and he told
me he’d get the book, whatever it might be, from the vault.
The vault?! I sat there thinking god knows what . Recently, I’d
gotten a call from Toronto, and it seems the Ripley folks wanted
me to take a look at what they had. I had made a considerable
offer, and at that point I figured I’d had at least a nibble.
As it so happened Norm would be visiting on a routine
inspection visit, so it was arranged he would bring the
manuscript with him.
Almost from the minute he placed it in front of me, things
began to make some kind of sense. Clearly, this was Ye Book of
Ye Art Magical. Just as clearly, it was an unusual piece,
written largely in the same hand as the Crowley Charter- that
is, the hand of Gerald Gardner. Of this I became certain,
because I had handwriting samples of Gardner, Valiente and
Crowley in my possession. Ms. Valiente had been mindful of this
when she wrote me, on August 8th, 1986:
I have deliberately chosen to write you in longhand, rather
than send a typewritten reply, so that you will have something
by which to judge the validity of the claim you tell me is
being made by the Ripley organisation to have a copy of a “Book
of Shadows” in Gerald Gardner’s handwriting and mine.
If this is…”Ye Book of Ye Art Magical,” ….this is
definitely in Gerald Gardner’s handwriting. Old Gerald, however,
had several styles of handwriting….I think it is probable
that the whole MS. was in fact written by Gerald, and no other
person was involved; but of course I may be wrong….
At first glance it appeared to be a very old book, and it
suggested to me where the rumors that a very old, possibly
medieval Book of Shadows had once been on display in Gardner’s
Museum had emerged from.
Any casual onlooker might see Ye Book in this light, for the
cover was indeed that of an old volume, with the original title
scratched out crudely on the side and a new title tooled into
the leather cover. The original was some mundane volume, on
Asian knives or something, but the inside pages had been
removed, and a kind of notebook — almost a journal — had been
substituted.
As far as I could see, no dates appear anywhere in the book.
It is written in several different handwriting styles,
although, as noted above, Doreen Valiente assured me that
Gardner was apt to use several styles. I had the distinct
impression this “notebook” had been written over a considerable
period of time, perhaps years, perhaps even decades. It
may, indeed, date from his days in the 1930s when he linked up
with a neorosicrucuian grouping that could have included among
its members the legendary Dorothy Clutterbuck, who set Gardner
on the path which led to Wicca.
Thinking on it, what emerges from Ye Book of Ye Art Magical is
a developmental set of ideas. Much of it is straight out of
Crowley, but it is clearly the published Crowley, the old magus
of the Golden Dawn, the A.A., and the O.T.O.
Somewhere along the line it hit me that I was not exactly
looking at the “original Book of Shadows” but, perhaps, the
outline Gardner prepared over a long period of time, apparently
in secret (since Valiente, a relatively early initiate of
Gardner’s, never heard of it nor saw it, according to her own
account, until recent years, about the time Aidan Kelly
unearthed it in the Ripley collection long after Gardner’s
death).
Dr. Gardner kept many odd notebooks and scrapbooks that perhaps
would reveal much about his character and motivations. Turner
showed me a Gardner scrapbook in Ripley’s store room which was
mostly cheesecake magazine photographs and articles about
actresses. Probably none are so evocative as Ye Book of Ye Art
Magical, discovered,it has been intimated,hidden away in the
back of an old sofa.
I have the impression it was essentially unknown in and after
Gardner’s lifetime, and that by the Summer of 1986 few had seen
inside it; I knew of only Kelly and my own party. Perhaps the
cover had been seen by some along the line, accounting for the
rumor of a “very old Book of Shadows” in Gardner’s Museum.
If someone had seen the charter signed by Crowley (”Baphomet”)
but written by Gerald Gardner, and had gotten a look, as well,
at Ye Book, they might well have concluded that Crowley had
written BOTH, an honest error, but maybe the source of that
long-standing accusation. There is even a notation in the
Ripley catalog attributing the manuscript to Crowley on
someone’s say-so, but I have no indication Ripley has any other
such book. Finally, if the notebook is a sourcebook of any
religious system, it is not that of medieval witchcraft, but the
twentieth century madness or sanity or both of the infamous
magus Aleister Crowley and the Thelemic/Gnostic creed of The
Book of the Law.
As I sat there I read aloud familiar quotations or paraphrases
from published material in the Crowley-Thelemic canon. This is
not the “ancient religion of the Wise” but the modern sayings of
” the Beast 666 ” as Crowley was wont to style himself.
But, does any of this invalidate Wicca as an expression of
human spirituality? It depends on where one is coming from.
Certainly, the foundations of feminist Wicca and the modern
cult of the goddess are challenged with the fact that the
goddess in question may be Nuit, her manifestation the sworn
whore, Our Lady Babalon, the Scarlet Woman. Transform what you
will shall be the whole of history, but THIS makes what Marx did
to Hegel look like slavish devotion.
What Crowley himself said of this kind of witchcraft is not
merely instructive, but an afront to the conceits of an era.
“The belief in witchcraft,” he observed, ” was not all
superstition; its psychological roots were sound. Women who are
thwarted in their natural instincts turn inevitably to all
kinds of malignant mischief, from slander to domestic
destruction…”
For the rest of us, those who neither worship nor are
disdainful of the man who made sexuality a god or, at least,
acknowledged it as such, experience must be its own teacher. If
Wicca is a sort of errant Minerval Camp of the
OTO, gone far astray and far afield since the days Crowley gave
Gardner a charter he “didn’t use” but seemed to value, and a
whole range of rituals and imagery that assault the senses at
their most literally fundamental level; if this is true or sort
of true,, maybe its time history be owned up to. Mythos has its
place and role, but so, too, does reality.
PART THREE
WICCA AS AN OTO ENCAMPMENT
The question of intent looms large in the background of this
inquiry. If I had to guess, I would venture that Gerald Gardner
did, in fact, invent Wicca more or less whole cloth, to be a
popularized version of the OTO. Crowley, or his successor Karl
Germer, who also knew Dr. Gardner, likely set “old Gerald” on
what they intended to be a Thelemic path, aimed at
reestablishing at least a basic OTO encampment in England.
Aiden Kelly’s research work on all this is most impressive, but
at rock bottom I can’t help feeling he still wants to salvage
something original in Wicca. In a way, there is some
justification for this; the Wicca of Gerald Gardner, OTO initiate
and advocate of sexual magick produced a folksy, easier version
of the OTO, but by the middle nineteen fifties some of his early
“followers” not only created a revisionist Wicca with relatively
little of the Thelemic original intact, but convinced Gardner to
go along with the changes.
It is also possible, but yet unproven, that, upon expelling
Kenneth Grant from the OTO in England, Germer, in the early
1950s, summoned Gardner to America to interview him as a
candidate for leading the British OTO. Gardner, it is confirmed,
came to America, but by then Wicca, and Dr. Gardner had begun
to take their own, watered-down course. Today most Wiccans have
no idea of their origins.
Let me close this section by quoting two interesting tidbits
for your consideration.
First consider Doreen Valiente’s observation to me concerning
“the Parsons connection”. I quote from her letter
abovementioned, one of several she was kind enough to send me in
1986 in connection with my research into this matter.
…I did know about the existence of the O.T.O. Chapter in
California at the time of Crowley’s death, because I believe his
ashes were sent over to them. He was cremated here in Brighton,
you know, much to the scandal of the local authorities, who
objected to the `pagan funeral service.’ If you are referring
to the group of which Jack Parsons was a member (along with the
egregious Mr. L. Ron Hubbard), then there is another curious
little point to which I must draw your attention. I have a
remarkable little book by Jack Parsons called MAGICK, GNOSTICISM
AND THE WITCHCRAFT. It is unfortunately undated, but Parsons
died in 1952. The section on witchcraft is particularly
interesting because it looks forward to a revival of witchcraft
as the Old Religion….I find this very thought provoking. Did
Parsons write this around the time that Crowley was getting
together with Gardner and perhaps communicated with the
California group to tell them about it?
We must remember that Ms. Valiente was a close associate of
Gardner and is a dedicated and active Wiccan. She, of course,
has her own interpretation of these matters. The OTO recently
reprinted the Parsons “witchcraft” essays in Freedom is a Two
Edged Sword , a postumous collection of his writings. It does
indeed seem that Gardner and Parsons were both on the same wavelength
at about the same time.
The other matter of note is the question of the length of
Gardner’s association with the OTO and with Crowley personally.
My informant Col. Lawrence, tells me that he has in his
possession a cigarette case which once belonged to Aleister
Crowley. Inside
“is a note in Crowley’s hand that says simply: `gift of GBG,
1936, A. Crowley’.”
(Personal letter, 6 December, 1986)
The inscription could be a mistake, it could mean 1946, the
period of the Charter. But, as Ms. Valiente put it in a letter
to me of 8th December, 1986:
If your friend is right, then it would mean that old Gerald
actually went through a charade of pretending to Arnold Crowther
that Arnold was introducing him to Crowley for the first time -
a charade which Crowley for some reason was willing to go along
with. Why? I can’t see the point of such a pretence; but then
occultists sometimes do devious things…
Crowley may have played out a similar scene with G.I. Gurdjieff,
the other enlightened merry prankster of the first half of the
twentieth century.
Gnosticism and Wicca, the subjects of Jack Parsons’ essays,
republished by the OTO and Falcon Press in 1990, are the two
most successful expressions to date of Crowley’s dream of a
popular solar-phallic religion. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think
Aleister and Gerald may have cooked Wicca up.
If Wicca is the OTO’s prodigal daughter in fact, authorized
directly by Crowley, how should Wiccans now relate to this? How
should Crowley’s successors and heirs in the OTO deal with it?
Then too, what are we to make of and infer about all this
business of a popular Thelemic-Gnostic religion? Were Crowley,
Parsons, Gardner and others trying to do something of note with
regard to actualizing a New Aeon here which bears scrutiny? Or
is this mere speculation, and of little significance for the
Great Work today?
If the Charter Crowley issued Gardner is, indeed, the authority
upon which Wicca has been built for half a century, then it is
perhaps no coincidence that I acquired that Charter in the same
year I was consecrated a Bishop of the Gnostic Catholic Church.
Further, it was literally days after my long search for the
original of Gardner’s BOOK OF SHADOWS ended in success that the
Holy Synod of T Michael Bertiaux’s Gnostic Church unanimously
elected me a Missionary Bishop, on August 29, 1986.
Sometimes, I muse, the Inner Order revoked Wicca’s charter in
1986,placing it in my hands. Since I hold it in trust for the
OTO, perhaps Wicca has, in symbolic form, returned home at
last. It remains for the Wiccans to, literally (since the
charter hangs in my temple space), to read the handwriting on
the wall.
” Witchcraft always has a hard time, until it becomes
established and changes its name.” – Charles Fort