Transcription
Please join me in welcoming Professor Hutton. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Modern pagan witchcraft, the oldest and most influential tradition of which is commonly called wicker, is probably the very first fully formed religion that England has ever given the world. The English have produced distinctive and very influential denominations of imported forms of religion, especially Christianity. Wicker seems, however, to have been the first complete religion to have been developed in England itself. It has spread from there in turn to most of the western world and inspired other kinds of pagan witchcraft that differ from it in some respects. It has also provided the basic template for modern paganism in general.
All these qualities are the more remarkable in view of the fact that it is a very radical and countercultural form of religion. Indeed, from the moment of its appearance, it breached virtually all the conventions of the dominant world religious faiths and of 20th century western society. This talk is designed to look at its background and suggest as far as possible how it appeared. In the process, it is also intended to establish the characteristics of pagan witchcraft and determine its significance as an aspect of modern religiosity.
First, a historical context may be proposed for it, that it is most unusually a religious tradition inspired, admittedly unwittingly, by academic scholars. Its roots run back into the 18th century and the great movement that called itself the enlightenment. One of the features of that movement was that the people who controlled power in European society ceased to believe in the reality of magic. This meant that they couldn't believe in witchcraft either. They therefore removed the traditional laws that enabled the prosecution and execution of suspected witches. This involved the apparent and deeply embarrassing admission that all the trials for alleged witchcraft which had peaked only in the previous 200 years had been a terrible mistake.
Somebody had to be held responsible for all those needless deaths. And the reformers blamed two very different groups. One consisted of established churches which to the 18th century rationalists typified all that had been most ignorant and bigoted in earlier European society. The other was the common people whom Enlightenment philosophers viewed as a sink of superstition and prejudice in need of re-education. The philosophers's program was therefore to break the power of the churches and improve the masses. It was enacted.
But in the subsequent era of the French Revolution, reformers changed their minds about two things. The heroes of the 18th century liberals had been monarchs who once re-educated could use their authority to make things better for everybody. The radicals of the 19th century were democrats who wanted to remove the powers of traditional monarchies with those of traditional churches. This meant that the common people could no longer be held responsible for the witch trials even though they'd produced most of the accusations. Instead, it was necessary to blame the traditional rulers with the traditional churches. The witch trials could be made into a conspiracy by those to brainwash the people for their own ends.
Here the supporters of the old regimes mounted a counterattack which actually played into the hands of the radicals. During the period of reaction in Europe after the fall of Napoleon when many of those regimes were restored two German conservatives Carl Ernst Yara that's him on the left and France Ysef Mona that's him on the right suggested that the victims of the witch hunts had actually been pagans. This was their way of getting around the challenge of the enlightenment. They argued that witchcraft itself did not exist. But the socalled witches had still deserved to die because they were practitioners of a bloodthirsty and disgusting ancient religion.
It was a clever tactic, but it had a fundamental flaw. To answer it, all that 19th century liberals had to do was reverse the sympathies. To declare that the alleged witches had indeed practiced an ancient religion, but a thoroughly good one. It was a tactic that was neat, speedy, and didn't actually involve much research. The Frenchman Jee Michel, the man incidentally who invented the idea of the Renaissance did this in 1862. He asserted that the witch trials had indeed been of a religion that loved nature, encouraged human beings to express and enjoy themselves freely and been rooted in the common people. He portrayed the witch religion as honoring women and embodying much natural wisdom, especially with regard to natural healing. It represented in Michel's exciting portrait everything that the medieval church and state were not. And therefore they had to destroy it to fix their power over the masses.
In the 1890s, an important addition was made to Misha's portrait when an American folklorist and radical, Charles Godfrey Leland, another revolutionary, claimed that this ancient witch religion had persisted into recent times among Italian peasants. He published what he alleged to be its liturgy. In its essence, therefore, the idea that witchcraft had been an attractive libertarian pagan religion was complete by the end of the 19th century. It was then taken up by several authors in Britain of whom the last and most celebrated was a distinguished Egyptologist Margaret Murray. What she contributed was a new wealth of detail taken from early modern texts which seemed to fill out a picture of the religion concerned. Her arguments could not readily be tested because of a lack of systematic research into the early modern witch trials based on the original sources. In default of that, it was widely accepted.
Between 1945 and 1970, it became something of an orthodoxy among British and French historians, being endorsed and repeated by such leaders of them as the great medievalist, Sir Steven Ransomman, the great expert on the 16th century, Sir George Clark, the leader of British scholarship on the 17th century, Christopher Hill, um the greatest mid 20th century French historian Emanuel Loy Ladiri. There was accordingly some credence to the claim revealed to the public by a retired colonial civil servant called Gerald Gardner in 1951 that Murray's witch religion had persisted in secret to the present. He stated that in 1939 he had discovered one of the last covens of it in the New Forest in Hampshire and been initiated into it and learned its traditions. He now revealed this to the public and invited those who wished to be initiated into it by him in turn and preserve it.
In the course of the 1950s, Gardner had considerable success in attracting people to his claimed old religion. It spread rapidly and crossed the Atlantic to America in the 1960s and has gained many adherents across the Western world. Other individuals came forward in the course of that time claiming to represent other surviving forms of the same religion, differing in aspects from gardeners and founded separate traditions of it.
It may therefore be worthwhile to pause at this moment to examine the likely veracity of Gerald Gardner's claims. It must be said at the start that they are for lack of evidence incapable of absolute disproof. That state of evidence however also makes proof of them equally difficult and there are reasons for disbelief in his story. The first is that no confirmation has been found to date of the existence of the old coven into which gardener claimed to have been initiated. Philip Hezelton has carried out excellent research which has identified a set of people in the right place, the Christ Church High Cliff area of Hampshire at the right time who might plausibly have belonged to it. What even he has been unable to do, however, is to show that these people actually all knew each other, let alone that they worked the kind of pagan witchcraft revealed by Gardener. Their interests which between them amounted to a love of nature, of mayday, of fairies and of herbalism or an interest in esoteric ritual of the sort associated with freemasonic or rosacrruian tradition were different from wicker.
The second problem is that Philip Hezelton has also revealed much more clearly than before that in the half decade between the end of World War II and the revelation of Wicker, that's between 1945 and 1951, Gardner had passed through a succession of esoteric religious groups. In 1946, he became a druid and a member of an unorthodox Christian sect, the ancient British church. The next year, he met the famous occultist Alistister Crowley, and joined his order of ceremonial magicians. When Crowley died at the end of 1947, Gardner was actually offered the leadership of that order in Europe. But he soon gave up the job. Instead, he began to write a novel about medieval pagan witches of the Margaret Murray kind. The rituals portrayed in that novel included some that were to feature in the Wickan religion. By 1950, at the latest, he was already committed to propagating wicker and it became his central preoccupation for the rest of his life.
There is therefore a natural progression in the sequence of commitments. The Druids made him a member of their council. The ancient British church ordained him as a priest. and Crowley's order tried to make him their European leader with Wicker. However, he automatically became the world leader and source of all information on it. This succession of events does suggest somebody who is frenetically looking for a spiritual home in the late 1940s rather than one who'd found his true home years before as he later claimed.
The third problem with accepting gardener's story on face value lies in the rituals and liturgy of wicker itself. These are preserved in a succession of manuscripts from the late 1940s onward. They show what were to become the key ceremonies and conventions of the religion to have been an estate of constant development all through the 1950s. Only a few were in existence before that decade and perhaps not long before it. The earliest of them consist of the initiation rituals to the three degrees through which members advanced in the Wickcan religion. They all presuppose a single male practitioner who's initiating a single female candidate. The early ceremonies also include the consecration of food and drink and of operative magic which again can be performed between two people. Later in the sequence come brief seasonal rituals which by then were expected to be performed by a group. A reading of this first body of ceremonies therefore shows an embriionic religion growing before the reader's eyes.
When all these factors are put together, it seems most likely that Wicker was first developed by Gerald Gardner and his friends from the late 1940s onwards. However, an earlier origin point for it cannot be ruled out and nor can a connection with the Christ Church highcliffe area. It's certain, for example, that the person with whom gardener was most closely connected in that area from 1939 onwards acted as his partner in running his first Wickham coven around 1950.
So what was the character of the religion as it was first created? It's often been noted that its early writes and liturgy show every sign of having been put together in a hurry from a medley of different sources. The basic structure of the degree system and of the initiation rituals was taken from Freemasonry mixed in the third degree with liturgy taken from Alistister Crowley and Charles Godfrey Leland. Parts of other ceremonies were assembled from a modern edition of an early modern magical handbook, from books and articles on ritual magic published between 1926 and 1949 from a poem by Radiard Kipling and from more work by Crowley. They also, as I have said, continued to develop steadily through the 1950s.
In the initial draft of the ceremonies, for example, only four seasonal rituals were celebrated, those which opened the seasons on the eaves of February, May, August, and November. These were the festivals declared by Margaret Murray to have been those of her historic witch religion. By 1953, Gardener's main coven based in North London was also celebrating the solstesses and the equinoxes, the festivals of the modern druids to whom gardener still also belonged. These solsticees and equinoxes were however still treated as lesser events to the quarter days. In 1958, however, gardener's main coven asked him to give the solar festivals equal status with the quarter days that began the seasons. He agreed and so the standard 8 festival cycle celebrated by pagans across the contemporary western world came into being.
It's easy therefore at a superficial level to get the impression that wicker was not only hastily improvised but derivative and unstable. It could be taken for a cobbling together of secondhand texts to create a framework of an attempted reconstruction of a historic witch tradition witch religion postulated by writers like Mish Leland and Murray. And while there is some truth in that, from the beginning, Wicker also contained major elements that were unique to it and marked it out as a distinctive and viable religious tradition.
One was its concept of divinity. It rejected the monotheism of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and of Western esoteric systems that had evolved in a Christian culture such as Freemasonry, Rossianism, and the Druid to which gardener belonged. Wicker also however rejected the polytheism of historic paganism with its local pantheons of many different deities and demi deities. It depended instead mainly on a divine partnership between a goddess and a god who represented between them the creative and sustaining powers of the cosmos. They could be identified with many different historic deities, but were essentially unitary beings, the goddess and the god. They represented simply the most popular female and male pagan divine forms of western culture since 1800. The goddess was the one identified with the earth, the natural world, and the night sky, celebrated ever since the romantic poets. The god was the dynamic horned one of nature, who had been prominent in literature and art as pan and became known also as Kenunos or simply as the archetype of the horned or antl, lord of the wild.
What was distinctive about Wicker was not merely that the two of them were stably joined as partners but that the goddess was the more powerful and important. This was reflected in the human sphere of the religion as well. Wicker was based on small groups usually 5 to 12 strong called covens. It still is. These were led by a high priestess and a high priest. They operated in partnership, but the priestess was the more senior and important partner. The Wickcan concepts of deity developed in details during the first 10 years. For example, the god who had at first been associated primarily with hunting, winter, and death became linked to the sun as well. The basic framework, however, never altered.
The second major and distinctive characteristic of the new religion was its concept of an afterlife. It embraced the idea of reincarnation of human souls into new bodies which had been popularized in the west by Buddhist and Hindu thought since the late 19th century. It gave this concept however its own addition. It taught that people who had been especially attached to each other in life could reincarnate in the same places and times. This enabled them to maintain their bonds of attachment through generations. Wicker thus immediately set out an original and unusual answer to each of the two great questions with which any religion needs to reckon. The nature of the divine and the fate of the soul.
Other distinctive features were provided by the fact that its initiates were both priestesses or priests and witches. In one sense, this was just a consequence of the model provided by contemporary scholarly orthodoxy that the main surviving paganism of Western Europe had been that persecuted and largely wiped out as witchcraft. This dual identity, however, provided Gardner and his companions with great potential. It meant that the main activities of coven meetings were the working of operative magic mostly aimed to help other people. This also involved a shift in relations with the divine. The goddess and God and the elemental and ancestral spirits also invoked at meetings were not there simply to be woripped but as active partners and participants in the magical operations.
Moreover, Wicker imported from traditional ceremonial magic what became its central religious act the invocation of the deities and especially the goddess into the bodies of members of the coven. These would then speak on behalf of the deities either with set texts or in spontaneous era fashion. This was a direct derivation from the magical practice recorded from ancient times whereby spirits or even deities would be invoked into a human being by the magician. The person into whom they were invoked would then act as a channel of communication with them. That precedent filtered through one of Alistister Crowley's most famous rituals in which an ecstatic goddess speaks through a priestess provided Wicker with an with a spectacular and effective divine apotheiois. It became known in the religion as drawing down the moon.
All three of the major features corresponded to Gerald Gardner's own tastes. The reverence for women and the joy of working with them. His belief in group reincarnation, which was made a key plot device in his first novel, published before even he claimed to have encountered Wicker, and his interest in witchcraft and magic. Two other strikingly unusual aspects of wicker, early wicker also reflected his tastes. One was that its initiates worked together nude. There were sound historical precedents for this. Artists had traditionally portrayed witches as meeting together naked. This in turn drew on a worldwide and timeless tendency to believe that magic in general should often be worked nude. It provided in disroing a very easy and dramatic separation of magicians from their everyday selves. For Wiccans, it afforded a simple way together with candle light, incense, and liturgy of establishing a completely otherworldly atmosphere, a clear sense of being in an utterly unusual and transformative space. It also accorded, however, with gardener's identity as a keen and doctrinire naturist.
The other remaining aspect that echoed his views was the technique used by his Wiccans to change consciousness before ritual. This was to bind and scourge each other by turns. The scourging was gentle and rhythmic and hypnotic. The binding intended slightly to restrict the blood supply. The combined effect, if successful, was a light state of trance. This was very definitely Gardner's own preferred method to achieve an altered mental condition before magic. It was not because he was a flegellant for which there is no evidence. It was because he was an elderly for whom other means of entering trance like dancing, chanting or taking mindaltering substances were unsuitable. He himself emphasized that other people were welcome to use other means to change consciousness before ritual and specified at least seven. Nevertheless, this method of his was the main one embodied in early wicker.
Both aspects have to some degree atrophied. Subsequently, most Wiccans have abandoned the binding and scourging, save as an ordeal on initiation. Many have also taken to robed ceremonies, although many also retain ritual nudity. What is very clear is that gardener's wicker was a countercultural religion of sensational boldness. As said in so many ways, it crashed the barriers of western religion and mores in the still very conservative midentth century. These features also positioned it to benefit greatly from the changes in social and cultural convention which occurred in the second half of that century.
In many ways, it was the association of paganism with witchcraft that enabled it to do so by connecting with three of the main historic currents of the late 20th century. The first was feminism. The witch simply is one of very few images of independent female power that traditional European culture has bequeathed to the present. In ancient European religions, men carried on most public rights as head of political and social units. They were also thought to be able to work magic, but they had to learn it from books or teachers. Women, by contrast, across most of Europe and the ancient near east, were regarded as natural repositories of magical power, less regulated, more spontaneous, and more dangerous. They therefore functioned in public religion as oracles and prophetesses but were also believed to wield destructive magical power much more easily than men. The identification of witchcraft with female power in most of Europe therefore runs very deep. Wicker as said accorded women primacy and power on both the divine and the human levels.
The second current with which wicker connected was environmentalism. Witches were traditionally supposed to understand nature because their meetings and rights were secret occasions held away from public view in meadows, woods, and mountains. This association with the wild and green stood them in goodstead in a modern age which went on to reckon with full-blown ecological crisis. In its first 20 years, Wicker identified itself more as a fertility than a nature religion. This echoed the insistence of early 20th century academics, including Margaret Murray, that fertility rights had been what ancient paganism was all about. From 1970, however, its leaders responded to the new interest in the ecosystem to define wicker as a religion focused on a sacralized natural world.
A third late modern cultural current which it rode perfectly was that of individual self-expression, self-realization and personal growth. Early modern people had officially believed that witches were enslaved by Satan and found his promises of reward barren. In the fantasies woven around witches, however, they seem by contrast to have been having an absolutely wonderful time. They were made into key traditional images of misrule, disorder, and freedom for moral restraint and were clearly hugely enjoying themselves. This element of abandoned realry and full-blooded taking of pleasure easily turned into a modern icon of liberation for the witch figure. It enabled modern pagan witches to function as a religion which celebrated the joys of living and above all of sexual union as things sacred in themselves.
From the start, Wicker put up some safety barriers against the excesses of libertanism. It may regard sex as sacred, but in none of its rituals are any of the participants obliged to have sex. Actual sex is not in fact necessary to any Wiccan practice. Likewise, within a few years, Wickham tradition had incorporated two texts to ensure that self-expression should not become irresponsible. One was the injunction, do what you will and harm none. The other was the dictim that the effects of any magical workings return upon the magician three times over.
It remains to be seen in conclusion how pagan witchcraft developed during the remainder of the 20th century. Here it is necessary to consider three more figures. The first is Dorene Valiente who was one of Gardner's early initiates and became his greatest high priestess. She composed much of the standard Wickan liturgy, especially that for festivals and the manifestation of the goddess drawing down the moon. After she and gardener quarreled, she continued to write more pieces that became incorporated into the practice of Wiccans and other pagan witch groups. She indeed actively encouraged and participated in some of the forms of pagan witchcraft that appeared in the wake of Wicker. They seem to have been inspired by it as none can be proved to predate it, but they differ from it in substantial details. Dorene Valiiente also went on to write extensively on pagan witchcraft. commence research into its history and design the first self initiation program and liturgy for solitary practitioners. She remained a major figure of the religion until her death in 1999.
The second important personality is Alex Sanders, a workingclass man from Manchester who bid to become the leading figure in Wicker after Gerald Gardner died in 1964. He claimed to derive from an independent lineage of the same religion. This claim is now generally discounted as his set of ceremonies was basically that employed by gardener's wicans at the time when Alexanders came into contact with them. Nevertheless, he augmented them significantly and made two major contributions to wicker. The first was to give it a massive reinforcement of publicity and secure it a huge number of new recruits. Taking the public title king of the witches, he played the mass media fearlessly and skillfully for 10 years, becoming the best known pagan witch. He was aided in this by a move to the west end of London and his marriage to a young stately shrewd and glamorous woman called Maxine who's in the picture with him who became an ideal partner for him in all his endeavors. His second component was to invest the gardenerian ceremonies with a greater component of ceremonial magic from a range of sources. His branch of wicker became known as Alexandrian. This was partly of course a recognition of his own central part in it. He was called Alex, but also of its inquiring eclecticism bonded by the original Wicken tax. This echoed the great city of the ancient world, Alexandria, with its medley of different ancient cultures.
The third figure is a Californian called Miriam Seamos who wrote under the name of Starhawk. She blended wicker, as it had by then established itself in America, with kinds of pagan witchcraft which had appeared there under its inspiration. More important, she infused the resulting mixture in books published from 1979 onwards with an additional and explicit component of feminism and environmentalism. In her hands, it became the ideal radical and countercultural religion for the age.
All this meant that pagan witchcraft was securely enough established by the end of the 1980s to survive the collapse of the academic construct that had inspired it. From the 1970s, sustained scholarly research commenced into the early modern witch trials. This revealed, it seems unequivocally, that the people accused of witchcraft in those trials had not been members of any surviving pagan religion. It also revealed that especially in some areas of Europe, pre-Christian beliefs may have colored the stereotype of witches and their activities, but that is not the same thing. This removed the origin story for Wicker which had given it especially as promoted by Gerald Gardner, the claim to be a continuously surviving ancient religion. Indeed, as characterized by Leland and Murray, it had been termed the old religion of Europe.
By the 1990s, however, Wicker and other forms of modern pagan witchcraft were so firmly embedded and had made such a clear and distinctive contribution to late modernity that they did not need the old origin mythology. After all, many important religious movements of reform and renewal have launched themselves by claiming not to be innovations, but a return to primeval and original forms of their tradition. The Protestant Reformation and Muslim, Judeaic, Hindu, and Buddhist religious renaissances have all taken this form and gone on to refresh and galvanize world faiths. By 1990, the leaders of British Wicker had established the historical revisionism, the idea that wicker was a religion which had appeared in the 20th century, although it incorporated many genuinely ancient images and ideas and had embodied some of the strongest, most powerful cultural impulses of Western Europe in the last 200 years before the late modern era. Most of Wiccans and pagan witches in other nations also accepted the revisionism, though sometimes with more local opposition, which continues.
We have therefore in this story a splendid paradox. What Gerald Gardner and his companions revealed to the public was build as having the peculiar merit of being the planet's most ancient religious tradition, extending ultimately back to the Stone Age. What they had provided instead was a viable and successful tradition that was especially well suited to radical late modernity. feminist environmentalists and embodying responsible self-expression and personal growth. It did draw on ancient images and ideas and as said on major cultural currents of the 19th and 20th century to provide a robust vehicle for a very contemporary and dynamic spirituality. It furnishes not only an exemplary case study of the appearance of a modern religion, but one of the ways in which the present can employ images of the past to create the future. That makes the study of the history of modern pagan witchcraft a particularly inspiring one for a historian. [Applause]