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A TRUE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT

A TRUE HISTORY OF

WITCHCRAFT

By Allen Greenfield

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A TRUE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT

"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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A TRUE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT

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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A TRUE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT

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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Allen Greenfield - A True History of Witchcraft.pdf

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