Drawing Down the Moon (11 page)

In the modern Wiccan rite “The Charge of the Goddess,” as published, for instance, in
The Grimoire of Lady Sheba
, this is only slightly changed and depoliticized.

Interestingly, many writers took
Aradia
's political references as a sign of the degeneration of the text. The historian T. C. Lethbridge said that
Aradia
was “much distorted by political propaganda.”
²⁷
Craft priest and writer Raymond Buckland concurred.
²⁸
Doreen Valiente noted that “Its sexual frankness—which Leland has toned down in his translation—its attacks on the Christian Church, its anarchistic attitude toward the social order, all contributed to make it a book that was pushed aside.”
²⁹
Leland was himself a political radical. The more modern Wiccan version was written by Doreen Valiente, who kept some of Leland's phrases and added some of her own poetry.

Still, it is in
Aradia,
and in Leland's other books, that the phrase
“la Vecchia Religione”
—the Old Religion—appears. And that is where the term, now used so often among Witches, may have originated. And
Aradia
's importance in helping to create the revival cannot be stressed enough. In contrast to Murray, Leland as far back as the 1890s said that women were given an equal, perhaps superior, place in the religion. He wrote that whenever “there is a period of radical intellectual rebellion, against long-established conservatism, hierarchy, and the like, there is always an effort to regard woman as the fully equal, which means superior sex.” And he noted that in Witchcraft, “it is the female who is the primitive principle.” Leland's book became very popular with feminist groups within the Craft, partly because the myth of the creation of Aradia and Diana placed the feminine principle first and partly because feminist Witches—the most political Crafters—have always been very sympathetic to the idea of a link between Witches and oppressed peoples. In the appendix to
Aradia
Leland wrote:

Along with Murray and Leland, Robert Graves has been very influential in the Witchcraft revival.
The White Goddess
and some of Graves's lesser-known works, particularly such novels as
Watch the North Wind Rise
and
King Jesus,
had an enormous impact on people who later joined the Craft. Several noted that after World War II a number of books put forth the idea of goddess worship as a way to turn humanity from its destructive course.
³¹

Bonewits told me, “Graves is a sloppy scholar.
The White Goddess
has caused more bad anthropology to occur among Wiccan groups than almost any other work. It's a lovely metaphor and myth and an inspirational source of religious ideas to people, but he claimed it was a work of scholarship and that people were to take what he said as true. There are still a few groups of Neo-Pagans who use Graves and Murray as sacred scripture.”

It is likely that certain members of the Craft have interpreted Graves too literally. Graves himself said that he wrote the first draft of
The White Goddess
in a few weeks, in a storm of passion, and from the beginning it was very clear in his mind that the book was poetic metaphor.
³²
His attitude toward Wicca was always one of bemusement. In 1964, writing in
The Virginia Quarterly Review,
he attributed the spread of organized Witch covens to Margaret Murray's anthropological works. He argued that Witches existed in Britain from early times and that several covens had survived, but that Murray's “sympathetic reassessment of organized witchcraft made a revival possible.” Graves looked at the Craft with some amusement, finding it numbered among its members idealists as well as “hysterical or perverted characters.” “Yet the Craft seems healthy enough in 1964, and growing fast,” he wrote. “It now only needs some gifted mystic to come forward, reunite, and decently reclothe it, and restore its original hunger for wisdom. Fun and games are insufficient.”
³³

If much modern scholarship has dismissed Murray as a crank, Leland as a satirist, and Graves as a writer of poetic fancy, Gerald B. Gardner is usually put down as a “fraud” or a “dirty old man.” And yet it is impossible to understand the revival of Witchcraft without coming to terms with Gardner and his influence—an influence that is much greater than one would think from reading about his life or reading his works.

The most sympathetic accounts of Gardner's life have been J. L. Bracelin's poorly written biography,
Gerald Gardner: Witch,
Doreen Valiente's beautifully written account in her
The ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present,
and the accounts of various Gardnerians, neo-Gardnerians, and ex-Gardnerians including Patricia Crowther, Stewart Farrar, and Raymond Buckland.
³⁴
The most negative accounts can be found in the works of the occult writer Francis King and the historian Elliot Rose.

Here is the story as put forth by Bracelin, Valiente, Buckland, and others. Since certain parts of it are in controversy, this story can be thought of as part of the Wiccan myth.

Gerald B. Gardner (1884–1964) was an amateur anthropologist and folklorist who lived much of his life in the Far East, working as a rubber planter and tea planter in Ceylon and Malaya and later as a British customs officer. He wrote a book on Malay weaponry in 1936 (
Keris and Other Malay Weapons
) and went into retirement that same year, settling in Hampshire, England, with his wife. He joined a naturist society, apparently having become a nudist early in life.

It was in 1939 that Gardner, according to the story, contacted the Witch cult in England. Valiente, who, according to her own account, was initiated into the Craft by Gardner in 1953, writes that Gardner joined an occult society, the Fellowship of Crotona, which had constructed a community theater called “The First Rosicrucian Theatre in England.” Among the members of this occult fraternity was the daughter of Annie Besant, the Theosophist and founder of Co-Masonry, a masonic movement for women.
³⁵

Bracelin writes that Gardner noticed among the members of the Fellowship a group that stood apart from the others.

According to Bracelin, Gardner was taken to the house of a wealthy neighborhood woman named “Old Dorothy” and in 1939 was initiated by her into Wicca. Until recently little was known about “Old Dorothy” and many scholars assumed she was a fiction. Valiente wrote that the lady was known to her, but to tell the public who she is would “be a breach of confidence.”
³⁷
In an appendix to
The Witches' Way,
Doreen Valiente described her long and ultimately successful search for the birth and death certificates of Dorothy Clutterbuck.
³⁸
Ronald Hutton, in
The Triumph of the Moon,
pretty convincingly demonstrates that Dorothy Clutterbuck existed, but may well have had nothing to do with Gerald Gardner or Witchcraft. Hutton writes that a woman named Dafo, the stage director of the Rosicrucian Theatre,
was
a close friend of Gerald Gardner throughout most of the 1940s, and may well have been his main partner in ritual.
³⁹
In Bracelin's account, Gardner was halfway through the initiation ceremony “when the word Wica was first mentioned: ‘and then I knew that that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived.'”
⁴⁰

Gardner wanted to write about the Craft openly, but could not because of the Witchcraft Acts in Britain (the last of these acts was repealed in 1951, largely through the efforts of the spiritualist movement). In 1949 Gardner published
High Magic's Aid
under the pen name “Scire.” It was a historical novel about the Craft and contained two initiation rituals, but there was no reference to the Goddess.
⁴¹
After the last Witchcraft Act was repealed, Gardner came out with two books under his own name,
Witchcraft Today
(1954) and
The Meaning of Witchcraft
(1959). In 1951 Cecil Williamson set up a museum of Witchcraft at Castletown on the Isle of Man. Gardner joined Williamson as the resident Witch and began creating quite a bit of publicity. Valiente writes:

Gardner's version of the Craft was very different from that described by Murray. To him, Witchcraft was a peaceful, happy nature religion. Witches met in covens, led by a priestess. They worshipped two principal deities, the god of forests and what lies beyond, and the great Triple Goddess of fertility and rebirth. They met in the nude in a nine-foot circle and raised power from their bodies through dancing and chanting and meditative techniques. They focused primarily on the goddess; they celebrated the eight ancient Pagan festivals of Europe and sought to attune themselves to nature.
⁴³

Valiente wrote that some of Gardner's critics felt the publicity he generated was undignified, but, “looking back,” she decided that Gardner was “sincere.” Gardner's coven “was mostly composed of elderly people” and he was afraid the Craft “was in danger of dying out.” She writes that many considered his insistence on nudity to be his own invention and that, while a very old and valid magical idea, it was unsuitable in the cold and damp of England. She also noted that many other Witches regarded much of Gardner's writings as “a reflection of his own ideas.” She noted the use of Masonic phraseology in Gardnerian rituals and the use of quotations from Aleister Crowley.
^g
She wrote:

The controversy surrounding Gardner is over whether he was initiated into an authentic surviving coven, and how much of revivalist Wicca is his own invention or Crowley's or Doreen Valiente's or anyone else's. Most writers who are not members of the Craft or sympathetic to it dismiss the entire revival as “a fraud” created by Gardner.

Francis King, the English writer, wrote a brief chapter on the Witchcraft revival in
The Rites of Modern Occult Magic
(1970). He estimated that between one and two thousand people in Britain were, at the time he wrote, members of covens that “are practicing, or believe that they are practicing, traditional witchcraft, which they suppose to be the stillsurviving fertility religion of prehistoric Europe.” King said that he believed that pre-Gardnerian covens did exist (although they may date no further back than the publication of Murray's thesis), but he attributed the growth of the movement to Gardner's writings. King argued that Gardner
was
initiated into a coven; that he did not find “their simple ceremonies to his liking,” and so decided “to found a more elaborate and romanticised witch-cult of his own.” To do this, he “hired Crowley, at a generous fee, to write elaborate rituals for the new ‘Gardnerian' witch-cult and, at about the same time, either forged, or procured to be forged, the so-called
Book of Shadows,
allegedly a sixteenth-century witches' rule-book, but betraying its modern origins in every line of its unsatisfactory pastiche of Elizabethan English.”
⁴⁵