An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Australia, Witchcraft in Present-day

When modern Australia came into being, peopled by emigrants from Europe, it was natural that the old beliefs of witchcraft should have travelled with them.

Nevertheless, a considerable sensation was created when a well-known Australian artist, Rosaleen Norton, publicly admitted to being ’The Witch of King’s Cross’, the Bohemian quarter of Sydney. Lurid and sensational allegations were made against her and her associates, which led to her arrest in 1956; but at her subsequent trial she was acquitted.

In previous and subsequent interviews with the Press, Rosaleen Norton spoke frankly of her life as a witch. She was born in Dunedin, New Zealand. Her father, a captain in the Merchant Navy, was a cousin of the composer, Vaughan Williams. From her earliest years, she felt herself to be somehow different from most other people. Being a witch came to her naturally. At the age of 13 she took a private and personal “Oath of allegiance to the Horned God”, in a ceremony which involved the burning of a joss stick, and the use of some wine, a little of her own blood and some green leaves. She had never been taught this ritual; it came to her instinctively.

Miss Norton’s own description of herself contains certain small but significant physical peculiarities which in former days would have been regarded as evidence of the Devil’s mark. These include two small blue dots on her left knee, which appeared when she was 7 years old; a pair of unusual muscles down her sides, which are not normally found in the human body; a rare formation of the upper ears, known as ’Darwin’s Peak’; and the ability to see clearly in semi-darkness, like a cat.

Add to these an extraordinary talent for drawing and painting the fantastic and weird conceptions of her own inner mind, from the beautiful to the horrific, and it is easy to see how she caused consterntion among the respectable bourgeoisie of Australia. An exhibition of her pictures was alleged to be ’obscene’; but again she fought the case and was acquitted.

She said in 1955 that her coven in Sydney consisted of seven persons; but that it was only one of half a dozen covens in that city, and she knew personally about thirty people, men and women, who were witches. They met at various places, sometimes outdoors.

Witchcraft was known as ’The Goat Fold’. Her coven invoked the pagan gods, who were sometimes called Pan and Hecate. A splendid mural painting of Pan presided over a little altar in her Sydney flat, with a motto written across the lower part: “I ’Psi’ with my little ’I’.” (“Psi” is the psychic researchers’ term for supernormal faculties.)

Like modern witches in Britain, Rosaleen Norton denied being a Satanist or devil-worshipper. For her, she said, the God Pan was the spirit of this planet, Earth and of all aspects of Nature which pertain to it. His name in Greek means ’All’. His horns and hoofs are emblems of “natural energies and fleet-footed freedom”; his pipes “a symbol of magic and mystery”. Only people who projected on to him their own malice and frustration regarded him as the Devil.

Her coven sometimes worked naked, and sometimes wore robes and hoods. They also made use of masks, representing various animals; a practice that was found in some of the old European covens. Each initiate took an oath of allegiance to the deities of the coven in an old ceremonial posture, kneeling with one hand on the crown of the head and the other beneath the sole of one foot. A new name was given to the initiate, together with a talisman to wear, and a cord known as ’The Witches’ Garter’.

Incense was used freely in the ceremonies, and sometimes infusions of herbs were prepared and drunk. An invocation of the Four Elements, earth, water, air, and fire, also had a place in the ritual.

Pictures of Pan’s altar in Rosaleen Norton’s flat showed it decorated with stag’s antlers and pine cones, and bearing candles, incense, ritual vessels, and a spray of green leaves in a vase. Miss Norton, slim, dark and attractive, was posed beside it.

Witchcraft was in the Australian news again in 1961, when another coven led by Anton Miles was described and pictured in the press. Miles was stated to be an Englishman, who had come to Australia after travelling in Asia and the Middle East, where he had studied magic and the occult. In 1959, according to Miles, he had been initiated as a witch while on a visit to Britain, in a coven that met in the Watford area, north of London. He returned to Australia, and started his own cult in Sydney.

His coven danced in the nude round a candle-lit altar. Wine and cakes, as symbols of the gifts of Nature, were placed on the altar, and incense was burned. Music was provided by a record player as an accompaniment to the dancing. The object of the rites was to bring the participants into harmony with Nature. The male aspect of Nature was called Pan, and the female Diana.

This coven practised a kind of pagan marriage ceremony, called a ’pairing rite’, in which a man and a girl, both nude within the magic circle, would leap hand in hand over a broomstick, which was held by two other members of the coven.

Anton Miles admitted that his rites were newly imported into Australia; but Rosaleen Norton and her associates claimed that their basic rituals had come to Australia in the nineteenth century, with early immigrants from the country districts of England.