[CTRL] Fwd: Wiccan Pseudohistory

[William Shannon]

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>From Sex to Superconsciousness - http://www.truthbeknown.com

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The Scholars and the Goddess.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/01/allen.htm

Historically speaking, the "ancient" rituals of the Goddess movement are

almost certainly bunk by Charlotte Allen
WICCA, sometimes known as the Goddess movement, Goddess spirituality, or the

Craft, appears to be the fastest-growing religion in America. Thirty years

ago only a handful of Wiccans existed. One scholar has estimated that there

are now more than 200,000 adherents of Wicca and related "neopagan" faiths in
the United States, the country where neopaganism, like many formal religions,
is most flourishing. Wiccans -- who may also call themselves Witches (the

capital W is meant to distance them from the word's negative connotations,

because Wiccans neither worship Satan nor practice the sort of malicious

magic traditionally associated with witches) or just plain pagans (often with
a capital P) -- tend to be white, middle-class, highly educated, and

politically involved in liberal and environmental causes. About a third of

them are men. Wiccan services have been held on at least fifteen U.S.

military bases and ships.



Many come to Wicca after reading The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the

Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979), a best-selling introduction to

Wiccan teachings and rituals written by Starhawk (n�e Miriam Simos), a Witch

(the term she prefers) from California. Starhawk offers a vivid summary of

the history of the faith, explaining that witchcraft is "perhaps the oldest

religion extant in the West" and that it began "more than thirty-five

thousand years ago," during the last Ice Age. The religion's earliest

adherents worshipped two deities, one of each sex: "the Mother Goddess, the

birthgiver, who brings into existence all life," and the "Horned God," a male
hunter who died and was resurrected each year. Male shamans "dressed in skins
and horns in identification with the God and the herds," but priestesses

"presided naked, embodying the fertility of the Goddess." All over

prehistoric Europe people made images of the Goddess, sometimes showing her

giving birth to the "Divine Child -- her consort, son, and seed." They knew

her as a "triple Goddess" -- practitioners today usually refer to her as

maiden, mother, crone -- but fundamentally they saw her as one deity. Each

year these prehistoric worshippers celebrated the seasonal cycles, which led

to the "eight feasts of the Wheel": the solstices, the equinoxes, and four

festivals -- Imbolc (February 2, now coinciding with the Christian feast of

Candlemas), Beltane (May Day), Lammas or Lughnasad (in early August), and

Samhain (our Halloween). This nature-attuned, woman-respecting, peaceful, and
egalitarian culture prevailed in what is now Western Europe for thousands of

years, Starhawk wrote, until Indo-European invaders swept across the region,

introducing warrior gods, weapons designed for killing human beings, and

patriarchal civilization. Then came Christianity, which eventually insinuated
itself among Europe's ruling elite. Still, the "Old Religion" lived, often in
the guise of Christian practices. Starting in the fourteenth century,

Starhawk argued, religious and secular authorities began a 400-year campaign

to eradicate the Old Religion by exterminating suspected adherents, whom they
accused of being in league with the devil. Most of the persecuted were women,
generally those outside the social norm -- not only the elderly and mentally

ill but also midwives, herbal healers, and natural leaders, those women whose
independent ways were seen as a threat. During "the Burning Times," Starhawk

wrote, some nine million were executed. The Old Religion went more deeply

underground, its traditions passed down secretly in families and among

trusted friends, until it resurfaced in the twentieth century. Like their

ancient forebears, Wiccans revere the Goddess, practice shamanistic magic of

a harmless variety, and celebrate the eight feasts, or sabbats, sometimes in

the nude. Subject to slight variations, this story is the basis of many

hugely popular Goddess handbooks. It also informs the writings of numerous

secular feminists -- Gloria Steinem, Marilyn French, Barbara Ehrenreich,

Deirdre English -- to whom the ascendancy of "the patriarchy" or the

systematic terrorization of strong, independent women by means of witchcraft

trials are historical givens. Moreover, elements of the story suffuse a broad
swath of the intellectual and literary fabric of the past hundred years, from
James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Robert Graves's The White Goddess to the

novels of D. H. Lawrence, from the writings of William Butler Yeats and T. S.
Eliot to Jungian psychology and the widely viewed 1988 public-television

series The Power of Myth. In all probability, not a single element of the

Wiccan story is true. The evidence is overwhelming that Wicca is a distinctly
new religion, a 1950s concoction influenced by such things as Masonic ritual

and a late-nineteenth-century fascination with the esoteric and the occult,

and that various assumptions informing the Wiccan view of history are deeply

flawed. Furthermore, scholars generally agree that there is no indication,

either archaeological or in the written record, that any ancient people ever

worshipped a single, archetypal goddess -- a conclusion that strikes at the

heart of Wiccan belief. IN the past few years two well-respected scholars

have independently advanced essentially the same theory about Wicca's

founding. In 1998 Philip G. Davis, a professor of religion at the University

of Prince Edward Island, published Goddess Unmasked: The Rise of Neopagan

Feminist Spirituality, which argued that Wicca was the creation of an English
civil servant and amateur anthropologist named Gerald B. Gardner (1884-1964).
Davis wrote that the origins of the Goddess movement lay in an interest among
the German and French Romantics -- mostly men -- in natural forces,

especially those linked with women. Gardner admired the Romantics and

belonged to a Rosicrucian society called the Fellowship of Crotona -- a group
that was influenced by several late-nineteenth-century occultist groups,

which in turn were influenced by Freemasonry. In the 1950s Gardner introduced
a religion he called (and spelled) Wica. Although Gardner claimed to have

learned Wiccan lore from a centuries-old coven of witches who also belonged

to the Fellowship of Crotona, Davis wrote that no one had been able to locate
the coven and that Gardner had invented the rites he trumpeted, borrowing

from rituals created early in the twentieth century by the notorious British

occultist Aleister Crowley, among others. Wiccans today, by their own

admission, have freely adapted and embellished Gardner's rites.



Elsewhere on the Web
Links to related material on other Web sites. "The Witch-Cult in Western

Europe," by Margaret Alice Murray (1921)
A study of witchcraft in Great Britain. Posted by The Sacred Text Archive, a

collection of digitized religious writings in the public domain.
In 1999 Ronald Hutton, a well-known historian of pagan British religion

who teaches at the University of Bristol, published The Triumph of the Moon.

Hutton had conducted detailed research into the known pagan practices of

prehistory, had read Gardner's unpublished manuscripts, and had interviewed

many of Gardner's surviving contemporaries. Hutton, like Davis, could find no
conclusive evidence of the coven from which Gardner said he had learned the

Craft, and argued that the "ancient" religion Gardner claimed to have

discovered was a m�lange of material from relatively modern sources. Gardner

seems to have drawn on the work of two people: Charles Godfrey Leland, a

nineteenth-century amateur American folklorist who professed to have found a

surviving cult of the goddess Diana in Tuscany, and Margaret Alice Murray, a

British Egyptologist who herself drew on Leland's ideas and, beginning in the
1920s, created a detailed framework of ritual and belief. From his own

experience Gardner included such Masonic staples as blindfolding, initiation,
secrecy, and "degrees" of priesthood. He incorporated various Tarot-like

paraphernalia, including wands, chalices, and the five-pointed star, which,

enclosed in a circle, is the Wiccan equivalent of the cross. Gardner also

wove in some personal idiosyncrasies. One was a fondness for linguistic

archaisms: "thee," "thy," "'tis," "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical." Another was a

taste for nudism: Gardner had belonged to a nudist colony in the 1930s, and

he prescribed that many Wiccan rituals be carried out "skyclad." This was a

rarity even among occultists: no ancient pagan religion is known, or was

thought in Gardner's time, to have regularly called for its rites to be

conducted in the nude. Some Gardnerian innovations have sexual and even

bondage-and-discipline overtones. Ritual sex, which Gardner called "The Great
Rite," and which was also largely unknown in antiquity, was part of the

liturgy for Beltane and other feasts (although most participants simulated

the act with a dagger -- another of Gardner's penchants -- and a chalice).

Other rituals called for the binding and scourging of initiates and for

administering "the fivefold kiss" to the feet, knees, "womb" (according to

one Wiccan I spoke with, a relatively modest spot above the pubic bone),

breasts, and lips. Hutton effectively demolished the notion, held by Wiccans

and others, that fundamentally pagan ancient customs existed beneath medieval
Christian practices. His research reveals that outside of a handful of

traditions, such as decorating with greenery at Yuletide and celebrating May

Day with flowers, no pagan practices -- much less the veneration of pagan

gods -- have survived from antiquity. Hutton found that nearly all the rural

seasonal pastimes that folklorists once viewed as "timeless" fertility

rituals, including the Maypole dance, actually date from the Middle Ages or

even the eighteenth century. There is now widespread consensus among

historians that Catholicism thoroughly permeated the mental world of medieval
Europe, introducing a robust popular culture of saints' shrines, devotions,

and even charms and spells. The idea that medieval revels were pagan in

origin is a legacy of the Protestant Reformation. Hutton has also pointed out
a lack of evidence that either the ancient Celts or any other pagan culture

celebrated all the "eight feasts of the Wheel" that are central to Wiccan

liturgy. "The equinoxes seem to have no native pagan festivals behind them

and became significant only to occultists in the nineteenth century," Hutton

told me. "There is still no proven pagan feast that stood as ancestor to

Easter" -- a festival that modern pagans celebrate as Ostara, the vernal

equinox. Historians have overturned another basic Wiccan assumption: that the
group has a history of persecution exceeding even that of the Jews. The

figure Starhawk cited -- nine million executed over four centuries -- derives
from a late-eighteenth-century German historian; it was picked up and

disseminated a hundred years later by a British feminist named Matilda Gage

and quickly became Wiccan gospel (Gardner himself coined the phrase "the

Burning Times"). Most scholars today believe that the actual number of

executions is in the neighborhood of 40,000. The most thorough recent study

of historical witchcraft is Witches and Neighbors (1996), by Robin Briggs, a

historian at Oxford University. Briggs pored over the documents of European

witch trials and concluded that most of them took place during a relatively

short period, 1550 to 1630, and were largely confined to parts of present-day
France, Switzerland, and Germany that were already racked by the religious

and political turmoil of the Reformation. The accused witches, far from

including a large number of independent-minded women, were mostly poor and

unpopular. Their accusers were typically ordinary citizens (often other

women), not clerical or secular authorities. In fact, the authorities

generally disliked trying witchcraft cases and acquitted more than half of

all defendants. Briggs also discovered that none of the accused witches who

were found guilty and put to death had been charged specifically with

practicing a pagan religion. If Internet chat rooms are any indication, some

Wiccans cling tenaciously to the idea of themselves as institutional victims

on a large scale. Generally speaking, though, Wiccans appear to be

accommodating themselves to much of the emerging evidence concerning their

antecedents: for example, they are coming to view their ancient provenance as
inspiring legend rather than hard-and-fast history. By the end of the 1990s,

with the appearance of Davis's book and then of Hutton's, many Wiccans had

begun referring to their story as a myth of origin, not a history of

survival. "We don't do what Witches did a hundred years ago, or five hundred

years ago, or five thousand years ago," Starhawk told me. "We're not an

unbroken tradition like the Native Americans."

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