{"id":5073,"date":"2013-01-14T17:10:53","date_gmt":"2013-01-15T00:10:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5073"},"modified":"2013-01-14T17:12:19","modified_gmt":"2013-01-15T00:12:19","slug":"gerald-gardner-and-the-question-of-polytheism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5073","title":{"rendered":"Gerald Gardner and the Question of Polytheism."},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently reviewed Philip Heselton’s latest biography of Gerald Gardner, but I did not have time to discuss one of his final observations, written in a too-brief closing chapter, “An Assessment of Gerald Gardner.”<\/p>\n

Heselton writes, “Indeed, he really didn’t, I think, have any of what we might call ‘spiritual’ feelings: at any rate, he never wrote about any.” Nor, in his assessment, did Gardner believe in spirits or have any success at working magick on his own (640).<\/p>\n

Think about that, the chief founder of a new Pagan religion who never had one of those knock-you-down experiences with the gods that convinces you that She, He, or They are really there. Compare, for example, the experience of Feraferia, Fred Adams, also back in the mid-1950s.<\/a><\/p>\n

If he, Edith, and friends were talking about witchcraft during lazy days at the nudist camp in the late 1940s, they had a lot of concepts swirling around, concepts such as these:<\/p>\n