How to Become a Witch (4 page)

Yet when we look at the religious life of Paleolithic humans, what emerges is the vast scope of our ignorance. We have no written accounts of their lives and beliefs. We have oral traditions from surviving indigenous tribes, which might or might not bear any resemblance to our ancient ancestors’ traditions. We have cave paintings and no way to see into the minds of the artists, who have been dust for a thousand generations. We have a few stone tools and bone carvings, a few caves and graves.

Let’s look at one type of Paleolithic artifact: the so-called “Venus figures,” little carved statues of busty, round women that were scattered around Europe twenty or thirty thousand years ago. We don’t know what they meant to the makers: dolls for children, fertility talismans, Paleolithic pin-up girls for lusty adolescent males, or images of a great Mother Goddess? We don’t know.

All we can know for certain is what they mean to us. And to us, they are perfect personifications of Gaia, Mother Earth, our fertile and abundant planet, source of life and sustenance. We
intuit
that they were the same for our ancient ancestors…but that’s not scientific evidence.

We do know that over the millennia more gods and goddesses were added, and each tribe personified Deity in their own way. By the time of the Roman Empire, many Pagan religions coexisted; all had numerous gods, both female and male, who held sway over the many aspects of the natural world: deities of earth, sea, and sky, of the sun and moon and stars.

Blessed be!

One of the ways Witches remind themselves and each other that everything and everyone is sacred, is by saying “Blessed be!” It means thou art blessed. It is often used to say goodbye, sometimes to say hello, and as a way of saying yes or inserted when a Christian might say amen; for instance, as a general blessing and the closing words of a ritual.

The dorset ooser

A few relics of the Old Religion still exist in Europe, such as the horns of the morris dancers. One artifact was called the “Dorset Ooser.” It was a wooden mask of the Hornéd God, complete with bull horns, passed down for generations within the Cave family of Dorset. Apparently, it was worn by a dancer dressed in animal skins, in village celebrations around the Winter Solstice. Such a relic would be priceless to any museum today. Unfortunately, a mysterious stranger bought it from a family servant in about 1897, and it hasn’t been seen since.

All the Pagan faiths overlapped. The gods and goddesses of different lands traveled with merchants and migrations, met and mixed and intermarried. As far as we can tell, religious differences were not usually considered a reason for war. Men might go to battle for grazing land, for cattle, or for access to fresh water—but not because their gods had different names and images. Before Egypt and Sumer and the art of writing, nothing is documented, so we can’t be certain of much.

The Norse Eddas give us a glimpse of the northern Pagan faiths. Druidry, a totally oral tradition, has only the descriptions left by Julius Caesar and a few other Romans, who were not only from a different faith but the ones who annihilated them. (In the year 60 CE, a final attack by the Roman legions broke the power of the Druids at the island of Mona in Wales, though they may have lingered in Ireland for a few more centuries.)

And what about Witches, or our spiritual forebears, by whatever name they called themselves? They also had a non-literate, oral tradition—the folkway of the common people. We have bits and pieces passed down through family tradition, or “famtrad,” Witches. We have legends and tales gathered by folklorists. We have masks and carvings and artifacts with no colorful pamphlets to explain them.

In 325 CE, Emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the official faith of the Roman Empire. The new faith began to spread over Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa.

There is evidence that early Christianity and Paganism co-existed in some places. The Culdee Church in Ireland was a happy blend of Jesus lore and traditional folk religion until Rome put an end to it. Early Christian churches in Britain had stone phalluses on the altars, Green Men and sheela-na-gig goddesses on the walls, and special doors in the north walls for the Pagans to join in the services (north was a holy direction for Pagans).

This friendly interlude did not last. The Roman Church gained political power and went to war against the Pagans, overthrowing the Old Gods and setting up their own altars on the ancient sacred sites. The Old Norse faiths fought a rearguard action for a thousand years, but they too gradually succumbed.

In the countryside, many folks still quietly followed the old ways. They honored the Lady of the Moon and the Hornéd God of the wilds, and they celebrated the turning Wheel of the Year at sabbat gatherings on the hilltops, where great bonfires lit the night sky. And when necessary, they also attended mass on Sundays and pretended to be orthodox Christians.

In time, the Roman Church became intolerant of anyone it considered threatening to its power. Jews, surviving Pagans, homosexuals, and Christians with differing viewpoints—heretics—were tortured and often executed. Women, sometimes widows who had inherited wealth, were frequent targets. In 1320, Pope John XXII declared Witchcraft a heresy and authorized the Inquisition to act against it.

Thus began the Burning Times in Europe, which lasted almost four centuries. Tens of thousands of people, at the very least, were murdered as accused Witches or heretics all over Europe. In the New World, the persecutions were mostly limited to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and 1693.

The Burning Times ended any live-and-let-live attitudes among the different faiths. When people were being imprisoned, tortured, hung, drowned, and burned as accused Witches, few actual Witches were about to assert their right to religious freedom.

A hammer—forged?

In 1487, two Dominican monks named Kramer and Sprenger wrote a book, the
Malleus Maleficarum
(“hammer against witches” in Latin), explaining in great detail how to capture and torture “witches.” Included were prewritten “confessions” that victims, usually women, could be forced to sign, admitting to devil worship and worse.

The book included a purported papal bull (message from the Pope) and an endorsement from the Theological Faculty at the University of Cologne; some scholars believe these were forged. After it was published and spread around Europe, the persecution of “witches” intensified. It was reprinted twenty-nine times between 1487 and 1669, and you can still get a copy today.

Did the worship of the Old Gods die in those days, or did it survive underground, as our stories declare? Or did mere fragments of the elder religion survive as folktales and rural customs, while any organization, leadership, theology, and teachings were lost?

Legend has it that the Old Religion survived but went underground. Secret covens and certain families kept alive the old ways. They celebrated the sabbats in wild places. They made turnip jack-o’-lanterns to frighten the Christian folk into staying indoors at night. They disguised their phallic ceremonial staffs as besoms (brooms) and pretended to be “good Christian folk.”

But after centuries of persecution, there were no visible Pagan faiths left in Europe. The Roman Catholic Church’s new rivals were the Protestant reformers.

The educated folk of the Age of Reason, or Age of Enlightenment, believed there were no such thing as Witches. Surely, they said, the Inquisition was all about religious power and social conflict, or perhaps mass hysteria—Witches were straight out of fairy tales! But some people believe that surviving covens of Witches anonymously encouraged this belief and waited.

The “witchfinder general”

During the “Burning Times,” Matthew Hopkins made his living by hunting and torturing “witches”—though most of them never practiced the Craft at all. For a price, Hopkins would hire out to any town council or other organization and receive a fat fee for each “witch” discovered. He would torture the accused and look for “witchmarks,” which might be a mole or birthmark thought to be the sign of the devil. When a village was empty of “witches”—or seemed to be running low on money for his fees—he would travel to the next “witch-infested” town and begin again.

In the rational, busy period from 1700 to 1900 or so, there were revivals or re-creations of both Druidry and ceremonial magick. From Witchcraft, there is mostly silence—but not total silence. We hear of Old George Pickingill (1816–c. 1909), from Canewdon in England, reputed “master” of nine covens. Occasionally a Book of Shadows will surface, purporting to describe a centuries-old Craft tradition. Stories are whispered of isolated English villages where the Old Religion was still practiced secretly well into the twentieth century.

In 1921, a distinguished British archaeologist named Margaret Murray published
The Witch Cult in Western Europe
, in which she theorized that the Witchcraft of the Middle Ages was actually the survival of an ancient Pagan religion. She followed this with
The God of the Witches
in 1931, explaining that Witches had worshiped a hornéd god of wildlife and hunting, who Christians immediately confused with their Satan figure. Though Murray was highly respected in her original field of Egyptology, conservative scholars and historians quickly dismissed her Witch theories.

Time passed.

The year was 1939. The National Baseball Hall of Fame opened, and CBS began broadcasting. Elvis Presley was four years old. General Motors introduced the automatic transmission, the first World Science Fiction Convention opened in New York, and Batman appeared in his first comic book. Meanwhile, a British civil servant named Gerald Gardner was secretly initiated into a surviving coven of Witches hidden in the New Forest of England. He would become known as the father of modern Witchcraft.