(Ebook) A True History Of Witchcraft, Wisdom Ancient
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A TRUE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT
1
A TRUE HISTORY OF
WITCHCRAFT
By Allen Greenfield
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2
"The fact is that the instincts of ignorant people invariably
find expression in some form of witchcraft. It matters little
what the metaphysician or the moralist may inculcate; the animal
sticks to his subconscious ideas..."
Aleister Crowley
The Confessions
"As attunement to psychic (occult) reality has grown in
America, one often misunderstood and secretive branch of it has
begun to flourish also -- magical religion..."
J. Gordon Melton
Institute for the Study of
American Religion, Green Egg, 1975
"Curse them! Curse them! Curse them!
With my Hawk's head I peck at the eyes of
Jesus as he hangs upon the cross
I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed &
blind him
With my claws I tear out the flesh of the
Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol and
Din..."
Liber Al Vel Legis 3:50 - 53
"If you are on the Path, and see the Buddha walking towards
you, kill him."
Zen saying, paraphrased slightly
"Previously I never thought of doubting that there were many
witches in the world; now, however, when I examine the public
record, I find myself believing that there are hardly any..."
Father Friedrich von Spee, S.J. , Cautio Criminalis, 1631
Having spent the day musing over the origins of the modern
witchcraft, I had a vivid dream. It seemed to be a cold January
afternoon, and Aleister Crowley was having Gerald Gardner over
to tea. It was 1945, and talk of an early end to the war was
in the air. An atmosphere of optimism prevailed in the "free
world" , but the wheezing old magus was having none of it.
"Nobody is interested in magick any more!" Crowley ejaculated.
"My friends on the Continent are dead or in exile, or grown old;
the movement in America is in shambles. I've seen my best
candidates turn against me....Achad, Regardie -- even that
gentleman out in California, what's - his - name, AMORC, the
one that made all the money.."
"O, bosh, Crowley," Gardner waved his hand impatiently, "all
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things considered, you've done pretty well for yourself. Why, you've
been called the `wickedest man in the world' and by more than a
few. And you've not, if you'll pardon the impertinence, done
too badly with the ladies."
Crowley coughed, tugged on his pipe reflectively. "You know" he
finally ventured, "it's like I've been trying to tell this
fellow Grant. A restrictive Order is not enough. If I had it
all to do over again, I would've built a religion for the
unwashed masses instead of just a secret society. Why, the
opportunities! The women!"
Gardner smiled. "Precisely. And that is what I have come to
propose to you. Take your BOOK OF THE LAW, your GNOSTIC MASS.
Add a little razzle-dazzle for the country folk. Why I know
these occultists who call themselves `witches'. They dance
around fires naked, get drunk, have a good time. Rosicrucians,
I think. Proper English country squires and dames, mostly; I
think they read a lot of Frazier and Margaret Murray. If I could
persuade you to draw on your long experience and talents, in no
time at all we could invent a popular cult that would have
beautiful ladies clamoring to let us strip them naked, tie them
up and spank their behinds! If, Mr. Crowley, you'll excuse my
explicitness."
For all his infirmity, Aleister Crowley almost sprang to his
feet, a little of the old energy flashing through his loins. "By
George, Gardner, you've got something there, I should think! I
could license you to initiate people into the O.T.O. today, and
you could form the nucleus of such a group!" He paced in
agitation. "Yes, yes," he mused, half to Gardner, half to
himself. "The Book. The Mass. I could write some rituals. An
`ancient book' of magick. A `book of shadows'. Priestesses,
naked girls. Yes. By Jove, yes!"
Great story, but merely a dream , created out of bits and
pieces of rumor, history and imagination. Don't be surprised,
though, if a year or five years from now you read it as
"gospel" (which is an ironic synonym for `truth') in some new
learned text on the fabled history of Wicca. Such is the way
all mythologies come into being.
Please don't misunderstand me here; I use the word `mythology'
in this context in its aboriginal meaning, and with considerable
respect. History is more metaphor than factual accounting at
best, and there are myths by which we live and others by which
we die. Myths are the dreams and visions which parallel
objective history. This entire work is, in fact, an attempt to
approximate history.
To arrive at some perspective on what the modern mythos called,
variously, "Wicca", the "Old Religion", "Witchcraft" and
"Neopaganism" is, we must firstly make a firm distinction;
"witchcraft" in the popular informally defined sense may have
little to do with the modern religion that goes by the same
name. It has been argued by defenders of and formal apologists
for modern Wicca that it is a direct lineal descendent of an
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ancient, indeed, prehistoric worldwide folk religion.
Some proponents hedge their claims, calling Wicca a "revival"
rather than a continuation of an ancient cult. Oddly enough,
there may never have been any such cult! The first time I met
someone who thought she was a "witch," she started going on
about being a "blue of the cloak." I should've been warned
right then and there. In fact, as time has passed and the
religion has spread, the claims of lineal continuity have
tended to be hedged more and more. Thus, we find Dr.
Gardner himself, in 1954, stating unambiguously that some
witches are descendants "... of a line of priests and
priestesses of an old and probably Stone Age religion, who have
been initiated in a certain way (received into the circle) and
become the recipients of certain ancient learning." (Gardner,
WITCHCRAFT TODAY, pp 33-34.)
Stated in its most extreme form, Wicca may be defined as an
ancient pagan religious system of beliefs and practices, with a
form of apostolic succession (that is, with knowledge and
ordination handed on lineally from generation to generation), a
more or less consistent set of rites and myths, and even a
secret holy book of considerable antiquity (The Book of
Shadows).
More recent writers, as we have noted, have hedged a good deal
on these claims, particularly the latter. Thus we find Stewart
Farrar in 1971 musing on the purported ancient text thusly:
"Whether, therefore, the whole of the Book of Shadows is post-
1897 is anyone's guess. Mine is that, like the Bible, it is a
patchwork of periods and sources, and that since it is copied
and re-copied by hand, it includes amendments, additions, and
stylistic alterations according to the taste of a succession of
copiers...Parts of it I sense to be genuinely old; other parts
suggest modern interpolation..." (Farrar, WHAT WITCHES DO, pp
34-35.) As we shall discover presently, there appear to be no
genuinely old copies of the Book of Shadows.
Still, as to the mythos, Farrar informs us that the "two
personifications of witchcraft are the Horned God and the Mother
Goddess..." (ibid, p 29) and that the "Horned God is not the
Devil, and never has been. If today `Satanist' covens do exist,
they are not witches but a sick fringe, delayed-reaction
victims of a centuries-old Church propaganda in which even
intelligent Christians no longer believe..." (ibid, p 32).
One could protest:, "Very well, some case might be made for
the Horned God being mistaken for the Christian Devil (or should
that be the other way around?), but what record, prior to the
advent 50 years ago of modern Wicca via Gerald Gardner, do we
have of the survival of a mother goddess image from ancient
times?"
Wiccan apologists frequently refer to the (apparently
isolated) tenth century church document which states that "some
wicked women, perverted by the Devil, seduced by the illusions
and phantasms of demons, believe and profess themselves in the
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hours of the night to ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the
goddess of pagans, or with Herodias, and an innumerable
multitude of women, and in the silence of the dead of night to
traverse great spaces of earth, and to obey her commands as of
their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on certain
nights." (Quoted in Valiente, WITCHCRAFT FOR TOMORROW, Hale,
1978, p 32.) I do not doubt that bits of pagan folklore survived
on the Continent through the first millenium -- Northern Europe
remained overtly pagan until the High Middle Ages. But what has
this to do with Wicca?
Farrar, for his part, explains the lack of references to a
goddess in the testimony at the infamous witch trials by
asserting that "the judges ignored the Goddess, being
preoccupied with the Satan-image of the God.." (WHAT WITCHES DO,
p 33). But it is the evidence of that reign of terror which
lasted from roughly 1484 to 1692 which brings the whole idea of
a surviving religious cult into question. It is now the
conventional wisdom on the witchburning mania which swept like a
plague over much of Europe during the transition from medieval
world to modern that it was JUST that; a mania, a delusion in the
minds of Christian clergymen and state authorities; that is, there
were no witches, only the innocent victims of the witch hunt.
Further, this humanist argument goes, the `witchcraft' of
Satanic worship, broomstick riding, of Sabbats and Devil-marks,
was a rather late invention, borrowing but little from
remaining memories of actual preChristian paganism. We have
seen a resurrection of this mania in the 1980s flurry over
`Satanic sacrificial' cults, with as little evidence.
"The concept of the heresy of witchcraft was frankly regarded
as a new invention, both by the theologians and by the public,"
writes Dr. Rossell Hope Robbins in THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
WITCHCRAFT & DEMONOLOGY, (Crown, 1959, p.9)"Having to hurdle an
early church law, the Canon Episcopi, which said in effect that
belief in witchcraft was superstitious and heretical, the
inquisitors cavilled by arguing that the witchcraft of the Canon
Episcopi and the witchcraft of the Inquisition were
different..."
The evidence extracted under the most gruesome and repeated
tortures resemble the Wiccan religion of today in only the most
cursory fashion. Though Wicca may have been framed with the
"confessions" extracted by victims of the inquisitors in mind,
those "confessions" --- which are more than suspect, to begin
with, bespeak a cult of devil worshipers dedicated to evil.
One need only read a few of the accounts of the time to
realize that, had there been at the time a religion of the
Goddess and God, of seasonal circles and The Book of Shadows,
such would likely have been blurted out by the victims, and more
than once. The agonies of the accused were, almost literally,
beyond the imagination of those of us who have been fortunate
enough to escape them.
The witch mania went perhaps unequaled in the annals of crimes
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