Rediscovery of Witches pt 2 title card.jpg

This is not a complete or accurate transcript of the podcast episode, as it does not include portions of my interview with Sarah Handley-Cousins.

According to Charles Godfrey Leland, as a child in Philadelphia, he had a Dutch nurse who was reputed to be a sorceress. One day, she carried him up into the attic of their home and performed a ceremony over him, placing a plate of salt with money and a lit candle by his head and laying a Bible, a key, and a knife on his little chest. Her ritual was meant to ensure that he would succeed in life as a scholar and as a wizard. The truth of this episode is impossible to determine, but indeed, Leland grew up to attend Princeton, study linguistics, and write numerous books about the traditional poetry and folklore of the Algonquian people and the Romany, or as he called them, Gypsies. Certainly the story of his early dedication to wizardry complements the eventual direction of his interests, which tended toward the occult. He spent a great deal of time traveling around Europe, especially Tuscany, and produced a volume in 1891 called Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling. One of his principal sources was a woman named Maddalena, an Italian fortune teller whom Leland called his “witch informant.” From her, he received a manuscript, written in her own hand, that purported to lay out the doctrines of an ancient religion in Italy, what Leland believed to be the tenets of Italian witchcraft going back to antiquity. In prose poetry which Leland translated and expanded upon, Aradia, the Gospel of the Witches, as he called it, revealed that those persecuted as witches by the Church in early modern times were in fact a cult to the goddess of the moon, Diana, theirs was a religion of the oppressed or the outcast, revenging themselves upon the feudal lords who did them wrong and holding naked orgies in worship of Diana, which rites were mistaken by the Church as gatherings to worship the devil. The book had Judeo-Christian parallels, for in it, it was said Diana and her brother, Luciferus, the god of the sun, had a daughter named Aradia, whom they sent to earth to be the leader of the witches. Leland’s book proved to be relatively obscure, but after the spread of Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis, it was rediscovered by some and raised as proof of Murray’s thesis. The problem is, scholars like Ronald Hutton have cast doubt on its authenticity. It is fundamentally different from medieval texts derived from ancient Latin works, Hutton argues, and appears to be of 19th century origin. As it was said to have been written in Maddalena’s own hand, some have suggested that Leland’s witch informant had hoaxed him, while others have suggested that Leland himself authored the work, making it a literary fraud. Whatever the case, there is certainly no evidence beyond the book of the organized religion it describes.

Margaret Murray, who later propagated the myth that women accused of witchcraft were actually observing a secret religion, wasn’t working in a vacuum when she formulated her witch-cult theory. As I noted, she was influenced most notably by the comparative religion work of James Frazer. But she also wasn’t the first to suggest the idea that the witches of early modern persecutions in Europe were actually pagan cultists. However, Leland’s book doesn’t appear to have been an influence on Murray. Its claims were very different. It made no assertions that the Italian witchcraft it described was a pan-European religion, and nowhere was the Horned God of Murray worshipped. In her earlier work, Murray did acknowledge Diana as a goddess the witches worshipped, but she suggested that it was really Janus, the Roman god of passages, rather than Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt. She, of course, had in mind the medieval canon law called Canon Episcopi, which described the existence of “some unconstrained women, perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, [who] believe and openly profess that, in the dead of night, they ride upon certain beasts with the pagan goddess Diana, with a countless horde of women, and in the silence of the dead of the night to fly over vast tracts of country, and to obey her commands as their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on other nights.” This canon law was claimed to be from the 4th century CE, but many scholars believe it to have been a medieval forgery dating to the 10th century. This was the law that had encouraged more lenient treatment of witches as people with erroneous beliefs, who had been misled to believe that their dreams of night flights with Diana were real, a view reversed by the time of Pope Innocent VIII’s bull declaring them to be real devil worshipers. But even if it only dated to the 900s, where did this idea of women worshiping Diana come from? And was this the same Diana described in Leland’s Aradia?

Depiction of the goddess Diana portraying all her associations with hunting, the moon, and night flight. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It seems that what the Canon Episcopi was describing was a certain strain of folklore, and as usual, when delving into the development of folklore, it is a story of syncretism, or the merging of beliefs. For instance, the Roman goddess Diana was not the goddess of the moon but of the hunt, with perhaps some association with the sky or daylight if one can judge by the etymology of her name. However, through identification with the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis, she inherited associations with Selene, the goddess of the moon, and Hecate, the queen of the dead. Hecate’s rides with the unquiet dead, which became all mixed up with Northern European folklore about the Wild Hunt, may be the basis for the idea of night rides with Diana, and may also be the point of intersection between these goddess traditions and folklore about faeries, creatures whom Diana leads in her rides, much as Hecate leads a host of the dead or Odin leads a host of faeries from the underworld in his Wild Hunt. In order to account for the strange creatures described in witchcraft trials as demons, Margaret Murray came up with an unusual explanation that again shows how she leapt to absurd and unsupported extremes in reaching for some interpretation that could make the witch narratives both real and rationally explainable. She suggested that faeries, styled as demons by witch-hunters, were really a now extinct race of diminutive people, like pygmies. But lacking substantive support for such a theory, I think we can just look at it quizzically for a moment before moving on. Another strange bit of syncretism in this folklore derives from the Old Testament. Some versions of the Wild Hunt folklore motif associated it with Herod the Great’s hunt for the “Holy Innocents” who might become the prophesied King of the Jews. And strangely, Diana appears to be strongly syncretized with Herodias, wife of Herod the Great’s youngest son, Herod Antipas, who convinced her daughter Salome to ask King Herod for John the Baptist’s head on a platter as reward for a particularly alluring dance she’d performed. According to legend, once the deed was done, Salome was remorseful, and a powerful wind blew from the murdered saint’s mouth, blowing her into the sky where she was doomed to fly forever. Salome seems to have become identified with her mother, so that it was said Herodias was the legendary flying dancer, and some used Herodias’s name or some derivative of it, like Aradia, as being synonymous with the pagan goddess Diana. As usual when I delve into folklore, I come out with my head spinning, but what can we take from all this? Despite a throughline of folklore that might help us identify the myth of Diana associated with witchcraft, there remains no evidence of a widespread religion devoted to her worship. What may be more likely is that, as folklore, these myths were passed as oral traditions, and the medieval church first misunderstood these tales to be real experiences that their tellers believed they were having, and later that the stories were real indeed. And even if women of the age occasionally got together and acted out the legends of Diana/Herodias, it would not been an organized revival of pagan religion but rather a reenactment of a popular folktale. These notions would, however, be involved in just such a revival but centuries after the early modern witch purges.

In 1951, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was finally repealed in Great Britain, replaced by Parliament with the Fraudulent Mediums Act, and almost immediately, a man named Gerald Gardner began to give interviews with the press claiming that he was a practicing witch, carrying on an age-old tradition of witchcraft. Gardner was a colonialist, having made his fortune operating rubber and tea plantations on the Malay peninsula. After retiring to England in 1936, he took the interest he had developed in Malay tribal magical practices and applied it to the field of folklore, writing a number of monographs. Once there was no longer a law against such claims, he let it be known that there existed a coven of witches in the New Forest district of Hampshire who had initiated him into their old religion. He named a certain local woman, Dorothy Clutterbuck, as the leader of the coven, and his favorite story about her coven was that they had engaged in magical battle against Hitler, gathering numerous covens to New Forest for what was called “Operation Cone of Power.” This was an ancient and powerful spell which had previously been directed against Napoleon, and before that against the Spanish Armada. The witches danced nude in the cold night with such abandon in casting this spell that some of them died of exposure or exhaustion. This coven’s rites involved much in the way of naked dancing as well as circle rituals and feasting, much of it for the purpose of promoting fertility and to achieve trance states that brought them closer to their gods. As Gardner described this religion in his book Witchcraft Today a few years later, they worshipped two gods in a duotheistic system. One was the Horned God described by Margaret Murray, while the other was the Goddess of the Moon described by Charles Godfrey Leland. While Murray had envisioned her witch-cult as a patriarchal system led by male priests, despite her feminism, Gardner described a more feministic secret witch-cult, and it is Gardner’s work in bringing this ancient witches’ religion to light that serves as the foundation for the modern religion of Wicca and neopagan beliefs generally. But how much truth was there to what Gardner taught?

Gerald Gardner, via Fortean Picture Library

First, consider the source of Gardner’s knowledge. Scholarly historians, such as Ronald Hutton, have investigated Gardner’s claims extensively and concluded that they seem very unlikely. The woman he claimed inducted him, Dorothy Clutterbuck, appears to have been a pious Christian and conservative Tory pillar of the community, which would indicate that she lived quite a double life if true. Only one other person has been recorded as claiming to have known about the coven and its operation against Hitler, but he told of it after Gardner himself had and may have just been repeating the story as he’d heard it. There were reports that Aleister Crowley, when Gardner met him, confirmed the existence of the New Forest coven, which would seem a strange thing to need confirmed if Gardner had been initiated as he claimed, but Crowley’s diaries and other accounts of their meeting don’t mention this. What they do show is that Gardner came to him and exaggerated his academic credentials and Masonic clout, hoping to get Crowley to initiate him into the magical secret society Ordo Templi Orientis, with no such luck, as Crowley doesn’t appear to have thought much of him. What seems likeliest is that he was searching for some occult initiation to make his retirement more interesting, first in the Folk-Lore Society, then in a Rosicrucian Theater he joined, and afterward in Crowley’s order or other mystical societies, like the Order of the Golden Dawn or the Ancient Druid Order, both of which he dabbled in, and when he failed, he simply created his own brand of magical order. He made up a supposedly ancient witchcraft religion, perhaps as a prank suggesting a stodgy old woman he knew of, who had since passed away, had inducted him into her coven’s mysteries. By mashing up the work of Leland and Murray, he produced their doctrines, and for rituals he cherry picked whatever suited his fancy from those two sources, including nudity and sexual cavorting, and added some that seem to be more of his own practices, such as flagellation to produce ecstasies or hallucinations. Certainly as the religion developed, it became clear that the writings he claimed were ancient were actually, at least in part, written by him, for when a High Priestess he had initiated into his feministic religion later tried to take the reins, he conveniently produced a new discovery of supposedly ancient rules that clarified the power he as a man should have over the women in his coven, making it more of a patriarchy after all. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t begrudge neopagans or Wiccans the conviction of their beliefs or the freedom to express them by whatever observance they wish—as the Wiccan tenet goes, “An it harm none, do what thou wilt”—but I cannot pretend that the historical basis for the faith is any more valid than, say, that of Mormonism, or of Scientology, another religion fabricated by an acquaintance of Aleister Crowley.

Thus we have more than one myth borne out of Margaret Murray’s discredited work. First, her own myth of a pan-European pagan fertility cult mistaken for Satanists by their persecutors, and then, Gerald Gardner’s derivative neopagan religion of Wicca, claiming to be a continuation of an ancient religion that had been practiced in secret into modern times. Next came the myth that most women accused of being witches were practicing midwives, whose knowledge of medicine was feared and misunderstood as magic. But this myth did not originate from Murray. As with many descriptions of the witch, it was spread in early modern Europe by Heinrich Kramer’s book, the Malleus Maleficarum, which described midwives as the being in the perfect position to take newborns and offer their souls to the devil, or to take them for sacrifice. As we have already seen, Murray relied heavily on the Hammer of the Witches as a primary source for her interpretation, rationalizing what seemed outrageous and taking what pleased her at face value. As it went well with her theory, she argued in her characteristically assertive style that the female worshippers of her imagined fertility cult were also practicing midwives with medical expertise. This argument would be taken up again in the 1970s by second-wave feminists and as a result would be presumed true by many. In an effort to address the sexual politics and history of the marginalization of women in medicine, sociologists and social critics Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English latched on to the Murray’s claims about midwifery’s connection to witchcraft allegations in their pamphlet “Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers,” and from there it spread. It would not be challenged as a myth until 1990, when medical historian David Harley wrote his article “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch.” In his article, Harley revealed that it was actually relatively uncommon for midwives to be accused of witchcraft, as they were usually considered trustworthy women.

Witches dancing with devils, featured in The History of Witches and Wizards (1720), via Wellcome Library

While it may be a myth that midwives were common targets of witchcraft accusations, what about female healers generally? Historians have revealed to us the presence in early modern Europe of a class of folk healers whose folk medicine essentially was spellcraft, and there has long been a view both popular and scholarly that it was these wise men and women, or cunning folk, who were most commonly persecuted as witches. The problem is that this too appears to be a misconception propagated by 1970s scholarship that has since been challenged, specifically a 1979 article called “Who Were the Witches?” by Richard Horsley in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. To clarify, cunning folk were practitioners of operative magic, meaning they performed services such as creating charms to cure people and livestock or acted as diviners for hire, telling the fortunes of those who paid them. Theirs was an especially practical magic, sought out in rural areas as a remedy to misfortunes that were believed to have been caused by evil magic or curses, counteracting black magic with white magic, as it were. I have given an apt example of cunning folk being accused of witchcraft in the famous case of the Pendle Witches in Lancaster, England, in a recent Patreon exclusive podcast episode. Because of prominent cases like these and the simple logic behind the proposition that it was practitioners of magic who were being accused of witchcraft, like the midwife-witch myth, the notion is easy to believe. I myself am guilty of having repeated the claim on previous episodes of this podcast. The problem is that there the evidence doesn’t allow for so grand a generalization. First of all, as we see in the Pendle Witches trial, much of the folk magic performed by cunning folk was widely considered a good magic and involved explicitly Catholic ritual elements—in fact, in his 1994 article in Social History, “Witch Doctors, Soothsayers and Priests: On Cunning Folk in European Historiography and Tradition,” Willem de Blécourt points out that there were even Catholic clergymen who dabbled in folk magic as well. The cunning folk certainly were not part of a pagan cult holding meetings. Historical records show they were almost invariably solitary figures, practicing extremely individualized rituals. Some may have been engaged in cursing those who had wronged them, as we see among the Pendle Witches, but those who were accused of evil magic, or maleficium, may have just been dealing with dissatisfied customers. If one hired a good witch to heal a family member or some livestock and instead of being healed their condition worsened, one might presume the charm they had worked was actually a curse. But the most problematic aspect of the cunning folk as witches claim is that it ignores the majority of the accused, who don’t appear to have engaged in the selling of magical services at all.

So let us look at what was behind the accusations against those who were not admitted practitioners of folk magic. First, there were those who were assumed to have been practicing maleficium because they had given someone an odd look or even a harsh word and afterward by coincidence some misfortune had befallen the person they’d looked at or dealt with unpleasantly, as we see was the case with Alizon Device, the first of the accused Pendle Witches. Among these, being socially isolated made the accusation harder to refute, for if no one knew you well, imaginations could run wild about what you believed and what you did with your time. And of course, witchcraft allegations as mechanism for revenge played a role in many cases as well, for when one saw that the charge of witchcraft brought someone, even an innocent, to ruin and death, what better way destroy an enemy? As for the confessions of the accused, as alluded to before, we know enough now about coercion and the effects of torture to easily explain these. In fact, some scholars have even examined the differences in confessions given under different types of torture, such as physical torment as opposed to sleep deprivation, and observed that the confessions take on a different quality of detail, with those elicited by physical torture being brief and without detail, as if blurted out to stop the pain, and those produced by sleep deprivation being more dreamlike, as though from the description of a hallucination. Nor can we discount the mere threat of torture as a driving factor behind the confessions. The details may clearly have been fed to the accused by their torturers, or they may have been gleaned from common knowledge of what witches were being accused of. The witch craze happened to coincide with a revolution in publishing that resulted in the spread of cheap publications detailing witch trials, featuring woodcuts that depicted what witches were supposedly up to so that even the illiterate acquired a working knowledge of the claims. Many accused witches hoped that by confessing to their accusers and saying they repented, the inquisitors and magistrates would have mercy on them, which certainly worked for some of them. And others, as mentioned earlier, may have simply been describing folk stories about Diana and her night rides in such a way that witch-hunters may have taken it for an admission of first-hand experience when it was only an oral tradition. Wherein lies the reality? Likely in some combination of all these scenarios.

Witches feasting, featured in The History of Witches and Wizards (1720), via Wellcome Library — Witches feasting, featured in *The History of Witches and Wizards* (1720), via Wellcome Library

The question remaining, then, is what drove the witch-hunters themselves? Typically they are depicted as zealots, unable to see past the tips of their noses, which they’d buried in the Bible. Certainly it is hard to refute that this was the case, but in recent times a more nuanced view of their motivations has emerged. The papal bull of Pope Innocent VIII that is seen as the beginning of the early modern witch craze explicitly accuses witches of having “blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees.” This has led some historians to suggest that the real impetus behind the witch craze was climate change, specifically the Little Ice Age that cooled Europe starting as early as 1250, causing many crops to fail. As the human mind is hardwired to find someone to blame for things that are outside our control, a scapegoat was sought, and witches fit the bill. Another theory has it that the worst of the witch purges occurred in places where civil authority was relatively weak, and the execution of outsiders as witches served as a show of strength to consolidate power and enforce social conformity. But recently, in 2018, two economists, Peter Leeson and Jacob Russ, put forward a different theory, based on statistical analysis. They claim that the evidence supports the idea that the early modern witch-craze was triggered by the Protestant Reformation. By their view, the Catholic and Protestant Churches engaged in witch purges as a kind of advertisement for their respective brands of religion, each demonstrating through their witch trials their power over the devil as well as their willingness to use violence against those who rejected their faith. This may seem like conspiratorial thinking, but this could be true even without an organized conspiracy to knowingly make false accusations against and put to death innocents. Economic forces may be at work without conscious knowledge of them, and furthermore, these economic motivators may have been working in combination with the people’s desire to scapegoat for failed crops and weak governments needing to enforce their authority. As I have shown time and time again, it is more the domain of conspiracist thinking to oversimplify very complicated episodes in history in order to create a tidy explanation at which one can point an accusatory finger.

A Rediscovery of Witches, Part Two: The Moon Goddess and the Cunning Folk

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