Drawing Down the Moon (13 page)

Like many others, Bonewits believes that folklore and literature gave birth to Neo-Pagan Witchcraft: the folklore of Frazer and the theories of mother-right, and Leland's studies of Pagan survivals among the Italian peasantry. He says that the fields of folklore, anthropology, and psychology really began to develop between 1900 and 1920, as did psychical research and ceremonial magic. He speculates:

Bonewits attributes most Neo-Pagan Witchcraft in the United States to Gerald Gardner's influence, and writes that Gardner took “material from any source that didn't run too fast to get away.”

Bonewits is most illuminating when he talks about the reality of Family Traditions (Fam-Trads). He accepts the idea that some “Classical witches” could have preserved folk traditions and agricultural festivals. While this was no organized universal cult, isolated and powerful families may have preserved many traditions, each family suffering contamination over the years. “There is plenty of evidence,” he writes, “of ancient Pagan traditions surviving under thin Christian veneers in isolated parts of Christendom,” but “there is almost nothing logical to suggest that the people leading these traditions were in touch with each other or shared more than the vaguest common beliefs.”
⁵⁵
These families often call themselves Witches now, but whether they did a short while ago, or whether they have anything in common with modern Wiccans, remains in question.

Bonewits stresses the contamination of the European family traditions, as well as of those families that immigrated to the United States (Immigrant Traditions). Classical witches were becoming fewer in number, and “Scientism was rapidly becoming the supreme religion in the West.”

Almost everyone who has met members of family traditions notes that their Craft is far different from the Witchcraft of the revival. They far more easily fit Bonewits's description of “Classical witches.” As one Midwestern priestess observed to me, “I know about family traditions—there are lots of people who have been taught how to do various things. But it's rarely called
Witchcraft.
Later on, of course, these people begin reading and they say to themselves, ‘I was taught to do
that,
and here they say it's Witchcraft!'”

In Bonewits's analysis, the Family Tradition Witches are essentially “Classical witches” who changed with the times. As he told me, “In order to stay unpersecuted, they had to use a lot of protective coloration. When Rosicrucian terminology was in, they would train their kids with that terminology. When Theosophy was in, they were Theosophists. When Spiritualism was in, they were Spiritualists. And this means that from an anthropological point of view, the Fam-Trads are extremely contaminated. The later generations don't know what's from the family and what's been inserted.

“There may have been Family Traditions who read Frazer and Murray and said, ‘Oh, that's what we've been doing,' and copied down all this stuff, thinking, ‘This is our long-lost tradition brought back to us by this anthropologist or this folklorist.'

“And when a Family Tradition comes to the United States—an immigrant tradition—they'll start to mishmash their family belief system with the folk customs of the people they're living with. Today, many of these people are sitting on the borderline between being a neoclassical witch and a modern Wiccan Witch.”

 

Do the Witches of these Family Traditions speak about themselves as Bonewits describes them? The answer is, pretty much, yes, as we will see from a few examples.

Lady Cybele is a Witch who lives in Madison, Wisconsin. Her roots are Scots and Welsh, and the main family magical traditions come from her father's side. Both her father's parents were from Craft traditions. After arriving in New York, most of the family settled in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Cybele told me of family gatherings of over two hundred people at which a small group would get together on the side and talk about “the old ways” or “the way we used to do things.” Her family was wary about letting the neighbors know that they had any unusual practices. And to them Witchcraft was a
practice.
She said, “The religious aspect was very simple—worship of Mother Nature. God was in Nature and Nature was female. The Goddess was the earth. The oak tree, not the sun, manifested the male principle. That was about all the theology.

“When I was growing up, the spiritual aspects were not stressed as they are now. The Craft has taken a lot of influences from high magic. I think that's a fine thing, but it's fairly new to the Craft.”

Cybele's tradition did not contain written laws. “If the Fam-Trads have a law,” she said, “that law would be: ‘If it works, do it; if not, throw it out.' The Craft has always borrowed from every culture we've come in contact with.” Since the family lived close to the land, she was taught primarily agricultural magic—weather working and crop magic.

“I was shown how to do certain things, practical things. How do you make your garden grow? You talk to your plants. You enter into a mental rapport with them. How do you call fish to you? How do you place yourself in the right spot? How do you encourage them?”

For most of her life, Cybele was unaware of the Wiccan revival. “It wasn't until college that I found out there were other people in the Craft, and I didn't know there were many of us until 1964, when my husband came running home from the library where he worked, bubbling with excitement, saying, ‘There are more of us in the world.' He had Gerald Gardner's book and we read it through and he said, ‘This is incredible! They're not like us completely, but,
yes,
we do this, and we do that, and whoever heard of
that?'”

Cybele said that in her experience most Fam-Trads were loners who had difficulty working in covens. Occasionally Fam-Trads would work together, but seldom would it be a formal ritual gathering. More likely it would be a series of telephone calls: “Hey, did you hear about Sam Smith, who is going in for cancer tests Tuesday at eight o'clock? Think about it!” Cybele said that most of the Fam-Trad Witches she knew worked in street clothing and used common kitchen implements for tools. “I've added things from other traditions,” she said, “because I think they're fun.”

I also talked with Bonnie Sherlock, a Craft priestess in Lander, Wyoming, before her death in 1976. She described the teachings of her Irish immigrant grandmother in similar terms.

“Her beliefs were Pagan, although her room was full of Roman Catholic statues and pictures. She never used the terminology that's used in the Craft today. She called a pentagram a ‘star.' If you had the ability, she referred to it as ‘the power.' She did not use the term ‘aura,' she would say ‘light.' She never called it ‘Witchcraft,' but simply ‘having the power.' She called the summer solstice ‘the Middle of the Summer,' and Beltane [May 1st] was ‘May Basket Day.' Yule was ‘Yule' and Samhain was ‘Hallows-een.' She made incense from ground cinnamon in the pantry and pine needles.

“I learned from her that the Craft is a religion of hearth and fireside. The tools of the Craft are kitchen utensils in disguise. It's a religion of domesticity and the celebration of life.”

Despite having these teachings, Bonnie Sherlock needed an impetus to begin working in the Craft. As with Cybele, that impetus came from outside and sounds strikingly similar.

“I got an advertisement in the mail and it had a list of books by Gerald Gardner. I decided to subscribe to the British magazine
Pentagram
. Then I saw a letter from Leo Martello in
Fate
magazine, setting up a method of getting Craft people together. Through Leo, I began corresponding with a man who became my High Priest.”

But this was still not enough. “You just can't go around saying, ‘I'm a Witch.' Perhaps it all boils down to the idea that you have to prove yourself to yourself before you can prove yourself to anyone else. I felt I had to have some kind of initiation. And so I went to a Native American Medicine Man. I went through a ritual, a three-day fast and vision quest. In creating our Delphian tradition, I used a combination of traditions, including Celtic and Native American material as well as things I remembered from my grandmother.”

Here is yet another story from a Family Tradition Witch, this one a man from Minnesota:

“I was brought up with a sort of old-fashioned American Paganoccult background. Mostly, I've revolted against this in much the same way most Neo-Pagans and other counterculture people have revolted against their Judeo-Christian backgrounds. Only a couple of members of my family were people I consider even remotely Aquarian, and they're dead now.

“I was raised as a Pagan. My whole family are ‘old-fashioned witches.' This doesn't mean they're anything like the Neo-Pagans or the Pagans of ancient Europe. Mostly it means they're
not
Christians, Jews, Moslems, or modern intellectual atheists.

“Other than reference to ‘Mother Nature' and the like, I was never exposed to the Pagan deities as described by Robert Graves and others, and the ‘magic' my grandmother, mother, aunts, et cetera, practiced was derived from a wide variety of sources, mostly modern Masonic and Rosicrucian techniques, Spiritualism, ‘Gypsy' card reading and divination, Theosophy, and so on. I have an idea the whole thing is rooted somewhere in the past in the Celtic Old Religion, but if so, the elements are so worn down as to be impossible to identify for sure.

“Most of the ways in which my upbringing differed from a standard American one are little nonverbal details. Like being put to nurse on a sheep-dog bitch when my mother ran short of milk, instead of being put on a bottle filled with cow's milk and refined sugar. Cutting my teeth on meat gristle instead of a plastic pacifier.
Lighting
instead of blowing out the candles on my birthday cakes. Bringing home a ‘Christmas tree' in a tub, roots intact, and planting it again in the spring. Those are the only things that I remember, but my personality turned out radically different from those of the kids I went to school with. For instance, I
never
had any true understanding of the Christian concepts of ‘sin' and ‘guilt.' As long as I can remember I've simply realized that if you do something ‘wrong,' you get ‘punished,' maybe by other people, maybe by the workings of Nature, but never by yourself.

“My family used the word ‘Witch' rather loosely for anyone who practiced ‘magic'—it had nothing to do with going through any particular
religious
rituals, only operational rituals [spells]. The ‘magic' I learned as a child was mainly what you might call ‘extrasensory perception'—knowing if an outsider was friendly or hostile, lying or telling the truth, having flashes of knowledge about the future or past of a person or object, locating lost things. As I got older, my aunt and uncle started teaching me from all sorts of ‘standard' magical sources: the holy books of a dozen or more religions, the occult and spiritualist books of the last century and this. They also taught me their ‘personal' system, which was a hodgepodge from many different magical systems, as well as a lot more that wasn't magic at all but all the con-man tricks necessary to make my living as a magician if I wanted to. (They spent about thirty years traveling around the country calling themselves ‘Gypsies' and supporting themselves mostly by doing various kinds of divination. They also gave people ‘profound spiritual experiences' by turning them on with peyote without telling them what they were doing.) So I'm really not a ‘Witch' in the sense the term is used among modern groups calling themselves by that name, even though I've used that term all my life. ‘Magician' would be more descriptive, and it's what I now use to describe myself, leaving ‘Witch' to apply to the people who practice Pagan religions loosely derived from Celtic and other Indo-European Old Religions.”

As a final example, here is the story of Z Budapest, the feminist Witch of Los Angeles. This is what she told me of her childhood in Hungary:

“I was a Witch before I was a feminist. My family kept a book of who had lived and who had died, starting in 1270. There were quite a few herbalists in my family. At one point our family had a small pharmacy in a little town. My father was a doctor and many people in my family were healers.

“I observed my mother talking to the dead. I saw her go into trance and feel presences around her. She is an artist and her art often reflects Sumerian influences. She presents it as
peasant,
not
Pagan,
and so she gets away with it in Hungary. And in Hungarian, the word is the same.