-Caveat Lector-
>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
Some scholars agree. Others do not. Read Raphael Patai, Merlin Stone or
Marija Gimbutas.
>invented by Gardner
Most of the historical and folkloric arguments for the existence of an
ancient Goddess religion tried to show that European witchcraft was a
descendant of a prehistoric religion. Two people are credited for first
hypothesizing that
witchcraft had been an organized religion prior to Christianity. In
1749, Girolamo Tartarotti claimed that witchcraft was a descendant of
the Dianic cults of Roman times (Valiente 1973: 224). In the early
Nineteenth century, the
French historian, Jules Michelet made a similar claim. Michelet argued
that witchcraft was a survival of a pre-Christian northern European
fertility cult (Jordan 1996: 106). Michelet's idea had a profound impact
on the work
of Charles Leland. Leland was a poet, an occultist, and the first
President of the Gypsy-Lore Society (Guiley 1989: 200). He was educated
at the Sorbonne (Jordan 1996: 98), where he encountered Michelet's
theory that witchcraft
was a survival of a pagan cult. In Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches
(1899), Leland claimed that the history of contemporary Italian witches
shows that they were descendants of a cult which worshipped the Roman
goddess Diana (Jordan 1996: 98). Although many questioned his use of
anecdotal evidence, some neopagans still use his book to show that
witchcraft is an ancient religion.
Margaret Murray, an amateur folklorist and professional Egyptologist,
advanced similar claims. In The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and
The God of the Witches (1931), she argued that witchcraft was an ancient
religion by
comparing Paleolithic rock art from Ariege and Dordogne depicting masked
and horned dancers (Murray 1970 [1931]: 16-7) with Roman, Greek, and
Celtic art, Christian depictions of the Witches' Sabbath as well as the
folk dances and
costumes of rural people in England and Europe. Murray concluded that
witchcraft is an old religion dedicated to the worship of a nature deity
known as the Horned God (1970 [1931]: 160-1). With the advance of
Christianity and the witch hunts, the witches went underground and
formed disparate covens. While these covens largely disappeared before
the end of the Nineteenth century, Murray suggested that some had
survived and had left a group of cultural artifacts that permeated
European culture. For instance, she argued in The Divine King in England
(1954) that the principles of kingship in Britain were inextricably
bound up with the murder of the sacred king demanded by the old religion
of witchcraft (Valiente 1973: 249).
After the last of the English Witchcraft laws had been repealed in 1951
and Murray's research had been published, Gerald Gardner also began to
write popular treatments of witchcraft.
-- from: http://sacredsource.com/all/page.pl?item=FSP
**********************
In my estimation, the REAL problem that Christians have with Wiccans is
the Wiccan attitude about sex.
See: http://www.goddess.org/sabrina/theology.html
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