An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Fertility, Worship of

It is not easy for present-day people, living in our glossy civilised world of supermarkets and packaged food, to realise what fertility really meant to our ancestors in past centuries.

For one thing, their expectation of life was shorter than ours, and infant mortality was much higher. They needed a big birth-rate to keep any nation or tribe strong. Also, if their crops failed, they could not easily buy food to make up for it; hunger stared them in the face.

Earlier still, before man learned to grow crops, he was dependent upon the herds of game which he hunted for meat. If they became fewer, his life became proportionately harder.

Consequently, when people in ancient times performed rituals for fertility, they were not doing this for a pastime. They were in the greatest earnest.

The principle of fertility is, after all, a very deep, fundamental and mysterious thing. It is Life itself, bursting out in a myriad forms, from the earth and the waters, never standing still, ever renewing itself; eternal, yet ever changing.

Even so, the sex-drive behind human fertility is something deep and fundamental, one of the primeval forces. And, although it was the principle of Life itself that the ancients were seeking to come into harmony with, their means of doing so was usually through their own sexuality; sex made into a ritual. ’As above, so below’. As they performed the acts which stimulated life, so the powers of universal fertility would be aroused and move.

As it was the country folk who lived closest to the earth, they were more immediately involved in fertility rites than the town dwellers. Consequently, it was the rustic pagans, the pagani or country-folk, who clung to these old ways after the townspeople had turned to more sophisticated, intellectual creeds. Because people believed in these old rites, crude and shocking though the more refined classes found them, they were loath to give them up.

Hence Christianity, although it was the official religion of Europe, was for a long period only a veneer over deep layers of old paganism, much of which went back to the very dawn of time. In Hindu and Buddhist countries, the same situation existed, and still does, to a considerable extent. The intellectual and the refined town dweller have their creeds and practices; the peasant has his primitive magic, based on beliefs of unknown antiquity.

In Western Europe the Wise Ones, or witches, kept to the old ways; and often had more public opinion behind them in the countryside than the Christian priest could command. An instance of this occurred in Dorset, in comparatively recent times. On the side of Trendle Hill, the great hill-figure of the Cerne Giant stands, fierce and with erect phallus. A certain clergyman who objected to the Giant’s frank sexuality, wanted to have ploughed up that part of the chalk-cut figure which he considered indecent. But the people of the countryside around were so much opposed to this being done, that they made him desist. “If you do that,” they said, “our crops will fail.”

In times past, this figure was ’scoured’, or cleaned and renewed, every seven years. This occasion was accompanied by a folk-festival on the hill, at which sexual intercourse was freely indulged in. The local clergy, however, did succeed in suppressing this rite. The Giant of Cerne now belongs to the National Trust; so the old periodic scouring, which has kept this and the rest of Britain’s unique hill-figures in being, is no longer necessary.

People kept up old fertility rites, not only because they frankly enjoyed them, but because they really believed these rites to work. These rituals served to keep people in touch with the forces of Life, which were also the forces of Luck. Many old lucky charms are of a frankly sexual nature. Small figures of the phallus have been worn as lucky charms since the days of Ancient Egypt. Sometimes these little phalli are fancifully decorated with wings and bells. (See PHALLIC WORSHIP.)

The maypole, which used to stand permanently in some of our towns and villages, is a phallic symbol; which is why the Puritans destroyed so many of the old maypoles. However, a very fine and tall maypole, one of the highest left in England, stands to this day in the significantly-named village of Paganhill, near Stroud, Gloucestershire.

Another relic of ancient sexual rites in Britain is the group of stones called the Men-an-Tol, in Cornwall. One of these stones is carefully cut away in the centre, so that it has a circular hole bored through it. On either side of it are upright stones of phallic shape. These stones represent the old Powers of Life and date from prehistoric times. For unknown centuries, they have been believed to be magical stones; and sick people have been passed through the holed stone of the Men-an-Tol in the hope of curing them.

The idea behind this type of ritual is that contact with the forces of life brings renewed vitality. From this mysterious élan vital flows the feeling of ecstatic joy that surges through so many religious and magical dances; notably the naked dance of witches at their Sabbats and Esbats.

Witchcraft is concerned with the forces of fertility, through among other things its practices of moon worship (though it is not the material moon which is worshipped, but the feminine power of Nature behind it). The moon is intimately connected with fertility, both of the earth and of human beings. On woman’s monthly cycle of menstruation and ovulation her fertility depends; while that of man depends upon his sperm, which astrologically is ruled by the moon. Its appearance is reminiscent of lunar whiteness and opalescence, of moonstones and crystals. Both sperm and menstrual blood have always been believed to be potent magical substances, for this reason. (See MOON WORSHIP.)

Sun worship, too, is essentially the worship of Life. Without the light of the sun, no crops would ripen; and all things on earth would wither and die. Without moisture, however, to temper the sun’s heat, nothing could grow in the parched land. The sun is the father of fire; the moon is the mother of water. Without these two principles, there would be no life as we know it manifested on earth. The link between the two is air; while earth is the sphere of their manifestation.

Life, therefore, to the ancients who philosophised from Nature, and all the fertility thereof, depends upon the universal interplay of positive and negative forces, counterbalancing and complementary to each other. Positive and negative; fire and water; sun and moon; man and woman; god and goddess; light and darkness; day and night; Lucifer and Diana; Pan and Hecate.

This, then, is the belief behind the sex-rites of ancient fertility cults. These rites were not only sympathetic magic, to arouse the life-giving forces of Nature. They were in their purest form the hieros gamos, or sacred marriage, which was the universal arcanum of Life itself—the rebis or ’double thing’ of the alchemists.

When present-day witches perform such rites, if they are true followers of the old traditions, they do so in this spirit, and not merely for the sake of the ’sex orgies’ so beloved by certain sections of the sensationalist press. It does not seem to occur to the writers of these sensational reports, that if all witches wanted was ’sex orgies’, they would have no need to invent a witch cult in order to indulge in them. In our present-day ’permissive society’, sex is blazoned forth everywhere, usually in some more or less commercialised form. Cheapened and degraded, sex in the form of promiscuity is so prevalent that people whose minds contain any other ideas on the subject are made to feel out-of-date, ’not with it’, ’square’ and so on.

And yet, how few people, in the midst of all this frantic search for satisfaction, ever seem to find it; and how many, beneath their surface gaiety, are loveless, insecure, neurotic and miserable? Perhaps the old idea of the sacredness of sex was not so foolish after all? To degrade sex is to degrade life itself.

Contrary to many misrepresentations, witches do not believe in promiscuity, any more than they believe in prudishness; because they do not think that either extreme is a natural way of living for human beings.

But, the sceptic may say, what place have the rites of an ancient fertility cult in the modern world at all? Do we still need to perform these old rituals in order to make the crops grow? And as for increasing the population, isn’t the world grossly over-populated already?

The answer is that all things, including living religions, evolve; and the Craft of the Wise is a living religion. Over the years, we have begun to see a new concept of the idea of fertility; one that is not only material, but also of the mind and the soul.

The creative forces are not only creative in the physical sense; they can also beget and give birth to art, music, poetry and literature. We speak of people’s minds being ’fertile’ or ’barren’. We talk of ’cultivating’ ideas as well as fields; of new ’conceptions’ of a better way of living. There is a spiritual as well as a material fertility; and human life is a desert without it. These are the aims towards which sincere and intelligent present-day pagans, witches, and Nature-worshippers are tending.

The spirit of the old rites, therefore, continues; but in a higher form. The concern is not so much with literal fertility as with vitality, and with finding one’s harmony with Nature. In this way, people seek for a philosophy of life which bestows peace of mind, as well as physical satisfaction.

Of course, initiation as a witch cannot automatically bestow anything on anyone. Witchcraft is the Craft of the Wise; and no one can be made wise. They can only become wise. All that initiation into any of the mysteries can or ever could do, is to open the gate; whether or not the individual progresses further is up to him. This, too, is something the modern world seems to find hard to understand.

Witchcraft is, and always has been, a fertility cult. As such, it is life-affirming, instead of life-repressing. Its followers throughout the ages have not been intellectuals, but people who were often unlettered, and who were concerned with the fundamentals of birth, life and death. Magic does not work through the intellect; it works through the instincts and emotions, the fundamental things that man was born with. Sex is one of the most fundamental and instinctive things of all; consequently it is one of the most potently magical things, when rightly understood.