Drawing Down the Moon (12 page)

In fact, there has never been any evidence that Aleister Crowley was hired to write the Gardnerian rituals. There are elements of Crowley in the rituals, just as there are elements of Ovid, Leland, and Kipling. Still, this idea was floating around in the 1970s, and one priestess, Mary Nesnick (who worked in both the Gardnerian and the Alexandrian traditions before creating her own combination tradition known as Algard Wicca), wrote to me:

Eliot Rose wrote a devastating critique of Gardner in his lively book
A Razor for a Goat.
Rose admits his biases. He is an Anglican who believes Witchcraft is foolish, and while it was “once rational to fear witchcraft,” it has “never been rational to admire it.”

Rose considered the Witchcraft revival to be a sort of literary production by a group of English men and women who were “sorry to see England going to the dogs” after World War II, and felt that a return to goddess worship would prevent this. The Witch cult, wrote Rose, “would happily combine the more aesthetically tolerable
motifs
of several former creeds and the least controversial ethical statements of all ages. Gods with Persian names and Greek bodies would prove, on examination, to have thoroughly Bloomsbury minds.”

Rose described Murray's Witch cult as “male-oriented.” The myth of the Goddess, he said, “reeks of twentieth-century literary fashion,” and was not easily available before 1930. He wrote: “I doubt if at any date much before 1930 enough of the appropriate literature yet existed for many people to feel that to be truly pagan one must be ‘matristic.'” He dismissed Engels and Bachofen. He described Apuleius's
Golden Ass
as “syncretistic” goddess religion and Paganism “of a very literary kind.” As for Leland's
Aradia,
which was published in London in 1899, he dismissed it as another literary production. He called the book “post-Christian,” “not very pagan,” and “not very religious at all.” He took the position that the Italian Church had so thoroughly taken over the old festivals that it had “quite as good a claim to represent the old paganism as a cult that talks about Diana. . . .” As for Gardner, Rose said his version of Witchcraft was “syncretic,” full of Greek names and no Celtic ones, and he even described Graves's contention that goddess worship is a part of the British heritage as a Nazi view.

Since Rose judged the revival of Wicca on the basis of its claim to “old traditions,” he could become quite acerbic, as when he observed:

While various writers were dismissing the revival, within the Craft the debate for many years focused on the question raised by Valiente: Was Gardner's version
authoritative?
Or was he merely an “upstart” and was there some other, older Craft that was authoritative? The second issue of
Pentagram,
the newsletter put out by the British Witchcraft Research Association, reprinted an address to the association in which Valiente paid tribute to Gardner and observed that many people assumed wrongly that he had invented the religion.
Pentagram,
she said, was beginning to contact surviving traditions that had had no contact with Gardner; the Craft had “survived in fragments all over the British Isles,” and each group had its own ideas and traditions of ritual and practice. And sure enough, other traditions, declaring themselves to be older, generally calling themselves “traditionalist” or “hereditary,” began to provide a counterpoint to the revivalist Craft described by Gardner. Various members of hereditary covens criticized the followers of Gardner and disagreed that Witchcraft was “a simple religion for simple folk.”
⁴⁷

Almost all the writers in
Pentagram
took the view that the old traditions were fragmented, that these fragments once formed a coherent whole. They saw the Witchcraft Research Association as a kind of “United Nations of the Craft” that would open the way “for a truly great work to be performed; namely, the piecing together of all the true parts of the ancient tradition. . . .” In other words,
Pentagram
accepted the idea that Witchcraft was once the
universal religion,
which had been driven underground to survive in secret, with much being lost. Many articles encouraged the joining of traditions “before it is too late,” as the heritage was in danger and time was running out.
⁴⁸

How is one to reconcile all this controversy with the idea of Wicca as a serious movement? Did Gardner simply make it all up? Are there hereditary Witches? Are there covens that predate Murray and Gardner? Did Gardner have access to an older coven?

As we have seen, until a few years ago most scholars dismissed all segments of the modern Craft as a hoax. Some Witches said they were of very old traditions that existed long before the time of Gardner. Others said that Gardner's version of the Craft was a “pure” tradition. And in America descendants of European immigrants insisted that they were Witches through family tradition, and that their Witchcraft didn't resemble Gardner's in the least. What's more, many of them said that Witchcraft was first and foremost a
craft
and only secondarily a
religion
. At the same time, covens sprang up in many places, and coven leaders declared themselves to be heirs of traditions that were thousands of years old. Many of these were soon discovered to be liars. One Wiccan priestess told me, “I've never seen a really old Book of Shadows. I'm not saying they don't exist . . . but like unicorns and hippogryphs, I've never seen one!”

What does this controversy have to do with the reality of the modern Craft? Fortunately, not much. Over the last thirty years, while some writers and scholars were dismissing the Craft as “silly” or “fraudulent,” Neo-Pagans and Wiccans began to reassess who they really were and what the Craft was really about. And during this time a number of Neo-Pagan American writers tried to piece together a revisionist history of the Craft.

In the beginning of this chapter it was noted that Isaac Bonewits had divided Witches into several categories. Now is the time to look at his arguments more closely, particularly as they are related to the origins of the Craft and the place of Witches outside the revival.

The history of Bonewits's interaction with the Craft is a stormy one. He is a magician and occultist, who was for many years a priest of the New Reformed Druids of North America. He then founded a revivalist Druid group called Ár nDraíocht Féin. From the beginning, when he wrote
Real Magic
(1971), Bonewits has always been a bit snide about Wicca. He dismissed the “Myth of Wicca” a little too bluntly, a little too easily, and a little too
early,
and thereby angered many in the Craft. At the time of
Real Magic
and his later article, “Witchcult: Fact or Fancy?” most Witches accepted literally the idea of a universal Old Religion such as that described by Murray. Since Bonewits's views were close to those of more inflexible scholars, he was branded by some as unfriendly to the Craft community. In the book, written when Bonewits was barely out of college, he argued (as he still does) that there never was a unified European-wide Old Religion. There were Pagan religions—many of which were very vital—and many European communities retained Pagan beliefs and even, perhaps, groups well into the Christian era; but Bonewits argued that the “Unitarian Old Religion of White Witches” existed in fancy, not in fact, “the product of local cultural egotism and bad ethnography.”
⁴⁹
His final sally in
Real Magic
caused even more friction:

Several years later Bonewits addressed a meeting of Witches in Minneapolis. His remarks were later published in
Gnostica
as “Witchcult: Fact or Fancy?” He later refined these arguments in a series of articles that appeared in
Green Egg
in 1976–1977 under the title “Witchcraft: Classical, Gothic and Neopagan.” He has changed these categories slightly in recent years.

Bonewits's division of Witches into categories is meant to clear up some of the confusion surrounding the word
Witch
. For example, the “classical witch” or cunning folk, would be defined as:

This “classical witch” would be found among most peoples. In Europe this woman (or man) would be an old peasant, perhaps, “a font of country wisdom and old superstitions as well as a shrewd judge of character.” For this kind of witch, writes Bonewits,
religion
was fairly irrelevant to
practice.
Some considered themselves Christians; some were Pagans. In Ireland many said that their powers came from the fairies. Relatively few classical witches exist today in Europe. But Bonewits thinks that most people who call themselves “witches” today are “Neoclassical”—that is they use magic, divination, herbology, and extrasensory perception without much regard for religion. According to Bonewits, 70 percent of the Witches in America today are “Neoclassical.”
⁵¹

Bonewits's “gothic witches,” now called “diabolic witches,” are those who appear in trial reports between 1450 and 1750. They represented a reversed version of Roman Catholicism, including pacts with the devil, the devouring of babies, and other pieces of propaganda that the Church used during the Inquisition. Gothic witchcraft, according to Bonewits, is a Church fiction. He refutes the Murrayite thesis of a universal Old Religion with the contention that witchcraft in Europe was a creation of the Inquisition, complete with descriptions of the sabbat, covens, and orgies. He regards contemporary Satanism as neogothic witchcraft because it descends from the gothic witchcraft created by Christianity. Most modern Satanists pattern themselves on the ideas created by the Church and proceed from there. (I would amend this to say that a few modern Satanists seem to be misplaced Neo-Pagans who have not been able to get beyond Christian terminology and symbolism.)

Bonewits does accept the survival of Neo-Pagans into the Christian era, although he is convinced that by the eleventh century most of them had gone underground or had been destroyed. Essentially he takes the orthodox scholarly position that until the middle of the fourteenth century witchcraft simply meant sorcery—the attempt to control nature—and was never an organized survival of Paganism; that the word acquired a new meaning in the fourteenth century, when it was identified as a heresy and was elaborated upon and spread by the Inquisition for its own political ends. We have met his arguments before: official Church policy that witchcraft was illusion was reversed; a new form of witchcraft was created by the Church to root out heresy; many of the old charges against Jews and Gypsies were “dusted off” and combined with the new inventions of the witches' sabbat and the Black Mass.

Bonewits believes that some European families may have kept Pagan traditions alive (he notes that rich families often don't get persecuted) but that there is no evidence of an underground organized religious movement during the European Middle Ages.
⁵²

Bonewits uses the term “Neopagan Witchcraft” to refer to Wicca. He estimates that of the many thousands of people in America who consider themselves Witches, a statistical breakdown might look something like this: