An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Atlantis, Traditions Derived from

The late Lewis Spence, who was an authority on Ancient Mexico and also on the subject of Atlantis, made an extraordinary discovery, relevant to the history of the witch cult, in a pre-Columbian manuscript. This native Mexican painting, known as the Codex Fejervary-Mayer, shows quite unmistakably, a picture of a naked witch wearing a pointed hat and riding on a broomstick.

Spence stated in his Encyclopaedia of Occultism (George Routledge, London, 1920, and University Books, New Hyde Park, New York, 1959), that he had found good evidence for the existence of a witch cult similar to that of Europe, in pre-Columbian Mexico. He remarks that this seems to indicate a very ancient origin for what he calls “the witch-religion”.

How could the unknown artist of a picture painted in Mexico before Columbus discovered the Americas, have possibly depicted this very distinctive figure? There are witches in Mexico today; but their existence can be accounted for by the beliefs brought to the New World by the Spanish Conquistadores. Nevertheless, before the European conquest of Mexico, followers of a cult that worshipped a lunar goddess and the god of the Underworld, of death and the world of spirits, used to meet at crossroads, as European witches did.

The pointed cap worn by the pre-Columbian witch in the picture mentioned above, is of course the ancient original of the pointed ’witch’s hat’ worn by the sorceresses of popular fairy tales. It probably represents the ’Cone of Power’ that witches seek to raise by their ritual It appears also in an even older painting, one in fact dating from the Stone Age, at Cogul in north-eastern Spain.

Robert Graves in The White Goddess (Faber, London, 1961 and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1966), describes this latter picture as “The most ancient surviving record of European religious practice”. It appears to depict a dance of witches, a group of women dancing in a circle round a naked man. The women are wearing pointed caps and the man something that looks very like the ritual garters which are traditionally a mark of rank in the witch cult. (See CAVE-ART, RELIGIOUS AND MAGICAL.)

We may then at least speculate, on the evidence, that the witch-cult is of very ancient origin, and that in some remote period of antiquity there was some contact between its devotees in Europe and Central America. The means of that contact may have been the lost continent of Atlantis.

At least one of the surviving branches of the witch cult in Britain definitely claims to derive its traditions from Atlantis or, as it calls it, ’The Water City’. Orthodox historians may scoff at the whole idea of the sunken continent, and dismiss it as legendary. For many years, the city of Troy was dismissed in the same way, until Heinrich Schliemann dug it up.