Supernatural (54 page)

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 witches.
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.

In the later years of his life, Gardner settled in Castletown on the Isle of Man, where he founded a witchcraft museum.
After his death the museum was taken over by Monique Wilson, a Scottish witch who is known as ‘the Lady Olwen’, and her husband Campbell, a former bomber pilot.
Monique Wilson also assumed the title of ‘Queen of the Witches’.
In a recent interview with the British journalist Colin Cross she explained: ‘It is a title conferred by three or more witch covens.
It is supposed to be an honour but really it means that I carry the can when anything goes wrong.
I adjudicate on disputes that arise in covens under my jurisdiction.
Of course there are many covens which are entirely independent.
I used to be the only Witch Queen but a few years ago we crowned one for America, where witchcraft is growing very rapidly.’

Monique Wilson estimated that there were about 2,500 witches in Britain.
Others have put the figure much higher, at between 5000 and 10,000.
‘A coven consists of a minimum of two members and a maximum of 13; when it reaches the limit, it subdivides,’ Mrs.
Wilson explained.
‘A female witch is always initiated by a man, and a male one by a woman.’

Witches are usually naked for their rituals, but the Wilsons denied that the witchcraft movement is really a cover for sex.
‘I daresay there are one or two so-called covens which operate for sexual reasons,’ said Campbell Wilson.
‘Anyone can read a book and start his own coven with his own rules.
But in real witchcraft sex is only a very small part of the whole.’

The Wilsons went on to say that there are a few black witches—those who use their power to do people harm—but in their view such witches were rare.
However, sufficient evidence exists to suggest that these darker powers of witchcraft—the power to cast damaging spells and lay curses—are no mere superstition, and that they are still being practised today.

In the encyclopedia
Man, Myth and Magic,
the photographer Serge Kordiev described how he and his wife became members of a coven.
After he had written an article in a Sunday newspaper describing his interest in the occult, he received a telephone call from a man who asked whether he would be interested in joining a witch cult.
He said yes.
By appointment the Kordievs were picked up in an expensive car and driven to a large old house.
After being given drinks at a bar they were told to strip and put on small black satin aprons.
They were then taken into a large room with a black floor and red carpets hanging on the walls.
Half a dozen hooded figures stood in front of an altar.
A naked man, his body gleaming with oil, appeared before the altar.
Two black-robed girls stood on either side of him.
The Kordievs were ordered to kneel, to swear perpetual homage to Satan, and to sign their oaths in blood.
They were then given magical names, and the naked man placed his hand on their genitals, causing ‘a curious tingling sensation’.

After several more meetings the Kordievs began to have second thoughts about the cult.
On one occasion a young girl was accused of betraying the group’s secrets.
She was made to serve as a human altar while a Black Mass was said over her, after which she was ravished by the Master.
When the Kordievs discovered that they still had to go through a ‘confirmation ceremony’ which involved sexual intercourse with the Master and with a High Priestess, they decided to leave the group.
Almost immediately their troubles began.
One day they returned home late at night to discover an enormous toad sitting on the front doorstep.
On another occasion they heard sounds of maniacal laughter and smashing glass coming from Kordiev’s studio.
When they investigated they found that the studio had been wrecked.
But the doors were still locked, and the windows had apparently been smashed from
inside,
with all the glass scattered outside on the lawn.
There followed many months of bad luck.

In his book
Experiences of a Present Day Exorcist,
the Reverend Donald Omand gives his opinion that a great deal of ‘black magic’ is the result of a kind of hostile thought-pressure.
He is firmly convinced, for example, that when a worker in a factory is ‘sent to Conventry’ (an English term for ignoring a co-worker as punishment) the hostile thought waves from the others may cause actual physical and psychological damage—quite apart from any effects that could be ascribed to the power of suggestion.
Readers of Ira Levin’s novel
Rosemary’s Baby
will remember the episode in which a circle of black witches cause someone’s death by ‘ill wishing’.
It could well be that ‘ill wishing’ and the Reverend Donald Omand’s ‘hostile thought-pressure’ are one and the same phenomenon.

Witchcraft and black magic have achieved an even greater popularity in the United States today than in Britain.
The white witches of the United States closely resemble their British counterparts, however, and their activities are largely based on the rituals revived or devised by Gerald Gardner.
The two leading white witches of the United States, Sybil Leek and Raymond Buckland, are both of British origin.
Sybil Leek claims to trace her witch ancestry back to the 12th century.
After her arrival in the United States in 1964, she rapidly became a popular radio and television personality.
She now lives in Houston, Texas, where she organizes classes in the occult, broadcasts a nightly radio show, and runs a restaurant called ‘Sybil Leek’s Cauldron’.

Compared with Sybil Leek, Raymond Buckland has a far more reserved approach to his craft, but he has probably done more than any other American witch to give modern witchcraft a serious image.
The High Priest of a New York coven, Buckland edits a monthly magazine on witchcraft called
Beyond,
and has founded his own witchcraft museum on Bay Shore, Long Island.
A one-time disciple of Gerald Gardner, Buckland is scornful of those who claim to be ‘King’ or ‘Queen’ of the witches, declaring that the witchcraft movement is far too scattered for such a title to have any meaning.
Nevertheless, there have been many attempts to unite the witches of the United States, including the New York-based Witches International Craft Association.
This organization is a kind of ‘Witches’ Liberation Movement’.

American witchcraft also has its darker side with an upsurge of interest in the practice of black magic and Satanism.
Most of the black magic groups are located in California, and the rise of such evil cults has been linked with the increased use of hallucinogenic drugs such as mescalin and LSD.

America’s most notorious black witch is an ex-circus ringmaster and police photographer, Anton Szandor La Vey.
On April 30, 1966 La Vey initiated the ‘First Church of Satan’ on California Street in San Francisco (April 30 is Walpurgis Night, the great feast of the witches’ year).
La Vey and his followers openly practice black magic, putting evil curses on their opponents, performing weddings, funerals, and baptisms in the name of Lord Satan, and preaching ‘indulgence instead of abstinence’.
The Church of Satan is dedicated to the worship of the Devil and the glorification of carnal pleasures—a far cry from the assurances of Sybil Leek and the Wilsons.

La Vey, known variously as the ‘High Priest of Hell’ and the ‘Black Pope of America’, goes out of his way to look satanic by wearing a pointed black beard, Fu Manchu moustache, and shaven head.
He is the author of a work called
The Satanic Bible,
which contains invocations to Satan in a language called ‘Enochian’ and La Vey’s own system of ‘satanic morality’.
States La Vey, ‘Blessed are the strong, for they shall possess the earth.
Cursed are the feeble, for they shall be blotted out!’

La Vey’s church is expanding, but there are many students of the occult who claim that no one can handle black magic without risk.
An event that took place in 1967 seems to support this view.
On the evening of June 29 a middle-aged man suddenly collapsed on the floor of his San Francisco apartment.
He and his family were all members of La Vey’s church.
As his wife and son knelt beside him, trying to revive him, they heard a woman’s voice coming from his lips, saying, ‘I don’t want to die.’

The mother and son immediately recognized the voice as that of actress Jayne Mansfield, a fellow member of La Vey’s congregation.
Later they learned that the actress had died in a road accident earlier that very evening.
She had been driving with her attorney on a narrow road near San Francisco when a truck hurtled from under a narrow bridge, and crashed into their car.
Jayne Mansfield was decapitated, and her attorney, Sam Brody, was also killed.