A Witches Bible - Janet Farrar, Stewar Farrar 1981

The Rationale of Witchcraft
The Wiccan Path
Principles, Rituals and Beliefs of Modern Witchcraft

Witches are neither fools, escapist nor superstitious. They are living in the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages, and they accept the fact without reservation; if they do tend to have a keener sense of historical continuity, and a broader time-canvas, than most people, that makes their awareness of the present more vivid, not less. Many witches are scientists or technicians, and in our experience often very good ones. If modern witchcraft did not have a coherent rationale, such people could only keep going by a kind of deliberate schizophrenia, with neither watertight compartment of their lives particularly happy — and we have seen no signs of that.

Modern witchcraft does have a rationale, and a very coherent one. This may surprise some of our readers, who know only that witchcraft comes from the gut. So it does, as far as motivation and operation go. The working power and the appeal of the Craft do arise from the emotions, the intuition, the ’vasty deep’ of the Collective Unconscious. Its Gods and Goddesses draw their forms from the numinous Archetypes which are the mighty foundation-stones of the human racial psyche.

But Consciousness is human, too. The individual conscious mind is a comparative newcomer to the evolutionary scene on this planet, and — at least as far as land animals are concerned¹ — it is the unique gift of homo sapiens. No other physically manifested land animal has it, though one or two of the higher mammals seem to possess its first embryonic stirrings. Sentimentalists credit their favourite animals with it to a quasi-human degree, but this is pure projection (and a misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness) given colour by the fact that some of the animals’ instinctual patterns, conditioned reflexes and learning ability overlap recognizably with human ones. Pet-owners would understand and learn from the creatures they love much better if they gave up this fantasy and saw (for example) a cat as a cat, with the dignity of its own nature, and not as a furry human.

Consciousness is not only a gift, it is a responsibility. It gives man ’dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’. Dominion in this sense does not mean the right to exploit them; it means that, since man’s growing complexity makes him, for better or worse, the spearpoint of Earth’s evolution, he has the greatest responsibility (indeed, his is the only species with conscious responsibility) towards the whole of manifested Nature. Witches are specially aware of it; Wicca as such is non-political, embracing voters and activists of many shades; but witches all tend to jump on the same soap-box when it comes to environmental issues.

But consciousness burdens man with a responsibility to himself, to his own race, as well. He must integrate conscious with unconscious, intellect with intuition, head with heart, brain with gut. If he does not, their conflict will paralyse or even destroy him, and possibly the Earth too; he will have betrayed the trust of his ’dominion’.

So it is incumbent upon witches, whose religion and Craft stem from the inner depths, to be truly the Wise People and show that Wicca satisfies the intellect as well. They have to demonstrate to themselves and to the world that their faith accords with reality and therefore does not (however beautiful it appears on the surface) contain the seeds of self-destruction.

The rationale of Wicca is a philosophical framework into which every phenomenon, from chemistry to clairvoyance, from logarithms to love, can be reasonably fitted. And since Wicca is a fast-growing movement, active in a real world, it must (without ever losing or weakening its preoccupation with the psychic depths) constantly explain, examine, develop and improve that philosophy.

The rationale of Wicca, as we see it, rests upon two fundamental principles: the Theory of Levels, and the Theory of Polarity.

The Theory of Levels maintains that reality exists and operates on many planes (physical, etheric, astral, mental, spiritual, to give a simplified but generally accepted list²); that each of these levels has its own laws; and that these sets of laws, while special to their own levels, are compatible with each other, their mutual resonance governing the interaction between the levels.

The Theory of Polarity maintains that all activity, all manifestation, arises from (and is inconceivable without) the interaction of pairs and complementary opposites — positive and negative, light and dark, content and form, male and female, and so on; and that this polarity is not a conflict between ’good’ and ’evil', but a creative tension like that between the positive and negative terminals of an electric battery. Good and evil only arise with the constructive or destructive application of that polarity’s output (again, as with the uses to which a battery may be put).

The Theory of Levels describes the structure of the universe; the Theory of Polarity describes its activity; and structure and activity are inseparable. Together, they are the universe.

Let us examine each of them in more detail.

The Theory of Levels (even if over-simplified to matter, mind, spirit and God) was more or less taken for granted until about a couple of centuries ago, when the avalanche of the Scientific Revolution (and its dark offspring the Industrial Revolution) really began to move. The Scientific Revolution, almost exclusively concerned with the physical level of reality, was a necessary if often temporarily disorienting stage in man’s development; the time had come for him to understand and conquer matter and its laws.

The trouble was that he did it so brilliantly, with such awe-inspiring and heady success, that he deluded himself into thinking that matter was the only level of reality. He came to believe that mind was merely an epiphenomenon, an electro-chemical activity of the physical brain; and that ’spirit’ was a fantasy, a symbolic projection of man’s mental or even glandular conflicts and uncertainties, or at best of his urge to perfection, the true key to which (it was believed) lay in material progress.

One would have thought that organized religion would have put forward a meaningful corrective to all this; but in fact its voice was barely head crying in the wilderness of triumphant materialism. In all the active arenas of human ideas, religion was relegated to the ethical or charity-doling sidelines, or to moral rationalizations of the social consequences of industrialization. As far as philosophy, the interpretation of cosmic reality, was concerned, it could fight only rearguard actions. Materialism was the actual dynamic force of the epoch.

And yet, for those with eyes to see, the discoveries of science were full of hints of the wider truth. Within its own limits, science reflected the Theory of Levels. The laws of each of its disciplines — mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and so on — were different, yet compatible. A botanist, analysing the structure and metabolism of a leaf, had to acknowledge and make use of the formulae of chemistry and mathematics and physics as well as his own. Each science’s set of laws had its own unique character and relevance; yet they all interacted, and no two sets of laws were in mutual conflict. Where they appeared to contradict each other, the scientists knew it was because they had not yet perfectly understood them, and quite rightly they studied and reassessed them until the apparent conflict was resolved.

It has only been in our lifetime that the wiser scientists have begun, on any significant scale, to have doubts about the neat nineteenth-century vision of a universe as a mere (however complex) physical mechanism.

These doubts, too, are a natural development. If one pushes the investigation of the physical plane to its uttermost frontiers, the very nature of those frontiers brings one face to face with the areas of interaction with other planes; one keeps getting puzzling glimpses over the boundary wall — and it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore what lies beyond.³

Einstein’s e = mc² and the transcendental subtleties of subatomic physics (in which scientists find themselves using such words as ’indeterminacy', ’strangeness’ and ’charm’ as technical terms) are two of the more obvious fields in which the mechanistic view of the universe is wearing very thin.⁴

Until quite recently, it was professional suicide for a respectable scientist to investigate the ’paranormal’ (ESP, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition and so on) or even to admit that there might be anything to investigate. But today, even in the dollar-dedicated USA and in the officially materialist USSR, universities and defence departments are allocating good money and first-class brains to such research.⁵

And going even farther in support of the Theory of Levels, Sir Bernard Lovell, the father of radio astronomy, can tell that august body the British Association for the Advancement of Science: ’We have deluded ourselves that through science we can find the only avenue to true understanding about nature and the universe…. The simple belief in automatic progress by means of scientific discovery and application is a tragic myth of our age. Science is a powerful and vital human activity; but this confusion of thought and motive is bewildering.’ (The Times, 28 August 1975).

Some of Sir Bernard’s learned listeners probably took those words to be merely a call to scientists to be aware of their moral and ethical responsibilities to the community — important enough in all conscience. But their philosophical implications are far deeper, which at least a minority must have understood and doubtless agreed with.

Either Sir Bernard’s statement means that non-physical levels of reality exist and must be taken into account, or else it is an empty platitude. And we feel that the man who has probably done as much to expand our factual knowledge of the physical universe as any individual since Galileo⁶ with his optical telescopes, is not given to empty platitudes.

Granted, as a working hypothesis, that reality is many-levelled — what are the practical implications?

If witches may quote Marxist Scripture for their own purposes (and our desire to see humanity realize its full potential is as strong as the Communists’ even though our aims and methods are very different from theirs), we would cite Marx and Engels’ statement in The Communist Manifesto: ’The philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it', and Lenin’s more succinct dictum: ’Theory without practice is sterile; practice without theory is blind.’

Witches are practical people; philosophy to them is not just an intellectual exercise — they have to put it into practice in their everyday lives, and in their working, if philosophy is to have any meaning. Similarly, much as they trust instinct, they do not merely blunder ahead in response to its promptings without any reference to logic — they prefer to understand what they are doing, and why. So on the relationship between theory and practice (if on little else) they agree with Lenin.

Witches know in theory, and have satisfied themselves in practice, that there are points and areas of interaction between the levels; situations in which the mental plane acts powerfully on the astral plane and affects its phenomena — or the spiritual on the physical, and so on. Each plane is affecting the others all the time; but there seem to be what may be called points of inter-resonance where this effect is particularly striking and clearly enough defined to be made use of in practice.⁷

It is the discovering and understanding of these points of inter-resonance which constitute a great deal of what witches call ’opening up the levels'; and it is their exploitation, in constructive work, which constitutes the operational side of the Craft.

To make this clear, let us take an example from practical science: namely, television. An event involving movement and sound takes place in the television studio. By suitably designed equipment, this event is transformed into an event on quite a different plane — the plane of electro-magnetic vibrations in what scientists used to call the ’ether’. (They no longer use the term, because increased knowledge has shown it to be an over-simplification; but it is still a useful bit of shorthand to help the layman to understand what is going on.)

This event in the ’ether', as it stands, is undetectable by the human senses. We cannot see or hear it, in the sky or passing through our walls; but it is there, real and coherent.

In our living-room, another suitably designed equipment takes this ’etheric’ event and transforms it, as if by magic, back into a movement-and-sound event. We see and hear a remarkably accurate re-creation of what is happening in the studio.

At the time of writing, this re-creation is merely in two-dimensional light and shade, colour and monaural sound; but there is already no technical reason (merely economic ones) why it should not be in three-dimensional vision and stereophonic sound. And in the future, television scientists may well be able to offer us smell, taste and touch as well.

The scientists here have been doing, between the sub-planes of their own recognized reality, precisely what the witches are doing between the major planes of their recognized reality: discovering and understanding the points and techniques of inter-resonance between them, and putting their new knowledge to practical use. In other words, ’opening up the levels’.

In this sense, television is magical; for that is exactly what magic is — in Aleister Crowley’s words, ’the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will’. He goes on to say: ’Nature is a continuous phenomenon, though we do not know in all cases how these things are connected.’ (Magick in Theory and Practice, Introduction pp. XII and XV.)

The discovery of those connections is the aim of the scientist (on the physical plane) and of the witch (on all the planes). The use of those discoveries is ’magic’. Magic does not break the laws of Nature; when it appears to do so, that is because it is obeying laws that the observer has not yet understood. A sixteenth-century scientist, for example, however intelligent and well-informed, if he could have seen television might well have branded it as supernatural.

As we have said, many modern scientists are becoming aware of (and some of them are investigating) phenomena which can only be explained on the basis that there are levels of reality other than the physical. Attempts to explain these phenomena in terms of still-undiscovered physical laws keep stumbling over fresh paradoxes. For example, if telepathy exists (and only wilful ignorers of evidence can still deny that it does) and is due to some kind of brain-generated radiation — why does all the evidence show that it is not subject to the inverse square law⁸ by which every other form of radiation known to physical science is governed?

One could go on at length about recent research into such subjects as telepathy, telekinesis, the influence of thought on growing plants, the statistical analysis of Zodiacal birth-sign types and so on; but this is not the place to do it. For an overall review of the field, we recommend Lyall Watson’s Supernature; and on telepathy in particular, Targ and Puthoff’s Mind Reach (both in Bibliography).

We shall have more to say on the Theory of Levels in later Sections. Meanwhile, let us take a closer look at the Theory of Polarity.

This theory is not new, either; it is common to many philosophies, both religious and materialistic.

The trap into which monotheist⁹ religions have fallen has been to equate polarity with good-versus-evil. They recognize that the activity of the world around them is engendered by the interaction of opposites; but they see this interaction only as the battle between God and Satan. When this battle ends with God’s total victory at the Last Trump, they assume that activity will continue — but on what basis? Apart from mass choirs, and an excessive architectural use of gold, the prognosis is vague. Even the inspired visions of Heaven by gifted poets and seers are really just impassioned descriptions of contemporary evils that will not be there.

The most-quoted example, in Revelations xxi and xxii, exults in the New Jerusalem’s absence of tears, death, sorrow, crying, pain, fear, unbelief, abomination, murder, whoremongers, sorcerers, idolators, liars, temples, shut gates, night, sea, curses, candles, Sun and Moon. But the positive description is purely static: nearly 1,500 miles wide, long and high (!) with walls 216 feet high, and foundations and gates of precious stones. The only mentions of any kind of activity or movement are of the righteous walking in it (xxi:24), the river of life ’proceeding’ (xxii:1), the tree of life yielding fruit every month (with no Moon?) (xxii:2), and God’s servants serving Him (xxii:3). Verse after verse about excluded evils and about (to be fair, doubtless symbolic) dimensions and materials, but effectively nothing about what happens there.

Our point is not to mock at St John’s high-rise architecture, nor even to complain at his abolition of Sun, Moon, sea, night and candles, but to suggest that his negative, static description is not just his personal style but intrinsic to the monotheistic, non-polarized viewpoint. Under the unchallenged rule of a non-polarized Creator, nothing can happen.

Islam’s Heaven is much more interesting, if only because Mohammed was sexually healthy and bequeathed to his followers none of the inhibitions and neuroses which woman-hating Paul of Tarsus imposed on Christianity. So polarity, in its most humanly enjoyable form, brings the Moslem Paradise to life. To the Moslem, woman is inferior but intended by Allah to be the giver and receiver of delight. To Pauline Christianity, woman is not only inferior, she is a temptation to sin, and herself morally weak if not actually wicked (a view of which the Church has never entirely rid itself — though we can find no authority for it in the words or deeds of Jesus). The Moslem view, while of course unacceptably male-chauvinist,¹⁰ does welcome sex into Heaven; so in the presence of at least one aspect of polarity, something actually happens there — and man or woman, one might do a lot worse.

The Buddhist goes to the other extreme; his Nirvana is frankly static, but at least it is consistent. He aspires to a pure, polarity-free, activity-free Existence, in the unchanging Eternal Mind; so he does not disguise his aspiration behind gates of pearl, nor plant Nirvana with fruit-bearing trees.

Heaven — whether choral, sexual or motionless — may be a long way ahead for the individual believer; but by studying his vision of it, one can directly assess his attitude to polarity.

The materialist’s Heaven on Earth (where else can he put it?) ranges from the capitalist one of individual wealth, fending off death, moth and rust as long as possible, to the Communist one of the classless society. Both recognize polarity at least in the shape of the class war — the latter preaching it, the former vigorously practising it. But it is only the Marxist, on the whole, who has a consistent philosophy of materialist polarity.

Karl Marx did not claim that his Dialectical Materialism was original, at least in its dialectical (polarized-activity) aspect. He acknowledged his debt to the dialectics of Georg Hegel (1770-1831), who had developed an elegant theory of the action of polarity in terms of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis and the Interpenetration of Opposites. This system Marx took over in its entirety. But Hegel was an idealist — which in the philosophical sense means not a ’do-gooder’ or optimistic dreamer but one who believes that mind or spirit is the basic reality, with matter merely reflecting it; as opposed to the philosophical materialist (such as Marx) who sees matter as the basic reality, with mind and spirit merely reflecting it. By Marx’s own metaphor, Hegel’s dialectic, in his view, was standing on its head; and he claimed to have set it on its feet. Thus he produced Dialectical Materialism, or Marxism — now the official (and enforced) philosophy of about a third of the world’s population.

In strict philosophical terms, witches are idealists; for while they believe that every entity or object on the physical plane has its counterparts on the non-material planes, they also believe that there are real entities on the unseen planes which do not have physical forms of their own. To witches, the unseen planes are the fundamental reality, of which material reality is one manifestation.

But to label witches as idealists, while correct, is perhaps misleading; maybe ’pluralists’ would be better. For matter is very real to them; they are lovingly rooted in Nature, ’the Veil of Isis', vibrant with overtones of all the other levels. Tangible Nature is holy to them. That is why their Goddess has two main aspects. She is both the Earth Mother, whose fecundity bears and nourishes them during physical incarnation, and the Queen of Night, ’she in the dust of whose feet are the hosts of Heaven, and whose body encircles the Universe', whose most vivid symbol is the Moon. The Earth Mother is the sovereign of physically manifested Nature, Isis Veiled; the Moon Goddess is the ruler of the invisible levels, Isis Unveiled; yet to the witch, the two are one and inseparable. They remain one, even though the complexity of the unseen levels is further symbolized by the Moon Goddess’s cyclical aspects of Maid, Mother and Crone — waxing, full and waning. And in her multiformity she is stirred and fertilized by her multiform Consort; for the witches’ God, too, is symbolized at the same time by the horned Pan-figure of forest and mountain and by the blazing Sun of the heavens. The witches’ vision of their God and Goddess expresses comprehensively their belief in the reality of all the levels, matter included.

So witches see the flaws of the dominant views of the Levels, and of Polarity, as follows:

(1) The materialist (and, in particular, Marxist) view has a basically sound understanding of the actual working of the Theory of Polarity but distorts and impoverishes it by denying the Theory of Levels.

(2) The monotheist-religious view accepts (in one form or another) the Theory of Levels but distorts and impoverishes it by debasing the Theory of Polarity into a mere conflict between Good and Evil.

Pagan, polytheistic religions have always accepted both the Theory of Levels and the Theory of Polarity, without distorting either to fit an inadequate concept (or even denial) of the other. One has only to study the pantheons of Egypt, Greece, Rome and India, with their creator-destroyer Gods and Goddesses, their eternal cycles of becoming and ceasing and re-becoming, their dialectical interplay, to realize how richly these attitudes have been symbolized.

Wiccan philosophy is in this direct tradition.

Every religion is unique, even when it is part of a wider inheritance. Wicca, like every other religion, has its own forms, its own preoccupations, its own atmosphere. And it is a Craft as well; to adopt Margaret Murray’s categories, it embraces both Ritual Witchcraft and Operative Witchcraft.

Wicca includes ritual, spell-working, clairvoyance, divination; it is deeply involved in questions of ethics, reincarnation, sex, the relationship with Nature, psychology and attitudes to other religions and occult paths.

In the following Sections, we shall examine these aspects and see how they relate to Wicca’s basic rationale.