ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to G.A.D. for her invariable kindness and encouragement. To Liz Miller for her typing, patience and German translations. To Gerald Yorke for the loan of documents. To Timothy d’Arch Smith for information. To Messrs. Jonathan Cape for permission to quote an extract from Aleister Crowley’s Confessions and to Messrs. Peter Davies for permission to quote an extract from Miss June Johns’ King of the Witches.
CHAPTER ONE
A Dildo for a Witch
The title of this chapter may require some explanation, but I have no doubt that a substantial number of my readers will be aware that a dildo (alternative spellings are dildoe and dildol) is an imitation penis, and that, while the use of such an artificial aid to sexuality may seem to show a level of erotic sophistication verging on depravity, its history extends back almost as far as that of Mankind itself.
Enough, for the moment at any rate, of the dildo!1
The witch of my chapter heading requires a more detailed explanation. She was not the traditional hag, complete with cat and broomstick, nor did she display any noticeable tendencies to either bewitch cattle, fly up a chimney on a broomstick, or turn milk sour. She was only twenty-three years of age, quite pretty, and a rather good viola player. I had first met her at a concert, but it was only after I had known her for some time and she had discovered that I was mildly interested in the more obscure aspects of occultism and magic, past and present, that she told me that she was not only a witch, but quite an important witch, the High Priestess of one of the covens of the contemporary witch-cult.
I was fascinated. It was not that Marian (for so I will call her) was a witch—I had already met several, most of them living on one variety or other of welfare hand-out—but that she was the first witch I had met who seemed to have charm and to be not only reasonably intelligent but a real personality in her own right; the most pronounced character-trait of the other witches I had met had been an inordinate and inexplicable fondness for the sweet white wines of Spain and Cyprus. One night Marian got very drunk on sherry—a drink to whose effects witches seem peculiarly susceptible—and told me the extraordinary story of the perverse sexual rite by which she had been initiated into the degree of High Priestess. It was this story that first aroused my interest in the complex interconnections between sexuality, religion and magic, and I think it worth recounting in some detail. Before doing so, however, it is best that I should briefly explain the origins of the contemporary witch-cult.2
In England there are a considerable number of groups of witches, known as covens. I estimate that there are between two and three thousand active witches who are members of such groups. The cult now seems to be enjoying a mushroom growth in the U.S.A., where at least one small business has found it worthwhile to specialise in the production of athames (ceremonial knives), scourges, and the other impedimenta of what its practitioners refer to as “the craft”. Without exception all the cult members I have met have believed, or at least pretended to believe, that their magical-sexual-religious rites are of immemorial antiquity, the remnants of the Great Mother worship of Stone-Age Europe, now at last able to re-emerge into the open after enduring an underground existence during long centuries of Christian persecution.
It would be nice if this was so, but alas, it isn’t! With one or two dubious exceptions all the covens of the modern witch-cult owe their existence to the activities of Gerald Gardner, an eccentric Englishman who died in 1964.
Gardner, whose relations seem to have been even more eccentric than he himself—his father used to strip naked every time it rained, go into the garden and sit on his clothes until the rain stopped, while one of his uncles spent a fortune on building places of worship for various Protestant denominations—had been born in the North of England but had spent much of his life in the Far East until his retirement from the Malayan customs service in 1936. He combined a taste for dabbling in the messier fringes of occultism with a considerable although unscholarly, acquaintance with the whole field of English and Manx folklore. Indeed, from March 1946 until his death he was a member of the Council of the Folk Lore Society, although it is probable that his fellow-members of that august body were somewhat embarrassed by his habit of plagiarising from long-dead folk-lore collectors, as they certainly were by his mysterious assumption (circa 1950) of the degrees of M.A., Ph.D. and D.Litt.! These sudden academic honours were certainly not conferred by any recognised university. At first I thought that they had been obtained from a degree-mill known as the Temple Bar College (Seattle), with which some of Gardner’s associates had been mixed up in the early ’forties. I found, however, that by order of the Federal Trade Commissioners this institution had been closed down in July 1947, some years before plain Mr. Gardner blossomed out as Dr. Gardner. Gardner’s degrees were almost certainly obtained from one or other of the bogus Universities associated with the strange ecclesiastical underworld of the episcopi vagantes.
In 1954 Gardner published Witchcraft Today, not as bad a book as one might have expected, for the publisher’s reader, an occult scholar of real distinction, had insisted on the deletion of the more rubbishy passages. The book’s basic theses were four in number; (a) that Margaret Murray had been right in her assertion that the mediaeval witch-cult had enjoyed a real existence, and had not been a mere fantasy of the Inquisitors, (b) that this cult was the “Old Religion”, the still surviving faith of prehistoric man, (c) that this secret religion had survived into the present century (Gardner claimed to be in touch with hereditary witches and implied that he himself was a member of a coven) and (d) that the magical-religious practices of the cult involved the worship of a horned God and a great Mother-goddess by rites involving both flagellation and sexual intercourse. These simple, but quite unproven assertions, were padded out with a good deal of rather meaningless flim-flam about the Order of the Garter, the Knights Templar and their alleged homosexual practices etc. etc.
One of the most notable personality characteristics of the majority of occultists is their overpowering credulity, their capacity to believe six impossible things before breakfast. Someone has only to announce the existence of a mysterious book, or an even more mysterious occult fraternity, and there will always be those who are prepared to produce the required article or organisation—usually for a suitably large fee. For example, no one had heard of any alchemical writings of the early English St. Dunstan until the Elizabethan magician Edward Kelly stated that he had found a strange red powder of projection and The Book of St. Dunstan, describing how to use this same red powder for the purpose of transmuting base metals into gold, in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. Nevertheless, within fifty years of Kelly first making his claim to this discovery no less than half a dozen alchemical tracts had been printed, all of them differing one from another and each claiming to be the sole authentic Book of St. Dunstan. Again, the American horror-writer H. P. Lovecraft invented a completely imaginary grimoire (text book of magic), entitled the Necronomicon, which became almost a fixed feature of the plots of the many stories he churned out for Weird Tales and other pulp magazines of the ’thirties. For some reason unknown to me many occultists became convinced that such a grimoire really existed; sure enough, a forged Necronomicon was produced, its contents pilfered from a much older forgery, the Fourth Book of the pseudo-Agrippa, but put into an Egyptian-cum-Arab form, and I know of at least one would-be Magician who has paid forty guineas for this literary-occult curiosity.
It is not surprising, therefore, that after Gardner had loudly proclaimed the existence of a network of covens practising traditional witchcraft such a network actually came into existence. In fairness to both the witches and Gardner however, it must be admitted that there were almost certainly at least two pre-Gardnerian covens in existence before 1954, one in St. Albans and the other in the New Forest. I think it most unlikely that their origins go back before 1900, however, and that in all probability they came into existence after 1921 and the