An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

United States of America, Witchcraft in Present-day

Witchcraft is active and widespread in the United States at the present day. There are also historical and traditional links with European witchcraft.

America has a great inheritance of old-world lore, brought to its shores by pioneer ancestors from all over Europe. In some parts of the United States, these beliefs have been intermingled with voodoo as practised by American negroes. The result is that a good deal of what is called voodoo in America today owes at least as much to European origins as it does to Africa or the Caribbean.

For over thirty years, the late Roy Heist ran a business on San Francisco’s Mission Street, which combined taxidermy with a trade in the requisites of witchcraft and voodoo, extending to all parts of the United States. In 1962 he was quoted as saying that business was particularly good with New York, Chicago, New Orleans and Los Angeles, as well as locally in San Francisco—proof that the present-day interest in witchcraft is not really new, only more open than it used to be.

Heist was a remarkable man, with piercing eyes and a shock of white hair. He looked the part of a wizard, and he prided himself on the genuineness of his wares; if a customer asked for dried bat’s wing or mummy dust, then that was just what they got. But his customers had to be genuine magical practitioners, who knew what they wanted. Heist would not prescribe for them. That way, he kept within the law.

Other testimony to the fact of witchcraft practices in the United States which are not simply done for kicks by moderns who have been seeing sensational films, is provided by the work of an American authority on folklore, Vance Randolph.

Mr Randolph has made a close study of witchcraft lore in the Ozark Mountains district of Missouri and Arkansas. This is a rural and relatively isolated region, the real backwoods, where old customs and beliefs lingered long; though the mountain folk were clannish and reserved, and would not discuss their private affairs with any curious outsider. In his book Ozark Superstitions (Columbia University Press, 1947), it was stated that the belief in witchcraft among hillfolk was still strong, and there were many people still reputed to be witches.

It is evident from Vance Randolph’s work that witchcraft in the Ozarks is the remains at any rate of an organised cult. The secret doctrines and teachings must pass only between blood relatives, or between people who have been united in sexual intercourse. The words of charms must be learned from a person of the opposite sex, to be fully powerful. Witches are initiated by a solemn ceremony. Randolph was told, by women who claimed to have experienced both, that being initiated as a witch was a profound spiritual crisis, even more moving than what the Christians call conversion.

A very interesting article on “Nakedness in Ozark Folk Belief” by Vance Randolph, appeared in The Journal of American Folklore in 1953. He tells of naked rites to aid the growing of crops, which he himself had witnessed in Missouri. For instance, he saw a man and two women rolling naked on ground freshly prepared for sowing turnips, and was told that it was “their religion”. Randolph stated in this article his opinion that, although ceremonies connected with witchcraft were secret, the old nature worship was not dead; and he believed that in certain well-hidden places in American backwoods, men and women still danced naked, in celebration of ancient rites.

Another part of the United States in which old beliefs have lingered, is south-eastern Pennsylvania, among the farming communities called the Pennsylvania Dutch. These people are famous for their brightly-painted barns, decorated with what are known as hex signs. This term is derived from the old German word hexe, meaning a witch. The purpose of these signs was originally to protect against black witchcraft and evil spirits.

Though many variations appear, the basis of the design is a circle with a geometrical figure inside it, usually a five-pointed, six-pointed, or eight-pointed star. Hex signs are usually painted in brilliant primary colours: red, blue, yellow, white and black. They appear not only on barns, but as general motifs of decoration in folk art, for all kinds of things; though the brightly-coloured barn decorations have attracted most attention.

The real hex sign has been described as a painted prayer. The outer circle represents God, or the Infinite. The centre of the circle is the human being, reaching out to God. The design represents harmony and beauty, a right relationship to God and the Universe. Formalised drawings of hearts and flowers sometimes occur in the design also. They represent life, love, beauty and prosperity.

Among the Pennsylvania Dutch, hex or hexerai means witchcraft. There is white hexerai and black hexerai, and both kinds make use of drawn symbols. A famous book of hexerai is John George Hohman’s Pow-Wows, or The Long-Lost Friend. This very curious book first appeared in 1820, and still circulates in the United States, usually without a printer’s or publisher’s name. Most of its spells and charms have a Christian appearance; but their essential nature is of traditional European magic. The book contains directions: “To prevent witches from bewitching cattle,” “How to relieve persons or animals bewitched,” “Against evil spirits and all manner of witchcraft,” and so on. Its author, John George Hohman, was a resident of Berks County, Pennsylvania, and a noted practitioner of white hexerai.

The outbreak of witchcraft persecution in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, as a result of which twenty people were executed, is the most notorious witchcraft episode in American history; but by no means the only one. The first person to be hanged as a witch in New England was Alse Young, in 1647; and in succeeding years a number of others were executed on the same charge.

The fact that the Salem trials were based upon the hysterical accusations of a group of neurotic young women, has often been taken to mean that there was no witchcraft actually existing in Massachusetts at that time. However, a detailed examination of the evidence casts some doubt upon this view. Here and there, things are said which make it seem at least possible that an underground cult existed in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, with doctrine which was not that of the dour Puritans.

For instance, a man called William Barker, of Andover, Massachusetts (a town which already possessed a reputation for sorcery), made a very strange and lengthy confession, the record of which contains the following: “He saith the Devil promised that all his people should be equal, that there should be no day of resurrection or of judgment, and neither punishment nor shame for sin.”

There occur also some detailed descriptions of Sabbats, upon which the Reverend Cotton Mather, one of the leading figures in the witch-trials, remarked: “The Witches do say, that they form themselves much after the manner of Congregational Churches; and that they have a Baptism and a Supper, and Officers among them, abominably resembling those of our Lord.” This is, in fact, quite a good way to describe coven organisation.

In present-day Salem, Massachusetts, poignant relics of the witchcraft trials are now preserved on public display, in Essex County Superior Court House and at the Essex Institute.

When Raymond Buckland, an English witch who has settled in New York, recently published the statement: “In only recent years did the Craft come to America . . . there is no long background of true Witchcraft in the United States,” his temerity raised a good deal of wrath among American witches. From the facts given above, it will be seen that their indignation was justified. It has been suggested that Mr Buckland derived this view from the late Gerald Gardner; but this can hardly be so, because it was Gerald Gardner who first introduced me to the writings of Vance Randolph about American witch lore.

Raymond Buckland is the holder of a Ph.D. in anthropology, and the director of the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick at Long Island, New York. He and his wife were initiated as witches in the Isle of Man, at the famous Witches Mill where the late Gerald Gardner’s coven met; so his presentation of witchcraft is naturally very much that of Gerald Gardner, with its insistence that witchcraft is essentially an ancient religion, and should be used for good and not evil.

Other witches in USA agree with this view; but they discount the Gardnerian insistence upon ritual nudity. They say that if witch power cannot penetrate through the moderate layer of clothing that most people wear today, then it must be pretty feeble power.

They also dislike the system of witch aristocracy, involving ’high priestesses’, ’witch queens’, and so on, that the Bucklands have sought to establish. They say that there have been covens of witches, and individual witches, in America, ever since the country was first colonised from Europe. The fact that until recent times witches had to keep very quiet, with the memory of Salem ever-present at the back of their minds, does not mean they had died out. Indeed, some American witches have been none too polite about the Bucklands, describing them as ’Johnny-come-latelies’, and their version of witchcraft as ’artsy-fartsy’.

Nevertheless, Dr Buckland and his wife (whose witch name is Lady Rowen), have ’seeded’ quite a number of new covens throughout the United States; and Dr Buckland is the author of several popular books upon the occult, including Witchcraft from the Inside (Llewellyn Publications, Minnesota, 1971), and Ancient and Modern Witchcraft (H.C. Publishers Inc., New York, 1970).

Yet the memory of Salem is not dead; in some minds, the terror and hysteria of the witch-hunt only sleeps, and is capable of waking from its slumber, even in the modern world. This is proved by a frightening incident which happened in Cincinnati. The October 1968 issue of a magazine called Eye carried an article called “The Magic Explosion”, dealing with present-day interest in witchcraft and the occult, and mentioning meetings in Cincinnati. Soon afterwards, some witches who live in that city had their apartment broken into and wrecked by vandals. Valuable paintings were slashed to ribbons. If the witches had been there at the time, would they have been slashed too?

The expression ’magic explosion’ is, however, not too sensational to describe what has happened recently in the United States. Everywhere, people are eager to learn about the occult, and interest in witchcraft is particularly lively. Witches themselves regard this as the beginning of the new Aquarian Age. Sometimes this is a healthy new freedom of the mind—sometimes something far otherwise.

For one thing, the commercialisers have not been slow to cash in. Shops purporting to sell witchcraft and magic supplies have now opened up all over the country, on a scale that would have amazed old Roy Heist. You can buy everything from statues of ’the horned god of the witches’ (modelled on Eliphas Levi’s picture of Baphomet), through candles, incense, anointing oils and herbs, to ’authentic witches athames’ and luxuriously-bound books of blank leaves for recording spells. The sound of the pipes of Pan can scarcely be heard, for the rustle of dollar bills and the clang of the cash register!

There are also books purporting to teach their readers do-it-yourself witchcraft. Some of these books sneer at the idea of any standard of occult right and wrong, and present witchcraft simply as a means of ’getting on’ in a materialistic society, of grabbing more dollars, and of bending others to your will; in other words, the gratification of greed and lust, no matter how squalid. As one who has studied and practised the occult for nearly a quarter of a century, I warn the readers—and the writers—of these books. By approaching any sort of occultism in this spirit, they are laying up trouble for themselves. The power of karma is very real, and none can escape it.

A more serious, and sadder, development is the number of mushroom ’Satanist’ cults which have sprung up. These insist upon identifying witchcraft with devil-worship and Satanism. Their rituals are as synthetic as the plastic horns their flamboyant leaders delight to be photographed wearing; as any experienced occultist would immediately recognise. But to the frustrated and sexually repressed, and to young people looking for kicks, these cults are attractive.

What is sad about them is the way in which they show that there are many people today who can only understand sexual satisfaction as being the work of the Devil. Hence such people can only achieve the fulfilment of their natural instincts in a context of ’wickedness’. In the surroundings of what they conceive of as a ’Black Mass’ or a ’witches’ Sabbat’—the more lurid the better—they find at last the orgasmic release that has hitherto been denied them.

People of this mentality have been sexually crippled by life-denying negative morality, phoney ’purity’ and hypocritical prudery. The sadism and blood-lust which often go hand-in-hand with Satanism, are further symptoms of what Wilhelm Reich has truly called the emotional plague, which is the result of centuries of ’Churchianity’. People have been indoctrinated with the idea that nearly all their natural feelings and desires are evil; and the old gods have been hidden behind the ugly mask of Satan.

Some of the leaders of these cults believe in what they are doing, and are a classic example in the occult world of the saying that a little learning is a dangerous thing. Others are simply clever psychologists, whose only real belief in Satanism is that they’ve found a devilish good racket. In my opinion, all are dangerous; not because they can evoke a non-existent ’Satan’, but because they invite their followers to attune themselves to unseen forces of evil, and to the lowest planes of the astral world.

One of the influences which have brought about the craze for delving into the darker regions of the occult, is the sensational film Rosemary’s Baby, which deals with Satanism. Was it more than a cruel coincidence that the producer of this film, Roman Polanski, lost his wife and their unborn child in the horrific murders carried out by Charles Manson and his followers, who called themselves Satan’s Slaves? (See MANSON, CHARLES.)

American witches who are serious followers of the Craft of the Wise have, like their brothers and sisters in Britain, been coming forward publicly in an effort to combat misrepresentation, and clear themselves of the stigma of Satanism. Many of them have talked to writers like Susan Roberts, who found them to be a fair cross-section of American citizens. Not quite ordinary people, truly—but people just the same.

Her book Witches, U.S.A. (Dell Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1971) reveals that there are many men and women in America today who are using the old witchcraft lore to evolve a basic philosophy of life. They regard this as being as legitimate a way of searching for truth as any other, in a world in which the authority of established religion, science and politics is being more and more deeply questioned.

On Lammas Day (1st August) 1971, a number of California covens joined together in an attempt to end the war in Vietnam. A letter was sent to a leading occult magazine in advance of this date, inviting other people to join with them in this collective use of the power of thought, which was reminiscent of English witches’ efforts against Hitler. According to the writer of the letter, Ken Nahigian of Sacramento, California, their feeling was that if a large enough number of witches and other occultists were united in working for this aim at one time, they would be able to “harness enormous fields of collective psychic power for peace”.

At the time of writing, it is too early to estimate the result of this magical effort; but it opens up interesting possibilities for the future.