Drawing Down the Moon (15 page)

In the summer 1985 issue of
Iron Mountain,
Doreen Valiente replied to his arguments. She said that she did contribute many things to the present-day Book of Shadows of “what has come to be called Gardnerian Witchcraft,” but she said her contribution was by no means as extensive as Kelly believed. She said she was not the first Gardnerian priestess and that Gardner already had a working coven when she was initiated in 1953. Valiente said the existence of a pre-1939 coven in the New Forest area did not stand or fall on an analysis of the Gardnerian documents, that independent testimony about such a coven was given to the occult writer Francis King by the writer Louis Wilkinson. Valiente then described her own search for “Old Dorothy,” the high priestess who supposedly initiated Gerald Gardner in 1939. After a long search, Valiente found copies of her birth and death certificates and she asserted that her background corresponded to the account given of her in Bracelin's biography of Gardner, and that she was living in the same area on the edge of the New Forest as were Gerald Gardner and his wife in 1939. As we have seen, Ronald Hutton asserts Dorothy Clutterbuck did live in the area but probably had nothing to do with Gardner or the Craft. Valiente also asserted that Kelly was simply wrong to say that there was no emphasis on the Goddess as a major deity and on the high priestess as the central authority in the coven until 1957. “The worship of the Goddess was always there,” she wrote, “and according to Gerald always had been there.”
⁶³

In the last years of her life, Doreen Valiente revealed various pieces of information. Some can be found in her book
Witchcraft for Tomorrow,
and the Farrars'
The Witches' Way
reveals more. But there are many questions that remain unanswered. I asked Valiente, “What do you think did exist in 1939?” In a series of letters over the summer and fall of 1985, Doreen Valiente wrote that she believed Gardner did not invent the basic skeleton of the rituals. “I base this belief,” she wrote, “on what old Gerald told me, and on the rather disjointed state of the rituals which he had when I first knew him. They were heavily influenced by Crowley and the O.T.O., but underneath there was a lot which wasn't Crowley at all, and wasn't the Golden Dawn or ceremonial magic either—and I had been studying all three of these traditions for years.” She wrote that she believed the initiations were more or less as they are today, as were the concepts of the Goddess and the God and the role of the Priest and the Priestess. “Yes, I am responsible for quite a lot of the
wording
of the present-day rituals;
but not the framework of those rituals or the ideas upon which they are based.
On that I give you my word.”

Valiente also said she never believed “Gardnerian” or any other Witchcraft rites had “a direct line to the paleolithic.” On the contrary, she said, “I think that our present-day rituals bear the same sort of relationship to the ancient days that, for instance, the Sacrifice of the Mass in a present-day cathedral bears to the little ritual meal that took place under dramatic circumstances in the upper room of a tavern in Palestine somewhere around 33 A.D.” She wrote that she was intrigued by Isaac Bonewits's suggestion that a group of folklorists in the 1920s got together with some Fam-Trads and some Golden Dawn Rosicrucians to produce the first modern covens in England.

Valiente also had some words that modern American Gardnerians would find surprising. Noting the tendency to use the titles of “Queen,” “Lord,” and “Lady,” within some American covens, she wrote: “All this bowing and scraping to ‘Queens' and ‘Ladies' makes me sick! The only Queen whose authority I acknowledge lives in Buckingham Palace!” She claimed such ideas were introduced into America by Monique Wilson.

In 1985, the priestess she was most impressed with was Starhawk. “Some years ago,” she wrote, “I did some scrying at a Sabbat, in the course of which I predicted that a new young priestess would arise who would do a great deal for the Craft in the future. When I read Starhawk's book I felt that my prediction was coming true.” So I asked Valiente, “How do you assess ‘validity'? What makes someone valid?” She wrote back, “Well, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, ‘a witch is a witch is a witch is a witch.' If someone is
genuinely
devoted to the ways of the Old Gods and the magic of nature, in my eyes they're valid, especially if they can use the witch powers. In other words, it isn't what people know, it's what they are.”
⁶⁴

Before moving on, it should be said that some people involved with Gardnerian Witchcraft have been looking at other sources for the Craft. Donald Frew, in a 1999 article in the scholarly Pagan journal
The Pomegranate
wrote that he now believes “that a direct line of transmission can be traced from the Hermetic and Neoplatonic theurgy of late antiquity to the beginnings of the modern Craft movement in the 1930s.”
⁶⁵
Frew and Anna Korn went to the ancient city of Harran in Turkey, to conduct research. Frew argues that Paganism and Neo-Platonism remained active in Harran until the twelfth century, more than five hundred years after Paganism ended in the Roman Empire, and many Neoplatonists fled east. What's more, Gardner, in his writings, mentions a short Neoplatonic work by Sallustius, a friend of the Pagan emperor Julian,
On the Gods and the World.
(In some translations it's called
Concerning the Gods and the Universe.
) Frew writes that Gardner saw this text as explaining the basic theology of the Craft.

Today most revivalist Witches in North America accept the universal Old Religion more as metaphor than as literal reality—a spiritual truth more than a geographic one. And while the first issue of
Pentagram
(in 1964) proclaimed that the old traditions were once a coherent whole that only needed to be pieced together again, many Witches never viewed Wicca monolithically and only a few dogmatists would view it so today. Bonewits's old definition of Neo-Pagan Witchcraft would now be disputed by most Wiccans. And he himself has modified his views. But he once wrote:

Bonewits, of course, was describing the Myth of Wicca early in its development in America, at a time when most Wiccans were newly initiated or were obsessed with re-creating “traditions.” But already by 1975 this had all changed. Many Witches no longer accepted the Murrayite thesis totally. While some still talked of “unbroken traditions,” few of them thought Gardner—or anyone else—had a direct line to the paleolithic caves. And people in the Craft were beginning to regard the question of origin as unimportant. Most had become comfortable with the idea of creativity and originality as the springboard to the Craft. As more and more of the Wicca came to see that there was no such thing as a totally unbroken or uncontaminated tradition, they began to reassess the meaning of their movement.

Today many Witches will speak forcefully about Pagan survivals. Many will talk about different traditions of ancient Pagan peoples and of a rich Pagan past. Many will speak of ancient mythology and folk traditions or about goddesses throughout the world. But they do not accept the Wiccan Myth as it was commonly described thirty years ago.

Many of them feel no link with the witchcraft of the Middle Ages or the seventeenth century, preferring to look farther back to the ancient Greeks, the Celts, and even the Egyptians. If they organize in “covens,” it is certainly not primarily because “covens” appear in some descriptions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witches, but rather because groups of seven to twelve people have proved over time—in encounter groups, therapy groups, and consciousness-raising groups—to be the best size for like-minded people to work together effectively. Modern Wicca descends
in spirit
from precisely those fragments of pre-Christian beliefs and practices that nobody denies: myths, poetry, the classics, and folk customs.

The comments of Witches are instructive. Ed Fitch, creator of the Pagan Way rituals, Gardnerian priest, and one of those who was attacked in the past for adhering dogmatically to the Wiccan Myth, told me:

“I think all of us have matured somewhat. After a while you realize that if you've heard one story about an old grandmother, you've heard six or seven just like it. You realize that the hereafter must be overpopulated with grandmothers.

“People like Raymond Buckland and myself used to believe that the Craft was very ancient. For a while I think I believed the Gardnerian Craft literally descended from rituals depicted in the paleolithic cave paintings in the Caverne des Trois Frères at Ariège, France.

“I think all of us went through this sort of thing. I know I did. But now, of course, the realization has come around to everyone that it doesn't matter whether your tradition is forty thousand years old or whether it was created last week. If there is a proper connection between you and the Goddess and the God in the subconscious, and other such forces, then that's what matters.”

Ed Fitch's former wife, Janine Renée, said she felt that Murray's chief contribution was to show the prevalence of Pagan survivals in Europe. She felt the Craft was connected to horticulture and that its origins were pre-Germanic and pre-Celtic.

Gardnerian priestess Theos told me:

“I do not personally subscribe to the idea that cavemen were Witches, as many seem so eager to attempt to prove. Nor do I feel that those many later societies who related to those forces were Witches; nor am I certain that those who were accused of being Witches in the seventeenth century were into the same thing we are into in modern Wicca.”

Carl Weschcke, a Craft priest in the American Celtic Tradition and the publisher of Llewellyn Press, told me that the universal Old Religion may not have existed geographically, but it existed in the Jungian sense that people were tapping a common source. “We are reaching back; we're trying to rediscover our roots. Nobody I've met seems to have a truly living tradition. Everyone seems impoverished. But it's coming to life, coming to life.”

Moria, a priestess from northern California, told me:

“What good is a lineage? You either have the energy or you don't.

“I've seen a lot of people in the Craft get hung up on fragments of ritual and myth. Some people accept these fragments as a dogma. And dogma is the worst thing you can have in the Craft. The Craft has to be a living, breathing religion, something that is alive, and growing.”

Many Witches expressed these same feelings. Dianic priestess Morgan McFarland of Dallas said that goddess worship had “an ancient universality about it,” but that it had appeared in different places at different times, changing from place to place. Still, she said, “at this point it really doesn't matter whether or not it existed. If not, invent it! The people I know in the Craft are so desperate to bring back some balance to the Mother before she is totally raped and pillaged that we are, through that desperation, creating it or re-creating it.”

The late priestess Alison Harlow took a similar position. “It doesn't matter if the Craft is ancient. What does matter is learning to accept the process of intuition that occurs, that rings a bell. When you are doing a ritual and you suddenly get the feeling that you are experiencing something generations of your forebears experienced, it's probably true.

“I don't think we will ever find a
true
history of the Craft, simply because too much time has gone by and all history is lies, often received second or third hand.”

Leo Martello put it this way: “Let's assume that many people lied about their lineage. Let's further assume that there are no covens on the current scene that have any historical basis. The fact remains: they do exist
now
. And they can claim a
spiritual
lineage going back thousands of years. All of our pre-Judeo-Christian or Moslem ancestors were
Pagans!
”

A few Witches were downright cynical. Herman Slater, formerly a Craft priest in New York City and the proprietor of the occult shop The Magickal Childe told me a number of years before he died:

“I have been initiated into several traditions. All their origins are questionable. The coven I practice with
now
is democratic. We are oriented toward celebration. We are Gardnerian in outline of rituals with a lot of bullshit thrown out. We are Welsh in background and mythology. Personally, I think Murray and Lethbridge were pretty good propagandists for the movement, but that's as far as it goes.”

Almost all Witches stressed the value of creating
new
rituals as opposed to being handed a lot of
old
ones on a plate. “I always stress very strongly the improvisational part of the Craft,” Z Budapest said to me. “It's not rigid. Our Book of Shadows is a pattern for others to get inspired and create their own books.” A Witch from Minneapolis began to describe to me “the beautiful creativity which is happening in us, which is more important than all the old texts.” She said thoughtfully, “If we could really get hold of an old Book of Shadows, it probably wouldn't fit where we're at now. Today, when we have a festival, we first sit down and talk about what that festival means and how can we apply it in terms of how we live now. It makes you think. Those groups that go strictly by somebody's book are really very impoverished.”