{"id":6467,"date":"2014-05-12T21:20:52","date_gmt":"2014-05-13T03:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6467"},"modified":"2014-05-13T09:32:06","modified_gmt":"2014-05-13T15:32:06","slug":"response-by-robert-mathiesen-to-investigating-a-grandmother-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6467","title":{"rendered":"Response by Robert Mathiesen to “Investigating a Grandmother Story”"},"content":{"rendered":"

This guest post by Prof. Mathiesen began as a comment to my earlier review of<\/a><\/em>The Rede of the Wiccae<\/a>,<\/a> which he wrote with Theitic of the NECTW tradition.<\/a> With his permission, I have moved his comments here.<\/em><\/p>\n

Thank you, Chas! That\u2019s a handsome and generous post.<\/p>\n

My view of the history is close to yours, and I really like the term \u201cGardnerian magnet.\u201d 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.)<\/p>\n

(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\u2019 circles today, but there are similarities, e.g., equal numbers of men and women as an ideal.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

(1a) This school of thought within Spiritualism was rooted in a somewhat earlier theory, held by several Mesmerists and scholars of Mesmerism (often called \u201canimal magnetism\u201d 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 devoil\u00e9e) 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.<\/p>\n

(1b) Other Spiritualists adapted the Mesmerists\u2019 viewpoint slightly to their own religious assumptions. Here I should mention particularly Allen Putnam, author of a pamphlet \u201cMesmerism, Spiritualism, Witchcraft and Miracle\u201d (1858) and \u201cWitchcraft of New England Explained by Modern Spiritualism\u201d (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, \u201cScience and Health,\u201d express her views somewhat more bluntly than the later editions.<\/p>\n

(2) Once Emile Grillot de Givry\u2019s 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\u2019 knife and called it (as Givry did) her artham\u00e9. (A British pronunciation of that odd word might have been misspelled as atham\u00e9 or athalm\u00e9 by any English speaker who knew no better.) Robert Heinlein\u2019s second wife, Leslyn MacDonald, seems to have been a woman who did just that, if the character \u201cAmanda\u201d in Heinlein\u2019s \u201cMagic Inc.\u201d 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\u2019s closest friends.<\/p>\n

(3) William Seabrook\u2019s book \u201cWitchcraft, Its Power in the World Today,\u201d 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\u2019s novel \u201cThe Star Rover\u201d (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\u2019s book, and Jack London\u2019s novel is explicitly cited in the manuscript \u201cYe Bok of ye Art Magical.\u201d Seabrook\u2019s book, issued by a major publishing house, circulated widely, and Jack London\u2019s novel even more widely.<\/p>\n

(4) On the West Coast, in particular, there are old traditions of Pantheism, Nature Religion and the \u201cpropless mind-over-matter\u201d 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.]<\/p>\n

(5) Although in the early days Margaret Murray\u2019s 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\u2019s \u201cNew Light on Witchcraft,\u201d which was one of the Julius-Haldeman \u201cLittle Blue Books.\u201d Anyone who wanted to invent a witchcraft for herself would have found ample inspiration in this brief work.<\/p>\n

None of these points, of course, challenges your claim, which is probably correct, that there is no reason to posit the existence of \u201ca self-consciously polytheistic Pagan religion called Wicca or Witchcraft\u201d before 1951 \u2014 much less any sort of unbroken centuries-old tradition of such a thing. I\u2019m 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 \u201cgrandmother stories\u201d have imagined.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s a handsome and generous post. My view of the history is close to yours, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,6,29],"class_list":["post-6467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-religion","tag-wicca","tag-witchcraft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1Gj","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6449,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6449","url_meta":{"origin":6467,"position":0},"title":"Investigating a “Grandmother Story”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 12, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"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). \u2022 \u2022 \u2022 Gwen Thompson (Craft name of Phyllis Healy), 1928\u20131986, founded the New England Coven of Traditional Witches in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"Book cover of Rede of the Wiccae","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/redeofthewiccae-e1399928966661.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3644,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3644","url_meta":{"origin":6467,"position":1},"title":"An Atheistic Critique of Wicca","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 30, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Blogging atheist Eric Steinhart, writing at Daniel Fincke's Camels with Hammers, turns his rhetorical guns on Wicca. He thinks that a \"woo-free Wicca\" might be tolerable. There are a number of separate posts, and I have not read them all. But I get the impression that he is engaging with\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":948,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=948","url_meta":{"origin":6467,"position":2},"title":"Wilhelm Reich, nature religionist","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 7, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"When I wrote Her Hidden Children, I gave three pages to Wilhelm Reich, because I felt that his unconventional ideas on the body, sexuality, and life energy had as much to do with the intellectual underpinnings of American Paganism as did, for example, the anthropological theories of Sir James Frazer\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"nature religion\"","block_context":{"text":"nature religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=nature-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7522,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7522","url_meta":{"origin":6467,"position":3},"title":"An Icon from an Alternate Universe","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 17, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"We arrived in Corfu late in the evening of the 12th of September and had about fifteen minutes of worry when the agent of the apartment's owner was not present to meet us at the airport, as promised. And I had neglected to get his number! But I did have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"art\"","block_context":{"text":"art","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=art"},"img":{"alt_text":"sasha & julian 2-sm","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/sasha-julian-2-sm.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":465,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=465","url_meta":{"origin":6467,"position":4},"title":"Trance danceJason Pitzl-Waters links to\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 3, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Trance danceJason Pitzl-Waters links to an article arguing that \"house music\" and other descendents of disco are the true soundtrack of the Pagan movement. (There are some examples to be downloaded.)Like the writer, I too, am tired of \"boring stereotypes of what witchy, pagan music should be.\" And I can\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1271,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1271","url_meta":{"origin":6467,"position":5},"title":"Our ‘Open-Source’ Religion","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 21, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Paganism as an open-source religion. (That approach works for some Jews too.)Douglas Cowen, in his book Cyberhenge, goes even further, making an explicit analogy to computer coding: \u201cPagans are \u2018hacking\u2019 their own religious traditions out of the \u2018source codes\u2019 provided by pantheons, faith practices, liturgies, rituals, and divinatory practices drawn\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6467"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6473,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6467\/revisions\/6473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}