Paganism and polemic (Ronald Hutton)

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The Opening of the Debate

In 1998, the first issue of the newly renamed journal of the Canadian Folklore Association, Ethnologies, included an article by Donald H. Frew, a Californian terming himself an "independent scholar writer." It represented a historiographical landmark, being only the second contribution to one of the key scholarly debates in the history of contemporary religions, that concerning the origin of Wicca, the first of the various traditions of modern pagan witchcraft to emerge into the public eye (Frew 1998). During the 1980s, British writers working within that tradition, such as Janet and Stewart Farrar and Doreen Valiente, had done valuable work in providing anecdotal material for its history and commencing the textual analysis of its liturgy (Farrar and Farrar 1981; 1984; Valiente 1989). Systematic discussion of the issue, however, only began in 1991, with the publication of a book by another Californian, Aidan Kelly. This made an analysis of certain key texts to suggest that Wicca had essentially been created by one man, a retired colonial official called Gerald Gardner, who had in turn been heavily influenced by the thesis propounded by the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Murray had argued that the people persecuted for the alleged crime of witchcraft in early modern Europe had been practitioners of a persisting pagan religion, then being finally exposed and rooted out by Christian authorities. Gardner declared that the religion concerned had survived in secret until the twentieth century, and that he was drawing the attention of the public to its continued existence, and to its rites and beliefs. Aidan Kelly argued that Gardner had himself founded the religion to which he was giving this publicity (Kelly 1991).

Donald Frew's essay is essentially a defence of Murray and Gardner against Dr Kelly and two other writers who have questioned their claims, Jacqueline Simpson and myself. He produces no decisive piece of evidence in support of this enterprise. Instead, his principal tactic is to attempt to catch out the three of us in mistakes of detail, and so to convey the impression that our work as a whole is unsound--at least in this area--and can therefore be disregarded. By this negative process, he suggests that Murray and Gardner have been unfairly treated, and so should be given credence. At no point does he grant any of his victims credit for virtues in other writings, or leave them any dignity as scholars; the destructive effect is apparently intended to be total.

This being so, the temptation to reply to his attack is pretty well irresistible, but a rejoinder based on mere rebarbative pedantry would be tedious to many readers. Instead, I regard the opportunity as one to review the main points in contention over the origins of modern pagan witchcraft, and make them clearer for those not directly concerned in the debate. In the process, perhaps, some insights can be provided of the way in which history is written in this field, or even in general. The issues cover three very different areas of research--ancient paganism, the early modern witch trials, and modern witchcraft--and each will be treated here in turn. That they can be surveyed in the journal of the society of which Margaret Murray was once president, and Gerald Gardner once a council member, provides a very neat sense of historical continuity.

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Ancient Paganism and Wicca: General Considerations

In 1991, I drew a stark contrast between Wicca and what is known of the pagan religions of ancient Europe, when concluding a survey of the evidence for those in the British Isles (Hutton 1991, 335-71). This had the effect of emphasising the essential modernity of Wicca and its distance and difference from the paganism of antiquity. As such, it was inevitably opposed to Donald Frew's purpose, which is to stress instead the similarity of Wicca to ancient paganism, and therefore both to advance the claims of the former to be a representation of the latter and to present the possibility of a direct process of transmission between them. Although he declares that all the specific contrasts which I drew between the two are "equally unfounded," he actually provides counter-examples to only three of them. I suggested that Wicca was distinctive in its duotheism, its veneration of a single goddess and god; in its regular summoning and invocation of those deities into the bodies of worshippers, who would then represent them to the other initiates present; and in its common use of ritual nudity. These are the features of which he claims to find precise parallels in antiquity; but before discussing them in detail it is worth making two general comments.

The first is to note how dramatic an alteration in the Wiccan foundation legend is represented by the work of Mr Frew. When I wrote in 1991, Wicca was still commonly declared to be what Gardner had claimed: the Old Religion of western Europe, once practised by the whole population. Mr Frew finds his counter-examples exclusively in the mystery cults and Neo-Platonic writings of the Roman Empire, representing tiny and exclusive groups very different from the bulk of the population. Most of them, also, are drawn from the very end of pagan antiquity, often after the establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion. Most, too, derive not from Europe at all but from Hellenistic Africa and Asia. In brief, we are hardly arguing on the same ground at all, for to answer my generalisations about ancient European religion, he has had to resort to the social, temporal and geographical margins.

My other general comment is that our viewpoints might have been reconciled had he given favourable attention to another of my statements in the same work, that "if Wicca and its successors are viewed as a form of ritual magic, then they have a distinguished and very long pedigree," which I traced back to Hellenistic Egypt (Hutton 1991, 337). My intention was not to deny them the status of religions, but to suggest that they represented religions recently developed within a framework of ceremonial magic, which could be documented as evolving steadily from Hellenised Egypt to the present. Mr Frew, however, cited against me a declaration of the American classicist Ramsay MacMullen, that it was unnecessary to discuss the relationship between religion and magic as had been common a generation ago, because anthropology had taught that the two could not be separated, and the distinction was confined to "the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition." Mr Frew added that this statement was footnoted to the works of ten other scholars who took the same line, and thus my views were antiquated enough to be dismissed without discussion (MacMullen 1997, 143; Frew 1998, 57).

In reality, Professor MacMullen's statement was itself a piece of special pleading, by a fine scholar determined to avoid theoretical discussions. Of his ten authorities, only eight support his case at all, and most of these argue that a clear boundary between religion and magic is impossible to find, not that the two should not be distinguished. His declaration is in fact a repetition of the argument of just one of them, a polemic published over forty years ago (Petersson 1957). Another classicist, writing in 1995, assumed that a clear distinction between religion and magic was still the norm among his colleagues (Fowler 1995). That which I employed in 1991 was one which a third scholar, publishing in the same year, stated to be by far the most widespread one used in studies of ancient Europe and the Near East (Graf 1991, 188); amongst those whom he cited as endorsing it was Ramsay MacMullen. In this formula, practitioners of religion are more or less powerless over the supernatural beings with whom they deal; they can only supplicate those beings for favours and then await their response. Practitioners of magic have some means of directing supernatural power to their own will, on a spectrum running from outright control of such power, to the secret knowledge of words and actions believed to have special potency to persuade divine beings into responding.

In drawing this distinction, no attempt is made here to deny that there is no firm boundary between these categories, nor that there can be a considerable overlap between them, nor that the assignment of an action to one or the other can be very much a matter of perception. It is equally undeniable that some acts of magic can have more in common with religion than with other kinds of magical practice. Nonetheless, this pair of definitions holds good enough overall to make it the one with which I work. It was used in the early twentieth century by the pioneers of anthropology and comparative religion, including Frazer, Malinowski, Lang, Lowe, Wade Fowler, and Westermarck. It is still, as said, the prevalent one among scholars of ancient Europe and the Near East, and although sometimes challenged, it has the merit that no alternative formulation has achieved anything like the same acceptance. As Ramsay MacMullan suggested, it has been abandoned by anthropologists, who have found that it does not work well for more "primitive" societies and argue convincingly that it is unhelpful to impose Western categories of thought upon such peoples (see Hamilton 1995, 28-41). It is equally logical to argue, conversely, that extra-European modes of thought should not be imposed on studies of ancient Europe.

This Western distinction between religion and magic certainly became part of Judaeo-Christian tradition, but was first formulated by pagans. It was used by such different philosophers as Plato and Heraclitus. Philostratus, in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana (VIII:7, 9-10), tells of how that celebrated mystic used it to secure his acquittal from a charge of sorcery, claiming that he had achieved a miracle not by his own powers but by praying to Heracles. It explains how the making of curse tablets could be forbidden in Roman law but hundreds of these objects be openly dedicated at Romano-British temples, where action against the persons cursed was left up to the deity (Hutton 1991, 238-40). One of the most remarkable and interesting features of Wicca, for me, is that it completely collapses this distinction, and blends classical features of religion and magic into a harmonious whole.

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Ancient Paganism and Wicca: Specific Contrasts

As stated earlier, Donald Frew challenged my own inclination to make a clear contrast between ancient paganism and Wicca over three specific issues: the regular invocation of deities into worshipper, duotheism, and regular ritual nudity. As an antique parallel to the first, he cites the Greco-Roman tradition of theurgy, and indeed goes on to suggest that it bore a very close resemblance to Wicca in general, making the same blend of religion and magic and preparing sacred space, using magic tools, and employing deities in the same manner (Frew 1998, 56-7). It is certainly true that theurgy operated at the boundary between religion and magic, as I have argued myself (Hutton 1999, 83), and that it represents the closest thing to Wicca that can be traced in antiquity; but how close was it? Mr Frew's only source for the subject is Ruth Majercik, and her work should have given him doubts. She emphasised that no systematic account of theurgic ritual survives; that the object of that ritual was to carry the devout upward to the divine rather than a "drawing down of the gods" into

practitioners (the quotation is from her own words, and is a direct contrast to Wicca); and that theurgists aimed at "contact" with particular deities and spirits, and not "union" (another contrast). The known magical tools of theurgy, a wheel with a dead bird tied to it and brass objects clashed together to ward off evil, have no parallels in Wicca (Majercik 1989, 24-46).

Other sources bear out these doubts. Theurgy might have operated where religion and magic meet, but has usually been consigned to the latter. E. R. Dodds, author of the first survey of the subject, called it "a special branch of magic" (Dodds 1951, 283). To another pioneer of equal distinction, Franz Cumont, it was "a respectable form of magic" (Cumont 1949, 125). More recently, George Luck defined theurgists as "philosophers who were interested in magic" (Luck 1985, 21). Ruth Majercik is unusual in suggesting that it was essentially religious while "conformable with the outward forms of magic," but she was influenced by the ancient theurgist Iamblichus, who used the classic distinction between the two by claiming that theurgists only operated at the will of the gods (Majercik 1989, 22-3). Iamblichus went on, however, to weaken this argument by claiming that theurgists controlled good spirits for good ends whereas magicians employed bad spirits for bad purposes (De Mysteriis, III:3,1). His rival Porphyry, who coined the word theurgy, devoted his Letter to Anebo to arguing that it belonged firmly to the category of magic.

Ancient authorities also reveal contrasts of detail with Wicca. In the passage cited earlier, Iamblichus emphasised the constant danger to theurgic working from evil entities, which have no place in Wiccan cosmology. Nor has the ubiquitous ancient custom of sacrifice, which Psellus insisted was necessary on commencing theurgic operations (Quaenam sunt Graecorum opiniones de daemonibus, c. 7). Iamblichus also stressed that theurgists usually worked with lesser divinities--heroes, daimons and angels--and only the greatest of all, in exceptional circumstances, would trouble actual deities (De Mysteriis, V:20). Coming from the only card-carrying practitioner of theurgy to leave a personal testimony, this is telling, and it is borne out by Eunapius's Lives of the Philosophers. His biography of Iamblichus claims as this master's greatest achievement the materialisation of the spirits of two springs, and Iamblichus is shown as warning that such a demonstration was "irreverent" (p. 459 in the edition by Boisonnade). In other words, Wiccans, by invoking their main goddess and god into the bodies of worshippers, are regularly attempting something against which theurgists themselves warned. All told, the differences between theurgy and Wicca seem at least as important as the similarities, and such similarities as exist can be accounted for by placing the former within that tradition of Hellenistic magic from which one of the components of the latter ultimately derives.

It should be emphasised also that there is no good evidence that theurgy was ever practised in the Latin West, and that theurgists were well aware of how little they had in common even with the vast majority of late antique pagans. Iamblichus's defensive text makes this clear, while the emperor Julian thought them "unknown, especially to the mob" even in their Asian strongholds (Orationes, V:172). Where the public had got wind of their reputed techniques, the reaction could be seriously hostile; when the author Apuleius was accused of magic in Hellenistic Africa, one of the charges was that he had tried to invoke a spirit into a boy. Apuleius escaped with his life by insisting that the story was a "lie" and a "fairytale" and doubting whether such things could be done at all (Apologia, 35-43). Even among intellectuals, indeed, even in that very school of Neoplatonic philosophy from which Iamblichus derived, theurgy was not necessarily respectable. The disapproval of Porphyry has been noted, and the much-admired founder of the whole school, Plotinus, made plain in his Enneads his opposition to the use of magical techniques to gain contact with the divine; making use, again, of the definition of magic against religion which has been discussed earlier.

Similar considerations vitiate Mr Frew's attempts to find ancient parallels for the Wiccan system of duotheism, the veneration of a divine couple who represent all goddesses and gods between them. His archaic blueprint for this is Neoplatonism itself, of which he cites a modern equivalent in the concept of "Dryghton" found in "British traditional Craft groups" (Frew 1998, 57-8). By this he means the "Dryghton Rune," a prayer not part of the standard Wiccan liturgy and representing a modern pagan pastiche. The first line echoes an Anglo-Saxon prayer-form, and the final section honours the standard Wiccan cosmology of a moon goddess, god, and elemental spirits. The part between asserts that a single original genderless divine force is the source of all things. How this harmonises with the subsequent duotheism is not explained, but the source of the idea probably lies in the writings of early-twentieth-century mystics such as George Russell and Dion Fortune, who suggested that an original single divine entity had divided into a goddess and a god representing all divinities between them (AE 1965, passim; Fortune 1989, 156-7). Behind this notion, in turn, lies Victorian Theosophy, just as the immediate antecedent of Wiccan ritual workings and tools is the Victorian magical Order of the Golden Dawn. Behind Theosophy may lie ancient Neoplatonism, but much more obvious is the former's debt to Buddhist and Hindu ideas of ultimate single divine forces. Between the Neoplatonism of late antiquity and modern Wicca lies a crucial difference, which is made clear by one of Mr Frew's favourite authorities, Ruth Majercik. Late Roman Neoplatonists venerated a supreme Father deity, who operated in a triad with two lesser deities, male and female, emanating from him. The concept is similar to the Christian Trinity, which may have inspired it, and the aim of the adept was to ascend spiritually to reunion with the Father (Majercik 1989, 5-9 and 36-46). Most British Wiccans emphatically do not believe in a single ultimate divinity but in a fully-formed and independent divine couple, although the concept of the creation of a goddess and god by the division of an original entity is found in the famous work by the non-Wiccan witch Starhawk, The Spiral Dance. Late antique Neoplatonism was essentially monotheism; Wicca is essentially duotheism.

Mr Frew's third argument, concerning ritual nudity, can be answered briefly. To prove its existence in ancient religion he cites the famous passage from Plotinus's Enneads, that initiates of the mysteries must enter them naked. This has commonly been taken to refer to spiritual purity and humility rather than literal nudity, and there seems to be no way of clinching either interpretation. He also quotes a writer in 1939, who read a scene of nude figures carved upon a bowl as representing worshippers in a mystery cult. Indeed they might, or they might represent a wholly mythological scene, of the sort common in vase and wall paintings (Frew 1998, 58-9).

His final polemical argument in considering antiquity is to attempt to show that towards its end pagan religions began to unify into a single self-conscious faith comparable to Christianity, from which a tradition might be transmitted to the present. Stylistic considerations, however, deprive him of any solid evidence at all. Thus, he cites an Egyptian academic, Mostafa El Abbadi, as declaring that members of the mystery cults came to think of themselves as having a single religion in common. It would be interesting to debate this idea if the data were furnished, but the footnote is not to a published work but to a private conversation. Mr Frew goes on to quote an address by a pagan scholar to a ninth-century Caliph, in which the former

characterises himself as a spokesman for a unified "Paganism." If the quotation is from a medieval Islamic text then it is most unlikely to represent the actual words of the speaker concerned, and much more liable to be an invented speech provided by the Moslem author generations after the event, in the traditions of ancient and medieval historiography. It is, however, impossible to check it, as Mr Frew fails to list in his bibliography the work to which the textual note refers (Frew 1998, 59).

There seem to be at least four different ways of characterising the relationship between Wicca and ancient paganism, three of which I have already deployed myself. One is to emphasise the considerable differences between the two (Hutton 1991, 335-7). The second is to draw attention instead to four traditions which do descend from one to the other over the centuries between--ritual magic, cunning craft, some folk customs, and the continuing popularity of classical art and literature--while recognising that only in the twentieth century do they seem to have been recombined with full-blown pagan religions (Hutton 1996). The third is to portray the latter as modern developments responding to modern needs, but drawing selectively and creatively on ideas and images from the ancient past (Hutton 1999). This process commonly produces the "pastiche" effect noted earlier, but it needs to be stressed both that there is nothing derogatory in the term and that this effect is a common one in the history of religion.

The material considered here prompts a fourth perspective; that the ancient models upon which Wicca has drawn are not those of mainstream religion but of the late antique avant-garde. They do not even represent the private mystery cults, so much as the world of the magical papyri of Roman Egypt and of theurgy, a world feared and suspected by the vast majority of ancient pagans or simply unknown to them. Furthermore, in some respects Wiccans regularly engage in practices against which theurgists themselves warned, except in very exceptional circumstances. Such an insight does no discredit to Wicca; rather, it further improves its credentials as a remarkably courageous modern counter-cultural religion.

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The Early Modern Witch Trials and the Murray Thesis

The historiography of Margaret Murray's thesis concerning early modern witch trials is complex. The notion that the individuals tried were practitioners of a surviving pagan religion had been around for a hundred years before she asserted it; her contribution was to provide apparently good documentary evidence for it. Experts in the subject immediately found flaws in her use of that evidence, and rejected her ideas, and neither of her books on the subject initially found a large market. From the late 1940s, however, their sales took off, and the "Murray thesis" became accepted by several distinguished historians who knew nothing of the trial records, and built it into their textbooks. Murray's stock in the Folklore Society rose by the same trajectory, being at its apex in the 1940s and 1950s and symbolised by her tenure of the society's presidency. By the 1960s, it was the best-known and most widely accepted interpretation of early modern witchcraft. I have discussed the reasons for this sequence of events elsewhere (Hutton 1999, 194-201); one which bears repetition here is the almost total cessation of research in the field in the English-speaking world during the mid-twentieth century. When that research resumed at the opening of the 1970s, the thesis was rapidly revealed as possessing no sustainable basis. Among a large body of relevant work, that of Alan Macfarlane, Keith Thomas and (above all) Norman Cohn was especially influential (Hutton 1991, 301-6 and 331-4; 1999, 362-3, and sources cited there). This story explains why it is possible, as Donald Frew does, to list distinguished scholars who supported the Murray thesis in the past, and why this does nothing now to revive faith in its validity.

More recent research has apparently buried it beyond retrieval, and it must be emphasised how extensive that research has been. Between 1980 and 1995 fifteen international academic conferences were held to discuss the witch trials and their context, and the papers presented there, and generally published in the proceedings, represented only a part of the work carried out into the subject during the past two decades. That united hundreds of scholars, covering between them every European state. During the 1990s, British historians have emerged among those at the forefront, the work of Lyndal Roper, Robin Briggs, James Sharpe, Diane Purkiss, and Stuart Clark being particularly noteworthy (Hutton 1999, 378-81, and sources cited there). None have found any basis for characterising early modern witchcraft as paganism.

Donald Frew has apparently read not a single one of these works. As a result, his declaration that the hypothesis that witchcraft was a survival of paganism "can't yet be ruled out" (Frew 1998, 61) is made without an attempt to engage even with the relevant body of secondary sources, let alone primary records. Significantly, the sole recent historian of the subject with whose books he seems to be familiar is Carlo Ginzburg, the only one to have a good word to say for Margaret Murray. He quotes Professor Ginzburg as proving that "there were cases of accused Witches practising what were clearly pagan `survivals"' (Frew 1998, 61). In fact, what Carlo Ginzburg has suggested is that some individuals accused of witchcraft in one district of Italy had vivid dreams in which they believed themselves to be leaving their bodies to do battle with witches for the good of the community. He regards as unproven the suggestion that their activities were ever more than dreams, has angrily distanced himself from the idea that the rites alleged against those accused of witchcraft ever took place, and regards the only truth in the Murray thesis as its drawing of attention to the importance of ancient beliefs concerning fertility in underpinning the fantasies of those accused (Ginzburg 1983, xiii-iv; 1989, 1-11). This last suggestion is itself unproven, however, and controvertrial (Hutton 1999, 276-8 and 377-8).

In attempting to vindicate Margaret Murray by attacking Jacqueline Simpson and me, while ignoring this whole mass of literature, Mr Frew may be likened to a man who attempts to discuss the anatomy of an elephant while having no apparent knowledge of any of its body except two toenails. In concentrating on our writings (Hutton 1991, 301-6 and 331-4; Simpson 1994; 1996), moreover, he was choosing relatively easy targets, for since the Murray thesis had already lost credibility in the world of professional history, we were looking at the implications of this rather than taking care to carry out the basic work of demolition ourselves. It is still instructive to examine the points that he found to make in criticism.

Dr Simpson has offered her own rejoinder to Ethnologies, so I shall confine myself to those directed against my work. Mr Frew declares that "there is no Goddess associated with the Witch-cult in any of Murray's books, only a Homed God" (Frew 1998, 44). My reply is that her first book on the subject states that the Goddess was initially important but was later superseded by the God (Murray 1921, 13-14), while her last book of all, The Genesis of Religion (1963), gives full prominence to the Goddess as the supreme deity of the ancient faith from which the "Witch-cult" arose. He also accuses me of faulting her for taking the term "esbat" from a single French source and then applying it to the whole putative witch religion to describe its private meetings (Frew 1998, 42). His own quotations, to my eyes, bear out this criticism, and so I see no reason to withdraw it. These exchanges may strike many readers as trivial stuff, and the same reaction may be provoked by his most serious indictment of me, that I stated that university presses ceased to publish Murray's books on the witch religion after 1930, when one such press did republish one of them. Behind this accusation, however, lies a comedy of errors which illustrates the traps into which scholars may tumble.

The serious point here is that Murray's first book on the subject, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), is the one which was always accorded the most respect, while her third, The Divine King in England (1954), has never been taken seriously by any professional historian. The second, The God of the Witches (1933), has a proportionately mixed status. Significantly, I could not find it in any university in my region, so I travelled to the nearest copyright library (in Oxford). The catalogue there only showed the first, Sampson Low, edition, and that I used. I was unaware that Oxford University Press had republished it in 1952, until some years later I discovered my own mistake and corrected it (Hutton 1999, 199-200). Donald Frew was not aware of that correction, and it seems that the only edition of the book which he has located is the 1981 Oxford paperback reprint, a surmise which seems supported by the fact that he repeats an error unique to it, that of giving 1931 instead of 1933 as the date of the first edition. His imagination could not stretch to the possibility that I had used any printing of the book other than the one which he had employed himself, causing him to accuse me of being either "inexcusably sloppy or deliberately deceptive" in failing to convey the information provided by that last edition to the public (Frew 1998, 43-4)! The truth is far less melodramatic; the vagaries of research have led us both into errors of detail.

Such farcical interludes aside, the major fact remains that the Murray thesis has been discredited, apparently beyond saving, by an enormous body of sound new scholarship. Its disappearance removes the apparent link between ancient paganism and Wicca, leaving a gap of almost a millennium with no surviving pagan religion discernible in western Europe.

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The Immediate Origins of Wicca

The history of Wicca itself is the field in which Donald Frew has carried out actual archival research, and has the opportunity to make the most telling points. I endorse his strictures against the excessive readiness with which academic scholars have accepted the confident assertion that Wicca was created wholesale by Gerald Gardner, and I agree with his emphasis upon the importance to the issue of a manuscript in private hands in Toronto. Apparently compiled by Gardner, and entitled "Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical," it contains the earliest known versions of Wiccan rituals. I further agree that Aidan Kelly's use of this material has flaws, and needs to be treated with more caution than some commentators have shown (Frew 1998, 33-7 and 45-6). Beyond this, however, Mr Frew and I part company again.

His indictment of Aidan Kelly is the most serious that can be brought against an archival scholar, that in his copious quotations from "Ye Bok" he systematically altered the source texts to support his argument. Mr Frew declares that all the texts reprinted in Dr Kelly's book are "corrupt" (Frew 1998, 33-7). Two comments may be made upon this. The first is that Aidan Kelly deserves the honour due to a scholar who first draws attention to a key source; without his work it is extremely unlikely that Donald Frew or anybody else would have appreciated the importance of "Ye Bok" to this debate. The second is that there is something badly wrong with the texts printed in his book. When checked against the original manuscript, a task which I have carried out independently from Mr Frew, they sometimes show serious discrepancies. The mystery is deepened by the fact that I own a copy of Aidan Kelly's unpublished revision of his book, made after two years and containing the scholarly apparatus denied him in the published work. The transcripts of the same texts given there are both accurate and sensitive, lacking all the distortions of those in the book; somewhere between the two, a publishing disaster has occurred. Moreover, the inaccuracies in the published version rarely seem to me to be purposeful or strategic. Dr Kelly advanced two principal arguments from the manuscript to support his conclusion that Gardner had created Wicca. One was that the rituals in "Ye Bok" altered as the work was written to suit different contexts; at first they presupposed a solitary practitioner of ritual magic, and then a solitary magus initiating a solitary witch. Only towards the end were they written to fit a full-blown Wiccan coven with high priestess and high priest. This suggested that Gardner's ideas, and ways of working, were developing steadily, not that he had inherited a pre-existing coven-based tradition. The second argument was that the most consistent original element in the Wiccan rituals in the manuscript is the heavy use of a highly idiosyncratic technique to achieve trance, involving binding and scourging. I differ from Dr Kelly in his ascription of this to the fact that Gardner was a straightforward flagellant, but agree with him that the taste for this practice is both a very unusual one and was certainly Gardner's own (Hutton 1999, 234-5). Both assertions are supported by the manuscript itself, and the distortions in Aidan Kelly's book do little if anything to reinforce them. For these reasons, I cannot endorse Donald Frew's accusation of a systematic doctoring of material to bear out preconceived assertions.

In making his own case against the idea that Wicca was Gardner's creation, Mr Frew advances two arguments. The first is Gardner's claim that the famous magician Aleister Crowley admitted that he had encountered the same witch religion at the opening of the century. Mr Frew states that this was endorsed by the two people who accompanied Gardner on his first visit to Crowley on 1 May 1947, Arnold Crowther and Eva Collins, and by other authorities such as Crowley's executor Louis Wilkinson (Frew 1998, 49). As I have argued at length elsewhere (Hutton 1999, 218-21), Eva Collins has never been identified, and Crowley's diary does not make it clear whether she was associated with Gardner and Crowther at all, so she cannot be called as a witness. Crowther himself has left no comment. His wife Pat once claimed to have been present that day also and heard Crowley make the remark, but since then she has changed her story to state that she did not meet Crowther or Gardner until the 1950s. Wilkinson's alleged remark is reported second-hand, and may not be based on Crowley's own testimony but on Gardner's own story. The "other witnesses" cited by Mr Frew cannot be identified either from his text or his source references.

There is other negative evidence. Crowley's own voluminous writings, published and unpublished, contain no reference to a religion of pagan witches. His diary entry for 1 May 1947 (Warburg Institute Gerald Yorke Collection, MS 23) does not record any mention of witchcraft in his meeting with Gardner and Crowther. Instead, it notes that Gardner claimed to be a Doctor of Philosophy (which he was not) and to hold the highest degree of Freemasonry, the Royal Arch. In other words, he was presenting himself as an establishment figure, with academic and Masonic laurels. The diary makes no record of the business which Crowley and Gardner discussed during their four meetings during that May, but subsequent correspondence between them, and between Crowley and others, does. There is no mention of witchcraft in that either; instead, Gardner was trying hard to revive an English branch of Crowley's magical order, the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). He only gave up in 1948, because of his failure to attract enough interest, and from that moment turned to promoting pagan witchcraft instead, and found success. Gardner subsequently erased from his public life story all reference to his attempts to revive the OTO, and they do beg the question of why he made them when he was allegedly already committed to a surviving witch religion (Hutton 1999, 221-3, and sources there).

Mr Frew's second argument against the proposition that Gardner created Wicca is that "there is not a single example of liturgical or ritual text that is unambiguously Gardner's writing," and therefore Gardner was unlikely to be a person to compose liturgies and rituals (Frew 1998, 50-2). The problem here is the word "unambiguous." Mr Frew admits a "sole possible counter-example, the Craft Laws," a body of alleged traditional rules governing Wicca which Gardner suddenly produced in order to quash a rebellion against his authority in 1957. Mr Frew declares that these "very likely come from earlier texts" not composed by him, and that some such exist in "Ye Bok." I cannot understand why this is very likely, and the correspondence between texts in "Ye Bok" and in the "Laws" is miniscule; the latter, rather, seem designed to deal with specific organisational and political issues which had arisen by the late 1950s. The rebels were of the opinion that they were "an ad-hoc invention" of Gardner's own (Valiente 1989, 69-72). Furthermore, Gardner did compose texts in partnership with others, one case being the famous Wiccan chant called the Witches' Rune, Which Doreen Valiente has recorded that she wrote in collaboration with him (Farrar and Farrar 1981, 45). Before their partnership, and during the time when the earliest rituals may have been composed, Gardner worked closely with a high priestess commonly known as Dafo, a woman trained in the theatre and initiated into esoteric societies; a companion like her could easily have fulfilled the same function (Hutton 1999, 212-14). The argument concerning authorship does not therefore seem to me to be a strong one.

Against these propositions can be set a number of others, to support the idea that Gardner (and his collaborators) did create Wicca. Two have already been credited to Aidan Kelly, that concerning the changing context for the rituals in "Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical," and that which notes that those rituals are built around the highly unusual technique which Gardner himself preferred for the raising of physical and spiritual energy. A third is the problem of Gardner's enthusiastic and failed attempt to become a grandee of the OTO, an enigma if he was already a Wiccan but understandable if his failure drove him to attempt immediately a different route to spiritual fulfilment and worldly fame, as a pagan witch. A fourth is that a document in the Gerald Yorke collection at the Warburg strongly suggests that "Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical" was not commenced until mid-1947 at the earliest, almost ten years after Gardner claimed to have been initiated into a coven and to have encountered its rituals (Hutton 1999, 227-8). A fifth is that Gardner behaved very much like the creator of a tradition, labouring with a determination shown by nobody else to propagate it and ensure its survival, and constantly encouraging his initiates to develop new liturgies and rituals for themselves, especially in places where those which he transmitted to them were weak. A sixth is that he was repeatedly suspected even by his friends of tricks, falsehoods and inventions, including in matters relating to tradition and the provenance of texts (Smyth 1970, 30-2; Valiente 1989, 41-2 and 47; Bourne 1998, 38; Frederic Lamond, personal communication 15 August 1996). A seventh is simply the utter lack of any good evidence for the existence of Wicca before Gardner founded his first coven at the end of the 1940s.

I myself most certainly do not think that these arguments add up to a conclusive case; I simply suggest that in the present state of the evidence, they are at least as strong as those upon the other side, and perhaps stronger. I also think it probable that the question of the origins of Wicca will never be completely resolved. If it had existed before Gardner, then it is entirely possible that the people who practised a religion which challenged so many cultural norms would have done so with such discretion that they have left no trace in the historical record; though they would have had to have been very few, and could not have been practising for very long. On the other hand, nothing is harder to prove in history than a negative. Only a few lines of writing or print with a proper chronological provenance would be enough to demonstrate that Wicca existed before Gardner's involvement with it; but if he did create it himself, with or without collaborators, then it is most unlikely that he or they would have allowed any data to survive which would clinch this point. The result would be a total absence of unambiguous data, and a mass of circumstantial evidence over which scholars would form different propositions indefinitely; but this situation is very common in historiography.

What is worth emphasising on the positive side is that Wicca did not arise out of a vacuum. As I have devoted a recent book to arguing (Hutton 1999), it drew upon a very rich and complex collection of cultural impulses and processes in modern Western societies in general and in English society in particular, some with roots long enough to reach the ancient world, and some distinctively recent. It was itself preceded by a number of pagan and quasi-pagan groups which did not endure long enough to become traditions. The recovery of much of the data relating to these developments is one which should be practicable to historians, and has as yet hardly begun. If it is possible--even likely--that we shall never know exactly how Wicca came into being, we certainly can understand a great deal more about the context within which it arose, and that is an important, and thrilling, work.

[Antiquarian]

Some Conclusions

There is no doubt that the most effective situation within which knowledge of a particular historical topic can be accumulated is to have a number of well-trained scholars working upon it, with different skills, personal perspectives, and geographical bases, who cooperate as often as possible and appraise each other's work with respect but also with constant criticism. This situation would be particularly effective in the field of the history of modern paganism. The source materials are scattered across Europe and North America, often in private hands; the problems of interpretation are frequently difficult enough to require expertise in the ways of specific traditions and personalities; and insights from literary studies, anthropology, and classical studies, together with knowledge of a very wide span of history, can be crucially important. Such a situation has barely begun to appear, for two interrelated reasons.

One is that academic interest in modern paganism is only just starting to develop, and is so far confined mainly to disciplines such as religious studies, anthropology and sociology, with very little input from historians. The other is that the pioneering work in the field has therefore been carried out by people who are pagans themselves, existing; outside the academy or on its fringe. Such a development is both honourable and natural, but it does mean that both the presentation of research and discussion of it have been coloured by the personal and sectarian rivalries which abound in parts of modern paganism. The initial work of the Farrars and Doreen Valiente was partly fuelled, and certainly influenced, by tensions between British witches. The aggressive tone of Aidan Kelly's book, and the yet brasher counter-polemic of Donald Frew, directly reflect a bitter division within Californian paganism. The gladiatorial posturing of Mr Frew is not a trait of personality alone, but very much part of a combative tradition which is plain to anybody who has read modern pagan journals over the past thirty years. To some extent, this has undoubtedly acted as a spur to research, but I believe that it distorts more than it reveals, and that all ultimately lose by the process.

I would like to see two different developments in the field during the next ten years, closely linked and complementary. One is the evolution of an international academic community with a common interest in the history of modern paganism, trading information and ideas and arguing propositions within an atmosphere of friendly rivalry and mutual support. The very first signs are now present that this is starting to emerge. The other is the parallel development of an international community of independent pagan scholars operating in the same manner and cooperating with the other. I would certainly regard Donald Frew, to whom I have had to respond so severely at moments in this essay, as a worthy member of such a community. I have already indicated points at which I am in agreement with him concerning the shortcomings of research into the history of Wicca, but I also think that there is considerable potential in his drawing of parallels between the latter and ancient theurgy and Neoplatonism. His overstatement of his case has forced me to contest it, but our differences are to some extent matters of emphasis which might be reconciled. Such reconciliations, however, can only take place with a change in the tradition of debate. Wicca possesses a famous, powerful and admirable ethical commitment, that each person should be free to do as she or he wills as long as no harm is done to others in the process. If applied to the world of Wiccan scholarship, it might reap particularly rich dividends.