The Re-Emergence Of British Witchcraft

In 1951 the British Parliament repealed the Witchcraft Act of 1735 - largely at the urging of Spiritualist churches, who objected to its prohibition of mediumship. This statutory change unexpectedly led to the emergence into public view of a religious tradition thought to be extinct: Witchcraft.

These British witches defied definitions of the term common both in the vernacular and in anthropology textbooks. They were of both sexes, all ages, and were not isolated practitioners of maleficent magic; rather they claimed to be inheritors of the islands' pre-Christian religions. Their religion was duotheistic: they worshipped a male god, often called Cernnunos, Kernaya, or Herne; and a goddess, sometimes called Aradia or Tana. Of the two, sometimes seen as manifestations of a nonpersonal Godhead, the goddess had the greater importance, and her earthly representatives, the coven's priestess, had greater ritual authority.

Greatly condensed, this is a description of what came to be known as "Gardnerian Witchcraft," after Gerald Gardner (1884-1964), who retired from the British colonial customs service in Malaya in 1936, returned to England and - as he described - was initiated into what he himself thought was a dying religion in 1938. This was no overnight conversion:

Gardner was fascinated for many years with magical religion and "practical mysticism". A recognised avocational archaeologist and anthropologist in Malaya, during a visit to England in the 1920s, he set out to investigate the claims of British Spiritualists, trance mediums and the like. As he wrote: "I have been interested in magic and kindred subjects all my life and have made a collection of magical instruments and charms. These studies led me to spiritualist and other societies..."

Gardner wrote three books on Witchcraft, one novel, and two nonfiction works. The novel was High Magic's Aid (1949), a stirring tale of late-medieval English coveners dodging secular and clerical foes with something of the feel of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe  or Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow to it. Interestingly enough, the "witchcraft" portrayed in High Magic's Aid differs from what was later called "Gardnerian  Witchcraft." In it the goddess is de-emphasised; the rituals are more in line with the post-Renaissance traditions of ceremonial magic. Gardner's next two books, The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959) and Witchcraft Today (1954), are more definitive of the tradition. All three of the forenamed remain in print; an earlier novel, with the suggestive title A Goddess Arrives, is long out of print.  Gardner and his followers also produced a "book" that was, until the early 1970s, passed on as handcopied manuscripts: "The Book of Shadows." It is a collection of "laws" and suggestions for running a clandestine coven, performing rituals, resolving disputes between witches inside the group, and so forth. It appears to be written in perhaps the English of the 17th century.  The Egyptologist Margaret  Murray of University College, London.  Professor Murray, known mostly for her work with Sir Flinders Petrie in  Egypt, began researching Pagan carryovers while convalescing from an illness  in 1915. World War I had interrupted her work in Egypt, and she wrote in her autobiography, My First Hundred Years: "I chose Glastonbury [to convalesce  in]. One cannot stay in Glastonbury without becoming interested in Joseph of  Arimathea and the Holy Grail. As soon as I got back to London I did a careful piece of research, which resulted in a paper on Egyptian elements in  the Grail Romance...

Someone, I forget who, had once told me that the Witches obviously had a special form of religion, 'for they danced around a black goat.' As ancient religion is my pet subject this seemed to be in my line and during all the rest of the war I worked on Witches... I had started with the usual idea that the Witches were all old women suffering from illusions about the Devil and that their persecutors were wickedly prejudiced and perjured. I worked only from contemporary records, and when I suddenly realised that the so-called

Devil was simply a disguised man I was startled, almost alarmed, by the way the recorded facts fell into place, and showed that the Witches were members of an old and primitive form of religion, and that the records had been made by members of a new and persecuting form." Murray's researches into medieval and Renaissance witch-trial documents from  Britain, Ireland, and the Continent (including those relating to Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais) led to her writing three books, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), The God of the Witches (1931), and The Divine King in England (1954). In them she described her evidence for the survival of a pre-Christian religion centred on the Horned God of fertility (later labelled "The Devil" by Christian authorities) up until at least the 16^th century in Britain.

As the late historian of religion Mircea Eliade wrote, "Murray's theory was criticised by archaeologists, historians and folklorists alike. " Pointing out some parallels between medieval witchcraft and Indo-Tibetan magical religion, Eliade gives qualified approval to part of Murray's conclusions. The most important assumption was that there existed a pre-Christian fertility cult and that specific survivals of this pagan cult were stigmatised during the Middle Ages as witchcraft....recent research seems to confirm at least some aspects of her thesis. The Italian historian Carlo Ginsburg has proved that a popular fertility cult, active in the province of Friule in the 16th and 17th centuries, was progressively modified under pressure of the Inquisition and ended by resembling the traditional notion of witchcraft. Moreover, recent investigations of Romanian popular culture have brought to light a number of pagan survivals which clearly indicate the

existence of a fertility cult and of what may be called a "white magic," comparable to some aspects of Western medieval witchcraft."

British witchcraft existed prior to Gerald Gardner's initiation into the craft. The works he and his associates produced gave a style of worship, a new set of ritual texts and increasing emphasis on the goddess-aspect as the tradition grew. The older tradition was more balanced, as God / Goddess were equal & one.

BLESSED BE.