Tag Archives: witchcraft

It’s Not Culturally Insenstive When We Do It in a Hip and Ironic Way

One Antonia Blumberg, writing at The Huffington Post, which often veers off into the weeds of political correctness, tackles that burning question of late October: Is it “culturally insensitive” to wear a Hallowe’en witch costume?

But the  HuffPo’s  cultural sensitivity is barely skin deep — they are also featuring an article on “Witch Is the New Black: How to Dress Like Your Favorite Sorceress.”

At least Blumberg interviews Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary, who sees no problem:

“As someone who has been politically active for many years, I see that there’s some power in taking images and repurposing them,” said Fox. “Some in our community have chosen to have some fun with witch costumes.”

Pagan doctoral candidate Sam Webster adds,

“It highly depends on who’s doing it,” Webster told HuffPost. “If it’s a pagan or a witch, they’re usually doing it with a bunch of self-referential irony.”

Which makes sense; and what also makes sense is to adopt an attitude of “who cares?” Don’t be like the stupid school administrators mentioned in the article who banned Hallowe’en celebrations in the school “partly out of respect for practitioners of Wicca who might find the symbols offensive.” Yeah, right. They care so much about us. That language is just bureaucratic butt-covering: “Let’s avoid controversy by banning something else.”

The more Hallowe’en celebrations and the more pointy hats, the better, as far as I can see. Only what do the guys wear? Sorry, I can’t do Sabrina or Stevie Nicks.

“Good Witches” at the Alchemical Bar

In Brooklyn, says the New York Times, “real-life good witches” are selling herbal cocktails and “celebrating all things magical.”

Ms. Ayales’s best-selling formulas are Love Handles, a tonic said to help blast fat with ginger, Himalayan pink salt, green coffee bean and a rain forest tree berry called cha de bugre, and Lucid Dreaming, a pungent cocktail of kava, ashwagandha, rose and passionflower that addresses anxiety.

Although let me say, as someone married to an herbalist, that herbal medicine works but it works slowly, and one drink served up by your “alchemical baristas” is not going to do the job.

 

Female Viking Warriors? A New Cinematic Arthur? And the Intern’s Tale

¶ Based on only six skeletons, some people are going crazy on Facebook, etc., about female Norse warriors. It’s not that simple, says someone who read the original archaeology paper. But it’s still interesting.

¶ Peg Aloi is a bit short of breath about a possible new film series on the Arthurian legend.

¶ What is it like to be an intern in a witchcraft museum? At least here is someone who knows who Cecil Williamson (Gerald Gardner’s business partner) was.

Blogging Break Over, Book Stuff Ahead

I have taken a brief and unwanted break from blogging, but I hope that it is over. First the MacBook Pro that I use for writing and blogging developed a weird, possibly demonic (or daemonic) directory corruption that flummoxed even the specialists up at Voelker Research. About the same time, my desk/computer chair broke, which felt like a sign. A sign that I should just go hiking and read more novels, possibly. And ponder some vivid and meaningful dreams.

That was wonderful, but I have to give a couple of talks next week, and I needed to prepare. So there I was out on the veranda with a legal pad and a stack of books and print-outs, preparing. If I have learned anything in teaching it is that I am not as good at “winging it” as I like to think I am—unless it is a course that I have already taught ten times over.

So while I am doing that, here is an interview with Doug Ezzy about his new book, Sex, Death, and Witchcraft: A Contemporary Pagan Festival.

The book is both a rich ethnographic account of controversial Pagan festival and a provocative reflection on the role of emotions, symbols, and ritual in theories of religion.  The festival involves “a recreation of the Witches’ sabbat . . .  It’s R-rated, it contains adult themes, nudity and sex references”, according to Harrison — one of the festival participants I interviewed.  The theory develops what Graham Harvey and I are calling “relational theory” in the study of religion.

It is on my reading list.

And speaking of reading, expect more book reviews here over the next few weeks.

“Choose How Cute or Evil She Should Be”

historical witch creatorThe sexy witch. The evil witch. The cute witch. What accessories should she wear? What animal is her familiar? And where did she come from?

When I ran across this website (another update of the old paper doll), I thought of two things right away.

One was a book co-authored by my friend Nikki Bado, Toying with God: The World of Religious Games and Dolls, all about board games and Muslim Barbie dolls, etc. Nothing Pagan or Crafty in it. But still, is this a “religious doll”?

And there was Ethan Doyle White’s recent interview with Ronald Hutton, in which Hutton discusses his latest project, “a comprehensive study of the concept of the witch, in a global, ancient and folkloric setting, to understand more fully the context of the early modern witch trials.”

If he does not address the “sexy witch” archetype, I will be sadly disappointed. This website is “historical,” it says so. 😉

But really, “cuteness” did not figure much in the witch trials. It’s more about that old black magic in a contemporary sense.The image of the sexy, magical woman has enormous power, don’t you think? Not to mention fashion possibilities.

The Mind of the Native and the Mind of the Witch

Typical Colorado foothills weather — from snow on the ground mid-May to temperatures in the 80s F. by the first of June. What is this “spring” people speak of? If you have hummingbirds and snow at the same time, that is our spring.

Some links:

• Rod Dreher posts on “How to see a ghost,” which is a little tangential for the blogger usually defined as “crunchy con,” but there is a connection to the idea of being embedded in place.

A lot of the post is excerpts from Rupert Ross’s book Dancing With A Ghost: Exploring Indian Reality, Much of it is animistic, as you would expect:

If, for instance, it is possible for a man to “walk” through the spiritual (that is, the imaged) plane, then he could not deny the possibility that others would be able to do the same. The dimension of each person which did this visiting thus ought to be able to encounter the corresponding dimension of others; suddenly the possibility of interaction with others on that plane becomes real.

Dreher is a capital-O Orthodox Christian (by conversion, hence enthusiastic), writing that he does not “subscribe to the pagan, animistic metaphysic Ross describes, but that it’s interesting to me to observe how much this overall outlook tracks with Orthodox Christianity and its belief in panentheism, which teaches that God is immanent in all creation.” But read his post for the excerpts and to watch him wrestle with what Ross has to say.

• Meanwhile, at his Paganistan blog, Steven Posch links to what he considers an accurate description of the “mind of a witch,” although it was not written from that perspective.

I liked this part:

Like all predators, a witch is a territorial animal, and to know your territory you have to patrol it regularly and you have to notice what’s going on there: what has changed, what’s changing, and what hasn’t changed.

It’s all in how you define “territory.

Response by Robert Mathiesen to “Investigating a Grandmother Story”

This guest post by Prof. Mathiesen began as a comment to my earlier review ofThe Rede of the Wiccae, which he wrote with Theitic of the NECTW tradition. With his permission, I have moved his comments here.

Thank you, Chas! That’s a handsome and generous post.

My view of the history is close to yours, and I really like the term “Gardnerian magnet.” What follows are relatively minor points only, just to flesh out the picture you have painted so ably. (And I am writing in haste, too, so please forgive any typos and other infelicities of expression.)

(1) In the 1800s a number of Spiritualists maintained that there was no essential difference between a (Spiritualist) medium and a witch (or, for that matter, a real magician). A small number of mediums actually hinted (rarely) that they regarded themselves as witches, or (even more rarely) risked calling themselves witches as a means of enhancing their power in the public eye. No doubt these witches, like most other Spiritualists at the time, did some of their work in circles. Theirs are not *quite* the same thing as witches’ circles today, but there are similarities, e.g., equal numbers of men and women as an ideal.

Spiritualism (like Freemasonry and New Thought) tended to run in families over generations, so this sort of witch might even truly be doing what her mother and grandmothers did, and they, too, might have called themselves witches. Since Spiritualism is a religion, these women would have been religious witches. The family history of Gundella (Marion Kuclo) might be an example here, to judge by some of the hints in her two published books of ghost stories.

(1a) This school of thought within Spiritualism was rooted in a somewhat earlier theory, held by several Mesmerists and scholars of Mesmerism (often called “animal magnetism” by its proponents), that the historic phenomena of magic and witchcraft could be explained as poorly understood forerunners of Mesmerism itself. The most notable exponent of this view was Baron Du Potet de Sennevoy, whose major work on the subject (La magie devoilée) appeared in English translation in 1927 (Magnetism and Magic). Du Potet was an artist of magic, so to speak, and his book offered much inspiration to any would-be witch who wanted to invent a witchcraft of her own.

(1b) Other Spiritualists adapted the Mesmerists’ viewpoint slightly to their own religious assumptions. Here I should mention particularly Allen Putnam, author of a pamphlet “Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Witchcraft and Miracle” (1858) and “Witchcraft of New England Explained by Modern Spiritualism” (1881). Some opponents of Spiritualism flipped this theory on its head, using it to condemn rather than examine what they regarded as genuine powers possessed by [some] human beings. An example of the latter would be Mary Baker Eddy; early editions of her main work, “Science and Health,” express her views somewhat more bluntly than the later editions.

(2) Once Emile Grillot de Givry’s pictorial album on Witchcraft and Magic had appeared in English translation (1931), any woman who wanted to invent a witchcraft of her own as a means of claiming agency and power had lots of useful material to draw on. She might, for instance, have borrowed or adapted some of the spells Givry included in his book, or used a witches’ knife and called it (as Givry did) her arthamé. (A British pronunciation of that odd word might have been misspelled as athamé or athalmé by any English speaker who knew no better.) Robert Heinlein’s second wife, Leslyn MacDonald, seems to have been a woman who did just that, if the character “Amanda” in Heinlein’s “Magic Inc.” depicts her at all. The same seems to have been true of Shirley Jackson, to judge by conversations I had with the daughter of one of Jackson’s closest friends.

(3) William Seabrook’s book “Witchcraft, Its Power in the World Today,” published in 1940 in the USA and 1941 in the UK, offered a whole range of other, much edgier magical practices to the would-be witch, and anyone who had read Jack London’s novel “The Star Rover” (1915) would already have been familiar with some of these practices and the putative power they offered. Gardner or his immediate teachers were almost certainly familiar with Seabrook’s book, and Jack London’s novel is explicitly cited in the manuscript “Ye Bok of ye Art Magical.” Seabrook’s book, issued by a major publishing house, circulated widely, and Jack London’s novel even more widely.

(4) On the West Coast, in particular, there are old traditions of Pantheism, Nature Religion and the “propless mind-over-matter” magic of New Thought that reach back to the days of Joaquin Miller and John Muir, and even beyond them into last decades of the 19th century. These have been moderately well studied by such scholars as J. Stillson Judah, William Everson and Catherine Albanese. [So far as I know, there are few really clear traces of outright Polytheism on the West Coast during those decades, but I may have overlooked something.]

(5) Although in the early days Margaret Murray’s books were not all that widely circulated in the USA, a small booklet that popularized her results (and even went beyond them a little!) was published in 1926 and had a simply enormous circulation. This was Joseph McCabe’s “New Light on Witchcraft,” which was one of the Julius-Haldeman “Little Blue Books.” Anyone who wanted to invent a witchcraft for herself would have found ample inspiration in this brief work.

None of these points, of course, challenges your claim, which is probably correct, that there is no reason to posit the existence of “a self-consciously polytheistic Pagan religion called Wicca or Witchcraft” before 1951 — much less any sort of unbroken centuries-old tradition of such a thing. I’m just putting a few more highlights and shadows on the picture you have painted. The pre-Gardnerian history of religious witchcraft in the USA is rather more complicated than either the proponents or the opponents of all those “grandmother stories” have imagined.

Investigating a “Grandmother Story”

Robert Mathiesen and Theitic, The Rede of the Wiccae: Adriana Porter, Gwen Thompson and the Birth of a Tradition of Witchcraft (Providence, R.I.: Olympic Press, 2005), 167 pp., $17.95 (paper).Book cover of Rede of the Wiccae

• • •

Gwen Thompson (Craft name of Phyllis Healy), 1928–1986, founded the New England Coven of Traditional Witches in the late 1960s. It went on to have various offshoots.

Central to her position as founder of the NECTW tradition was a “grandmother story.” She claimed to have been taught “the Old Religion” (in Margaret Murray’s sense) by her grandmother, Adriana Porter (1857–1946), an underground Craft teaching that supposedly originated in the West of England, in Somerset. Porter was born in Nova Scotia, married William Healy, a bookkeeper and insurance broker, in 1888, and moved with him first to Rhode Island and then to Melrose, Mass. They had one son, Walter, Gwen’s mother’s first husband.

According to Gwen Thompson, her grandmother’s family “were carriers of a secret tradition of Folk Witchcraft,” although her mother had broken with it upon marrying her second husband. Nevertheless, by then Adriana had initiated her and given her the Craft name of Gwen. When Adriana died, Gwen found some of her papers, which she considered to be a Book of Shadows, and which she copied. But she always “refused to tell her initiates anything about the identity of her living relatives, saying, ‘They don’t want to talk to you!'”

This study of her claims has two authors. One, Robert Mathiesen, never met her. Now retired from the Dept. of Slavic Languages at Brown University, he has “a life-long interest in the history of magical practices and doctrines and alternative religions” Theitic, on the other hand, was Thompson’s student from 1974–78 and is now considered to be the historian of the NECTW tradition.

Mathiesen faced one daunting obstacle — he was not allowed to look at Gwen’s Book, except for a part, the Rede (Old English for “counsel”)  that had been published in the Pagan magazine Green Egg in 1975. Most of the Rede is traditional folk wisdom, such “With the fool no season spend / or be counted as his friend.” Other couplets contain wisdom more appropriate to seamen in the days of sail rather than farmers, which could connect them with a port such as Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

The collection as published starts and finished with other couplets that sound a great deal like Gerald Gardner or Doreen Valiente. As Mathiesen writes, they “use the false archaism Wiccan and strongly echo Gardner’s form of Wicca.”

Mathisen researched Adriana Porter’s family history extensively, and he notes that when she came to the Boston are in the 1880s, she had the leisure and income to have investigated  Spiritualism, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and other esoteric currents in that city. Since this book’s publication, he has found hints that she might have known Paul Foster Case, in the 1920s. Case was a ceremonial magician and founder of the mystery school Builders of the Adytum, which still exists.

But the so-called Old Religion? The authors conclude that between 19 and 21 of the 26 couplets in the Rede might well have been written down by Adriana Porter, or else some other 19th-century person. The rest, those that give it a Wiccan flavor, were added almost certainly by Gwen Thompson.

It is another example of what I call “the Gardnerian magnet.” Because books by Gardner and his associates became available from 1957 on, many people not part of that initiatory lineage “borrowed” from it heavily.

Adriana had opportunities to become well acquainted with various occult and esoteric teachings. But there is nothing to prove that she carried forward a deep ancestral tradition of Witchcraft as an alternative religion.

My own larger conclusion is that I still have seen no credible evidence for anyone practicing a self-consciously polytheistic Pagan religion called Wicca or Witchcraft prior to 1951 in the English-speaking world.* What we find, instead, are cases such as these:

  • A Craft leader drops bits of information about their own or an ancestor’s involvement in an esoteric school, ceremonial magical group, etc. and passes that off as an ancestral tradition. Such may well have been the case with Gwen Thompson.
  • A person’s ancestor knew herbalism, root-working, card-reading or other divination, spell-casting, water-witching, conjuring, astrology, etc. — even in a Christian context — and their descendent describes this involvement as an ancestral tradition of Witchcraft in order to legitimize their own position in the new religion of Pagan Witchcraft.

Research projects such as The Rede of the Wiccae are needed, therefore, to settle some of these historical questions — inasmuch as they can be settled — and free scholarship on contemporary Paganism to view it through other lenses.

* Yes, I include Philip Heselton’s work here, as detailed in this book review.

A New History of the Craft in America

When I wrote Her Hidden Children, I definitely was not trying to tell the history of different groups, except in broad strokes and as that history helped the discussion of the larger questions that interested me, chiefly, “What do we mean by the term ‘nature religion’?”

Thanks to his earlier experiences with reference books on new religious movements, Aidan Kelly, one of the founders of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (a spoofy name that stuck) in the 1960s Northern California, is better able to do it.

He has released the first book of what he hopes to be three, A Tapestry of Witches, Vol. 1, which is available on Amazon.

He writes on his blog,

I was an active participant in many of the events and developments I describe, but I have tried to tone down the autobiographical details by unobstrusive (I hope) use of passive constructions and third person. Still, one reason the book is accurate is that I have first-hand knowledge of the decade from 1967 to 1977. However, I also as much as possible worked in information from letter, emails, and interviews that my friends shared with me. I have not ignored the Big Name Pagans–I couldn’t; many of them did much of the work, many were and are good friends–but I have also tried to give due credit to the many who worked hard without ever receiving public acclaim.

Having drawn on his earlier history of NROOGD’s beginnings, Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches, I look forward to reading the new book very much.

Pentagram Pizza: An ‘Apocalypse’ for Witches

pentagrampizza¶ From Scarlet Imprint, Peter Grey’s Apocalyptic Witchcraft. In its review The Daily Grail said,

Grey sets out to explicate a perspective on the familiar symbols and stories of witchcraft in the West which has little truck with the formalities of scholarship, the sensibilities of the Wiccan paths or the white-light Newage perspective. His is a witchcraft both messy and impudent, one that stinks of mud, blood and spunk — in a good way. One where the oft-ignored or sidelined aspects — the legends of human sacrifice, poisons, curses and The Devil Himself — are both represented and, on some level, embraced.

¶ Once again, local authorities are deeply unimpressed by a legal defense based on “sacred prostitution,” especially when the woman involved is trying to get a license for a Colorado marijuana dispensary. 

¶ The list of polytheistic devotional books (and some Pagan SF) published by the Biblioteca Alexandrina  continues to grow. I have one and should get a couple of others.