Witches

Gerald Gardner, generally regarded as the founder of modern Wicca, first met in Aleister Crowley in May 1947, just a few months before Crowley's death. But their paths had come within hailing distance when both were in Kandy, Ceylon, at around the same time in 1901.

It's interesting to compare Crowley the occultist, the foremost popularizer of "high" magic, with Gardner the witch, popularizer of "low" magic. While Crowley grew up in a family that afforded him no intellectual or emotional support, Gardner's father was "kind and gentle" and his mother was an intellectual of wide literary interests. Where Crowley believed that any sort of manual labor was degrading work that should be left lower classes, Gardner worked on tea and rubber plantations in Ceylon, Borneo, and Malaya. Where Crowley went through women as disposable means of satiating his physical needs, and never respected them in the least, Gardner was happily married for over 30 years.

But it is an odd coincidence how their paths crossed in Ceylon - and how it was asthma that drew them both there. Like Alan Bennett, Gardner looked to find relief from his asthma in a warmer climate. (Crowley also suffered from asthma -- he became addicted to the heroin he was prescribed for bronchial spasms. And Crowley's secretary Israel Regardie, who became a noted writer on the occult, also suffered from asthma. Regardie notes a theory -- from an unnamed English author and occultist -- that asthma is an occupational hazard to magicians and mystics. It is interesting to consider. Or maybe it just says something about air pollution in England!)

From 1900 until 1936 Gardner made his home in the colonies in Ceylon, Borneo, and Malaya. In Ceylon he encountered Buddhism and was interested by (what he interpreted to be) its idea of reincarnation, but that seems to have been the extent of its impact on him. On one of his occasional visits to England he became interested in Spiritualism, and while he found some mediums to be frauds, he believed that others had genuine abilities to contact the spirits of the dead.

In the years he lived in the East Gardner spent much time learning about the local cultures. He witnessed the religious and magical rites of the Dyak and Sakai tribes, and studied the mythology and folk magic of the Malays, especially that centering around their traditional weapon, the kris. (His fascination with the kris may explain the predominance of the athame in Wiccan ritual.) He became interested in anthropology and archeology, and had his work published in the Royal Asiatic Society's Journal.

The magic that he saw the Dyak and Sakai tribes perform was quite different from the "high" magic of Mathers and Crowley. This was not work done in isolation by intellectuals, referencing ancient tomes and grimoires. What he saw with the Dyaks was more like Spiritualism, with a medium acting as a voice for spirits; while the Sakai danced and sang themselves into a frenzy, and treated disease with spells to cast out demons. It was Paleolithic, shamanistic, community activity. In the Muslim culture of the Malays he saw sympathetic folk magic and divination practices not too different in character from those found in European cultures.

Two other influences from his time in the East came through clearly in his later development of Wicca. First, during his time in Ceylon he became a Freemason. Second, after suffering a a minor medical mishap in a Singapore hospital, he turned the most ancient and natural healing treatment: sunbathing. The relief he obtained from sunshine and fresh air turned him into a naturalist.

Gardner retired to England in 1936, and in 1938 -- looking for a safe location for his collection of archaeological artifacts and exotic weapons if the looming war came to pass -- he moved to the New Forest district of Hampshire. During lulls in his work as an air raid warden, he followed his interest in the unusual by visiting a group in Christchurch that styled itself a "Rosicrucian Theatre".

Despite some Masonic and Theosophic ties, it was a generally silly group -- its leader claimed to be immortal, and to have in his possession the Holy Grail! But there was a small clique that he got on well with: a group of newcomers, Co-Masons who had followed Mabel Besant-Scott when she moved to the New Forest area.

According to Gardner this group was a witch coven, practitioners of an pre-Christian European religion that had survived down the ages, and he was initiated into their coven in 1939.

Ten years later, he published a novel, High Magic's Aid, which contained disguised descriptions of the (claimed) rituals and beliefs of this group. He portrayed their witchcraft as equal in status to "high magic", but less elitist and more closely linked to the forces of nature.

The descriptions had to be fictionalized because under the 1736 Witchcraft Act and the 1824 Vagrancy Act, it was a crime to claim to practice witchcraft in Britain. After the repeal of these laws in 1951, Gardner published another book, Witchcraft Today. This was a (purported) non-fiction work in which he posed as an independent anthropologist reporting on the discovery of a surviving pre-Christian religious system.

Between his (claimed) initiation and the publication of High Magic's Aid, Gardner also joined a Druid revival group called the Circle of the Universal Bond (a.k.a. the Ancient Druid Order), and became a member of its governing council. And he met with Aleister Crowley, who initiated him into the Ordo Templi Orientis.

The O.T.O. was a German offspring of Freemasonry founded in 1904. Besides its basis in the myth of the Knights Templar, it was influenced by the "high magic" of Eliphas Levi, and by Indian yoga and tantra. Crowley was a natural for the organization, and they approached him in 1912; he became the head of its English branch. By the time of his meeting with Gardner, Crowley was running the whole show, and had converted the O.T.O. into an organ of his Thelema system.

After WWII the O.T.O. was moribund, and Crowley seems to have planned that Gardner would work to revive it in England.

So, leading up to 1949 Gardner (apparently) had experience, connections, and sympathies in the worlds of both "high" magic -- the O.T.O. -- and "low" magic -- the coven, and the tribal shamans he had seen in the Far East.

When he visited the U.S. in 1947, he was also able to make some contact with Voodoo practitioners. And sometime around here, by the 1950s at least, Gardner was also familiar with a British group called the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry. This, as odd as it may seem, was a sort of Paganish offshoot of Scouting -- connected more with Ernest Seton's original Woodcraft Indians than with Baden-Powell's militarist, jingoist youth movement. (Some have even suggested that this Order, or an offshoot, was the group that Gardner refered to as the New Forest coven; however the historical evidence for this is muddled at best. See the Appendix for more details.)

After Crowley died in 1947, some in the O.T.O. viewed Gardner as his successor in the organization. But Gardner seems to have abandoned plans to revive the O.T.O., and decided instead to throw his lot in with the witches.

Assuming, that is, that there was a group in New Forest doing some sort of ritual work, and if, in fact, they were witches.

We have to use all these qualifiers in relating Gardner's encounter with the New Forest Coven for two reasons. First, historical analysis casts much doubt on the claim that this group was a survival of ancient Paganism.

Gardner's description of the witch rituals match very well the discredited anthropological theories of Margaret Murray. Murray published two popular books, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1933), about her theory of an "Old Religion". Her theory is most notable for two aspects. First, that the victims of the witch trials of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries had been practitioners of a pre-Christian Pagan religion. Second, that this religion was a fertility cult based around a horned god of generative power, and that it was spread across all of Western Europe, organized into small covens.

This theory might have been accepted by layman in the 1930s -- especially by Gardner, who knew Murray through the Folk-Lore Society -- but was not well regarded by contemporary experts, and has been thoroughly overturned by later research.

This points at an attempted reconstruction -- either by Gardner, or by the New Forest coven before he encountered them -- of witchcraft based on theories that were current in the 1920s and 1930s, rather than to a survival of an ancient religion.

Furthermore, the rituals that Gardner used in the late 1940s and early 1950s show many borrowings from the works of Crowley and Mathers, as well as poetry from Kipling, and ritual elements from Masonry, the OTO, and Thelema (the 'Gnostic Mass'). Gardner's explanation was that the New Forest coven's ceremonies were "fragmentary" by the time he encountered the group, and he used this other work to fill in the gaps.

But that brings us to our second reason for richly qualifying any statements about the origins of Wicca: Gardner had what his student Frederic Lamond calls a "devious creative attitude to factual truth." He was known to make bogus claims of university degrees, including a Ph.D. In Witchcraft Today, he falsely claimed to be a disinterested observer, rather than admitting to be a member of the culture he was describing. He claimed that the coven was led by a woman named Dorthy Clutterbuck, but historical evidence shows her to have been a pious Christian with no links to any sort of witchcraft; it seems he used Clutterbuck's name either as a prank, or as a blind to conceal the identity of the actual leader.

So with all these caveats, what can we clearly say about Gardner and Wicca? He didn't pull it out of some deep dusty closet where it had rested since the Stone Age. Nor did he make it up out of whole cloth.

Instead he wove together threads that had been floating around since the early nineteenth century. From the Romantic poets and the work of Murray came the notions of the Horned God and of the Goddess. From the Theosophists came connections between Western and Eastern traditions.

From Whitman up through D.H. Lawrence and (in an incomplete way) Crowley, the re-sanctification of sexuality. (Even with a bit of light kink -- Gardner shunned drugs, and as an asthmatic could not dance himself into ecstasy, and so made use of light bondage and flogging to achieve trance states.

From the occultists came ritual elements of initiation and invocation, and the idea of magic as a tool for spiritual development. From naturalism, the practice of working "skyclad". From primitive tribes, the raw methods of trace, and the emphasis on natural forces. And from Gardner's wide-ranging experience and exposure to Buddhism and Islam, came an inherent respect for diversity in religious practice.

With these elements, Gardner developed something special. It wasn't the first modern Pagan religion (see below), but it was the first to "break the surface", to spread widely and to have mass appeal. It combined methods from low magic and high magic, and applied them to small groups instead of solitary practitioners.

And it emphasized the role of the priestess and brought the Goddess, the divine feminine, to a new preeminence.