A Witches Bible - Janet Farrar, Stewar Farrar 1981

In Tune with the Times
The Wiccan Path
Principles, Rituals and Beliefs of Modern Witchcraft

For many centuries, Wicca has been a personal or small-group religion; and until our lifetime, it has survived those centuries by secrecy. The degree of secrecy has varied a little with time and place. During the terrors of the ’burning time’, the persecution which reached its peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it had to be absolute. In the slightly less fanatical nineteenth century, a bean fheasa (wise-woman) like Biddy Early of Co. Clare, or a cunning-man like ’Old George’ Pickingill of Canewdon, Essex, could practise their Craft more or less openly in the turbulent waters between clerical harassment and popular support. But even Biddy and Old George, one feels, would have been in far more serious trouble if they had openly led ritual covens. Individual psychic ability (which could not be denied in those and similar cases) was one thing — a thorn in the Establishment flesh which could be lived with. The Old Religion practised unashamedly in organized congregations would have been quite another. (Biddy Early seems to have been purely a solo worker; George Pickingill — see Doreen Valiente’s Witchcraft for Tomorrow is said by Craft sources to have had nine covens, though they were certainly secret at the time.)

It would be unrealistic to deny that the position has changed radically in the past thirty years.

In 1951 Britain’s archaic and unworkable Witchcraft Laws were repealed and replaced by the carefully worded Fraudulent Mediums Act, of which any serious witch or occultist can only approve. In 1949 Gerald Gardner had published his guardedly informative novel High Magic’s Aid; in 1954 and 1959 respectively he published his frank non-fiction books Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft. Since then, in Britain alone, Doreen Valiente, Patricia and Arnold Crowther, Justine Glass, Lois Bourne and other practising witches, including ourselves, have published books on the Craft. (See Bibliography under all these names.) Witches appear regularly on television and radio, almost entirely replacing the non-witch ’experts’ who used to pontificate on the subject. Newspapers and magazines interview them and, apart from the incorrigible sensationalist Press, treat these interviews with increasing seriousness. The current issue (November 1982) of the magazine 19, for example, contains a four-page article on the witchcraft boom by Barbara Rowlands. In it she interviews English witches of not always identical views, including Seldiy Bate and her husband Nigel, Celia Gough, Alex Sanders, Zachary Cox and others. The article is well balanced, interesting and informative — and would have been unthinkable in a popular women’s magazine as little as twenty years ago. We could cite a long list of other examples.

Even the News of the World, stuck fast in its rigid and highly profitable formula, has progressed to the stage of admitting in print that white witches and sensible occultists do exist, and that they condemn the sick fringe on whose unhealthy activities the News of the World thrives.

All this is not to say, of course, that misrepresentation, bigotry and victimization have entirely died. Examples continue to abound; Mike Howard’s The Cauldron, the best Wiccan newsletter in these islands (Myrddin, c/o Groesffordd Llwyndrain, Llanfyrnach, Dyfed SA35 OAS) is particularly keen-eyed in pouncing on them. But a generation ago, these would have been the whole picture. That is no longer the case.

The Craft has come into the open (even if many individual witches and covens, for their own understandable reasons, have to stay quiet). The public image of the witch is at last changing and escaping from the stereotype which has lingered on since the persecution days. More and more ordinary people are becoming aware that modern witches exist, that they try to do good and that they too are ’ordinary’ even if somewhat bizarre. They have read about them, seen them on television, heard them on radio — and may actually know them to say hullo to. They may even feel that it adds to the richness and variety of life to have one living round the corner.

It is a slow process, but it is happening; and witches who refuse to recognize this are themselves falling into a stereotyped attitude. It would be naïve to think it could not be reversed; engineered hysteria, or an authoritarian regime, in any one country could always turn the emerging witch back into a scapegoat; but in today’s unstable world, any minority is vulnerable that way. And the more that witches can speed up the process of correcting the stereotyped image — a process which, we repeat, is already happening — the more difficult and unlikely will such a reversal become.

Just why is this process happening — the emergence of the Craft into the daylight, its increasing acceptance (whether friendly or grudging) as an existing part of the general scene, and above all its accelerating growth?

We believe that it is because a revival of the pagan outlook is an inevitable, and instinctively sought-after, aspect of this point in mankind’s evolution. It coincides naturally with the impending end of the patriarchal epoch; with the growing public anxiety over environmental and ecological issues; with the growing abhorrence of nuclear brinkmanship; with the urgent necessity of a shift (enforced willy-nilly by economic and technological developments) from a work-ethic to a personal-fulfilment-ethic as the basis of everything from education to morality; with the increasing independence of the young; with the increasing impossibility (thanks to satellite television and the general communications breakthrough) of keeping any country, from Holy Ireland to Communist Russia, as a mentally and culturally watertight compartment; and a host of other related factors.

A century ago, men and women died in more or less the same kind of world as they had been born into. Today, brothers and sisters born ten years apart in the same family may have to make a real effort to understand each other’s worlds. Such a rate of change is not conducive to the unthinking acceptance of established philosophies or conventions, or to the persistence of outworn stereotypes.

Both established religion and tunnel-vision materialism have failed to provide answers to the challenge. Any given religious symbolism may give personal fulfilment, just as determined materialism may make an individual rich; but religion as a bureaucratic structure, or materialism as the driving-force of political and economic planning, lags increasingly behind the real needs of the community.

Thousands know this, instinctively or consciously; and the thousands are rapidly becoming millions.

How any existing religion will react to this evolutionary turning-point is the affair of its followers. We would dare a prediction; that within the foreseeable future, Christianity as a hierarchic and dogmatic machine will collapse, but that it will be reborn in a flexible and human form very much closer to the outlook of its founder. And the same sort of thing may well happen to other too-long-ossified religions.

That, as we have said, is their affair, to be observed sympathetically but without interference. But the role of the Craft, both present and future, is the witches’ affair.

Wicca is not a proselytizing religion and is unlikely to become one. In any case, the seeking of converts implies that there is only one true Path and that all else is heresy — an idea which caused untold human suffering, particularly in the past two thousand years, and which should be abandoned once and for all.

But thousands are turning to paganism, in one form or another, as a viable philosophy with which to meet the spiritual, ecological and evolutionary crisis. They are looking for existing forms, and already-active comrades, so that they can not merely hold such a philosophy but live it.

The Craft is one such form; and in its flexibility, its sense of wonder, its earthiness, its adaptability to local roots and its emphasis on female-male polarity, it has a lot to offer to such seekers. It should therefore be rendered available to them, by making its image clear but undogmatic. It should not try to recruit them, but it should be there for those to whom it is suited; they will seek it out, but it must be ready to receive them.

There is another reason why the Craft is peculiarly in tune with the times; of all the pagan (as distinct from merely occult) paths, it lays perhaps the greatest emphasis on the development of psychic abilities. Mankind’s understanding of the nature of the human psyche, particularly through Jung and his successors, has made great strides in this century; and science itself, at its most creative frontiers, is revolutionizing our ideas on the nature of cosmic reality. We would make another prediction (not an original one; for it is shared by many who are pondering on the Aquarian Age): that homo sapiens is on the threshold of an evolutionary leap in his psychic functioning, comparable with the leap that came about with the development of Ego-consciousness. This leap will be more compressed in time, and even more far-reaching in its consequences, than the earlier leap. The time always produces the thinkers necessary for its consummation; and it may be that Gardner, when he pushed the Craft into the daylight, was in his own way arriving as punctually on the evolutionary scene as Freud, Jung, Copernicus and Einstein did in theirs.

We are not suggesting a crusade; religious crusades tend to acquire a momentum of their own which distorts their nature and destroys their original intent. The nature of Wicca is that of small-group, autonomous flexibility and the developments of individual psyches by co-operation among friends. May it always remain so.

But Wicca and its covens exist in a real and changing world. What we are suggesting is that witches should persistently expand their consciousness of that changing world and their role in it — and remember always that the function of tradition is to provide nourishing roots, not to impose blinkers or shackles.

The Craft has come a long way; and it has still a long and exciting way to go.