{"id":6449,"date":"2014-05-12T15:16:16","date_gmt":"2014-05-12T21:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6449"},"modified":"2014-05-12T21:36:52","modified_gmt":"2014-05-13T03:36:52","slug":"investigating-a-grandmother-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6449","title":{"rendered":"Investigating a “Grandmother Story”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Mathiesen and Theitic, The Rede of the Wiccae: Adriana Porter, Gwen Thompson and the Birth of a Tradition of Witchcraft <\/em><\/a>(Providence, R.I.: Olympic Press, 2005), 167 pp., $17.95 (paper).\"Book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2022 \u2022 \u2022<\/p>\n

Gwen Thompson (Craft name of Phyllis Healy), 1928\u20131986, founded the New England Coven of Traditional Witches in the late 1960s. It went on to have various offshoots.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>) by her grandmother, Adriana Porter (1857\u20131946), 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.<\/p>\n

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!'”<\/p>\n

This study of her claims has two authors. One, Robert Mathiesen<\/a>, never met her. Now retired from the Dept. of Slavic Languages at Brown University<\/a>, 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\u201378 and is now considered to be the historian of the NECTW tradition.<\/p>\n

Mathiesen faced one daunting obstacle \u2014 he was not allowed to look at Gwen’s Book, except for a part, the\u00a0Rede<\/em> (Old English for “counsel”)\u00a0 that had been published in the Pagan magazine Green Egg <\/em>in 1975. Most of the Rede<\/em> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> and strongly echo Gardner’s form of Wicca.”<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 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,<\/a> in the 1920s. Case was a ceremonial magician and founder of the mystery school Builders of the Adytum,<\/a> which still exists.<\/p>\n

But the so-called Old Religion? The authors conclude that between 19 and 21 of the 26 couplets in the Rede<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.*<\/strong> What we find, instead, are cases such as these:<\/p>\n