Drawing Down the Moon (8 page)

My tentative conclusion is that Neo-Pagans are an elite of sorts—a strange one.
²¹
The people you will meet here may be some of those few who, by chance, circumstance, fortune, and occasionally struggle, have escaped certain forms of enculturation.

Most Pagans are avid readers, yet many of them have had little formal education. Few are addicted to television. They are, one priest observed to me, “hands-in-the-dirt archeologists,” digging out odd facts, “scholars without degrees.” They come from a variety of classes and hold down jobs ranging from fireman to Ph.D. chemist. But as readers, they are an elite, since readers constitute less than twenty percent of the population in the United States.

The paradox of polytheism seems to be this: the arguments for a world of multiplicity and diversity are usually made by those few strong enough and fortunate enough in education, upbringing, or luck to be able to disown by word, lifestyle, and philosophy the totalistic religious and political views that dominate our society. Perhaps in my own fascination with the Neo-Pagan resurgence I am hoping that these attitudes can become the heritage of us all.

Here's the big question: Has the polytheistic affirmation of diversity come at a time when most people increasingly fear complexity and accept authoritarian solutions? Neo-Paganism is a growing movement. According to some sources,
²²
there are a million Neo-Pagans around the world. In previous editions of this book, I wondered if Neo-Paganism was doomed to be a delicacy for the few. I am still convinced contemporary Paganism will remain a minority religious phenomenon; but I am more convinced today that it has staying power.

—DR. ANN BELFORD ULANOV
¹

 

 

THE WORD
witch
is defined so differently by different people that a common definition seems impossible. “A witch,” you may be told, “is someone with supernatural powers,” but revivalist Witches do not believe in a supernatural. “A witch,” you may be told, “is anyone who practices magic,” but revivalist Witches will tell you that Witchcraft is a religion, and some will tell you that magic is secondary. “A witch,” you may be told, “is a worker of evil,” but revivalist Witches will tell you that they promote the good. The historian Elliot Rose observed that the word
witch
is “free to wander, and does wander, among a bewildering variety of mental associations,”
²
and the occultist Isaac Bonewits has asked:

Bonewits does away with some of this confusion, as we shall see, by dividing Witches into many types, including Classical or cunning folk, Neodiabolic, Familial, Immigrant, Ethnic, Feminist, and Neo-Pagan. And in this book we are (mostly) talking about Neo-Pagan Witches—the revival, or re-creation, or new creation (depending on your viewpoint) of a Neo-Pagan nature religion that calls itself Witchcraft, or Wicca, or the Craft, or the Old Religion(s). This religion, with its sources of inspiration in pre-Christian Western Europe, has a specific history—clouded though it may be—and a specific way of being in the world.

We saw that the word
witch
comes from the Old English
wicce, wicca,
and these words derive from a root
wic,
or
weik,
which has to do with religion and magic. We saw that many practitioners of Wicca will tell you that Wicca means
wise,
although that is etymologically incorrect. Others will tell you that Wicca comes from a root meaning to bend or turn, and that the Witch is the bender and changer of reality.

But etymology does not help one to confront the confusing feeling that lies behind the word
witch.
The very power of the word lies in its imprecision. It is not merely a word, but an archetype, a cluster of powerful images. It resonates in the mind and, in the words of Dr. Ulanov, takes us down to deep places, to forests and fairy tales and myths and friendships with animals. The price we pay for clarity of definition must not be a reduction in the force of this cluster of images.

Witches are divided over the word
witch.
Some regard it as a badge of pride, a word to be reclaimed, much as militant lesbians have reclaimed the word
dyke.
But others dislike the word. “It has a rather bad press,” one Witch told me. Another said, “I did not plan to call myself Witch. It found me. It just happened to be a name—perhaps a bad name—that was attached to the things I was seeking.” One Neo-Pagan journal stated that the term
Witchcraft
is inappropriate as “it refers to a decayed version of an older faith.
”
⁴

Some witches will tell you that they prefer the word
Craft
because it places emphasis on a way of practicing magic, an occult technology. And there are Witches—the “classical” ones of Bonewits's definition—who define Witchcraft not as a religion at all, but simply as a craft. Others will say they are of the “Old Religion,” because they wish to link themselves with Europe's pre-Christian past, and some prefer to say they are “of the Wicca,” in order to emphasize a family or tribe with special ties. Still others speak of their practices as “the revival of the ancient mystery traditions.” But when they talk among themselves they often use these terms interchangeably, and outsiders are left as confused as ever.

Sadly, it is only poets and artists who can make religious experiences come alive in telling about them. Most descriptions of mystical experiences are monotonous and banal—unlike the experiences themselves. And that is why, after all other chapters lay finished, this one remained unwritten. I had stacks of notes lying in piles on tables: descriptions of Witchcraft by Witches; definitions of Witchcraft by scholars; theories on the origin of Witchcraft by historians, the theories of modern Neo-Pagan writers like Aidan Kelly and Isaac Bonewits; a hundred stories and anecdotes.

But Ed Fitch, a Craft priest in California, told me, “To be a Witch is to draw on our archetypical roots and to draw strength from them. It means to put yourself into close consonance with
some ways that are older than the human race itself.”
I felt a slight chill at the back of my neck on hearing those words. And then I remembered a quotation from Robert Graves's
The White Goddess
that the true “function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse,” that all true poetry creates an “experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.” Graves said that one must think both mythically and rationally, and never confuse the two and never be surprised “at the weirdly azoological beasts that walk into the circle.”
⁵

So perhaps the best way to begin to understand the power behind the simple word
witch
is to enter that circle in the same spirit in which C. G. Jung consulted the I Ching before writing his famous introduction to the Wilhelm-Baynes translation. Do it, perhaps, on a full moon, in a park or in the clearing of a wood. You don't need any of the tools you will read about in books on the Craft. You need no special clothes, or lack of them. Perhaps you might make up a chant, a string of names of gods and goddesses who were loved and familiar to you from childhood myths, a simple string of names for earth and moon and stars, easily repeatable like a mantra.

And perhaps, as you say those familiar names and feel the earth and air, the moon appears a bit closer, and perhaps the wind rustling the leaves suddenly seems in rhythm with your own breathing. Or perhaps the chant seems louder and all the other sounds far away. Or perhaps the woods seem strangely noisy. Or unspeakably still. And perhaps the clear line that separates you from bird and tree and small lizards seems to melt. Whatever else, your relationship to the world of living nature changes. The Witch is the changer of definitions and relationships.

Once on a strange and unfamiliar shore a group of young and ignorant revivalist Witches were about to cast their circle and perform a rite. They were, like most modern Wiccans, city people, misplaced on this New England beach. They had brought candles in jars and incense and charcoal and wine and salt and their ritual knives and all the implements that most books on the modern Craft tell you to use. The wind was blowing strongly and the candles wouldn't stay lit. The charcoal ignited and blew quickly away. The moon vanished behind a cloud and all the implements were misplaced in the darkness. Next, the young people lost their sense of direction and suddenly found themselves confronting the elemental powers of nature, the gods of cold and wind and water and wandering. The land—once the site of far different ancient religious practices—began to exert its own presence and make its own demands upon the psyche. Frightened, they quickly made their way home.

The point of all this is simple. All that follows—the distinctions, the definitions, the history and theory of the modern Craft—means nothing unless the powerful and emotional
content
that hides as a source behind the various contemporary forms is respected. This content lies in the mind. There is something connected with the word
witch
that is atemporal, primordial, prehistoric (in
feeling,
whether or not in
fact
), something perhaps “older than the human race itself.” The story of the revival of Wicca is—whatever else it may be—the story of people who are searching among powerful archaic images of nature, of live and death, of creation and destruction. Modern Wiccans are using these images to change their relationship to the world. The search for these images, and the use of them, must be seen as valid, no matter how limited and impoverished the outer forms of the Wiccan revival sometimes appear, and no matter how contested its history.

Many have observed that myths should never be taken literally. This does not mean that they are “false,” only that to understand them one must separate poetry from prose, metaphorical truth from literal reality.

The Wiccan revival starts with a myth, one that Bonewits used to call—much to the anger of many Witches—“the myth of the Unitarian, Universalist, White Witchcult of Western Theosophical Britainy.”

It goes something like this: Witchcraft is a religion that dates back to paleolithic times, to the worship of the god of the hunt and the goddess of fertility. One can see remnants of it in cave paintings and in the figurines of goddesses that are many thousands of years old. This early religion was universal. The names changed from place to place but the basic deities were the same.

When Christianity came to Europe, its inroads were slow. Kings and nobles were converted first, but many folk continued to worship in both religions. Dwellers in rural areas, the “Pagans” and “Heathens,” kept to the old ways. Churches were built on the sacred sites of the Old Religion. The names of the festivals were changed but the dates were kept. The old rites continued in folk festivals, and for many centuries Christian policy was one of slow cooptation.

During the times of persecution the Church took the god of the Old Religion and—as is the habit with conquerors—turned him into the devil of the new one—the Christian devil. The Old Religion was forced underground, its only records set forth, in distorted form, by its enemies. Small families kept the religion alive and, in 1951, after the Witchcraft Acts in England were repealed, it began to surface again.
⁶