Tag: Wicca

The First Wiccan Book Published in India

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment

A little more than twenty years ago, in the preference to his landmark study of contemporary Pagan Witchcraft, The Triumph of the Moon, the historian Ronald Hutton wrote that “the unique significance of pagan [sic] witchcraft to history is that it is the only religion which England has even given the world.”

Author Rashme Oberoi is second from the left.

It’s true. There is Wicca all over Europe, North America, and parts of South America. Outposts of local, as opposed to expat, Wicca have appeared in south Asia too.

Now comes an announcement of the publication of the first book on Wicca from an Indian publisher, Om Books Internationa, and written by an Indian author, Rashme Oberoi. It is titled Wicca: A Magical Journey with Spells and Rituals.

A Member of Parliament, Dr. Shashi Tharoor, himself an author, praised it: “In her writing, Rashme displays a deep knowledge of the psyche of Wicca, of healing witchcraft and of the exotic practice of spells and magical wizardry. The reader is led through a bewildering maze of incense-filled prose which will assail your senses as though you are physically by her altar.”

According to the publisher, the book “takes you through the practices she has perfected over a period of time.While providing a succinct introduction to the subject, it also creates an awareness about the world of the Wiccan that will help dispel the myth of a witch being ‘evil’ and make people realize that the modern-day witch is engaged in working for the highest good. As much a well-written manual on Wicca as it is a chronicle of a wondrous journey, the book will not only make you discover the hidden Wiccan in you, it will also be an appropriate guiding tool.”

I would like to know more about the “wondrous journey.” Is this really about Wicca-the-magical religion, or is it more about the Wiccan as “service magician,” to use another term that Professor Hutton has tried to popularize as a neutral way to describe sorcerors, shamans, hedge witches, and all manner of folk magical practitioners? Rashme Oberoi is on Facebook here for her Tarot practice, and if I am not mistaken, also works in corporate public relations.

Either way, it says something for Wicca  that it such a book could be published in a nation known for ancient polytheisms. Or is there a novelty factor at work here too?

Witch Dance is a Phenomenon

On By Chas S. Clifton3 Comments

“Time was,” Minnesota witch Steven Posch wrote in 2016, “here in Paganistan, the Besom Brigade used to show up at the Heart of the Beast May Day Parade, black steeple hats and all, doing our precision broom drills down the middle of Bloomington Avenue.”

A sort of drill team with witches’ brooms popped up in several places in the 2000s; Here is a grainy video from Pantheacon 2008.

I was researching something about Wicca in Germany, and up popped this Witch Dance video. Apparently the belly-dancers got involved, put some shimmy in the besom brigades’ sweeping, and now it’s an international thing. From Germany, here is the Tribal Gypsy Dance troupe:

A few years ago at Nokomis beach in Florida, some pirate flavor:

This year, the Witches of Wasburn, Wisconsin, help celebrate Zombie Days:

And this year in Frenchtown, New Jersey, a plaintive call from the bourgeois bohemians in the YouTube comments:

Hello Tricia. We checked this account but didnt see an email posted by way we could get in touch with you. That said, my husband and I live in Milford NJ. We are throwing a Christmas party and are wondering if you could teach our guests a dance. If so, please let us know your fee. You’re great at teaching groups of people and feel you would make a wonderful addition to the occasion. Please think about it.

I am all for putting your Paganism in the street (or on the beach or Salem Common) where it belongs. But Pagan studies friends, this is waiting for some theoretical lenses!

UK Pagans “More Established”

On By Chas S. Clifton
Celebrating the summer solstice at Stonehenge 2019. Photo: Martin Dalton/Rex/Shutterstock

The Guardian newspaper (UK) cherry-picks a few things from the 2021 England and Wales census, including a rise in the number of self-identified Pagans.

2) Pagans and wiccans are becoming more established

More established [than self-identified shamans] are pagans [sic], who number 74,000 people (up from 57,000 in 2011) and who gather most in Ceredigion, Cornwall and Somerset, and wiccans [sic], who number 13,000. Wicca is sometimes described as a witchcraft tradition whose roots lie in pre-Christian religious traditions, folklore, folk witchcraft and ritual magic.

Don’t get a swollen head, unless you speak Romanian (see number 3).

How about Museum of Witchcraft Version 4.0?

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment

You can buy the former mill (built 1828) in Castletown, Isle of Man, that once housed housed Cecil Williamson and Gerald Gardner’s “Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft,” whose name went through various permutations, even as its little restaurant went from being “The Folklore Restaurant” to “The Witches’ Kitchen.”

All you need £425,000 plus associated costs. (It was converted to a residence about twenty years ago.)

Being near to the former residence of the Arbory witch, Elizabeth Kewin, who was in 1666 rumoured to have transformed into a hare and cast evil spells, the mill was soon associated with witchcraft.

By the 1950s, an Englishman named Cecil Williamson had bought the mill and planned to create a museum of folklore and witchcraft there. Later selling it to his friend Gerald Gardner, the mill was revamped as The Museum of Magic and Witchcraft.

After Gardner’s death in 1964, the museum ran for a short time under new owner Monique Wilson, who eventually sold it and its exhibits, but in its relatively short life, the museum was credited with helping to popularise Wicca as a religion.

I would go farther than that. I would say that this was more or less where Wicca was born. There ought at least to be a plaque. (Here is a Manx article about Ronald Hutton’s lecture there in 2010.)

Gerald Garder at the museum in the 1950s.

To have a museum, you must have exhibits, and Phlip Heselton’s Witchfather: A Life of Gerald Gardner, vol. 2, shows Gardner scurrying around to find, borrow, or make witchy objects for the museum.

In the museum world, objects must have “provenance,” a detailed description of where they came from and a chain of ownership. Ideally. Think of it as a story with documentation — although the art and antiquities trades are full of examples of forged documentation

In Gardner’s case, he merely had to provide a story. This ritual sword belonged  to . . . wait a moment, it’s on the tip of my tongue. . . “The Southern Coven of English Witches.” In other words, me and my fellow explorers of possible survivals of ancient Paganism, as described by Professor Murray.

“A collection of objects used by witches, lent by an existing coven of witches,” the witchcraft museum’s pamphlet read at one point.[1]Philip Heselton, Witchfather: A Life of Gerald Gardner, vol. 2 (London: Thoth, 2012), 474.

And this Southern Coven, they are followers of an ancient religion, called Wicca! It’s been here all along! People still go back and forth about this.

There is a saying in the SF-writing world, which I have seen attributed in its original form to the paranormal researcher Charles Fort (1874–1932), that “It steam-engines when it’s steam engine time.”

The example given is that ancient Mediterranean people knew at a basic level how steam power worked. A few simple examples were built .Roman technology could have produced boilers and pistons, but it wasn’t “steam engine time” yet. There were no situations that required steam engines, no one willing to invest in them. Yet in the 18th-century, steam technology took off and dominated the next two centuries, still having some use today.

Even as Hero (or Heron) of Alexandria could conceptualize a steam engine two thousand years ago, so various people tried various Pagan revivals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some in the Baltic countries, for example, clung to life through Nazi and Communist persecution but did not go world-wide, beyond their own ethnic diasporas.

Wicca went world-wide in the late 20th century, becoming, as Ronald Hutton writes in The Triumph of the Moon, “the only religion which England has ever given the world.”[2]Ronald Hutton The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), vii. Maybe we should just say that “It Wiccas when it’s Wicca time,” and that time was 1950–51. And one of the key locales was an old windmll on the Isle of Man.

In my fantasy, the old mill could be bought and turned into a museum again, complete with dioramas of its 1950s self — a meta-museum! — material on the history of Wicca  as a worldwide religion since the 1950s, and of course a restaurant, selling “Home Baked Cakes in the old Manx farmhouse style” as did the original.[3]Heselton., 429.

Notes

Notes
↑1 Philip Heselton, Witchfather: A Life of Gerald Gardner, vol. 2 (London: Thoth, 2012), 474.
↑2 Ronald Hutton The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), vii.
↑3 Heselton., 429.

Z Budapest Is Still Creating

On By Chas S. Clifton2 Comments
Z Budapest (Los Angeles Times)

Z Budapest, one the first public witches of the 1970s in the United States, is “largely retired from ritual work” but still creating, according to a profile pubished in the Los Angeles Times.

“I don’t agree with all her views, but in the history of the craft, she is an important person,” said Sabina Magliocco, professor of anthropology and religion at the University of British Columbia. “When you look at all of the witchcraft as feminist resistance that flowered in the Trump era, none of that would have existed if it hadn’t been for what Z and others like her did in the 1970s.”

Here she speaks in Malcolm Brenner’s 1991 documentary Out of the Broom Closet, which was digitized and placed on YouTube by the New Age Movements, Occultism, and Spiritualism Research Library. Archives and Special Collections. Valdosta State University. Valdosta, Georgia.

A New Graphic Timeline of American Wicca

On By Chas S. Clifton4 Comments
One of the non-Californians on the timeline, Grey Cat (Manya M.) lived in Tennessee and was a friend of mine.

The Covenant of the Goddess (CoG) “TImeline” is now available for free download online. Anyone interested in the history of contemporary Paganism in America ought to give it a look.

The CoG Timeline was compiled and designed by Andrea Joy Kendall with contributions from Anne Agard, Angie Buchanan, Jo Carson, Andras Corban-Arthen, Phyllis Curott, Amber K, Anna Korn, Rowan Fairgrove, Donald Frew, J. Hildebrand, M. Macha NightMare, and Starhawk. This timeline includes events of interest to anyone that wants to understand what the Covenant of the Goddess (CoG) and its members do.

The Timeline is presented in two PDF files: Part 1 and Part 2. Do understand that since CoG started in northern California, the Timeline reflects that geographical slant. The San Francisco Bay Area is somewhat over-represented. New Yorkers may wail and lament.

CoG itself was started in the 1970s:

In the Spring of 1975, a number of Wiccan elders from diverse traditions, all sharing the idea of forming a religious organization for all practitioners of Witchcraft, gathered to draft a covenant among themselves.  These representatives also drafted bylaws to administer this new organization now known as the Covenant of the Goddess

It chief purpose, beyond fellowship, was to provide ministerial credentials to Witches who wished to perform weddings and fill other public roles.

“The Woman Who Inspired Wicca”

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment

This popped up on Twitter recently:

There is no conference that I know of, which may say something about how small a set of academics are interested in Wiccan history. Maybe we Pagan-studies types do not have anything new to say right now, because this issue has been covered pretty well. The debunking of Murray’s claims was underway in the 1960s by such historians as Elliot Rose  (A Razor for a Goat: A Discussion of Certain Problems in the History of Witchcraft and Diabolism) and Norman Cohn (Europe’s Inner Demons).

In my own experience, I would say that by about 1980, Wiccan elders were quietly beginning to abandon the Murray-ite thesis of unbroken ancient Pagan religion lasting to the 17th century or later.

Leave it to First Things, a Catholic-leaning magazine on religious issues, to weigh in on the upcoming centenary, which deserves to be noted.

While Margaret Murray was by no means a founder or adherent of Wicca, the religion to which her writings gave birth, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe inspired the now global phenomenon of neopaganism. There can be no doubt that Murray had a brilliant scholarly imagination—too brilliant, perhaps, for the serious flaws in her reasoning to be seen by many. While few Wiccans and neopagans now believe literally that their religion has existed since prehistory, Murray’s legacy persists in the strange idea that witchcraft was a religion, an idea long since debunked by historians of witchcraft. It is ironic that this idea, devised by a feminist historian, often eclipses the reality that the accusation of witchcraft was a misogynistic construct weaponized against innocent women. Murray’s unsubstantiated claim that these women practiced a secret pagan religion was, ultimately, a calumny against the victims of a dark era of misogynistic violence.

Read the whole thing here: “The Woman Who Inspired Wicca” by Francis Young.

From Viking Re-enactor to Practitioner

On By Chas S. Clifton5 Comments
A still from the BBC video, linked below.

At the BBC, a short video with a man who started doing re-enactments and ended up adopting Norse religion.

Fighting with the Wuffa Viking and Saxon Re-enactment Society, he did not expect that his hobby of more than three years would help him find his own belief through Norse mythology.

“What it is about the Norse gods is they teach you to respect nature and the world and that’s how the world should be run, not like in the modern day,” said Mr Mehmed, who is also known as Magnus Shield-Breaker.

It is a different sort of re-enactment, but in America, Wicca is more or less the “house religion” of the Renaissance Faire circuit, or so says Rachel Lee Rubin in her history of Renn Faires, Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture.

“The Witches of Manitou”—More than an Urban Legend

On By Chas S. Clifton2 Comments
The old spa town of Manitou Springs, west of Colorado Springs
The old spa town of Manitou Springs, located in the foothills west of Colorado Springs. Photo by Mark Reis, ( a former newspaper co-worker of mine) from the Colorado Sun. Click to embiggen.

The Colorado Sun, an online news site, dropped this into my inbox yesterday, giving M. and me both giggles and epic nostalgia. Back in the Eighties, we were “The Witches of Manitou” — at least two of them.

“The Witches of Manitou Springs: History, hysteria and wand-waving Wiccans behind a stubborn urban myth” was co-authored by  Nathalie Reinstein, , and

It begins,

Manitou Springs, a picturesque mountain town nestled in the shadow of Pikes Peak, is full of whispers of witches and witchcraft.

Maybe you’ve heard it from an Uber driver on the way to an area bar or while scrolling through a travel site. It’s a tale that often wanders through word of mouth. Wherever it comes from, legend has it there are witches in Manitou Springs. More, perhaps, than usual.

But is there an overabundance of witches in this town at the foot of America’s mountain, where at least one apothecary sells miniature broomsticks — or is it just a persistent urban legend?

That much is true. It definitely is a persistent urban legend — I encountered it in my more youthful days, circa 1976. Everybody had heard of ceremonies in “the big cave.”[1]Actually, it was an abandoned limestone quarry, and it definitely was a site of high-school keg parties and that sort of thing. It was demolished when an upscale housing development was built in that … Continue reading

There’s the horror mockumentary, “The Warning,” a film by Summer Moore, a Liberty High School graduate turned filmmaker. Filmed in Colorado Springs, “The Blair Witch Project”-inspired script follows three friends as they investigate a local cult in the forest that borders the town.

While promoting her film in 2015, Moore told The Gazette she spoke with 50 of her classmates who alluded to “true accounts” of dark happenings in Manitou. Moore went on to write, produce, and star in her film. . . .

When Bryant T. Ragan, a history professor at Colorado College, was teaching a class at Colorado College in 2018 titled “Sorcery, Magic, and Devilry: The History of Witchcraft,” he wanted to bring in a practicing Wiccan from Manitou Springs to talk to his students. He ultimately couldn’t track down someone willing to do it

Read the whole thing.

Obviously a must-see. How did I miss it? (The cave in the movie trailer is not the cave that I mentioned above.)

I can say that for a time there was the Iron Mountain Coven, named for the little peak above our house, labeled at the left edge of the photo above.

We used both the second-floor of the Spa Building (labeled) and the basement of an art gallery for ritual/festival/handfasting sites. At the time, a Pagan-friendly couple operated a hot tub and flotation tank-rental business in the Spa Building, which included a large room facing out over the avenue. When ritual ended, the tubs were waiting.[2]There was a separate legend about the “old Indian curse” on the Spa Building, which does have a soda spring in its lobby.

But I disagree with the Rev. Thorian Shadowalker, Wiccan leader. Salem, Mass., is the “witch capital of the U.S.” as far as I am concerned.

M. worked at Celebration, the West Side (Colorado Springs) metaphysical store mentioned in the article, for a couple of years. Its original owner, Coreen Toll, later served on the Manitou Springs city council and narrowly lost a race for mayor in 2015.

Current mayor John Graham, when he published the Pikes Peak Journal, let me use his equipment to typeset Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion, which was an ancestor of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies. John is not a Pagan, but he facilitated Pagan publishing.

So where did the “witches of Manitou” legend originate? Since it was firmly in place by the mid-1970s, it would be easy to blame it on “the Sixties.” To be honest, I cannot say. I do know that our coven was not the first.

To quote a story about the iconic Manitou artist Charles Rockey, who was our own Van Gogh, “Manitou Springs has always harbored a sizeable community of artisans, musicians, potters, healers, New Age masseurs, alternative gardeners, dharma motorcyclists, metaphysical high-techers and liberal-artsy bohemians of every stripe and hue.”

UPDATE 25 March 2020: The Wild Hunt interviewed me for their follow-up story, “The Witches of Manitou Springs and Their Tale of Two Cities.“

Notes

Notes
↑1 Actually, it was an abandoned limestone quarry, and it definitely was a site of high-school keg parties and that sort of thing. It was demolished when an upscale housing development was built in that area.
↑2 There was a separate legend about the “old Indian curse” on the Spa Building, which does have a soda spring in its lobby.