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We must dismiss with some respect the assertion, put forth by Margot Adler and others, that "Wicca no longer adheres to the orthodox mythos of the Book of Shadows."
Many, if not most of those who have been drawn to Wicca in the last three decades came to it under the spell (if I may so term it) of the legend of ancient Wicca. If that legend is false, then while reformists and revisionist apologists (particularly the peculiar hybrid spawned in the late sixties under the name "feminist Wicca") may seek other valid grounds for their practices, we at least owe it to those who have operated under a misapprehension to explain the truth, and let the chips fall where they may.
I believe there is a core of valid experience falling under the Wiccan-neopagan heading, but that that core is the same essential core that lies at the truths exposed by the dreaded boogy-man Aleister Crowley and the 'wicked' pansexualism of Crowley's Law of Thelema. That such roots would be not just uncomfortable, but intolerable to the orthodox traditionalists among the Wiccans, but even more so among the hybrid feminist "wiccans" may indeed be an understatement.
Neopaganism, in a now archaic "hippie" misreading of ecology, mistakes responsible stewardship of nature for nature worship. Ancient pagans did not `worship' nature; to a large extent they were afraid of it, as has been pointed out to me by folk practioners. Their "nature rites" were to propitiate the caprice of the gods, not necessarily to honor them. The first neopagan revivalists, Gardner, Crowley and Dr. Murray, well understood this. Neopagan wiccans usually do not.
In introducing a "goddess element" into their theology, Crowley and Gardner both understood the yin/yang, male/female fundamental polarity of the universe. Radical feminist neopagans have taken this balance and altered it, however unintentionally, into a political feminist agenda, centered around a near-monotheistic worship of the female principle, in a bizarre caricature of patriarchal Christianity. Bigotry, I submit, cuts both ways.
I do not say these things lightly; I have seen it happen in my own time. IF this be truth, let truth name its own price. I was not sure, until Norm and John got back from the Old Jail.
A couple of months earlier, scant days after hearing that I was to become a gnostic bishop and thus an heir to a corner of Crowley's legacy, I had punched on my answering machine, and there was the unexpected voice of John Turner saying that he had located what seemed to be the original Book of Shadows in an inventory list, locating it at Ripley's office in Toronto.
He said he didn't think they would sell it as an individual item, but he gave me the name of a top official in the Ripley organization, who I promptly contacted. I eventually made a substantial offer for the book, sight unseen, figuring there was (at the least) a likelihood I'd be able to turn the story into a book and get my money back out of it, to say nothing of the historical import.
But, as I researched the matter, I became more wary, and confused; Gardner's texts "A" "B" and "C" all seemed to be accounted for. Possibly, I began to suspect, this was either a duplicate of the "deThelemized" post1954 version with segments written by Gardner and Valiente and copied and recopied (as well as distorted) from hand to hand since by Wiccans the world over.
Maybe, I mused, Valiente had one copy and Gardner another, the latter sold to Ripley with the Collection. Or, perhaps it was the curious notebook discovered by Aidan Kelly in the Ripley files called Ye Book of Ye Art Magical, the meaning of which was unclear.
While I was chatting with Ms.Deska, Norm returned from his mission, we introduced in best businesslike fashion, and he told me he'd get the book, whatever it might be, from the vault.
The vault?! I sat there thinking god knows what. Recently, I'd gotten a call from Toronto, and it seems the Ripley folks wanted me to take a look at what they had. I had made a considerable offer, and at that point I figured I'd had at least a nibble. As it so happened Norm would be visiting on a routine inspection visit, so it was arranged he would bring the manuscript with him.
Almost from the minute he placed it in front of me, things began to make some kind of sense. Clearly,
this was Ye Book of Ye Art Magical. Just as clearly, it was an unusual piece, written largely in the same
hand as the Crowley Charter- that is, the hand of Gerald Gardner. Of this I became certain, because I had
handwriting samples of Gardner, Valiente and Crowley in my possession. Ms. Valiente had been mindful
of this when she wrote me, on August 8th, 1986:
I have deliberately chosen to write you in longhand, rather than send a typewritten reply, so that you will
have something by which to judge the validity of the claim you tell me is being made by the Ripley
organisation to have a copy of a "Book of Shadows" in Gerald Gardner's handwriting and mine. If this
is..."Ye Book of Ye Art Magical," ....this is definitely in Gerald Gardner's handwriting. Old Gerald,
however, had several styles of handwriting....I think it is probable that the whole MS. was in fact written
by Gerald, and no other person was involved; but of course I may be wrong....
At first glance it appeared to be a very old book, and it suggested to me where the rumors that a very old,
possibly medieval Book of Shadows had once been on display in Gardner's Museum had emerged from.
Any casual onlooker might see Ye Book in this light, for the cover was indeed that of an old volume, with the original title scratched out crudely on the side and a new title tooled into the leather cover. The original was some mundane volume, on Asian knives or something, but the inside pages had been removed, and a kind of notebook -- almost a journal -- had been substituted.
As far as I could see, no dates appear anywhere in the book. It is written in several different handwriting styles, although, as noted above, Doreen Valiente assured me that Gardner was apt to use several styles. I had the distinct impression this "notebook" had been written over a considerable period of time, perhaps years, perhaps even decades. It may, indeed, date from his days in the 1930s when he linked up with a neorosicrucuian grouping that could have included among its members the legendary Dorothy Clutterbuck, who set Gardner on the path which led to Wicca.
Thinking on it, what emerges from Ye Book of Ye Art Magical is a developmental set of ideas. Much of it is straight out of Crowley, but it is clearly the published Crowley, the old magus of the Golden Dawn, the A.A., and the O.T.O.
Somewhere along the line it hit me that I was not exactly looking at the "original Book of Shadows" but, perhaps, the outline Gardner prepared over a long period of time, apparently in secret (since Valiente, a relatively early initiate of Gardner's, never heard of it nor saw it, according to her own account, until recent years, about the time Aidan Kelly unearthed it in the Ripley collection long after Gardner's death).
Dr. Gardner kept many odd notebooks and scrapbooks that perhaps would reveal much about his character and motivations. Turner showed me a Gardner scrapbook in Ripley's store room which was mostly cheesecake magazine photographs and articles about actresses. Probably none are so evocative as Ye Book of Ye Art Magical, discovered,it has been intimated,hidden away in the back of an old sofa.
I have the impression it was essentially unknown in and after Gardner's lifetime, and that by the Summer of 1986 few had seen inside it; I knew of only Kelly and my own party. Perhaps the cover had been seen by some along the line, accounting for the rumor of a "very old Book of Shadows" in Gardner's Museum.
If someone had seen the charter signed by Crowley ("Baphomet") but written by Gerald Gardner, and had gotten a look, as well, at Ye Book, they might well have concluded that Crowley had written BOTH, an honest error, but maybe the source of that long-standing accusation. There is even a notation in the Ripley catalog attributing the manuscript to Crowley on someone's say-so, but I have no indication Ripley has any other such book. Finally, if the notebook is a sourcebook of any religious system, it is not that of medieval witchcraft, but the twentieth century madness or sanity or both of the infamous magus Aleister Crowley and the Thelemic/Gnostic creed of The Book of the Law.
As I sat there I read aloud familiar quotations or paraphrases from published material in the Crowley-Thelemic canon. This is not the "ancient religion of the Wise" but the modern sayings of " the Beast 666 " as Crowley was wont to style himself.
But, does any of this invalidate Wicca as an expression of human spirituality? It depends on where one is coming from. Certainly, the foundations of feminist Wicca and the modern cult of the goddess are challenged with the fact that the goddess in question may be Nuit, her manifestation the sworn whore, Our Lady Babalon, the Scarlet Woman. Transform what you will shall be the whole of history, but THIS makes what Marx did to Hegel look like slavish devotion.
What Crowley himself said of this kind of witchcraft is not merely instructive, but an afront to the
conceits of an era.
"The belief in witchcraft," he observed, " was not all superstition; its psychological roots were sound.
Women who are thwarted in their natural instincts turn inevitably to all kinds of malignant mischief, from
slander to domestic destruction..."
For the rest of us, those who neither worship nor are disdainful of the man who made sexuality a god or,
at least, acknowledged it as such, experience must be its own teacher. If Wicca is a sort of errant
Minerval Camp of the OTO, gone far astray and far afield since the days Crowley gave Gardner a charter
he "didn't use" but seemed to value, and a whole range of rituals and imagery that assault the senses at
their most literally fundamental level; if this is true or sort of true, maybe its time history be owned up to.
Mythos has its place and role, but so, too, does reality.
The question of intent looms large in the background of this inquiry. If I had to guess, I would venture that Gerald Gardner did, in fact, invent Wicca more or less whole cloth, to be a popularized version of the OTO. Crowley, or his successor Karl Germer, who also knew Dr. Gardner, likely set "old Gerald" on what they intended to be a Thelemic path, aimed at reestablishing at least a basic OTO encampment in England.
Aiden Kelly's research work on all this is most impressive, but at rock bottom I can't help feeling he still wants to salvage something original in Wicca. In a way, there is some justification for this; the Wicca of Gerald Gardner, OTO initiate and advocate of sexual magick produced a folksy, easier version of the OTO, but by the middle nineteen fifties some of his early "followers" not only created a revisionist Wicca with relatively little of the Thelemic original intact, but convinced Gardner to go along with the changes.
It is also possible, but yet unproven, that, upon expelling Kenneth Grant from the OTO in England, Germer, in the early 1950s, summoned Gardner to America to interview him as a candidate for leading the British OTO. Gardner, it is confirmed, came to America, but by then Wicca, and Dr. Gardner had begun to take their own, watered-down course. Today most Wiccans have no idea of their origins.
Let me close this section by quoting two interesting tidbits for your consideration.
First consider Doreen Valiente's observation to me concerning "the Parsons connection". I quote from her letter abovementioned, one of several she was kind enough to send me in 1986 in connection with my research into this matter.
...I did know about the existence of the O.T.O. Chapter in California at the time of Crowley's death, because I believe his ashes were sent over to them. He was cremated here in Brighton, you know, much to the scandal of the local authorities, who objected to the `pagan funeral service.' If you are referring to the group of which Jack Parsons was a member (along with the egregious Mr. L. Ron Hubbard), then there is another curious little point to which I must draw your attention. I have a remarkable little book by Jack Parsons called MAGICK, GNOSTICISM AND THE WITCHCRAFT. It is unfortunately undated, but Parsons died in 1952. The section on witchcraft is particularly interesting because it looks forward to a revival of witchcraft as the Old Religion....I find this very thought provoking. Did Parsons write this around the time that Crowley was getting together with Gardner and perhaps communicated with the California group to tell them about it?
We must remember that Ms. Valiente was a close associate of Gardner and is a dedicated and active Wiccan. She, of course, has her own interpretation of these matters. The OTO recently reprinted the Parsons "witchcraft" essays in Freedom is a Two Edged Sword , a postumous collection of his writings. It does indeed seem that Gardner and Parsons were both on the same wave- length at about the same time.
The other matter of note is the question of the length of Gardner's association with the OTO and with
Crowley personally. My informant Col. Lawrence, tells me that he has in his possession a cigarette case
which once belonged to Aleister Crowley. Inside "is a note in Crowley's hand that says simply: 'gift of GBG, 1936, A. Crowley'."
(Personal letter, 6 December, 1986)
The inscription could be a mistake, it could mean 1946, the period of the Charter. But, as Ms. Valiente
put it in a letter to me of 8th December, 1986:
If your friend is right, then it would mean that old Gerald actually went through a charade of pretending to
Arnold Crowther that Arnold was introducing him to Crowley for the first time - a charade which Crowley
for some reason was willing to go along with. Why? I can't see the point of such a pretence; but then
occultists sometimes do devious things...
Crowley may have played out a similar scene with G.I. Gurdjieff, the other enlightened merry prankster
of the first half of the twentieth century.
Gnosticism and Wicca, the subjects of Jack Parsons' essays, republished by the OTO and Falcon Press in 1990, are the two most successful expressions to date of Crowley's dream of a popular solar-phallic religion. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think Aleister and Gerald may have cooked Wicca up.
If Wicca is the OTO's prodigal daughter in fact, authorized directly by Crowley, how should Wiccans now relate to this? How should Crowley's successors and heirs in the OTO deal with it?
Then too, what are we to make of and infer about all this business of a popular Thelemic-Gnostic religion? Were Crowley, Parsons, Gardner and others trying to do something of note with regard to actualizing a New Aeon here which bears scrutiny? Or is this mere speculation, and of little significance for the Great Work today?
If the Charter Crowley issued Gardner is, indeed, the authority upon which Wicca has been built for half a century, then it is perhaps no coincidence that I acquired that Charter in the same year I was consecrated a Bishop of the Gnostic Catholic Church. Further, it was literally days after my long search for the original of Gardner's BOOK OF SHADOWS ended in success that the Holy Synod of T Michael Bertiaux's Gnostic Church unanimously elected me a Missionary Bishop, on August 29, 1986.
Sometimes, I muse, the Inner Order revoked Wicca's charter in 1986,placing it in my hands. Since I hold it in trust for the OTO, perhaps Wicca has, in symbolic form, returned home at last. It remains for the Wiccans to, literally (since the charter hangs in my temple space), to read the handwriting on the wall.
(webmistress' note: for more sites with info on the origins of wicca, visit my Links page)
WEBMISSTRESS REPLIES: Readers take note. While this article presents some interesting ideas, there is much to dispute. First, the claim that ancient pagans did not worship nature, and that rites were more apt to "propitiate the caprice of the gods, not necessarily to honor them," is untrue. Many researchers of cultures around the world have documented their theories of ancient nature cults and very old rites, some of which still survive today, that are designed to give honor to the gods of nature. It is true that ancient pagans feared the awesome power of nature, but it is clearly untrue that they did not worship nature in the guide of godheads.
Second, the author brings up Crowley's influence on the beliefs of Wicca as if no one has ever noticed it before. In fact, Crowley's influence has never been disputed, nor has the influence of Charles Leland, Robert Graves, and others to whom Gardner was indebted. Wicca is far too different from Crowley's personal beliefs to be considered a "version" of the OTO or something that he and Gardner "cooked up."
Rather, Wicca has flourished as a system based on ancient philosophies and practices which are brought back to life by new rituals, teachings, and philosophies that were sometimes written by Gardner, sometimes by other authors whom he admired. Neopaganism, and Wicca, is a thriving and growing tradition that has a history of borrowing in order to renew. This fact need not be obscured by claims of collusion between Gardner and another religious sect with similar ideas and goals.
