Wicca: A comprehensive guide to the Old Religion in the modern world. Vivianne Crowley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       lead thy lost flock from darkness unto day.

       Forgotten are the ways of sleep and night –

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

       Open the door, the door which hath no key,

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

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

      Gerald Gardner had very different ideas from other Witches practising the Craft at that time. While they harked back to the persecutions of the past, believing that the Craft would best endure by remaining a secret and closed movement, Gerald believed that the Craft had the potential СКАЧАТЬ