Drawing Down the Moon (14 page)

“Many country folk buy my mother's ceramics. She uses ancient motifs, such as the tree of life, flower symbology, and the idea of the Goddess holding a child within a circle of rebirth. She does spontaneous magic and chants, and rhymes. She tells fortunes and can still the wind.”

When Z was sixteen the Hungarian uprising occurred and she became a political exile.

“In one day I saw a total change occur. Suddenly the people of my country came out and loved each other. Hungarians usually hate each other. It was my first initiation into revolution. It made me decide to change my life. I wanted to live. I wanted to thrive. I decided my country was wiped out. I decided to check out the West.”

But when Z came to New York she discovered a new form of oppression. The Ford and Rockefeller foundations were giving scholarships to refugees. Men would get a reasonable income, but women could get very little money. They had to become waitresses to even get through high school. She ended up in a traditional role: wife and mother. After twelve years, feeling limited and enslaved, she was driven to make a suicide attempt. During this attempt she had a vision in which she died and death was not fearful. She told me:

“After this vision, I regained my true perspective of a Witch, how a Witch looks at life—as a challenge. It is not going to last forever, and it's all right on the other side, so what are you going to
do?

“And once that happened inside me, I just packed up and stuck out my thumb and hitchhiked from New York to Los Angeles. And I picked up a paper and there was a women's liberation celebration on March 8th. And I thought I would check out these people. And I knew them. They looked like me. Some of them had my wounds; some of them had different wounds.

“I began to talk about the Goddess. I knew a lot of Pagan customs that my country had preserved, but which had lost religious meaning—although not for me. I also began to read about Dianic Witchcraft, the English literature. A year later I began, with several other women, to have sabbats. In 1971, on the Winter Solstice, we named our coven the Susan B. Anthony Coven.”

The pattern is clear. The family tradition begins quite close to Bonewits's definition of “Classical Witchcraft”: a heritage of magical teachings, mostly oral. The religion is simple. There are no elaborate initiations. Ritual is at a minimum. It is a
craft.
Then there is contact with revivalist Wicca, in many cases with the “English literature”—Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner, among others. From this comes a new outward direction toward activity, and in some cases the adoption of more formal structures, initiations, and rituals.

The literature of the revivalist Craft had influenced almost everyone I met. And whatever Gardner had done in England for good or ill, his books had served as a catalyst or springboard for many covens and traditions that did not necessarily “look” Gardnerian. These covens had little of the minor trappings of Gardner's Craft—the nudity, the scourge, the use of particular rituals. But the influence was there.

My interview with the poet and shaman Victor Anderson is a case in point. This was among the most mysterious of my encounters. His was the only story I heard that was clearly from the land of faery. It was pure poetry.

Anderson, the author of a beautiful book of Craft poems,
Thorns of the Blood Rose,
⁵⁷
told me of his meeting with a tiny old woman who said to him, at the age of nine, that he was a Witch. He was living in Oregon when he came upon her sitting nude in the center of a circle alongside a number of brass bowls filled with herbs. He said that he took off his clothes, knowing instinctively what to do, and was initiated “by full sexual rite.” He then told me of the vision he had in that circle.

“She whispered the names of our tradition and everything vanished; it was all completely black. There seemed to be nothing solid except this woman and I held on to her. We seemed to be floating in space. Then I heard a voice, a very distant voice saying ‘Tana, Tana.' It became louder and louder. It was a very female voice, but it was as powerful as thunder and as hard as a diamond and yet very soft. Then it came on very loud. It said, ‘I am Tana.' Then, suddenly, I could see there was a great sky overhead like a tropical sky, full of stars, glittering brilliant stars, and I could see perfectly in this vision, despite my blindness.
^h
The moon was there, but it was green. Then I could hear the sounds of the jungle all around me. I could smell the odors of the jungle.

“Then I saw something else coming toward me out of the jungle. A beautiful man. There was something effminate about him, and yet very powerful. His phallus was quite erect. He had horns and a blue flame came out of his head. He came walking toward me, and so did she. I realized without being told that this was the mighty Horned God. But he was not her lord and master or anything like that, but her lover and consort. She contained within herself all the principles and potencies in nature.

“There were other strange communications, and then the darkness disappeared. We sat in the circle and she began to instruct me in the ritual use of each one of the herbs and teas in the circle. Then I was washed in butter and oil and salt. I put my clothes back on and made my way back to the house. The next morning when I woke up, I knew it had really happened, but it seemed kind of a dream.”

After the description of this vision had settled, I asked Anderson, “When did you decide to form a coven?” And he replied, “It was when Gerald Gardner put out this book of his,
Witchcraft Today.
I thought to myself, ‘Well, if that much is known . . . it all fits together.' ”

On the other side of the country I questioned another Neo-Pagan leader, Penny Novack, one of the early leaders of the Pagan Way, a Neo-Pagan group that in theology was closely allied with Wicca. She described her entry into a religion of goddess worship.

“I was working as a cleaning lady for a small college in Vermont. There was a terrible snowfall and I was out on the road, hitching. The moon was up, a beautiful full moon, and I was walking along the road.

“Now, me and God had this relationship. I always yelled at God and God always said, ‘If you get off your ass and do something, it will straighten out.' And sometimes it would and sometimes it wouldn't.

“So I'm walking along this road, shaking my fist at the moon and saying, ‘Why am I not growing any more? What am I supposed to do?' And I'm furious and I'm shaking my fist at the moon and getting more freaked by the whole situation when I get this message. I didn't hear a voice. I just got this message: ‘Your problem is that your concept of the Eternal One is masculine, and until you can know the One as Feminine, there's no way you're going to grow.' So I said to myself, ‘That's weird. I never would have thought of that, but I'll give it a try.'”

When Penny and her husband, Michael, moved to Philadelphia, Michael began to get interested in Witchcraft. Penny told him, “I'm
not
interested in magic. I want something that deals with
goddesses
and
spiritual
growth.

“And Michael is saying, ‘I read these books by Gerald Gardner, and it sounds like a real nature religion,' and I'm saying ‘Don't talk to me about
Witchcraft.'

“A week later, in December of 1965, the local Republican committeeman came to call and, in passing, mentioned some Witches he'd like us to meet. He brought over a Gardnerian pamphlet, and things took off from there.”

In the late 1970s, Aidan Kelly, a founder of one of the most vital and beautiful Craft traditions in America—the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (NROOGD)—began to write about the origins of the Gardnerian tradition.

The early versions of his manuscript were titled “The Rebirth of Witchcraft: Tradition and Creativity in the Gardnerian Reform.” Within this work, Kelly did something quite new. He labeled the entire Wiccan revival “Gardnerian Witchcraft.” “I refer to this current religious movement as ‘Gardnerian,'” he writes, “because almost all the current vitality in the movement was sparked by Gerald B. Gardner, a retired British civil servant who instituted a reform (and I use this word very precisely) in the 1940s.”
⁵⁸

Most modern Witches use the term “Gardnerian” to refer either to those specific covens that derive through a chain of apostolic succession from Gardner's coven on the Isle of Man, or to those covens that use Gardnerian rituals, a large number of which have been published in books. NROOGD fits into neither category. But Aidan was saying something different—that the influence of Gardner on the modern Craft revival is much greater than most people realize, and that many groups have, often unknowingly, assimilated his main contributions.

The manuscript focused on the problems we have been considering—the Wiccan movement's claim to historical continuity—since many members of the Craft (at least until recently) have said that their practices descend in a direct line from the pre-Christian religions of Great Britain and Northern Europe. As Aidan observed, most Witches see their religion as a “native Pagan religion of Britain and northern Europe that, according to Margaret Murray's theory, underlay the politico-religious struggle that culminated in the witch trials of early modern time.” But, as we have seen, most scholars dismissed Murray's theory and the entire movement as fraudulent. The truth, wrote Aidan, in the late 1970s, lies somewhere in between.

Kelly's manuscript went through many revisions. Part of his work on Gardner was finally published in 1991 as
Crafting the Art of Magic.
One of his most important contributions was finding the earliest version of Gardner's Book of Shadows in the Toronto collections of Gardner's materials:
Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical.
It is the earliest version of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows, or the Gardnerian liturgy. The material found its way to Canada after Monique Wilson sold Gardner's museum on the Isle of Man to Ripley's International Ltd.

At the beginning of his research, when
Drawing Down the Moon
was first published, Kelly argued that there was no way of proving whether a New Forest coven actually existed. He wrote that if it did, its procedures were so rudimentary that new ones had to be invented. And whether he had traditional information, or simply took information out of books, Gardner tranformed the concepts “so thoroughly that he instituted a major reform—that is, as has happened so many times in history, he founded a new religion in the apparently sincere belief that he was merely reforming an old one” and although this religion may have elements of the Old Religion, it is “no more the same religion than the first Buddhists were still just Hindus, or the first Christians were still just Jews.”
⁵⁹

The concepts that were new—the focus of Gardner's reform—were: the preeminence of the Goddess; the idea of the woman as priestess; the idea that a woman can
become
the Goddess; and a new way of working magic that was particularly accessible to small groups. The last was a combination of the “low magic” common to folklore the world over (spells and recipes) and the “high magic” of the ceremonial
grimoire
. Added to this was the idea of the circle as a place to contain power. Sources used by Gardner included Ovid, Crowley, Kipling, Leland, and the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Aidan wrote that it
really makes no difference
whether or not Gardner was initiated into an older coven. He invented a new religion, a “living system,” and modern covens have adopted a lot of it because it fulfills a need. This new system has little to do with the rituals that are labeled “Gardnerian.” It has little to do with the few covens that “are part of the ‘orthodox apostolic succession' of Gardnerian initiation.” The reform consists of these new concepts, the primary ones being the worship of the Goddess and a new way of working magic, a kind of middle-class magic (although Aidan did not use that term). The appeal of the Goddess makes the movement more significant than its size would indicate.

Aidan observed that Gardner's reform took place during the same period in which Robert Graves published
The White Goddess
and Gertrude Rachel Levy wrote
The Gate of Horn.
⁶⁰
He wrote that

It was Aidan's view that Gardner had never been given credit for creative genius. He had a vision of a reformed Craft. He pulled together pieces from magic and folklore; he assimilated the “matriarchal thealogy” set forth in Graves and Leland and Apuleius. With these elements he created a system that grew.

Kelly argued that the Craft is valid on its own terms. Why? Because it is a religion based on experience. The Craft is a religion that allows certain experiences to happen. It doesn't need dogma. Its covens are linked by their focus on the pantheons of pre-Christian Europe, by their ethic of “An ye harm none, do what ye will,” and, primarily, by their worship of the Goddess.

In later years, after analyzing Gardner's notebooks, Kelly came to believe that there was no basis at all for the claim that Gardnerian Witchcraft derived from the ancient Pagan religion of Europe. Looking at
Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical,
Kelly noted that many things were copied into it, including passages from the
Greater Key of Solomon
that appear in Gardnerian rituals and the initiation rituals that are found in Gardner's novel
High Magic's Aid
. Kelly contended that the book did not start out as a “Book of Shadows” but “had become one—in fact, the very first one—by the time it was filled up and retired.” Kelly argued that by looking at the documents it is clear that up until 1954 all the rituals were adapted from the Cabalistic procedures in the
Greater Key of Solomon
. There was, in his view, no emphasis on the Goddess as a major deity and on the high priestess as the central authority in the coven until after 1957, “when Doreen Valiente became the first such ‘Gardnerian' high priestess and began to adopt Robert Graves's ‘White Goddess' myth as the official thealogy of her coven.” According to Kelly, it was only after the publication of
Witchcraft Today,
in 1954, that the Goddess and the priestess became dominant. Writes Kelly: “Valiente's major work from 1954–7 was the creation of a Pagan theology on which rituals could be based; she also created rituals based on this theology by adapting the cumbersome procedures of the HOGD (Holy Order of the Golden Dawn) system to the needs of a small group. As such things go, I must consider this a major advance in magical technology.”
⁶²