A Witches Bible - Janet Farrar, Stewar Farrar 1981

Introduction
Principles, Rituals and Beliefs of Modern Witchcraft

This book is intended as a companion volume to our earlier one, Eight Sabbats for Witches, and it has a double purpose.

When we wrote the earlier book, we were fortunate in being able to enlist the help of Doreen Valiente. She was one of the late Gerald Gardner’s High Priestesses, and she was co-author with him of the definitive version of the Book of Shadows, the ritual anthology which is copied out by hand by each new Gardnerian (or Alexandrian) witch when he or she is initiated, and which is by now the accepted liturgy (to borrow a Christian word) of an unknown but certainly large number of covens throughout the world.

The Book of Shadows has never been published; it only exists in handwritten copies, which are in theory only available to initiated witches. But Gardner himself revealed elements of it, disguised in his novel High Magic’s Aid (1949), and undisguised in his non-fiction books Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959).¹ And since Gardner’s death in 1964, almost all the remainder has been leaked, plagiarized (usually without acknowledgement) or distorted either deliberately or by careless copying. This produced the unsatisfactory situation where a theoretically secret document was public property, but in a number of versions which varied from reasonably accurate to maliciously or ignorantly garbled.

With Doreen’s agreement, therefore, we were glad to be able to begin the task of defining what the Gardner/Valiente Book of Shadows actually said. Also, we were able to identify at least some of the sources from which the Book was compiled. This was not always easy, because Gardner himself (perhaps not foreseeing how widespread and public the revival which he initiated would become) never bothered to identify them, except now and then to Doreen in passing. (See the remarks on Texts A, B and C below.) Apart from the genuinely traditional passages, some elements, such as the Kipling verse in the Bealtaine ritual, or the Crowley passages in the Great Rite declamation, were self-identifying; others, such as the borrowings from Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica, were more obscure; and the passages which Doreen herself wrote, such as the bulk of the prose version of the Charge, she could of course tell us about. Some passages’ origins remain a mystery. But we were able to clear the air a good deal.

In Eight Sabbats for Witches, this defining and clarifying process only covered the rituals relevant to our theme: namely, those for setting up and banishing the Circle, the Great Rite and the fragmentary Book of Shadows rituals for the eight seasonal Festivals which we incorporated in our own expansions. In the present book — again with Doreen’s permission and help — we continue the process with the other substantial elements of the Book of Shadows: the first, second and third degree initiation rituals, the consecrations and some miscellaneous items.

There is only one necessary overlap between the two books. In Eight Sabbats for Witches we gave the ritual for casting the Circle in Section I and for banishing it in Section III, with explanations and notes. Since the rituals in the present book cannot be worked without casting and banishing the Circle, we have repeated the casting and banishing rituals here (Appendix B), without the explanations and notes and with condensed instructions, to make this book complete in itself.

We would like to make one or two things clear. First, in taking on this task, we are not setting up the definitive Gardnerian Book of Shadows as Holy Writ. Modern witchcraft is a growing and developing thing, and we ourselves have departed from the original when we felt we had a good reason. But where we have done that, we have always said so, and have said as well what the original was — either in a footnote or in the opening explanation. Nor do we suggest that the Gardnerian body of rituals is ’better’ than other Wiccan systems. What we do suggest is that, for us and thousands of others, it works; that it is coherent and self-consistent; and that if there is a standard to which the whole movement’s rituals can be related, and which is followed by more working covens than any other, this is it. Again, since it is the ’liturgy’ which (like it or not — it is too late by many years to argue about that) has become most publicly known, there are more and more self-initiated groups which are basing their working on whatever Gardnerian rituals they can gather — and some of what they are finding is garbled. We discuss the question of self-initiation, and the setting up of covens without outside help, in Section XXIII; but whether one approves or not, it is happening, and it will happen more healthily if they have the genuine material to work with. Finally, the Gardnerian Book of Shadows is one of the key factors in what has become a far bigger and more significant movement than Gardner can have envisaged; so historical interest alone would be enough reason for defining it while first-hand evidence is still available.

In this book, we refer to Texts A, B and C of the Book of Shadows. We attached these labels ourselves to the three versions of the Book of Shadows which are in Doreen Valiente’s possession. They are:

Text A Gardner’s original rituals as copied down from the New Forest coven which initiated him, and amended, expanded or annotated by himself. His own amendments were very much influenced by the OTO,² of which he was at one time a member. His process of making a coherent whole out of the fragmentary traditional material used by the New Forest coven had already begun.

Text B The more developed version which Gardner was using when he initiated Doreen Valiente in 1953.

Text C This was the final version which Gardner and Doreen produced together, and which was (and still is being) passed on to later initiates and covens. It eliminated much of the OTO and Crowley material which Gardner had introduced; Doreen felt, and persuaded Gardner, that in many places ’this was not really suitable for the Old Craft of the Wise, however beautiful the words might be or how much one might agree with what they said’. Substantial passages in it were written by Doreen herself, or adapted by her from sources more appropriate than the OTO or Crowley, such as the Carmina Gadelica (see Eight Sabbats for Witches).

The parts of the Book of Shadows which changed least between Texts A, B and C were naturally the three initiation rituals; because these, above all, would be the traditional elements which would have been most carefully preserved, probably for centuries, and for which Gardner would have to find little if any gap-filling material. However, the third-degree rite (see Section III) does include some Crowley material in the declamation, where for once it seems entirely suitable.

A note on the Alexandrian offshoot of the Gardnerian movement. In the 1960s Alex Sanders, having failed to gain admission to any Gardnerian coven (including Patricia and Arnold Crowther’s), somehow obtained a copy of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows and used it to found a coven of his own. He attracted, and welcomed, a lot of publicity and initiated people wholesale. He and his wife Maxine were much criticized by Gardnerian and other witches for showmanship, for his claim to be King of the Witches and for the way he freely added any other occult or magical elements that caught his fancy to the strict Gardnerian canon. He had, like Aleister Crowley, a wicked sense of humour, and no scruples about exercising it, which also did not endear him to the rest of the Craft. But like the Joker in a pack of cards, he had a role to play. He and Maxine initiated hundreds of people who might otherwise not have heard of the Craft until years later; many of them of course drifted off or otherwise fell by the wayside, but a substantial number went on to found their own covens and achieve their own balance and build on it. It has to be said that there are many excellent covens working today which would not exist but for the Sanders.

We ourselves were initiated by Alex and Maxine early in 1970, and founded our own coven at Yule of that year. From that London coven, and from our later Irish one, others have hived off — and others, in turn, from them.

Alex and Maxine separated soon after we left them. Alex is in semi-retirement in Sussex, his headline days behind him. Maxine stayed in London, where she worked more quietly and solidly with her half-brother David Goddard as High Priest. In March 1982 she announced that she had become a Liberal Catholic, but added: ’It would be quite untrue to say that I have given up all my previous activities.’ That may well be; we have known other Liberal Catholics who are first-rate occultists.

The Book of Shadows with which we began working was, of course, copied from Alex’s. It is basically Text C but, as we suspected at the time and confirmed later, it was incomplete and contained many amendments of Alex’s own — and many mistakes, for he was not a careful copyist.

We have pointed out several Alexandrian amendments in this book; and to be fair, one or two of them we have found worth retaining ourselves — though again, where we have done this we have always said so, and footnoted Gardner’s original.

The first part of our book, ’Leaves from the Book of Shadows’, consists of the Gardnerian rituals we have discussed above (plus, in Section V, some non-ritual material), with commentaries. The second part, ’More Wiccan Rituals’, offers some of our own which we hope other witches may find useful (as we did with our Wiccaning, Handfasting and Requiem rituals in Eight Sabbats for Witches) and also a Section on protective rituals and talismans.

The third part, ’The Wiccan Path’, fulfils the second purpose of our book — namely to summarize the various aspects of modern witchcraft in what we hope is a concise and helpful form. It includes Sections on the rationale of witchcraft, its ethics, the problems of running a coven, witchcraft and sex, astral projection, spells, clairvoyance and divination, healing, ritual nudity, self-initiation, the role of Wicca in the modern world, and so on.

There seems to be a need for a compendium of this kind, both for the Craft itself and for those who want to know what it is all about. Stewart attempted something of the sort in his 1971 book What Witches Do, and many witches have been good enough to commend it. But here we try to go into more of the reasons behind the reasons, and to expand on some of the things we have learned since 1971. What Witches Do, we like to think, has a special value in that it records the reactions of a new witch exploring an unfamiliar field, and there is little in it which Stewart would want to change. (After many years out of print, it has been republished at about the same time as this present volume, with a new Foreword to the Second Edition, by Phoenix Publishing Co., PO Box 10, Custer, WA 98240, USA.)

In the third part of this book, we do not claim to speak for the Craft as a whole, nor to propose any final authoritative orthodoxy; finality, authority and the very concept of orthodoxy are foreign to Wicca anyway. We have merely put down things as we see them, as we have experienced them and as we have learned them from witch friends of many paths — as a basis for discussion, agreements and disagreement, and (always) for further study.

We would like to think that these two volumes together, Eight Sabbats for Witches and The Witches’ Way, offer a basic ’liturgy’ and working handbook on which any coven can build its own unique philosophy and practice, within the common tradition — and that to interested non-witches they will give an overall picture of what these strange people in their midst are doing and believing, and why; perhaps persuading them that witches are not so bizarre, misguided or dangerous after all.

Finally, we are very happy to include an Appendix By Doreen Valiente herself, entitled ’The Search for Old Dorothy’. Gerald Gardner claimed to have been initiated in 1939 by Old Dorothy Clutterbuck, a New Forest witch. Some of his detractors have suggested that Old Dorothy, and even the New Forest coven, were a fiction invented by Gardner to give plausibility to his ’pretence’ to be an initiated witch. Doreen set herself the task of proving the detractors wrong — and did so. We leave it to her to describe her search and its fruits, which are a solid contribution to the history of the Craft revival.

JANET FARRAR

STEWART FARRAR

Note to Fourth Impression

Two years after its publication, we find no need for changes in our text. But we would make two points: our remarks about the Irish Craft scene have been overtaken by events. The Craft revival is on the move in Ireland, and we are certainly no longer the ’only known witches’. A symptom of this is the lively little pagan magazine Ancient Ways, produced by Dublin initiates of ours who hived off and founded their own coven. (It can be obtained from The Alchemists’ Head, 10 East Essex Street, Dublin 2.)

The second point is that we make several references to our living in Co. Louth. We have moved since then, but have allowed the references to stand.

A point on the Charge. This was written before the current (and justified) sensitivity about the patriarchal slant of the English language, and uses the words ’man’ and ’men’ to include men and women. We have left the printed text as it is, but our own practice is to amend the Charge in places to correct this, and others may wish to do the same. For example, we say ’heart of mankind’ instead of ’heart of man’, which some may not feel radical enough. But in amending it, care should be taken not to destroy the rhythm and poetry of this lovely declamation.

We would like to thank the hundreds of readers all over the world who have written to us, and still do; and if pressure of work, and the sheer volume of these letters, has prevented us from answering all of them promptly, we hope they will understand.

Herne’s Cottage,

J.F.

Ethelstown,

S.F.

Kells, Co. Meath, Ireland.