Drawing Down the Moon (9 page)

At this point the Wiccan Myth branches in many directions. Different Wiccan traditions (or sects) have a different story to tell. Many will mention the work of Margaret Murray, whose
Witch-Cult in Western Europe
(1921) popularized the idea that Witchcraft is the surviving pre-Christian religion of Europe. Many will mention Charles G. Leland, whose books, written at the turn of the century, described a surviving Pagan religion in Italy, including a Witch cult that worshipped Diana, and a host of ancient Etruscan survivals. Others will mention Gerald B. Gardner, a retired British civil servant who said he was initiated into one of the surviving ancient English covens in 1939. Convinced that the Witch cult was dying from lack of knowledge about it, Gardner published some of what he had learned in a novel,
High Magic's Aid,
and after the repeal of the Witchcraft Acts in 1951, published
Witchcraft Today
and
The Meaning of Witchcraft
. British Witches will often mention the work of the Witchcraft Research Association and its short-lived magazine
Pentagram,
which did much to aid the revival.

The elements of this Myth of Wicca can be found—in much lengthier form—in almost all the introductory books on the modern Craft that were circulating prior to 1980, including works by Gardner, Doreen Valiente, Justine Glass, Patricia Crowther, Stewart Farrar, and Raymond Buckland. Many elements are unquestionably true—such as the idea of pre-Christian survivals in Europe. Others are sharply contested by scholars—in particular, Margaret Murray's theory of a
universal, organized
Old Religion.

Until several decades ago most Wiccans took almost all elements of the myth literally. Few do so today, which in itself is a lesson in the flexibility of the revival. Many scholars refuted the literal accuracy of the myth and then wrongly dismissed the modern Craft itself as a fraud. One cannot really understand the revival of Witchcraft today without first becoming familiar with some of the sources that formed the Wiccan Myth and gave birth to the revival. These sources include the matriarchal theorists, such as J. J. Bachofen and Friedrich Engels; the British folklorists; Margaret Murray's theory of Witchcraft in the Middle Ages; and the books of the revival, in particular Gerald Gardner's writings in the 1940s and 1950s.

While modern Wicca has very little to do with the witchcraft of the Middle Ages or the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the revival was strongly influenced by Margaret Murray's writings.

Although there have been many different approaches to the study of medieval European witchcraft, until about eighty years ago there were two main opposing theories, humorously called by the historian Elliot Rose the “Bluff” school and the “Anti-Sadducee” school.
⁷
The former, reflecting the rationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concluded that witchcraft was a delusion invented by the Inquisition. Rationalist scholars said that “supernatural elements” in reports of the trials—accounts of flying through the air and transformations into animals—made them totally suspect. In addition, the use of torture to obtain these accounts rendered them useless as evidence. Opposing scholars, such as Montague Summers, believed in the reality of Satan and accepted all trial reports as accurate and literal.

In 1921 Margaret Murray published
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
. Murray was foremost an Egyptologist and secondarily a folklorist and anthropologist. After reexamining the trial documents of the Inquisition, she argued that witchcraft could be traced to “pre-Christian times and appears to be the ancient religion of Western Europe” centered on a deity which was incarnate in a man, a woman, or an animal. One of its forms was the two-faced horned god known to the Romans as Janus or Dianus. Murray wrote that the feminine form of the name—Diana—was found throughout Western Europe as the leader of the witches. Because of this, Murray called the religion the Dianic Cult, although she wrote that the god rarely appeared in female form and a male deity had apparently superseded a female one. This “organized religion” was, according to Murray, primarily a fertility cult, in the tradition described by Sir James Frazer in
The Golden Bough
. It was a cult of the god who dies and is reborn, and whose birth and death are reflected in the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of crops. According to Murray, this cult had originated with an aboriginal British race of small people who were the reality behind the fairy faith. The cult had participants in all classes from the peasantry to the nobility. The two main festivals of the cult, on May Eve and November Eve, were described as “pre-agricultural,” having more to do with the fertility of animals than of crops.

Murray wrote that witches practiced a joyous religion. They met at the eight great festivals (sabbats) and at more general meetings (esbats) in covens of thirteen. They feasted and danced and had shamanistic visions. She argued, in fact, that the trial reports of accused witches describing themselves as flying through the air and changing their shape into animals were “ritual and not actual,” a “clear account of the witch herself and her companions believing in the change of form caused by the magical object in exactly the same way that the shamans believe in their own transformation by similar means.” Murray also argued that the coven, the sabbat, and all other aspects of the accusations made against witches had a reality behind them. The Inquisition had simply turned the god of the witches into their devil and substituted evil for good.
⁸

Murray's later books,
The God of the Witches
(1933) and
The Divine King in England
(1954), were even more controversial, particularly the latter. In that book she argued that the idea of the sacred king was a reality in Britain and that many English kings had been ritually murdered; she contended that most of Britain's royalty had been members of the Dianic Cult. Most scholars dismissed this book as the work of a crackpot who had the audacity to publish at the age of ninety. (Murray was a remarkable woman who lived to be a hundred. She published her autobiography,
My First Hundred Years,
in 1963, the same year she died.
⁹
)

Murray's theories were well regarded for some time. In the last forty-five years, however, they have been discredited. The arguments against her were many: that she took as true stories that may have been fabricated under torture; that, while she gave good evidence for Pagan survivals in Britain, she did not give evidence that an
organized
Pagan religion survived, or that this religion was universal, or that covens or sabbats existed before they appeared in trial reports.

The primary value of Murray's work was her understanding of the persistence of Pagan folk customs in Britain and her realization that Witchcraft could not be examined in isolation from the comparative history of religions or from the study of anthropology and folklore. But most scholars today dismiss most of her work.

 

Studies of European witchcraft, particularly of what has come to be called the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are so vast that to summarize scholarship after Murray would be impossible in a book of this nature. Also, the scholarly landscape has changed completely since
Drawing Down the Moon
was first published.

The late historian Norman Cohn was the author of
Europe's Inner Demons
(1975). Cohn argued that the stereotype of the witch comes from a specific fantasy that originated in antiquity. This fantasy—that there exists in the midst of the larger society a small clandestine society engaged in antihuman practices, including infanticide, incest, cannibalism, bestiality, and orgiastic sex—was an age-old tradition. It was first used by the Romans to characterize Christians, and later by the Christians to characterize Jews as well as heretical Christian sects such as the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Manichaeans, the Montanists, and groups such as the Knights Templar.

Cohn doubted that a sect of witches ever existed; therefore his book is the history of a “fantasy.” He argued that folklorists Jacob Grimm and Girolamo Tartarotti—long considered the originators of the view that witchcraft is a pre-Christian religion—merely drew attention to the persistence of pre-Christian folk beliefs that later contributed to the stereotype of the witch. Karl Jarcke in 1828 first stated that witchcraft was the former Pagan religion of Germany, surviving among the common people. Ten years later Franz Joseph Mone described German Witchcraft as an underground esoteric cult. Cohn believed neither theory was convincing; neither Jarcke nor Mone could show that the worship of ancient gods was “practised by organized, clandestine groups in the Middle Ages.” Cohn's next victim was the historian Jules Michelet, whose famous book on witchcraft,
La Sorcière,
appeared in 1862. He characterized Michelet as an “aging romantic radical with neither time nor desire for detailed research.” He argued against Michelet's view that witchcraft was a protest by medieval serfs against an oppressive social order and that those serfs came together in secret to perform ancient Pagan dances and satires of their oppressors. Such a view, wrote Cohn, was prompted by “a passionate urge to rehabilitate two oppressed classes—women, and the medieval peasantry,” but there was no evidence behind it.

Next, Cohn took on the idea of witchcraft as the survival of a fertility cult. He wrote that Frazer's
The Golden Bough
“launched a cult of fertility cults,” and in 1921, when Murray's theory of the Dianic cult appeared, “the influence of
The Golden Bough
was at its height.” He was completely contemptuous of Murray. Because she was sixty years old when she put forth her theory, he was convinced that her mind was rigidly “set in an exaggerated and distorted version of the Frazerian mould.” (In fact, throughout the book Cohn uses age as a reason to dismiss a scholar or an idea.) He argued—like many other scholars—that Murray could not prove the existence of an organized cult. But his main criticism was that she eliminated the fantastic features of the witch trial reports and gave a false impression that realistic accounts of the sabbat existed. If there are parallels between the descriptions of the sabbats and fertility rites, they are, he observed, meaningless. For him the sabbats were a complete delusion, a fiction. He rebuked such historians as Elliot Rose and Jeffrey Burton Russell for still being under Murray's influence despite their criticism of her work; and he expressed dismay that Murray's work had “stimulated the extraordinary proliferation of ‘witches' covens' in Western Europe and the United States during the past decade, culminating in the foundation of the Witches International Craft Association, with headquarters in New York.”

Cohn's main point was that no story with “impossible elements” should ever be accepted as evidence. “Nobody has ever come across a real society of witches,” he wrote adding:

According to Cohn, scholars had simply been “grossly underestimating the capacities of human imagination.” He wrote that the many “fantastic” notions about witches had a long history in folk beliefs—that they practiced evil, that they changed shape and flew through the air—but were never significant until new Inquisitorial procedures began to investigate ritual magic. At that point, small-scale trials of individuals accused of consorting with demons took place. These were minor affairs, and most of the accused were priests. It was not until all parts of the “fantasy” were put together and believed by those in authority that the witch persecutions could really begin. For most peasants, witches were simply those—mostly women—who harmed by occult means. The other notion, that witches were members of a secret sect headed by Satan, came from educated Church leaders and Inquisitors when the Inquisitors themselves had become convinced of the
reality
of the sabbat and nocturnal flights. (Murray, as we have seen, never considered the nocturnal flights to be real, but believed them to be shamanistic visions similar to those reported by religious visionaries around the world.)

At the end of
Europe's Inner Demons
Cohn, unfortunately, adopted, whole hog, the most popular witchcraft religion of our day—psychiatry. The origins of witchcraft in the Middle Ages lie in our unconscious, he wrote: It is a fantasy at work both in history and the writing of history. The witch hunts would never have taken place without “the fantasy of a child-eating, orgiastic, Devil-worshipping sect.” The only continuity is in the fantasy. And where did those fantasies come from? Cohn's answer was that they represented “the innermost selves” of many Europeans, “their obsessive fears, and also their unacknowledged, terrifying desires.” These fantasies of cannibalism and infanticide were in all folklore, and their roots were in childhood, part of the “wishes and anxieties experienced in infancy or early childhood, but deeply repressed and, in their original form, wholly unconscious.” The creation of a society of witches was, therefore, an unconscious revolt against Christianity as too strict and repressive.