Perhaps you who bring this sentence against me are more afraid than I who receive it.15
Solo magicians and Pagan thinkers were many, but the more liberal and open intellectual climate of the eighteenth century saw a new phenomenon: magicians banding together in magical societies, such as the Martinists, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. Their members were some of the most advanced thinkers of their age and it is rumoured that American statesman Benjamin Franklin was a member of the Illuminati. The formation of the magical societies marked a new openness. While the practices of the societies were secret, their existence was not. For the first time in many centuries the magical arts were being taught in an organized fashion. An important magical book which appeared at turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was The Magus by Francis Barrett. This consisted of a magical compendium of correspondences, talismans, various aspects of natural magic, astrology, alchemy and Qabalah, but its most unusual aspect was what was in effect a coven advertisement.
The Author of this work respectfully informs those who are curious … that, having been indefatigable in his researches into those sublime Sciences, of which he has treated at large in this Book, that he gives private instructions and lectures upon any of the above-mentioned Sciences … Those who become Students will be initiated into the choicest operations of Natural Philosophy, Natural Magic, the Cabala, Chemistry, the Talismanic Art, Hermetic operations of Natural Philosophy, Astrology, Physiognomy, & co, & co. Likewise they will acquire the knowledge of the Rites, Mysteries, Ceremonies, and Principles of the ancient Philosophers, Magi, Cabalists, Adepts, & co. – The purpose of this school (which will consist of no greater number than Twelve Students) [i.e. thirteen including Barrett] being to investigate the discovery of whatever may conduce to the perfection of Man; to bring the Mind to a contemplation of the Eternal Wisdom; to promote the discovery of both in respect of ourselves and others; the study of religion here, in order to secure to ourselves felicity hereafter; and finally, the promulgation of whatever may conduce to the general happiness and welfare of mankind.16
These were worthy aims indeed and, although couched in language of an earlier age, they are not dissimilar to those of us who teach the Mysteries today. The tide was turning.
History speaks
Until the eighteenth century, the Paganism which had excited the imaginations of those seeking a return to the Elder Faiths was the Paganism familiar to people educated in the Classics – the Gods of Greece and Rome. From the eighteenth century onwards, western and northern Europeans began to look not only to the Mediterranean for their Pagan revival, but to their own roots – to the Celtic and Norse-German Gods of their ancestors.
In Britain, Stonehenge and other Neolithic monuments were thought to be the work of the Druids and much speculation began in England about Celtic practices. Many of the ideas were romantic and historically doubtful. Just as Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century had decided that Britons were descended from the Trojans, so people began to speculate that they were descended from lost Atlantis. However, what these visions represented was a yearning for a genuine Pagan spirituality. A positive outcome of people’s interest in their native Paganism was a growing interest in folklore and folk custom.
The folklore revival also awakened a new interest in the Witch persecutions of a few hundred years earlier. There were three major stances: the Christian religious approach – Witches existed and were in league with the Devil; the psychological – there were no Witches and the whole thing was a crazed fantasy dreamed up by churchmen with psychopathological tendencies; and the sociological – the persecutions were a way of consolidating the Church’s power and oppressing the peasants. However, from the nineteenth century onwards a number of European researchers challenged these views. Another theory was put forward: that Witchcraft was a religion, the remnants of the Old Religion of Europe, the indigenous Paganism that Christianity had suppressed.
The first modern scholar to put forward the theory that Witches were Pagans was Karl Ernst Jarcke,1 a professor of criminal law at the University of Berlin. From studying the records of a seventeenth-century German Witch trial Professor Jarcke argued that Witchcraft was a Nature religion and a survival of pre-Christian Pagan beliefs. Another slightly more complex theory was put forward a little later in 1839 by an historian, Franz Josef Mone.2 Mone, who was director of the archives of Baden in Germany, also believed that Witchcraft was an underground Pagan religion. Mone believed that the German tribes who had once populated the north coast of the Black Sea came into contact with the cults of Hecate and Dionysus. They had absorbed the ecstatic religious practices of Hecate and Dionysus into a cult which worshipped the Horned God. Mone believed that this religion had survived into Medieval times until its adherents were persecuted as Witches. A more romantic view of the Pagan cult is portrayed by a French historian, Jules Michelet, in his book La Sorcière3 published in 1862. Michelet’s speculations are based on earlier accounts of Goddess worship in France such as those of John of Salisbury4 who, writing between 1156 and 1159, said:
… they assert that a certain woman who shines by night, or Herodias, … summons gatherings and assemblies, which attend various banquets. The figure receives all kinds of homage from her servants …
While many harked back to the ways of Paganism, those European scholars who had re-appraised the Witch trials generally believed that the Craft had died with the fires of the Inquisition. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a book emerged which suggested that Goddess worship had not been completely suppressed in Europe. In 1886, the American folklorist Charles Leland met an Italian fortune-teller and Witch from Florence called Maddalena. Leland claimed that as his friendship with Maddalena grew, she gradually imparted to him secrets that had remained hidden for centuries. These were the beliefs of the Italian Witch tradition that the Witches called the Old Religion.
In 1899, these were published in a book called Aradia or The Gospel of the Witches.5 Charles Leland claimed that not only were the Italian Witches practising magical arts and preserving interesting pieces of folklore, they were also practising a Pagan religion – a Goddess religion. The Italian Witches’ beliefs owed much to the Gods of Classical Rome and the Etruscan civilization that preceded it. The chief Deities were Diana and her daughter, Aradia or Herodias. These two Deities were seen as being two aspects of the one Goddess and their names were used fairly interchangeably. It appeared that through all the centuries of persecution, the Goddess still lived.
The ideas of other European scholars about Witchcraft excited the interest of the English anthropologist, Egyptologist and folklorist Margaret Murray. Margaret Murray’s contribution was important in the development of modern Wicca and we owe much to this fascinating woman who lived to the grand age of 100. In 1921, she published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology.6 In this, she analyzed the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Witch persecutions and concluded that the inquisitors were persecuting an underground Pagan religious movement that worshipped the Horned God. To Margaret Murray, the followers of the Old Religion were those who had secretly kept the older faith throughout centuries of Christian persecution. In remote villages, people met together in small groups – covens – and practised in secret the rites of their ancestors. They had also preserved the lore of herbs and plants, which was the traditional craft of the village wise woman and cunning man.
The new interest in the religious practices of European Witchcraft went hand in hand with a