Natural Magic - Doreen Valiente 1998

Foreword

CREDITS

Author’s own drawings: 1, 2, 4, 8; from Observations on Popular Antiquities by John Brand (Chatto and Windus, London, 1877): 3, 9, 12, 13, 15; from Our Woodland Trees by Francis George Heath (Sampson Low & Co., London, 1878): 5 (artist L. Evans); from Le Satanisme et la Magie by Jules Bois (Leon Chailley, Paris, 1895): 6, 7, 10 (artist Henri de Malvost); from Etruscan Roman Remains by Charles Godfrey Leland (Fisher Unwin, London, 1892): 11, 14, 16; from The Book of Days (W. & R. Chambers, Edinburgh, 1869): 17; from The Discovery of Witches by Matthew Hopkins (London, 1647): 18.

Doreen Valiente was one of the founders of modern Wicca and was initiated into four different branches of the Old Religion in Great Britain. She studied the occult for more than thirty years and was one of witchcraft’s most widely known figures. Over the years, Doreen Valiente made many television and radio appearances, discussing witchcraft and folklore and displaying items from her collection of witchcraft objects. She is the author of An ABC of Witchcraft: Past and Present, Witchcraft for Tomorrow, The Rebirth of Witchcraft and Witchcraft: A Tradition Renewed (with Evan John Jones). Doreen Valiente died in 1999.

Foreword

To many people, the title of this book may seem to be a contradiction in terms. They think of magic as something essentially unnatural; indeed, against nature, because if it works at all then it must work by overthrowing nature’s laws.

However, the occult philosophers of olden time have never conceived of magic in this way. To them, magic works because of nature’s laws, not in spite of them. It is something built into the universe. Hence, there is nothing really supernatural or supernormal, in the strict sense of these words. All is part of nature; but much of the realm of nature is ’occult’, that is, hidden.

The occultist, therefore, is one who ventures into these hidden realms in search of their secrets. He is not some wild-eyed crank who goes around dressed in eccentric clothes in order to attract attention to himself. Some people may behave like this, and no doubt get a lot of fun out of it. They are perhaps feeling the influence of Uranus, the planet of the eccentric and bizarre (among other things), which rules the new age of Aquarius upon which mankind is entering. However, in the past occultists have been more anxious to go about their business secretly than to call attention to themselves. When the penal laws against witchcraft were in force, becoming noticed as a practitioner of the occult could have dire results.

Today, it must be evident to all thinking people that we have entered upon a new era. Call it the Age of Aquarius, the Aeon of Horus (as Aleister Crowley did), or what you will. Not only has the physical world been revolutionized by new scientific discoveries; things like morality and basic social attitudes are undergoing change. One of the spheres in which this is happening is the public attitude to occultism.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that a revival of magic has taken place. It started around 1951, when the last of the moth-eaten old Witchcraft Acts was finally banished from the statute book of English law. Hitherto, this Act had been used to prosecute Spiritualist mediums and clairvoyants, and in theory it could be used to bring a prosecution irrespective of whether a medium was genuine or not. Its repeal and replacement by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which in effect legally recognizes the possibility of genuine psychic gifts, was a turning-point in the history of occultism in Britain. Not only did it set Spiritualism free; it also, perhaps rather to the surprise of the legislators, enabled witchcraft itself to emerge from the shadows where it had lurked for so long, and to be proclaimed by its followers as the oldest religion in the world.

In the same fateful year, 1951, appeared the first edition (published by Riders of London) of The Great Beast, John Symonds’ now-famous biography of Aleister Crowley, a man of considerable stature as a poet who had devoted his whole amazing life to magic. This book caught the public imagination and from then on the occult revival has steadily gathered momentum.

The results of this have naturally been mixed. People who had become cynically atheist and materialist because of their disgust with orthodox religions, have been encouraged to think again and have sometimes been enabled to achieve a completely new outlook upon life. On the other hand, all kinds of charlatanry have been enabled to flourish; and, of course, the hustlers have moved in, determined to get their hands upon every possible pound or dollar available in this great new bonanza.

It is partly as a protest against this latter tendency that this book has been written. I wanted to show people that magic is for all, as nature is for all. Magic, indeed, is all around us, in stones, flowers, stars, the dawn wind and the sunset cloud; all we need is the ability to see and understand. We do not need to join high-sounding ’secret’ fraternities, swear frightful oaths and pay fees, in order to become magicians. Very few fraternities are genuinely old and still fewer have any real secrets to impart. Still less do we need to buy a load of expensive paraphernalia, such as ceremonial swords, wands and so on, which can be seen advertised tor sale today.

Moreover, I have tried in this book to be essentially practical, as magicians and witches have been throughout the ages, ever since the days of ancient Egypt and before. Magic is meant to help people, including yourself. The priggish notion that ’you mustn’t use magic for yourself, only to help others’ is a piece of sanctimonious waffle that is entirely modern. If you study the history of magic and the lives of famous magicians, you will find that this is so. The highly spiritual religion of ancient Egypt was inextricably entwined with magic, as the great Egyptologist Wallis Budge has made clear in his book Egyptian Magic (first published in London in 1901 and now reprinted by Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1971).

Many people will tell you that occultism, witchcraft and magic are dangerous. So they are; so is crossing the road; but we shall not get far if we are afraid ever to attempt it. However, we can choose either to dash across recklessly, or to use our common sense and cross with care, and so it is with magic. It is often argued, too, that magic can be used both for good and for evil. Of course it can; so can electricity, atomic power, television, the power of the press, indeed anything that has any power in it at all.

However, in my book I have endeavoured to exclude anything really harmful and where any caution is necessary, I have tried to indicate it. I have set out to write a treatise which will put the simpler kinds of magic, such as the village ’wise-women’, or white witches, have used for centuries, within the reach of all.

For this reason, too, I have written about the old method of fortune-telling with ordinary playing cards, rather than the more expensive Tarot cards; because almost everyone has a pack of playing cards in their home, or can easily obtain one. It may be wondered what relation playing cards have to natural magic; but I think the curious correspondence noted in Chapter X between the pack of cards and the calendar of the year earns them a place here.

The quotation in Chapter V of part of the wonderful ’Hymn to the Sun’ by the Pharaoh Akhenaton, is from the translation of this hymn made by the late Professor Henry James Breasted, and comes from his book A History of Egypt, first published in 1906 (Hodder & Stoughton, London, and Charles Scribner’s Sons, USA).

As poetry is essentially a magical art, and has its origins in magic, here is a poem of my own which seems relevant in this place. It is entitled “The Mysteries”:

Here and now are the Mysteries.

Out of no stored and storied past

Of things long lost;

But the breathing moment of time.

Out of no twilight

But that which falls upon the hills this night.

The old trees partake of them,

And the voices of the grass;

The ghost-white blossomed elders,

And the first clouded glow

Of the rising moon.

If we can hear,

If we can see,

Out of no buried past they come;

But from the fields of our own home

Is reaped the grain

That makes the bread of their feast.

Out of the flowers of every summer

Flows the honey of their mead.

Look, between the stones is a blade of grass;

And all the rites of the high Mysteries,

And the runes of all witcheries,

Are written upon it.

DOREEN VALIENTE