-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: Other Altars - Roots and Realities of Cultic and Satanic Ritual Abuse and Multiple Personality Disorder Craig Lockwood©1993 CompCare Publishers 3850 Annapolis Lane, Suite 100 Minneapolis, MN 55441 612.559.4800/800.328.3330 ISBN 0-89638-363-6 255+pps — out-of-print/one edition. ----- A very interesting and excellent book. Om K --[8]-- Chapter 8 Witches, Wiccans, And History "Witchcraft is a secretive otherworld, and more than other magical practices it is rich in symbolic, special items." -T. M. Luhrmann, 1989 Confusion about the nature of witchcraft, sorcery, and Satanism has led to many misconceptions about contemporary witchcraft's role in suspected cases of ritual abuse. Individuals who call themselves witches have certainly practiced and participated in abuse. Some have done it in ritual settings. It is entirely possible that individual witches have participated in the sexual abuse of children, just as "good" Catholics, Theosophists, Buddhists, Baptists, Unitarians, and Mormons have sexually abused children. Individual acts by members of individual religions, however, are just that: individual acts. Because some members of a religion or religious movement abuse children, animals, or adults, does not mean all members are guilty or that the religion itself promotes such behavior. If in the past, or today in other cultures, witches may have been guilty of abusive practices, so have persons who follow Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Catholicism—in the name of religion. Today, in the United States, no credible evidence exists to suggest that Wiccan witchcraft as now practiced sanctions any kind of sacrificial or abusive practices. Which Witch? Defining a witch, or witchcraft as an activity, is not easy. Witches are often creatures of secret social action in most societies, if not always social creatures. Modern Western witchcraft defines itself as a Neo-Pagan movement, a rekindled worship of an "Old Religion," with a primary focus on the great Goddess. This personification-of-nature Goddess, who appears in many forms and with many names, has a "constant theme" centering around "cyclicity and transformation: the spinning of the Fates."[1] While witchcraft may be a "movement," it is far from dogmatic or organized. Idiosyncrasy and individualism are highly regarded traits in witches, but the social practice of witchcraft involves a great deal of emotional trust, bonding, and cooperative social interaction. One Wiccan estimates that most of the witches she comes in contact with as a writer, lecturer, and conductor of workshops, have several years of college experience and are employed. If witchcraft was once the religion of peasants, she believes that today it is distinctly a movement of the educated middle class. To an outsider, witchcraft presents a bewildering array of concepts, beliefs, and magical practices. Proponents of almost all ancient and modern beliefs can be found, and extensive literature supports these various belief systems. Most witches take their witchcraft seriously. Anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, who was initiated into several covens in London while doing field work, notes that witches tend to be "remarkably self-conscious about their practice." This selfconsciousness, however, gives them a certain kind of freedom. Luhrmann's experience brought her in contact with many highly educated Londoners. It was her impression that despite appearances, magic seemed to be a religion of the romantic intellectual. Luhrmann observes that the way the modern middle class believes in magic is not the same way preliterate communities believe in it. Westerners who espouse magic are self-consciously rejecting "conventional ideals" and are attracted to magical ideas because of their "imaginative, emotional involvement." Does witchcraft's romantic appeal attract more women than men? European folk traditions cast most witches as either beautiful and seductive enchantresses or crones—old hags with bad attitudes—who for all their supposed power lived as impoverished isolates. Often they were portrayed as members of a group. African witches, by contrast, tend to be male. In Brazil, where African and European traditions blend, both genders are represented equally. Western folklore often depicts witches as living in seclusion—on a remote headland, on a deserted heath, or deep in a forest like the witch in Grimm's Hansel and Gretel. In common with the ideology of contemporary witchcraft, the locations were usually set in nature. Today, however, urban witches are in vogue. A Prevalence of Witches Traditional European/Western witchcraft blends many cultural and folk traditions of somewhat uncertain origins. Dozens of scholars, anthropologists, historians, and lay authors have offered a mind-boggling array of explanations as to the origins of the diverse practices lumped together under the heading of witchcraft. What emerges are two broad hypotheses explaining the enduring belief in witches and witchcraft: 1) cultic lineagewitchcraft and various types of witch cults have existed since Paleolithic times and are remnants of the widespread worship of the god of the hunt and goddess of fertility; and 2) superstitious tradition-organized witchcraft or witch cults never existed. What we've had is simply an old folk-belief in such things, with isolated examples of people calling themselves witches that has somehow survived. Prior to the late nineteenth century, witchcraft was accepted as an ancient folk tradition. Classical references to witches were numerous but, without paleoethnography, history before the Greeks was a matter of conjecture and myth. Rationalism, Materialism, and Marxism, as the prevailing intellectual paradigms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, characterized magic and witchcraft as superstitions of the ignorant. The Inquisition and English and colonial witch-hunts were seen as irrational social aberrations and explained in materialist terms. Ample evidence exists of organized efforts in fifteenth-century Europe and later in England to create social scapegoats, to use fear and power to solidify aristocratic, judicial, and ecclesiastic power. Secret societies, clandestine groups, and cabals existed within the aristocracy, the church, and in society at large. But what intellectuals ignored was that during this period almost everyone from Pope to peasant actually believed in the supernatural powers of witches. "Witch-hunting never flourishes unless the common people are eager for it." wrote Harvard's G. L. Kittredge in American Historical Review in 1917. People feared witches whether they existed in organized cults or not. In 1921 anthropologist Margaret Murray offered the first example of hypothesis number one, cultic lineage built around the existence of a pan-European pre-Christian fertility cult. In her book Witchcult in Western Europe, Murray says that cults, centering their beliefs around seasonal cycles and crops, worshipped a male horned god who shared the stage with a goddess. Murray believed that the horned god eventually displaced the goddess. The Inquisition then labeled this Pagan tradition "devil worship. Protestant theologians perpetuated the anti-Pagan bias. While historians rightly questioned Murray's scholarship, and though she may have been wrong in detail, she may have been right in concept.[2] Hypothesis number two, superstitious tradition, has been, for the past fifty years, the more academically accepted belief Norman Cohn's Europe's Inner Demons, published in 1975, epitomized the no-witches—no-witch cult thinking. Cohn's research, however, done years before, couldn't reflect the evidence, unearthed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of the long-established witchcraft traditions in isolated eastern European cultures such as Romania. Cohn, and the other academics, represented the prevailing progressive, postmodern, humankind-is-essentially-good socio-political view of humanity. The enduring nature of witchcraft didn't fit, any more than did evil episodes in human history like the Inquisition. Historic events are complex and confusing. No single theory or explanation can account for the bewildering number of potential causes for belief in witchcraft and magic. Examples include social tension; sexual repression; capitalist, political, and economic development; collusion between the civil machinery of justice and the church; psychological fantasy; ergot-tainted hallucination-producing grain; social displacement; race/class/gender oppression; the advent of individualism; collapse of a more tolerant; to-magic Catholicism; the rise of rigid Protestantism; and combinations of all the above. Historians must support their hypotheses with substantiating documentation, but the historical record is notably fragmented and short, and human traditions are unknowably long. Libraries the world over are crammed with discarded historical theories and interpretations once regarded as state-of-the-art scholarship. At best the historical record is incomplete. If history is a jigsaw puzzle, most of the pieces are missing. Since belief in magic has never died out, the belief that witchcraft has survived via family traditions or small cults bears careful examination, not dismissal simply because no written records exist. In recent decades, practitioners of witchcraft, magic, and Pagan traditions who are not scholars, historians, or anthropologists have popularized a form of research into their various magic traditions. For the interested reader, many of these books offer a peek at a fast reawakening form of human spirituality. National Public Radio reporter Margot Adler, a skilled researcher and writer, notes in her book Drawing Down the Moon that many Pagans believe, while acknowledging that the evidence is sketchy at best, in a continuous pancultural linear tradition which has withstood time's erosive forces. Contemporary scholars like Carlos Ginzburg and D. L. O'Keefe suggest a more complex, diverse, and less contiguous form of transmission. Ginzburg believes evidence shows that occasional cults and elements of lineages may well have existed. While Ginzburg and O'Keefe approach their subjects cautiously, their works are based on years of in-depth study, with access to more cross-disciplinary sources of information than those available earlier to Norman Cohn. Since historians and anthropologists are constantly reevaluating their concepts, and their research is adding to a growing body of information, there is today no definitive answer to the question of cultic lineages. Contemporary scholarship is reevaluating the shamanic/ Paleolithic cult paradigm. Ginzberg and O'Keefe offer substantive proof of what scholars like Cohn didn't know or refused to accept-the fact that identifiable and traceable remnants of several powerful preliterate Eurasian cultural traditions, predating the Celts and Anglo-Saxons, appear to have had a wide cultural distribution throughout the ancient Mediterranean world and Europe. And they have, at least in some cases, survived the Christianization of Europe. Witchcraft, like myths, magic, money, tools, and technology, is an eclectic traveler.[3] Each style of witchcraft accumulates a "history," and that history accompanies the particular witch's craft. Covens Western witchcraft, especially, tends to be group-oriented. Most contemporary witches say witchcraft is most effective within the coven setting. Pronounced "kuvv-en," the word has Latin rather than Celtic roots. Most books on witchcraft establish the coven as a traditional gathering of thirteen witches of roughly equal male/female distribution. All-female and all-male covens exist, but they are thought by some witches to be less effective. Since witchcraft and Wicca are not formalized religions, much flexibility occurs in making and breaking rules. One Wiccan priestess, who prefers limiting her covens to eight for her "workings," explains that only three people are needed, though she acknowledges that the traditional coven is thirteen. Why thirteen? Answers abound. English folklore speaks of a leader-plus-twelve. We have King Arthur and his twelve knights and Robin Hood and his twelve men. Thirteen, for whatever reasons, has assumed a mystical mythos. A quick glance at Michelangelo's Last Supper shows twelve of Christ's disciples, plus Christ. The cardinal, ordinal, and sub-ordinal points of the compass, plus one, the center, have been the mariner's guiding companion for centuries. Also, from a practical standpoint, thirteen are about all that can comfortably fit in the traditional nine-foot-diameter circle—assuming everyone in the coven shows up. Circles of stones have been found in Paleolithic sites associated with magic. Pennethorne Hughes notes in his book Witchcraft that anthropologists discovered a Neolithic "Cave of Bats" near Grenada in Spain. Inside sat twelve skeletons in a circle around another skeleton draped in a leather skin. One answer to the question of circular formation may be that any group of standing people engaged in a mutual activity will naturally arrange themselves in a circle formation. Many other mammals behave in the same way. Against greater odds, defenders will circle for protection. Whatever the reasons, most Wiccans believe that their traditional grouping predates compasses or Christianity. But does it? Margaret Murray thought so, but the earliest reference to thirteen is during the 1662 witchcraft trial of Isobel Gowdie in Auldearne, Scotland.[4] Covens, in the English Gardnerian tradition, are supposed to stay "at least a league" (three miles) from each other. When covens hive off, the English tradition is that members sever contact, "voiding the coven," and only the high priestess and priests have contact with each other, a tradition supposedly left over from the "burning times." Contemporary practice acknowledges that both of the above are "impractical" today. Hiving keeps a coven from growing unworkably large. The new leaders should be at least second-degree initiates and have approval from the leadership of the parent coven.[5] Popular vs. Unpopular Witches Folk culture, Hollywood, and the popular press, have cast the witch in various molds. Folk traditions—in tales like Hansel and Gretel—typically vilified witches. Magical beings, such as Cinderella's fairy godmother, had far greater powers, but could be capricious. Hollywood often typifies witches as wicked, as in Walt Disney's Snow White. Comic strips such as the Wizard of Id, Broomhilda, and The Far Side treat witches with humor. What little the public knows about witches comes from a jumble of folk tales and superstition every bit as enduring as witchcraft itself. Much of this hasn't been updated since medieval times. Not all medieval witches were—or were judged by their peers to be—evil. Sometimes, according to G. L. Kittredge in American Historical Review, they were just sweet little old midwives, unfairly and unjustly accused. Then, as now, some witches undoubtedly practiced what they and everyone else in the community considered an evil craft. Others may have been no more than dotty, cantankerous old women who believed in the same pantheon of supernatural forces as their accusers. Not all witches know how to practice-or would even consider practicing-black magic. Some simply lack the knowledge. Others categorically reject practices they consider negative. Sexual Witchcraft Witches tend to be female in Western societies, and sexuality, either explicit or implicit, is cited as a frequent component of European, especially British, ritual. According to Margot Adler in Drawing Down the Moon, explicit sexuality seems less prevalent, but she notes that "of course there are some groups that do use sex in ritual." Ritual sexual components for some covens may include fertility rites, sado-masochistic acts, such as "scourging" (or flagellation) and the use of "the ancient and almost forgotten tradition of using pain and sex as a means of achieving ecstasy-ecstasy in the full sense of God-intoxication."[6] Not part of the Wiccan tradition, sex magic is more typical of the Alexandrian and Gardnerian styles of English witchcraft. Spiritual Feminists Adler believes witchcraft is undergoing major social and cultural changes in the West. Sometimes it is linked—or confused—with feminine spirituality, a relatively new field of study that explores ancient images and beliefs that express the innate power of women. Idealized matriarchal or egalitarian social structures and societies figure importantly in the research and writing being done in this field. Whether such matriarchies or egalitarian societies ever existed historically is less important to spiritual feminists than the concept as an ideal. Relying on the writings of Robert Graves, Esther Harding, C. 0. Jung, Helen Diner, and Elizabeth G. Davis, the feminists hypothesize a society in which feminine power, as distinct from masculine power, is valued and exerted in noncontrolling and nonoppressive ways that are harmonious with nature. Radical Lesbian Witches Margot Adler notes that among the various paths to Neo-Paganism are those trod by feminists with "a history of political action. They view all human concerns as both spiritual and political, and they regard the separation between the two as a false idea born of 'patriarchy,' an idea unknown before Classical times and one that has produced much bitter fruit." Patriarchies, male-dominated societies, are characterized in this view as responsible for the world's problems. According to Adler, Neo-Pagan, goddess, and Wiccan traditions have been especially appealing to lesbian separatists, radicals whom she characterizes as "seeking to remove themselves entirely from the mainstream" of a Western society seen as "contaminated by masculine ideology." Language figures importantly in radical lesbian ideology. Much of the rhetoric draws upon Marxist and left-wing lexicon, but is given a metaphysical slant. "Capitalism" is replaced by "patriarchy" and "spiritual oppression" characterizes mainstream Christian religions' treatment of women's spirituality. Adler says that "spiritual" women are seen as "revolutionizing their political consciousness" and tasked with "setting up alternative structures" in "socialist patriarchies." Sweeping pronouncements and "spiritual communiques" about "gender genocide" and ideosyncratic spellings are not uncommon: "wymin" or "wimmin" sometimes replace the noun ((woman." By grafting socialist dogma onto witchcraft, die-hard radicals may be able to keep their ideology alive a little longer. Witchcraft, however, under any circumstances in any society, has proven itself far more viable as a doctrine than socialism—with many more satisfied practitioners. Though many witches feel uncomfortable with the strident militancy of the radicals, others shrug it off as an inevitable part of the natural polarity of any social or spiritual movement. Love Magic Love magic, however, is a different story. Because acquiring a desirable mate can be problematic at any time in any society or class, for either gender, love magic is constantly in demand. Popular fiction has always portrayed the love spell and love potion as the witches' stock-in-trade, but ethical witches maintain that casting a spell to make person X fall for person Y is courting disaster. There are notable exceptions, however. In The Witches' Way, Janet and Stewart Farrar relate a charming story of a newly initiated witch and her two friends who were each strongly attracted to the other but far too inhibited to make a move. The witch, feeling her friends' frustration, "secretly worked a spell to overcome their shyness and bring them together-if they were right for each other." Her spell proved successful. Within a day the gentleman had asked the lady for a date. "That was twelve years ago," write the Farrars. "They, plus three delightful children, are now busy living happily ever after." Almost any community, of any size anywhere in the world, has at least one person who can divine love's true course. They call themselves psychics, palmists, or Tarot card readers, or any of a hundred names. To those who require such services, however, the title is less important than the hope that when it comes to love, perhaps a little supernatural nudge will help. Called to the "Craft" Occult traditions have always tended to intermingle and diffuse. This process of diffusion once took years. But now, since the advent of jet travel, magical elements from different traditions are so quickly grafted onto each other that keeping track of where they came from is difficult. If contemporary witches have discarded the broom as a means of air transportation, they have not discarded the belief that theirs is a very special calling. Born gifted, or simply coachable, in the European and British traditions, witches are usually mentored by other witches who represent a seniority of acknowledged supernatural skills and personal power. Skillful witchcraft, nevertheless, requires a strong component of psychic sensitivity, a form of highly refined intuition. pps. 85-97 --[notes]-- Chapter 8 1. T. M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch's Craft: Ritual, Magic, and Witchcraft in Present-day England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 341-42. 2. C. Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990), 8-9. 3. W. Burkett, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (University of California Press, 1983). 4. N. Drury, Dictionary of Mysticism and the Occult (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985). 5. Janet and Stewart Farrar, The Witches' Way: Principles, Rituals, and Beliefs of Modern Witchcraft (London: Robert Hale, 1984), 22-23. 6. F. King, Sexuality, Magic and Perversion (London: Carol Publishing Group, 1971). --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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