Drawing Down the Moon (23 page)

Still, the School of Wicca may have created a hundred covens through its activities, and in years past, the Frosts have often been at the center of Neo-Pagan ecumenical ventures, as well as numerous disputes within the Craft—disputes over sexuality, homosexuality, monotheism versus polytheism, to mention only a few. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of students have begun their twelve-lesson Witchcraft course, although apparently only several hundred have ever finished it.

Part of the controversy that surrounded the Frosts came from Gavin Frost's wry and rather bizarre sense of humor, and his tendency to say almost anything to get a rise out of someone. Because of this, the Frosts have been much misunderstood. For a time their opposition to homosexuality in the Craft raised a great debate. Since their particular tradition stressed heterosexual sex magic, this attitude was somewhat understandable, as long as they stopped short of claiming that their methods were “the Way”; unfortunately, Gavin did not always do this.

They made another mistake. They wrote a Witchcraft book and called it
The Witch's Bible
—or, at the least, their publisher did.
³⁵
When it appeared, many people in the Craft were outraged and labeled it a “Witchcrap book.” This book, with its emphasis on an asexual monotheistic deity, described a religion very different from that practiced by most Wiccans. There were also questionable statements about sex and race. There were descriptions of the use of artificial phalli—an old magical tradition, but one not familiar to most people in Wicca. The title of the book was the worst part. Many Witches fumed at the word
The,
since the book, in their view, had nothing to do with their religion.

In person, the Frosts have always been delightful. Gavin is kind and humorous. Yvonne, who has long gray hair down to her waist, is forthright and even a bit prim. When I visited them back in 1975 they lived in southern Missouri, near a town aptly called Salem. (They have since moved to West Virginia.) At the time, they lived with their daughter in an old red schoolhouse on fourteen acres of land, and they ran a pig farm. The sense one got of their life was
solidity.
Despite my strong religious and political differences with them, I left thinking that they had truly translated the Craft into a living philosophy that placed a high value on techniques of survival and simple rural living. They had many rural-based covens connected with their school and church. This was a welcome change from the mostly urban covens I had encountered.

Gavin Frost told me that he was an iconoclast who believed in an abstract monotheistic deity. He divided “gods” into two types. On the one hand, “God” was abstract, unknowable, beyond the need for worship. But there were also “stone gods,” the gods we “create” for a purpose. These gods are used as storehouses of energy. They are necessary for magic. Gavin said that people make “stone gods” or “idols” in order to have something to put energy into, so that later they can draw power out. Both kinds of deities “exist,” but “stone gods” are of one's own creation. Gavin said he was not a “Pagan” because he did not worship “stone gods.” “What do you mean?” I asked, as we sat around the cozy schoolhouse farm. At this point, the following conversation took place:

M.A.: You both say you are not Pagans, is that true?

Gavin: Absolutely!

Yvonne: I do not consider myself a Pagan. I do not worship any nature deity. I reach upward toward the unnameable which has no gender.

M.A.: How do you define “Pagan”?

Gavin: A Pagan is someone who worships a nature spirit.

Yvonne: Or a named, finite deity.

M.A.: Or many of them.

Yvonne: I say there is one deity, without gender.

Gavin: Okay, but if you want to make something happen, magically, you have no problem or objection to worshipping a statue of Isis, and then dumping power.

Yvonne: Oh! My mascot?
My
deity is my Volkswagen ignition key. That's what makes it happen for me. I do not reach up to it. But if I am going to work a procedure, that is the deity or mascot I use.

Gavin: And you don't have any objection to calling on Mars, let us say, if Mars seems to be appropriate for magical procedure.

Yvonne: But that is not a
reverence.

I asked them if, had they known
The Witch's Bible
would create such a furor, they would have changed anything in the book.

“Maybe we'd change the title to
A
instead of
The,
” Gavin said.

And Yvonne added, “If there are still masculine overtones in regard to deity in the book, we might change them to asexual ones.”

Gavin Frost's interest in the Craft began when he was working for an aerospace company on the Salisbury plains. He told me that there, “surrounded by monuments,” it was easy to become interested in the druids. When he came to the United States, he said, he was initiated by a group in St. Louis. Gavin said his tradition was “thirty seconds old” and that “we have a bunch of traditional stuff, but it keeps changing all the time and we encourage people to experiment and change.” And while the Church of Wicca—an organization connected with the School of Wicca—includes many covens, several follow their own path, which has no connection with the Frosts' tradition; they chose to affiliate themselves with the Church in order to obtain the tax-exempt status of a religious organization.

The Frosts are militantly public, and they have stated that “the conscious decision to be a Witch should be at least semi-publicly acknowledged and admitted.” They believe firmly that communication between groups should be fostered and that “secrecy brings with it persecution, for fear of the unknown results in destruction and death.”

Here are some of the things that distinguish the teachings of the School of Wicca from other Wiccan traditions.

1. Monotheism: the view that Witchcraft is not a Pagan nature religion.

2. No particular emphasis on the feminine.

3. A very structured concept of “the astral,” called
Side,
by the Frosts. The
Side
has ten levels.

4. Very structured beliefs in progressive reincarnation as the primary learning tool of human beings and all “souls.” They also told me that they believe that overpopulation is causing “inferior souls” to reincarnate on the earth plane.

5. Kundalini sex practices, including “introitus,” a practice in which sex without orgasm is used as a form of surrender to God.

6. The use of the Egyptian ankh as a symbol of regeneration. The use of artificial phalli.

7. An antimatriarchal bias. Gavin called the theory of matriarchy “a Marxist heresy.”

The beliefs of the School of Wicca are often stated as follows:

Today, despite their differences, the Frosts seem to get on well with most other Witches, most of the time.

 

Again, these traditions are not “hard and fast.” As one priestess from the Midwest wrote humorously, “Mary Nesnick began as a Gardnerian, Jesus Christ began as a Jew, I began as an Alexandrian. None of us stayed that way.”
³⁷
Most people in the Craft are coming to feel that traditions should be guides, no more, no less. “A tradition,” one New York Craft priest wrote to me, “should be rich enough in associative values and nuances not to wear thin, but to lead to deeper pathways, deeper mysteries. Its images and symbols must not be trite. It should give you supportive values and relationships that aid growth with people or growth with other planes of reality. It should offer an introduction to the world of spirit, but be balanced in regard to the world of the senses and the flesh. In short, it should be stable enough to offer a pathway, a guideline, but it must not be so rigid that all spontaneity is lost.”

As the Witch Diana Demdike told the British magazine
Quest:
The best thing Witches could do, she said, would be to make a huge bonfire of all their carefully copied old books of rituals and then “drink the water of knowledge fresh from its source,” which was “the light of the moon, the shape of the clouds and the growing of green things.”
³⁸

Despite the constitutional amendment that gives citizens of the United States the freedom to practice their religion—“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .”—Witchcraft is not accepted as a valid minority religion by most people in the United States, and many of those I interviewed told me of persecution they had encountered once they were identified as Witches. There were stories of firings from jobs, of children taken away from parents and placed in the custody of others, of arrests for practicing divination. There were stories of stones thrown through windows, and several tales of people who moved away from an area after fundamentalist groups decided to take literally the biblical injunction: “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live.”

Among the Witches quoted in this book, Judy Myer lost custody of her children in a divorce proceeding after her husband said she was practicing Witchcraft. Z Budapest was “set up” by a police informer and arrested for doing a tarot reading for which she charged ten dollars; the informer told the court that the reading seemed quite accurate, but Z was convicted and fined three hundred dollars. Local teenagers tried to set fire to Bran and Moria's house; they threw tomatoes through the windows, as well as stones and other objects. This happened after Moria appeared on the
Tomorrow Show
to talk about the Craft. As a result, Bran and Moria picked up and left for northern California; they told me they regarded the incident as a “sign from the Mother” that it was time to get out of Los Angeles.

Then there was the probable murder of a man by his “caring” relative who wanted to make sure his soul would be saved, and the case of Robert Williams, a psychologist who, after he mentioned the Craft in an interview in a local newspaper, was fired from his job at a Kansas reformatory and shortly after committed suicide.
³⁹
But now, twenty-five years later, these kinds of incidents are quite rare.

Most persecution is not this blatant. It takes the more subtle form of the images of Witches portrayed in television shows and in films like
Rosemary's Baby
and
The Exorcist.

The late Leo Martello, long an activist for civil and gay rights, organized a “Witch-in” in New York's Central Park on October 31, 1970. He had to fight, with the help of New York's Civil Liberties Union, to obtain a permit from the Parks Department. Martello then formed the Witches Anti-Defamation League, devoted to securing religious rights for Witches .
⁴⁰
That organization eventually changed its name to AREN: The Alternative Religions Education Network.

Several years later Isaac Bonewits and a number of other occultists formed the AADL—the Aquarian Anti-Defamation League—an organization dedicated to fighting legal battles on behalf of Pagans and occultists. Writing in
Gnostica,
Bonewits gave details of anti-occult laws and statutes on the books in many states. For example, in Delaware pretending to be able to do magic, divination, or “deal with spirits” made one a vagrant. In Massachusetts to “pretend” fortune-telling for gain was larceny and fraud. In Michigan any form of divination was illegal, including dowsing. In many states, it's still illegal to practice astrology, palmistry, and so forth without a license.

Bonewits observed in an article called “Witchburning . . . Now and Then” that since most people don't consider Witches members of a “real” religion, they often don't get the protection the law gives to churches.
⁴¹

The idea for AADL occurred after Bonewits and a number of other occultists were approached by some apparently sympathetic people who said they were trying to make a documentary on the occult. They turned out to be a fundamentalist group. The film,
The Occult: An Echo from Darkness,
was narrated by Hal Lindsey, the author of
Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth, The Late Great Planet Earth,
and other such books. Bonewits observed:

Bonewits said that the film, a full-color production costing at least a hundred thousand dollars, used misquotes and trick editing. Many Neo-Pagans, psychics, Witches, and Neo-Christians appeared in it, including Bonewits.

The AADL was formed in response to this kind of problem, but the organization died from a lack of volunteers to do the work and a lack of funds. Today, the most important groups fighting for religious freedom for Wiccans and Pagans are the Lady Liberty League, AREN, and ERAL—the Earth Religions Assistance List.