Today is Samhain. So I thought it might be appropriate to say a few words about a bit of modern history: Gerald Gardner and his role in the establishment of the only religion ever to originate in England.
Gerald Gardner was born in Crosby, near Liverpool, in 1884. He spent most of his life in southeast Asia, mainly Malaya, where he was a rubber planter. During his time there he spent much of his time working as an amateur anthropologist, being especially interested in traditional religion and magical practices. In 1936 he published a book about Malayan weapons and magical beliefs, and in the 1940s he published a number of articles on similar subjects.
In 1936, Gardner retired and moved to England permanently. After spending most of his life in the tropics he found the London weather hard to deal with; he would spend the winters in the Mediterranean and much of the summers sunbathing nude, apparently at the advice of his doctor. Gardner became quite an enthusiastic nudist, joining the local nudist society and advocating the health benefits of exposure to the elements to all who would listen. In 1938, alarmed at the prospect of war, he and his wife moved to Highcliffe, in Dorset.
This was when, to his delight, Gardner discovered that ancient magical beliefs and practices were still alive in England as well as in Malaya. He became involved in the local Rosicrucian society and, most importantly, discovered a witches’ coven that met in the New Forest. He would later claim that, through his Rosicrucian contacts, he encountered a witch known as Old Dorothy in 1939, and that she initiated him into her coven. He made these claims in his two most important books, Witchcraft today, published in 1954, and The meaning of witchcraft, 1959. These books described the beliefs of the coven that Gardner claimed to have discovered. He had already published a novel, High magic’s aid, in 1949, which described some elements of witchcraft, but he could do no more than this because witchcraft was still illegal under English law. Amazingly, this law was only repealed in 1951, after which Gardner could officially “come out” as a practising witch – or, as he called himself, a “Wican”, from the old Saxon word for a witch. The word would later be spelled “Wiccan”.
After this, Gardner broke away from the New Forest coven and founded his own, with the help of a number of followers and disciples who helped him to formalise the beliefs and practices of the movement. One of the most important was Doreen Valiente, who acted as high priestess within the coven. She edited Gardner’s notes into The book of shadows, one of the most important Wiccan religious texts. Valiente later fell out with Gardner after he replaced her as high priestess; she died in 1999 after establishing herself as one of the leading figures of Wicca.
Gardner himself died in 1964.
Debate has raged ever since over where, precisely, Gardner got his ideas from. At one end of the spectrum are those who take his claims at face value and believe that Wicca, as Gardner formulated it, really was an ancient pre-Christian religion which he was taught by one of the last surviving groups of practitioners. And at the other extreme are those who argue that he just made the whole thing up. As usual, the truth is probably somewhere in between these. Gardner was certainly influenced by a wide range of sources. One of these was the Golden Dawn, the famous group of magicians founded in the 1880s. He met the most infamous of these magicians, Aleister Crowley, shortly before the latter’s death in 1947. And indeed there are many parallels between Crowley’s teachings and Gardner’s. At the same time, many aspects of Wicca, as Gardner presented it, are drawn from attested practices or beliefs of ancient pagans. For example, the four principal sabbats or religious festivals of the years are based upon ancient Celtic practices. Finally, some elements certainly came from Gardner’s own imagination. For example, his coven’s practice of performing its rituals “sky-clad” – that is, naked – came entirely from Gardner’s own naturism and has nothing to do with any ancient pagan practice.
To his credit, Gardner himself never claimed that every aspect of Wicca was ancient; he simply presented it as a faith, drawn from many sources, which he personally found fulfilling. The myth of Wicca as a single ancient religion was spread more by his followers than by him himself.
The question is hard to resolve for several reasons. The first is that not much is known about the religions from which Wicca claims ancestry in the first place. The ancient Germans, Scandinavians, and Celts did not have writing; that arrived with Christianity. Pretty much everything that is known of the pre-Christian religions of these places comes from ancient Roman commentators or, mostly, medieval Christian writers. For example, the oft-repeated fact that Easter is named after an ancient goddess is only known because the Venerable Bede mentioned it. So there is considerable debate over what the ancient pagans believed and practised. For example, it is not known if the ancient Celts practised human sacrifice, as the Romans claimed they did.
There is also the fact that modern Wicca is itself very varied. The basic tenets are these:
But these all vary considerably. For example, many Wiccans also worship the divine under other aspects, apart from the God and the Goddess. Some believe that gods from various ancient pagan religions, such as Diana or the Horned God, can be considered aspects of the divine; some even believe that these are real and distinct entities in their own right.
There is no “central authority” of Wicca or generally accepted set of beliefs other than the fairly basic ones mentioned above. Wiccans do not believe in proselytising: they typically believe that everyone should follow the spiritual path that is appropriate to them, and they have little interest in “converting” anyone to Wicca. In fact it is quite difficult to join a Wiccan coven: a potential convert needs to seek out a coven, and even then there is quite a long period of training and mutual checking before they can join it. Wiccans don’t advertise. All of this means that – at least until about twenty years ago – Wicca developed almost exclusively along personal lines. That is, Gardner’s associates went on to found covens of their own, and these covens – or those founded by members of them – make up most of the main covens today. The teachings of Gardner’s original coven have thus been passed on by word of mouth, supplementing the texts by him and his followers. This means that different groups, although mostly descended from Gardner’s coven and following his main tenets, have developed their own beliefs and practices. The main division in Wicca today is that between “Gardnerian” Wicca and “Alexandrian”. The latter was founded by Alex Sanders, and is inspired primarily by Gardner’s religion but with much more of an emphasis on ceremonial magic. It’s worth mentioning at this point that ceremonial or high magic is a tradition going back mostly to the Golden Dawn and to Aleister Crowley, and it is distinct from Wicca; it lacks Wicca’s interest in the divine and is not really a religion at all. Alexandrian Wicca is something of a cross between this tradition and Gardnerian Wicca. Like other traditions within Wicca, Alexandrians typically trace their covens back to that of their founder, in this case, Sanders’ own.
In the early 1980s, the notion of solitary Wicca developed. Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: a guide for the solitary practitioner, first published in 1988, was extremely popular. The rise of solitary Wicca coincided with a period of increased interest in Gardner, as a number of authors pored over his works and tried to establish the real history of witchcraft in general and Wicca in particular.
As with most religions, many Wiccans hold mistaken beliefs about their own religion and its history. For example, most histories of witchcraft available on pagan websites today are full of extremely inaccurate information about the persecution of witches by Christians in early modern times. These are also found even in published books. For example, Raymond Buckler’s Complete book of witchcraft, published in 2002 (revised edition), repeats the old claim that nine million people died in the early modern witch hunts, something no scholar of the period could countenance today.
But since the 1980s and the increased interest in Gardner’s sources, many Wiccans have become more enlightened and been quite happy to accept that their religion is not some ancient tradition transmitted in a pure form but an amalgam from many different elements. They point out that the value or truth of a religion really has nothing to do with how old it is. They are happy to acknowledge that their religion, at least in the form that they know it, is very new; they simply deny that this makes it any less valid than the older religions. Even Christianity was brand new once. Thus, most Wiccans today, certainly those who identify themselves as Gardnerian, continue to hold their rituals “sky-clad” even though they know that Gardner invented this practice himself. They insist that it is spiritually significant and helpful (it represents honesty and openness within the group) irrespective of its origins.
In the preface to his book mentioned above, Scott Cunningham writes:
The individualist form of Wicca that Cunningham helped to encourage has exploded in the past ten years with the Internet. Now Wiccans, High Magicians, Witches, Warlocks, New Agers, Neo-Pagans, and others can contact each other and share their experiences without having to meet at all. Information (and mis-information) is that much more widely available. This has diluted, to some extent, the emphasis upon personal links going back to Gardner himself which used to be so central. All the same, these personal ties are still vitally important. Even though Wiccans invariably reject the idea of external controls on the individual’s beliefs, the line of tradition back to Gardner gives the movement some structure and form, particularly as the generation of Gardner’s immediate circle has now mostly passed on.
Wicca today is in a very similar situation to Christianity in the late first century AD. At that time, the apostles were all dead. The churches that they had founded were all extremely proud of their link – through the founders – to Christ himself. They jealously preserved the teaching they had received, but they each had different forms of that teaching – which led to schisms, arguments, mutual condemnations, and so on. Over the years that followed, certain elements in the religion came to dominate, and it became more standardised. Gerald Gardner is to Wicca what St Paul was to Christianity: he did not exactly invent it, but he gave it its definitive form and was largely responsible for its current popularity.
What will happen to Gardner’s legacy in the future? Like Christianity in the late first century, Wicca today faces much hostility and misunderstanding from outside as well as internal divisions. Wiccans are still often accused of devil-worship, an accusation which was largely invented by Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger in their infamous Malleus maleficarum in the fifteenth century. They took the medieval notion of a witch as a magic-worker and re-invented the witch as a devil-worshipper. Perhaps ironically, the Catholic Church (which had commissioned the study) took it on-board only half-heartedly; it was the Protestants who conducted the vast majority of the witch hunts in early modern times. And of course the charge of devil-worship was never true, but even today many people still think of witches as Satanists. It is not possible for a teacher to “come out of the broom closet”, as it is known, for example. In 1999 George W. Bush famously commented that US army should not accommodate the religious needs of Wiccan soldiers, declaring “I don’t think that witchcraft is a religion.” Yet, in the same breath, he did uphold the right of judges to post the Ten Commandments in public buildings. One rule for Christians, another for Wiccans? In today’s enlightened world, Wiccans do not suffer the consequences for their faith that Christians did in the first centuries of their faith. Yet the popular prejudices against them are remarkably similar, and they can still suffer great social pressures of all kinds. There’s a great irony in the fact that it was the spiritual descendants of those much-maligned early Christians who demonised the witches – a fact that modern Wiccans repeat constantly. But their bitterness isn’t entirely misplaced.
There are all kinds of websites about Wicca that you can find if you want to know more: most of them are very good at describing modern Wiccan beliefs and shockingly bad at describing the history of witchcraft. On Gardner himself, this is a good site.
Gerald Gardner was born in Crosby, near Liverpool, in 1884. He spent most of his life in southeast Asia, mainly Malaya, where he was a rubber planter. During his time there he spent much of his time working as an amateur anthropologist, being especially interested in traditional religion and magical practices. In 1936 he published a book about Malayan weapons and magical beliefs, and in the 1940s he published a number of articles on similar subjects.
In 1936, Gardner retired and moved to England permanently. After spending most of his life in the tropics he found the London weather hard to deal with; he would spend the winters in the Mediterranean and much of the summers sunbathing nude, apparently at the advice of his doctor. Gardner became quite an enthusiastic nudist, joining the local nudist society and advocating the health benefits of exposure to the elements to all who would listen. In 1938, alarmed at the prospect of war, he and his wife moved to Highcliffe, in Dorset.
This was when, to his delight, Gardner discovered that ancient magical beliefs and practices were still alive in England as well as in Malaya. He became involved in the local Rosicrucian society and, most importantly, discovered a witches’ coven that met in the New Forest. He would later claim that, through his Rosicrucian contacts, he encountered a witch known as Old Dorothy in 1939, and that she initiated him into her coven. He made these claims in his two most important books, Witchcraft today, published in 1954, and The meaning of witchcraft, 1959. These books described the beliefs of the coven that Gardner claimed to have discovered. He had already published a novel, High magic’s aid, in 1949, which described some elements of witchcraft, but he could do no more than this because witchcraft was still illegal under English law. Amazingly, this law was only repealed in 1951, after which Gardner could officially “come out” as a practising witch – or, as he called himself, a “Wican”, from the old Saxon word for a witch. The word would later be spelled “Wiccan”.
After this, Gardner broke away from the New Forest coven and founded his own, with the help of a number of followers and disciples who helped him to formalise the beliefs and practices of the movement. One of the most important was Doreen Valiente, who acted as high priestess within the coven. She edited Gardner’s notes into The book of shadows, one of the most important Wiccan religious texts. Valiente later fell out with Gardner after he replaced her as high priestess; she died in 1999 after establishing herself as one of the leading figures of Wicca.
Gardner himself died in 1964.
Debate has raged ever since over where, precisely, Gardner got his ideas from. At one end of the spectrum are those who take his claims at face value and believe that Wicca, as Gardner formulated it, really was an ancient pre-Christian religion which he was taught by one of the last surviving groups of practitioners. And at the other extreme are those who argue that he just made the whole thing up. As usual, the truth is probably somewhere in between these. Gardner was certainly influenced by a wide range of sources. One of these was the Golden Dawn, the famous group of magicians founded in the 1880s. He met the most infamous of these magicians, Aleister Crowley, shortly before the latter’s death in 1947. And indeed there are many parallels between Crowley’s teachings and Gardner’s. At the same time, many aspects of Wicca, as Gardner presented it, are drawn from attested practices or beliefs of ancient pagans. For example, the four principal sabbats or religious festivals of the years are based upon ancient Celtic practices. Finally, some elements certainly came from Gardner’s own imagination. For example, his coven’s practice of performing its rituals “sky-clad” – that is, naked – came entirely from Gardner’s own naturism and has nothing to do with any ancient pagan practice.
To his credit, Gardner himself never claimed that every aspect of Wicca was ancient; he simply presented it as a faith, drawn from many sources, which he personally found fulfilling. The myth of Wicca as a single ancient religion was spread more by his followers than by him himself.
The question is hard to resolve for several reasons. The first is that not much is known about the religions from which Wicca claims ancestry in the first place. The ancient Germans, Scandinavians, and Celts did not have writing; that arrived with Christianity. Pretty much everything that is known of the pre-Christian religions of these places comes from ancient Roman commentators or, mostly, medieval Christian writers. For example, the oft-repeated fact that Easter is named after an ancient goddess is only known because the Venerable Bede mentioned it. So there is considerable debate over what the ancient pagans believed and practised. For example, it is not known if the ancient Celts practised human sacrifice, as the Romans claimed they did.
There is also the fact that modern Wicca is itself very varied. The basic tenets are these:
- God – or the divine – is worshipped in two main aspects: the God and the Goddess. These express the masculine and feminine sides of the divine. The feminine usually predominates in Wicca, and is herself manifested in three main forms – the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone.
- Magical rituals are performed as a means of attuning oneself to the divine and influencing events in the world.
- The ethical code of Wicca is that you can behave as you like provided you don’t harm others. This is usually expressed in the form “An it harm none, do what ye will.” This famous formulation was written by Doreen Valiente.
- There are four major festivals, or “sabbats”, throughout the year. These are Imbolg (2 February), Bealtane (30 April), Lughnasadh (31 July), and Samhain (31 October). There are also four lesser ones: the two equinoxes and the two solstices.
But these all vary considerably. For example, many Wiccans also worship the divine under other aspects, apart from the God and the Goddess. Some believe that gods from various ancient pagan religions, such as Diana or the Horned God, can be considered aspects of the divine; some even believe that these are real and distinct entities in their own right.
There is no “central authority” of Wicca or generally accepted set of beliefs other than the fairly basic ones mentioned above. Wiccans do not believe in proselytising: they typically believe that everyone should follow the spiritual path that is appropriate to them, and they have little interest in “converting” anyone to Wicca. In fact it is quite difficult to join a Wiccan coven: a potential convert needs to seek out a coven, and even then there is quite a long period of training and mutual checking before they can join it. Wiccans don’t advertise. All of this means that – at least until about twenty years ago – Wicca developed almost exclusively along personal lines. That is, Gardner’s associates went on to found covens of their own, and these covens – or those founded by members of them – make up most of the main covens today. The teachings of Gardner’s original coven have thus been passed on by word of mouth, supplementing the texts by him and his followers. This means that different groups, although mostly descended from Gardner’s coven and following his main tenets, have developed their own beliefs and practices. The main division in Wicca today is that between “Gardnerian” Wicca and “Alexandrian”. The latter was founded by Alex Sanders, and is inspired primarily by Gardner’s religion but with much more of an emphasis on ceremonial magic. It’s worth mentioning at this point that ceremonial or high magic is a tradition going back mostly to the Golden Dawn and to Aleister Crowley, and it is distinct from Wicca; it lacks Wicca’s interest in the divine and is not really a religion at all. Alexandrian Wicca is something of a cross between this tradition and Gardnerian Wicca. Like other traditions within Wicca, Alexandrians typically trace their covens back to that of their founder, in this case, Sanders’ own.
In the early 1980s, the notion of solitary Wicca developed. Scott Cunningham’s Wicca: a guide for the solitary practitioner, first published in 1988, was extremely popular. The rise of solitary Wicca coincided with a period of increased interest in Gardner, as a number of authors pored over his works and tried to establish the real history of witchcraft in general and Wicca in particular.
As with most religions, many Wiccans hold mistaken beliefs about their own religion and its history. For example, most histories of witchcraft available on pagan websites today are full of extremely inaccurate information about the persecution of witches by Christians in early modern times. These are also found even in published books. For example, Raymond Buckler’s Complete book of witchcraft, published in 2002 (revised edition), repeats the old claim that nine million people died in the early modern witch hunts, something no scholar of the period could countenance today.
But since the 1980s and the increased interest in Gardner’s sources, many Wiccans have become more enlightened and been quite happy to accept that their religion is not some ancient tradition transmitted in a pure form but an amalgam from many different elements. They point out that the value or truth of a religion really has nothing to do with how old it is. They are happy to acknowledge that their religion, at least in the form that they know it, is very new; they simply deny that this makes it any less valid than the older religions. Even Christianity was brand new once. Thus, most Wiccans today, certainly those who identify themselves as Gardnerian, continue to hold their rituals “sky-clad” even though they know that Gardner invented this practice himself. They insist that it is spiritually significant and helpful (it represents honesty and openness within the group) irrespective of its origins.
In the preface to his book mentioned above, Scott Cunningham writes:
The individualist form of Wicca that Cunningham helped to encourage has exploded in the past ten years with the Internet. Now Wiccans, High Magicians, Witches, Warlocks, New Agers, Neo-Pagans, and others can contact each other and share their experiences without having to meet at all. Information (and mis-information) is that much more widely available. This has diluted, to some extent, the emphasis upon personal links going back to Gardner himself which used to be so central. All the same, these personal ties are still vitally important. Even though Wiccans invariably reject the idea of external controls on the individual’s beliefs, the line of tradition back to Gardner gives the movement some structure and form, particularly as the generation of Gardner’s immediate circle has now mostly passed on.
Wicca today is in a very similar situation to Christianity in the late first century AD. At that time, the apostles were all dead. The churches that they had founded were all extremely proud of their link – through the founders – to Christ himself. They jealously preserved the teaching they had received, but they each had different forms of that teaching – which led to schisms, arguments, mutual condemnations, and so on. Over the years that followed, certain elements in the religion came to dominate, and it became more standardised. Gerald Gardner is to Wicca what St Paul was to Christianity: he did not exactly invent it, but he gave it its definitive form and was largely responsible for its current popularity.
What will happen to Gardner’s legacy in the future? Like Christianity in the late first century, Wicca today faces much hostility and misunderstanding from outside as well as internal divisions. Wiccans are still often accused of devil-worship, an accusation which was largely invented by Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger in their infamous Malleus maleficarum in the fifteenth century. They took the medieval notion of a witch as a magic-worker and re-invented the witch as a devil-worshipper. Perhaps ironically, the Catholic Church (which had commissioned the study) took it on-board only half-heartedly; it was the Protestants who conducted the vast majority of the witch hunts in early modern times. And of course the charge of devil-worship was never true, but even today many people still think of witches as Satanists. It is not possible for a teacher to “come out of the broom closet”, as it is known, for example. In 1999 George W. Bush famously commented that US army should not accommodate the religious needs of Wiccan soldiers, declaring “I don’t think that witchcraft is a religion.” Yet, in the same breath, he did uphold the right of judges to post the Ten Commandments in public buildings. One rule for Christians, another for Wiccans? In today’s enlightened world, Wiccans do not suffer the consequences for their faith that Christians did in the first centuries of their faith. Yet the popular prejudices against them are remarkably similar, and they can still suffer great social pressures of all kinds. There’s a great irony in the fact that it was the spiritual descendants of those much-maligned early Christians who demonised the witches – a fact that modern Wiccans repeat constantly. But their bitterness isn’t entirely misplaced.
There are all kinds of websites about Wicca that you can find if you want to know more: most of them are very good at describing modern Wiccan beliefs and shockingly bad at describing the history of witchcraft. On Gardner himself, this is a good site.
