An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Coven

The traditional number of persons to form a witches’ coven is thirteen. Ideally, they should consist of six men, six women and a leader.

This does not mean, however, that a witches’ cult-group cannot function unless it comprises thirteen persons. Less than this number can form a coven; but the members of a coven should not exceed thirteen. When the membership goes above this figure, the coven should divide itself, and form a new coven. Thus the Craft spreads and continues.

There is an old witch law that the meeting-place of a coven should be at least a league (3 miles) from the meeting-place of any other coven, to avoid any clashes of interest. It is also a traditional rule that covens should not know too much about the private business of other covens or their members. Only the leaders should keep in touch with each other. The reason for this was, that in the times of persecution, what people did not know they could not be made to tell.

The practice of using ’eke-names’, or nicknames, for members of the coven, arose partly from the same source; though this is also an old and world-wide custom, that people going through a significant religious ceremony take a new name, to signify a permanent change of personality. We can even see a reminder of this in the Christian Church, where people are allowed to change their Christian names at Confirmation, if they wish to do so.

The coven of thirteen is the best-known of the witches’ cult groups; but there is also a lesser-known coven of eight. This consists of more experienced initiates than the coven of thirteen. In fact, the latter might be called the fertility coven, invoking and worshipping the powers of life and luck in a general way; whereas the coven of eight is the magical coven, which concentrates on deeper things, and is especially interested in achieving the higher states of consciousness. The people comprising a coven of eight are likely to be generally older, and much more reserved and secretive, than those who belong to a coven of thirteen.

Apart from these two kinds of coven, there are individual witches who are not organised into any coven, and prefer to work on their own. Such witches are generally elderly, and often possess a good deal of experience, and more potent occult powers than those who are members of covens. It will generally be found, however, that they have been trained in a coven in their earlier years; and they usually know the whereabouts of other witches, and will occasionally join forces with them for some special purpose.

In recent years various estimates have been made of the number of witch covens operating in the British Isles. Most of these have been merely fanciful guesses; as not all witches by any means belong to the same rule of witchcraft. Owing to the years of persecution, the craft has become fragmented, and different branches of it follow their own ramifications, ’keeping themselves to themselves’.

The well-meaning activities of the late Gerald Gardner, in publicising witchcraft, aroused strong indignation among many of the old practitioners. In fact, they would agree with the person who said that today there were three kinds of witches—white witches, black witches, and publicity witches! They regard the activities of people who call themselves ’Kings’ and ’Queens’ of the witches as being just showmanship. Nor do these oldsters view with favour the version of witchcraft practised in the covens Gerald Gardner founded, which they feel to be more ’Gardnerian’ than traditional.

To this, the ’Gardnerians’ retort that Gerald Gardner’s motives for publicising witchcraft were good and sincere, and that thanks to him the old Craft of the Wise has experienced a veritable renaissance in the present day. They claim that their practices are as traditional as anyone else’s, and that their beliefs and philosophy have brought happiness to many people, who, were it not for Gerald Gardner, would never have heard of witchcraft as a religion and a way of life.

They agree that publicity was a break with the old custom; but they say that times have changed, and that public discussion of witchcraft has enabled old traditions to be gathered together and preserved, that might otherwise have died out and been lost.

They agree, too, that the renewal of public interest in witchcraft and the occult generally has brought a good deal of highly dubious activity in its train. However, they point out that this is a perennial problem for all serious occultists, and that time eventually sorts out the good from the bad, and the genuine from the bogus.

The number thirteen has long been regarded as having peculiar magical properties, which are reflected in the cult-group of twelve people and a leader. In astrology, which goes back far into the pre-Christian era, we have the sun and the twelve signs of the zodiac. Also, and this is the thing which most probably applies to witchcraft, there are thirteen lunar months to the year; an older time measure than the twelve calendar months we now have. Thus there were thirteen full-moon Esbats to each year, as celebrated by the witches.

Throughout history, we find cult groups of thirteen people; that is, twelve and a leader. Romulus, the hero who founded Rome, had twelve companions, called lictors. The ancient priesthood of the Arval Brethren were twelve, who danced round the statue of Dea Dia, representing the thirteenth. The Danish hero Hrolf, was followed by his twelve Berserks. Some versions of the Arthurian legends say that King Arthur’s Round Table consisted of the king and twelve of his principal knights. In medieval legend, King Charlemagne had his twelve Paladins. Robin Hood’s band in Sherwood Forest, according to some stories, consisted of twelve men and one woman, Maid Marian.

The old Celtic stories tell us of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain, which Merlin the wizard took with him when he vanished from among men. The same concept of the sacred thirteen appears in the legends of the Northmen, who pictured Odin as ruling in Asgard over a company of twelve principal gods and goddesses.

We have a survival of the sanctity and potency of thirteen in our system of trial by jury, which calls for twelve people, presided over by the judge, to return their verdict. There is also the old belief, often encountered in English ghost lore, that twelve clergymen acting together could banish a troublesome spirit, or at any rate, bind it to trouble the living no more. In this case the ghost is the thirteenth.

From its associations with witchcraft, the number thirteen came to be called the ’Devil’s Dozen’. Old pictures of witches’ meetings often depict twelve people and a thirteenth. There is, for instance, a very charming fifteenth-century French miniature from the Rawlinson MS in the Bodleian Library, which depicts a witches’ meeting just outside a village. In the foreground, three women and a man are adoring a goat, with lighted candles in their hands. Behind them, two couples are embracing. Three witches mounted on broomsticks fly merrily overhead, and another witch is just emerging from the chimney of the nearest house. Thus there are twelve witches in the picture, and the Goat God is the thirteenth.

Margaret Murray, in her book The God of the Witches (Faber, London, 1952), reproduces a picture of a witches’ dance from an old black-letter ballad of “Robin Goodfellow”. There are shown eleven witches dancing in the ring, man and woman alternately. Outside the circle of dancers, a twelfth witch plays on some musical instrument, probably a recorder. The thirteenth figure is Robin Goodfellow, dancing in the circle, horned and hoofed, and carrying a lighted candle and a broomstick. He is either the Old God himself or his earthly representative in ritual disguise. There is another version of this picture which shows six men and six women in the circle, plus the figure of Robin Goodfellow and the musician outside the circle. It is curious that these two versions exist and it may have some significance.

One of the earliest witchcraft trials in the British Isles of which full details have survived, is that of Dame Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny in 1324. The names of the accused are recorded, and they total twelve. The thirteenth was one Robin Artisson, the ’Devil’ of the coven, who escaped (as eventually did Dame Alice). (See KYTELER, DAME ALICE.)

Two more covens of thirteen are described by Joseph Glanvil in his Sadducismus Triumphatus, published in 1681. Glanvil was Chaplain to King Charles II, and he deplored the growing scepticism of the times, or ’Sadducism’ as he called it, and he wrote his book to confute it. He recounts a number of interesting tales to prove the reality of witchcraft and the supernatural. Among them is the story of the Somerset witches who were tried in 1664. There were two covens of thirteen people each, one at Wincanton and the other at Brewham. They were governed by a mysterious ’Man in Black’, whose identity was never revealed. Again, this is a case in which the actual names of the two covens of thirteen are preserved in legal records.

A Scottish witch, Isobel Gowdie of Auldearne, for some reason gave herself up to the authorities in 1662 and made the longest and most detailed confession which has come down to us from a witch trial in Britain. In the course of this, she stated that the witches were organised in covens, and that there were thirteen people in each coven.

Dr. Russell Hope Robbins, in his Encyclopaedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (Crown Publishers Inc, New York, 1959), scorns the idea of the real existence of witch covens, and says that the word ’coven’ first appeared in 1662, as a result of Isobel Gowdie’s confession, which he calls “these meanderings of an old woman”. But according to Christina Hole, in her Witchcraft in England (Batsford, London, 1945 and Collier Macmillan, New York, 1966) Isobel Gowdie was “a pretty, red-haired girl, the wife of a farmer”, and her name is still remembered among the people of Morayshire. She was hanged at the West Port of Elgin, and her body was afterwards burned to ashes, in the belief that this was the only way a witch’s power could be really banished. Why she sacrificed herself has never been discovered.

Chaucer uses the word ’covent’ in his Canterbury Tales, meaning an assembly of thirteen people. It is actually a variant of the word ’convent’, and survives to this day in London in the name of Covent Garden. The Latinised spelling ’convent’ was introduced about 1550, and gradually superseded the older form. A poem of the early fourteenth century, called “Handlyng Synne”, tells of a ’coveyne’ of thirteen people who impiously held a dance in the churchyard while the priest was saying Mass, and were duly punished for their sinful ways.

Evidently the ’covent’, ’coveyne’ or ’coven’ (there are a number of variant spellings) was a group of thirteen people. They might be Christians, as in a book of Ecclesiastical Memorials (quoted by the Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1933), written in 1536, which speaks of houses of religion “whereof the number in any one house is or of late hath been less than a covent, that is to say under thirteen persons”. But the naughty people of the ’coveyne’ who danced in the churchyard were certainly not religious persons.

Eventually, the word ’coven’ came to be used exclusively of the witches’ cult group; and so it has come down to our day.

The traditions of heraldry embody much curious lore and symbolism, some of which contains hints of the occult. It is notable that the old constitution of the College of Heralds consists of thirteen persons: three Kings of Arms, namely Garter, Clarencieux and Norroy; six Heralds, Somerset, Richmond, Lancaster, Windsor, Chester and York; and four Pursuivants, called Rouge Dragon, Blue Mantle, Portcullis and Rouge Croix.