by A.C. Fisher Aldag
This is my opinion and not necessarily that of other writers, contributors, or staff of Magickal Media.
Witchcraft with a capital W existed here in America long before Wicca was imported by Sybil Leek and Raymond Buckland. What many Pagan scholars do not seem to realize is that religious Witchcraft was and is very much active for decades in America, right up to the present day, but not as neo-Pagans currently practice. Wiccans frequently use the model of God and Goddess worship, invoking the four elements / directions, casting circle as a place to perform magickal acts, and other practices which incorporate a combination of ceremonial magick, international legend (“myth”) and devotion. These practices derived primarily from Gerald Gardner, who was a folklorist that studied various traditions of Witchcraft, ceremonial magick, pre-Christian legend, and worldwide cultures, then combined them with Masonic and other fraternal rites to make a cohesive whole.
I believe that many of Mr. Gardner’s rites were actually derived from observing the religiomagickal rituals of existing witches and Witches in Britain (and I make a case for this theory in my article series on The Witches’ Voice, which is called “Another Pagan History”). I’ve drawn this conclusion because several of Mr. Gardner’s Wiccan ceremonies directly parallel the rites performed by American Witches who had no contact with Gardner or his coven descendants. These individuals, families and groups have stated that they learned their Craft from family members and neighbors who brought their practices from “the old countries”, and who had syncretized their religiomagickal rites with that of Native cultures, long before Wicca was brought to America. Further, several of Mr. Gardner’s rituals encompass folkloric tales, dances, legends and magioreligious ceremonies performed by working-class rural people and inner-city folks right up until the 1940s and 50s, when a combination of WWII and television caused the traditions to fizzle out (Christianity did not kill Paganism, as modern Wiccans would have us believe. It was Ed Sullivan). Many people are reviving these customs today. However, many more people practiced their magickal religions right up to present times. We’ll get to how Witchcraft differs from Wicca in a moment.
Location: Many of the Witches I’ve encountered were from the rural Upper Peninsula of Michigan, as well as the northern parts of Appalachia, the mountains and farmsteads of Indiana / Kentucky Ohio West Virginia, and the farthest Northern portions of Wisconsin. My own tradition comes from Mandan, a tiny copper-mining and timbering village near Copper Harbor in the Upper Peninsula, a town that no longer exists due to the economic crash of the 80s. After my husband performed a hoodening (wearing an animal skin and antlers in a ceremonial dance and children’s simulated hunt) for a local parade, several individuals from our small town came forward to state that they’d been involved in or observed a similar rite. After publishing “Another Pagan History”, several people corresponded with me privately to state that when they were kids, they’d participated in religious Witchcraft, Shamanic practice, and some of the meso-Pagan customs mentioned in the article series. These folks wrote from all across America, Canada and Britain. I figure there are Witches everywhere.
Ethnicity: Most of the Witches I’ve encountered are of Celtic descent, including Welsh, Irish, Scots, and northwestern English, mixed with the blood of the Saxon invaders of those districts. Dozens are of Cornish heritage, who’d never heard of Mr. Coltraine. Over time in America, they’d intermarried with the “Three Fires” nations (Pottawatomi, Odawa, Chippewa) as well as Lanapi, Cheroki, Menomeni, and other tribes. However I’ve also spoken to traditional Witches of Mexican, African, Roma and Asian descent. People who come from a heritage of Witchcraft seem to marry each other, regardless of national ancestry. Some, not all, syncretized each others’ practices. I’ve found Cymri (Welsh) folk who had bottle trees to scare away baneful entities, Native Americans who use the tarot for divination, and “Pellars” (spell casters) of Cornish descent who used sticks and tree configurations to cast or interpret runes (no, not the Runes as taught by Mr. McNallen and Mr. Thorsson … not the Norse alphabet. Still, they were called runes with a small r). None of these folks claimed knowledge of Wicca or neo-Paganism. Some were functionally illiterate. Others had heard of the modern Pagan movement, but believed it to be full of “hippies” (hi, Grandpa) and desired to distance themselves from that culture.
Commonality of belief: Includes presence of a Goddess Mother Queen Lady in addition to a God or Lord; belief in fairies or “little people” as spirit beings or natural entities (the First Nations people call ’em “puck-wudgies” which is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Puck character!); a belief in descendancy from the Gods themselves, and thus ancestor worship; a belief in magick and the ability to use it or work with it, and a desire to use natural forces to create a beneficent environment for humans, such as using herbs to heal, and trancework or dreaming to achieve interaction with nature and spirits; a belief in reincarnation, a belief in spirits and the soul transcending death; and other practices that modern Pagans would surely recognize. In addition, there was is a coexistence with Nature and self-sufficiency, as well as a severe pragmatism, that I find sadly lacking in Wicca and neo-Paganism. “Cursing” enemies or hexing for revenge was unfortunately common; following the “Wiccan Rede” was unheard of. Rituals nearly always included creating some type of sacred space (although NOT “casting circle”), summoning entities to help including Deity and minor spiritual beings, divination, celebration of seasonal holidays, performing ritualized dances, theatre and telling legends and lore, and the use of magick for attunement, healing or to create change. The latter included making potions, creating talismans, or “witching” a person to make them feel better, mentally, physically or spiritually, or “witching” a situation to achieve optimal results. However, the primary purpose was spiritual expression and yes, entertainment.
How does modern Wicca differ from oldline Witchcraft? Obviously the belief in “harm none” is important. I believe that the Wiccan Rede is the single greatest gift offered to the magickal community by neo-Paganism. It does not matter if it was Mr. Gardener’s idea, or the invention of Lady Gwen Thompson or genuinely came from an older source, the Rede is crucial. It has probably prevented thousands of earth-scorching baneful spells from wiping out whole communities. No, really, I am serious. Cursing the neighbor’s cattle and watching them all drop dead is not a diplomatic thing, nor is it nice when the neighbor’s wife and kids have to go on Relief (before Welfare, there was Relief, and it was quite shameful to partake of it). The sense of community, of multiculturalism, of sharing beliefs and comparing traditions and merging cultures done by modern Pagans is wonderful. I really like that Wicca has become feminized and that neo-Paganism has gone political, fighting for our environment and for equality. Another thing that can be beneficial is the elements. Some older traditions have the same four or five as Wicca, and perhaps this derived from the First Nations (there’s speculation that Mr. Gardner observed Native people on his trip to America, and compared their sacred directions to the elements and the Watchtowers of ceremonial magick). Recently, whole intensives have been given to immerse the soul in one particular element, to work with it until it’s incorporated into the very fabric of ones’ magick. Our tradition used the directions more as “wards” to guard us from harmful influences and to lend power. Earth is down. Sky is up. Water is Lake Michigan. It’s great to find more ways to use, to integrate, to attune with the elements. Some modern scholars have argued that the elements are a recent invention of Wicca and ceremonial magick, but I disagree. The elements are pretty much universal to magick users and Witches. The Wiccan interpretation seems particularly useful.
However, the worst element of modern Wicca has been the frivolity, in my opinion. Magick and communications with the Gods and honoring Nature must be approached reverentially. We have food, and heat, and air, and our health, because of the beneficence of our ancestors, our Deities and the Earth. Modern Wiccans are neither satisfactorily awed nor thankful enough, in my observation. While oldline or meso-Pagans were often ridiculed as tree huggers, we were and are always a realistic bunch. We sometimes laugh at Pagans who attend festival without sufficient blankets and fire-kindling skills. (Yes, we’ll help you. But we’ll laugh at you.) Modern Wiccans and neo-Pagans could use a healthy dose of pragmatism. But please, keep your idealism, too. It’s one of the coolest things about Wicca.
Today, when we hear about these big conferences on gender within Paganism, we snort behind our hands. Who cares? Can he milk a cow, can she dig a ditch? Equality, good. Rumination, not good. Of course, women and men are equal, and have different ways of approaching magick, and life. Yet so do individuals. Every ancient society always had one or two homosexual people, who were accepted just fine by others, usually the male school teacher or the spinster who made awesome soap or the two “maiden ladies” who shared a household. If they’d gone around “creating dialogue about gender”, they would have been ignored or laughed out of town.
Handicapped people were found jobs they could do, making shoes, tending hogs, in the days before mandatory mainstreamed public education and our subsequent mollycoddling. Our society has completely debilitated our children, and neo-Pagans are some of the worst for extending adolescent dependency. And as Charlie Daniels sang, “A rich man goes to college, a poor man goes to work”. My grandfather and uncles worked in the timber or mines from the time they were 14, and they were properly respectful of the boggins and knockers and gnomes and dirtkins and chrystal elves, who were offered whiskey, brack (not Obama, but bread) and songs to keep the excavation from caving in.
If we believed some neo-Pagan scholars (cough, Hutton, cough) we’d be under the impression that oldline magickal practices only survived as vestiges of ancient cultures, that Witchcraft had no connection to religion – let alone Goddess worship, and that all modern practices of Paganism came from either Gardner or ceremonial magick, were invented, or were reconstructed from ancient sources, primarily literature. I’ve been disputing this fallacy since approximately 1982, when I met and became involved with Wiccans and neo-Pagans – years before Hutton ascended his ivory tower and used working-class peoples’ taxes to fund his badly-written theses coopting the text of his undergrads without giving them writing credits (shall I tell you how I really feel? LOL!) I’ve had this argument with Isaac Bonewits, who in his desire to debunk some of the myths surrounding Wicca with scholarship, threw out the baby with the bathwater and dismissed all surviving traditions of hereditary Witchcraft and folkloric magioreligion. Since then, I’ve read several other accounts of the “Pow Wow” tradition, Appalachian Witchcraft, the Gullah practice of magick, Stregeria, the Curenderia traditions, generic European folk magick, family and hereditary traditions, and heard several other statements made by those who either discovered or practiced religiomagickal or folkloric traditions in America. Nearly everywhere I go, I find at least one other Witch, buying pretty rocks in gift shops for healing crystals, gathering herbs at highway rest areas, sewing magickal designs into quilts, murmuring prayers while knitting, doing spellwork as they garden. I’ve run into them at neo-Pagan festivals, and communicated online. There really are Witches everywhere.
Do I have any proof? Not really. My ancestors could’ve made it up. People who I talk to might be lying. It’s been implied that I’m not being truthful, either, as many scholars view any hereditary traditions of magick or Witchcraft with skepticism. Let me assure you, my imagination is truly not that great. I’ve not documented my sources, as most of the individuals I’ve talked to prefer to remain anonymous, and not have college kids or magazine writers camped out on their doorstep, begging for scraps of lore and interfering with chores. Letters I received were wiped out with a computer crash, but maybe that’s for the best. It’s also been implied that since I went to work and had children rather than pursuing the futility of a college education, I am not qualified to write or lecture about folklore, magioreligion or modern-day Witchcraft. Y’know what? I don’t care. Wanna hear some cool stories and rites, or argue about their legitimacy?