He also describes how, not long after the ‘exorcism’ ritual, his servant killed a cobra outside his bungalow. As they were exulting about the death of the snake, Neal noticed another snake—this time a small grey one—slithering towards them. When he drew the servant’s attention to it, the man went pale. This, the man said, was a ‘bad snake’—meaning a snake created artificially by witch-doctors; a man bitten by such a snake has no chance of recovery. Neal was understandably sceptical. Then he saw the snake—which was still slithering at a great speed towards them—come to a halt as if against an invisible wall. It had encountered the ‘wall of protection’ put there by the holy man. With a single stroke, the servant chopped off its head with a cutlass. No blood came out. Soon after this, Neal began to itch all over. Two perfectly healthy trees just beyond the ‘wall of protection’ split down the middle with a loud crash. Consultation with another skilled sorcerer elicited the information that both Neal and his servant were victims of a new ju-ju attack, but that because of the ‘protection’, Neal could not be seriously harmed; the itch was the worst the magician could do.
This kind of witchcraft can be found in primitive societies all over the world. In a book called Mitsinari, a Catholic priest, Father André Dupreyat, describes his years in Papua, New Guinea. When he clashed with local sorcerers, he was also placed under a ‘snake curse’. One day, walking towards a village, he was surprised to see a silvery-coloured snake wriggling towards him. The villagers all scattered. Knowing it would have to lower its head to come closer, Dupreyat waited until it was no longer in a position to strike, and killed it with his stick. The next day, when he was lying in a hut, a snake lowered itself from the roof-beam and dropped on to his chest. He lay perfectly still until it slid down to the floor, when he was able to kill it with a stick. A few days later, as he lay in a hammock, a native warned him that two black snakes had writhed up the support of the hammock, and were close enough to bite him. They cautiously handed him a knife and told him when to strike; he succeeded in killing both snakes.
Dupreyat also has a remarkable account of a local sorcerer named Isidoro who was able to turn himself into a cassowary (a kind of ostrich). One evening as they all sat talking of Isidoro, they heard the distinctive sound of a cassowary running, and Isidoro came into the hut. He talked with them for a while, then said he would be staying in a house in the village overnight, and went out. They again heard the sound of a cassowary running. Dupreyat checked, and found that Isidoro was not in the house where he had claimed he would be staying. The next day, he visited Isidoro’s village—five hours away on the other side of the mountain. There he was greeted by Isidoro. Villagers assured him that Isidoro had spent the early part of the previous evening in the communal hut, then gone away at seven o’clock. By nine o’clock he had been with Dupreyat, a five-hour journey away on the other side of the mountain. And at dawn, he had been observed in his own village again. Yet in the dark, it was at least an eight-hour journey away,
James Neal’s own experiences of witchcraft in Ghana ended disastrously. Leaving his home in a hurry, on a morning when he intended to go to the Accra races—to capture a race-course gang—he left behind a protecting amulet that had been given him by the holy man. From an almost empty grandstand he watched the men being arrested by his own officers. Then, walking down from the grandstand, with no one within twenty yards of him, he was pushed violently, and fell. The multiple fractures he sustained kept him in hospital for months; and when he recovered, his broken bones prevented him from continuing his police work and he was forced to resign. The holy man, who came to see him in hospital, told him that he had been pushed by an ‘astral entity’. Neal insists that, as he was pushed, he twisted round to see who was responsible, and that there was no one there.
It was while writing about cases like these that I came to recognise that it was illogical to accept evidence about witchcraft in Africa, and reject the same kind of evidence about witchcraft in Europe. It is possible that the Chelmsford witches, the North Berwick witches, the Auldearne witches, were innocent victims of a barbarous superstition. It is equally possible that, like the umbanda magicians of Brazil, they had learned to make use of the ‘spirit world’ for their own purposes. Montague Summers was not being as absurd as he sounded when he declared that modern spiritualism is a revival of mediaeval witchcraft.
It was in the 1880s, at the time when the Society for Psychical Research was trying to place the study of the paranormal on a scientific footing, that modern scholarship turned its attention to witchcraft. An American scholar named Charles Leland became fascinated by the English Gypsies—as George Borrow had been half a century earlier—and became president of the Gypsy Lore Society. In 1886 he went to Florence, continuing his studies of Gypsy magic and lore, and encountered an Italian witch named Maddalena, who told fortunes and sold amulets. He employed Maddalena to gather what traditions she could about the origins of Italian witchcraft, which was known as la vecchia religione, the old religion. She finally provided him with a handwritten manuscript called Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches. This tells the story of how the goddess Diana had an incestuous affair with her brother Lucifer, and gave birth to Aradia (or Herodias); it was Aradia who eventually came down to earth and taught men and women the secrets of magic. This, according to the Gospel of the Witches, was because the Church and the aristocracy were treating the poor with such cruelty that Diana felt they needed to be provided with some means of self-defence. That is to say, witchcraft was originally a movement of social protest, like the Peasants’ Revolt. In his Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy (1931), Grillot de Givry hits upon the same idea: ‘. . . it is perfectly logical that certain men . . . having seen that God possessed his rich and honoured Church on earth . . . should have asked themselves—above all, if they believed that they had a right to complain of God, Who had condemned them to a wretched state of life and denied them worldly goods—why Satan . . . should not have his Church also . . . why they themselves should not be priests of this demon, who would, perhaps, give them what God did not deign to give . . .’
There is every reason to believe that Aradia is a genuine document, for there could be no possible reason to forge such a work. It would hardly attract the attention of anyone but a folk-lorist—and, in fact, it went out of print almost immediately. It provides one of the most powerful pieces of evidence that witchcraft was a survival of a pagan cult of the moon and earth goddess—a fertility cult.
During the First World War, an English archaeologist named Margaret Murray was living in Glastonbury when she decided to study the history of witchcraft. Without, apparently, studying Aradia (at least, she never mentions it), Margaret Murray reached the conclusion that witchcraft was a survival of a pagan fertility cult. It was her view that the image of the Devil—as a horned man with a tail—originated in the hunting rituals of our Cro-Magnon ancestors in which the shaman wore the skin of the animal about to be hunted. When man became a farmer rather than a hunter, he directed his magic towards the earth with the object of ensuring a good harvest. These innocent pagan festivals continued down the ages. The Church attempted to stamp them out, partly because they were a pagan survival, partly because of their strong sexual undertones—but in many country areas the ‘old religion’ was simply blended with the new; dances around a maypole replaced the pagan fertility ceremony with its ritual phallus.
In recent years, Margaret Murray’s theory—which was once accepted by most respectable scholars—has been violently attacked, on the grounds that she censored the evidence about witchcraft cults and sabbats to support her theories. And there can be no doubt that her later book The Divine King in England (which appeared when she was 94) is wildly eccentric, with its theory that many English kings were members of the ‘old religion’. Yet no one who looks impartially at the evidence can doubt that witchcraft was closely bound up with the cult of Diana, and that many of its ceremonies were pagan survivals. In his book The Roots of Witchcraft, Michael Harrison me
ntions that after the Second World War, Professor Geoffrey Webb was given the task of surveying damaged churches, and discovered that many altars of churches built before the Black Death contained stone phalluses. (Scholars have long been puzzled by carvings on many ancient churches showing a crouching woman holding open the lips of her vagina—they are known as Sheila-na-gigs.) Harrison also mentions an event documented in the Bishop’s Register of Exeter in the 14th century, which states that the monks of Frithelstock Priory in Devon were caught by the Bishop worshipping a statue of ‘the unchaste Diana’ in the woods, and made them destroy it. Why ‘unchaste’ Diana, when she is usually known as the ‘queen and huntress, chaste and fair’? Because the Bishop recognised the ceremony for what it was—a fertility ritual.
Amusingly enough, Montague Summers is enraged by the theory of Margaret Murray, and denounces it as imaginative moonshine. He is determined to promote his own view that the witches were genuine heretics, inspired by the devil, and that the church was right to ‘stamp out the infection lest the whole of society be corrupted and damned’. As we have seen, there is a great deal to be said for his opinions—even though he takes them to the point of absurdity. He is almost certainly in the right when he attacks Margaret Murray’s view that Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais were priests of the Dianic cult who were sacrificed for their faith.
All of which only demonstrates that the subject of witchcraft is far more complicated than at first appears. The truth seems to be roughly this: the ‘old religion’ survived from the days of our Cro-Magnon ancestors, and in late Neolithic times led to the construction of stone ‘temples’ like Avebury, Stonehenge and Carnac. This religion involved the invocation of earth spirits and deities—like Van Der Post’s ‘spirits of the Slippery Hills’. It managed to co-exist quietly with Christianity in Europe—although the authors of the Canon Episcopi knew about it nearly a thousand years before John XXII made it a crime. Almost certainly, it had nothing to do with the rise of Catharism, whose roots are in Manichaeism and Gnosticism. But the persecution of the Cathars drew the attention of the Church to the Old Religion, with dire results. In fact, one of the first results of the persecution of witches was probably to cause them to band together and take their stand against the doctrines of Christianity. So, to some extent, the church created the heresy it was so determined to destroy. If we can believe Aradia, they did worship the devil—or Lucifer, the sun god—as well as his sister Diana. And many of them probably practised ancient forms of magic passed down from palaeolithic times. It was not the Church that stamped out witchcraft—it was Newton and Leibniz and Dalton.
1951 was a watershed in the history of witchcraft, for it was in that year that the Witchcraft Act was finally repealed in Britain. In the view of the British Parliament, the act was obsolete. Legislators believed that there were no witches in Britain, and probably never had been.
One man who strongly disagreed with this point of view was Gerald Gardner. He was the author of a book called High Magic’s Aid, which described in detail various rituals used by medieval witches. In 1954, three years after the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, Gardner published a book called Witchcraft Today in which he made it fairly clear that he was himself a practising witch. He declared that there were still dozens of covens—groups of witches—in England, practising the rites he had described in his earlier book.
Witchcraft Today is a fascinating but irritating book. In her introduction to it Margaret Murray says that ‘Dr Gardner has shown in his book how much of the so-called “witchcraft” is descended from ancient rituals, and has nothing to do with spell-casting and other evil practices.’ In fact Gardner shows nothing of the kind. What he does is to develop and popularise the views put forward thirty years earlier by Margaret Murray herself. As we have seen, Dr Murray maintained that witchcraft, or the ‘Dianic Cult’ as she called it, is an ancient pagan religion, older by far than Christianity. She traced the cult back to prehistoric worship of the fertile Great Mother, the oldest of all ancient gods, and of the Horned God, a primitive symbol of power. Taking up this theme, Gardner declared that witchcraft was the religion of the first inhabitants of Britain. He suggested that these ancient Britons were pygmies or ‘little people’, and were the origin of the legends of fairies, elves, and dwarfs. Under successive waves of invaders these Little People were driven into hiding, taking with them their old religion. When the rest of Britain became Christianised they continued to hold their strange, orgiastic ceremonies in remote places. The superstitious peasants were afraid of them, but noblemen and their ladies often joined in.
These incredible assertions, along with the implication that modern witches practised sexual orgies, aroused the interest of the British press. At the age of 70, Gardner suddenly found himself famous. Popular Sunday newspapers sought him out and printed his descriptions of witches’ meetings called Sabbaths or Sabbats—complete with naked witches and ritual floggings. Gardner himself turned out to be the kind of man who makes good copy for sensational journalists. He was born in Lancashire in 1884, the son of a wealthy timber merchant. His father was a noted eccentric who used to remove all his clothes and sit on them whenever it rained. Gardner developed a taste for voyeurism and for being spanked, during boyhood travels in the Middle East with a buxom Irish nurse. Later, nudity and ritual flagellation were to feature prominently in his writings about witchcraft. He lived in the East until 1936, developing a taste for weapons, particularly knives. His first book was a study of the Malayan kris, a dagger with a wavy blade. Then he returned to England and became a student and practitioner of magic. According to his own account, his introduction to witchcraft occurred in 1946 when he was living in the New Forest in southern England. There he met a witch called Old Dorothy—allegedly an aristocrat—who taught him about the cult of witchcraft, and convinced him that it was the survival of an ancient pagan religion.
The truth of this account has since been widely questioned. Some of Gardner’s ‘age-old’ rituals have been criticized as the products of his own imagination—both by sceptics unsympathetic to witchcraft and by witches unsympathetic to Gardner. He was not, apparently, a particularly truthful man. In various reference books he described himself as a Ph.D. and a D.Litt. Elsewhere he admitted that he had never attended a university. A professor at Leeds University has told how Gardner read a paper on Manx fishing craft to an International Congress on Maritime Folklore, conveying the impression that it was based on his own research. In fact, the paper had been lifted almost entirely from an article that had appeared in the Proceedings of the Isle of Man Natural History Society. In spite of his critics, however, Gardner drew hundreds of new recruits to the cult of witchcraft, and when he died at the age of 80, British newspapers ran headlines on the death of the ‘King of the Witches’. Whatever his standing as a scholar, Gardner had become recognized as the leading figure in the witchcraft revival. Since his death witchcraft covens have sprung up all over Britain and the United States, and there are now estimated to be between 10,000 and 20,000 active witches in the United States alone.
Under the influence of Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner, witchcraft today is dominated by the so-called white witches who claim to be on the side of good. Sybil Leek, one of America’s leading living witches, was formerly head of an English coven centred in the New Forest. In an interview with London’s Daily Express in 1964 she declared, ‘I am a white witch and come from a long line of white witches, who exist only to do good.’
The white witches of the 20th century stand outside the European-American witch tradition with its emphasis on Devilworship. Modern white witches claim, like Gardner, to be the inheritors of an ancient religious tradition, and not a cult of evil. They point to the derivation of the word ‘witch’ from the Anglo-Saxon wicca meaning ‘the wise one,’ and use the word Wicca as a name for their cult. The white witches, like their black opposites, use many of the techniques of sorcery and engage in activities that resemble many of the quasi-religious ceremonies of traditional wi
tches. Their worship, however, is directed toward the Earth Mother and the Horned God, and they emphatically deny that there is any link between the Horned God and the Devil. According to Gardner, the two-faced Horned God worshipped by the followers of Wicca is not Satan, but a fertility god usually known by the Roman name of Dianus or Janus. He represents the cycle of the seasons and the crops, and the rites performed in his honour are designed to ensure the continued fruitfulness of the earth. He has also been related to the famous prehistoric painting in the Trois Frères Caves in the French Pyrenees, which appears to depict a dancer in the skin of an animal with great branching antlers. Gardner suggests that the horns on the god led to the confusion with Satan in the minds of Christians, and that some witches may have encouraged this confusion to keep their enemies at a distance.