Thanks. About this "An Ye Do Harm None, Do As Thou Wilt". The wiccan goldenrule. Some other parallels in your story to some versions of wicca as well. It's like a battle between an abrahaimic copycat god and a wiccan god.
Well, yes and no. Yes, in that it's supposed to be a conflict of a stone-age goddess of fertility and war versus a copy-cat Abrahamanic god. No, in that fertility goddesses go back to the stone age, but Wicca is only about sixty years old. While I did essentially cite the Wiccan Rede, Satin is not Wiccan - in fact, Baal in the story discounts all pagan beliefs as being demonic trickery, and says that only the "Ancient Ways" ever really worked, and then only for those who had the power.
And before the screaming begins, yes, I did mean that, Wicca is only about sixty years old.
Wicca is based on three specific books: 1) Charles Leland's
Aradia: Gospel of the Witches., 2) Margaret Murray's
The Witch Cult in Western Europe , and Gerald Gardener's
Witchcraft TodayCharles Leland (1824-1903) was a prolific author and folklorist, and founder of the
Gypsy Lore Society.
Aradia deals mainly with the Goddess Diana, and porports to be an ancient document which recorded the doctrines of La Vecchia Religione (The Old Religion), the beliefs of Italian witchcraft. Leland claimed to have received the information from an Italian witch named Maddalena. Modern Wiccans point to Leland's work as confirmation of Margaret Murray's theory of a pre-existing universal pagan religion in Europe, and point to it's similarities with Murray's beliefs. However, in doing so, one has to ignore the stark and glaring differences between Murrite theories and what Leland recorded of La Vecchia Religione (the largest difference being that La Vecchia Religione was essentially an extrapolated form of Diana-worship, whereas Murrite theories point towards an unnamed horned male God, possibly Herne the Hunter, who was later associated with Satan). Moreover, Leland has been shown to be more than willing to invent facts to sell his books on occult lore - occultism was very popular during Victorian times (ever heard of a guy named Crowley?), as the younger generation used occultism as a way to rebel against what they viewed as a stifling, paternalistic society (kind of like kids in the 1960's were doing - including the use of drugs to "expand the mind"). Occult books literally sold like hotcakes, then, and the more anti-establishment the book was, the better it sold (hence Crowley's fame even into the modern day). There is no evidence to support any of the claims Leland makes in
Aradia, nor even any evidence to show that Maddalena or La Vecchia Religione even existed.
Gerald Gardener (1884-1964) was a British civil servant who wrote
Witchcraft Today. He was part of a secret "coven" of self-proclaimed witches during the early days of the "beatnik" movement (an anti-materialistic social, literary and philosophical movement that began with Jack Kerouac in 1948), and the coven's
de facto leader. Gardener's story about himself, his coven and the origins of their beliefs changed several times over the years, and at one point he admitted having incorporated rituals, symbols, concepts and elements from the "ceremonial magick" of Crowley and other Victorian-era witches, Freemasonry, and other sources to "flesh out" the coven's beliefs and practices. Most Wiccans point to Gardener's
Witchcraft Today as the source of their beliefs. However, Gardener's most consistenly cited source, himself, was the writings of Margaret Murray.
Margaret Murray (1863-1963), wrote the article for "Witchcraft" for the 14th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1929. Murray was a British Egyptologist, and she considered all the witches of western Europe to be the the last lingering adherents of what was once a somewhat universal neolithic pagan religion that was being displaced by Christianity. Murray's theories were primarily based on the evidence given at the witch-trials. She took the statements given by the witnesses, even those who had confessed under torture, and treated them as ethnographic data. Eventually Murray put together a logical framework which explained all of the witchcraft testimony in a very literal way, coming up with what she honestly believed was an accurate portrayal of what witchcraft might have been like before Christianity. She published her theory in her book
The Witch Cult in Western Europe in 1921, and it enjoyed such immense popularity in Britain that she was invited to write the article on Witchcraft for the 14th edition
Britannica. Thereafter it remained, influencing half a century of readers until the article was finally replaced in the 15th edition Britannica, in 1974. It was replaced because Murray's theories had been largely discredited.
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It should be noted that the article which replaced it mentioned modern Witches only in passing, and derided them as being 'misguided' and 'eccentric', both of which are terms modern practitioners of Wicca object strongly to (and rightly so), and the article itself sums up their entire set of beliefs in a mere two paragraphs. That in itself is ridiculous, considering that modern Wiccan and non-Wiccan scholars have written dozens of books each hundreds of pages long attempting to describe all the myriad facets of the religion of Wicca, and admit that this only scratches the surface. Though Murray`s article was replaced, the replacement seems little better.
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Murray`s theories were discredited for two reasons: First, her hypothesis was based on a question which had an obvious answer. The question was `Why, in an age when there was no mass communication, was the testimony of the witch trials so consistent?` The answer was already known to historians of her day: For the same reason Christianity remained relatively consistent across the entirety of Europe for so long despite the lack of mass communication. The Church itself not only maintained uniformity, but also spread the word of what was heresy. A uniform understanding of what was Christian and what was heretical was crucial to the early days of the church - and the
Malleus Maleficarum (explained below) not only performed this function, that is precisely its stated purpose in its prefatory remarks.
The
Malleus Maleficarum was a detailed legal and theological document written about 1486. It was written by two Dominican monks, Johann Sprenger, dean of the University of Cologne, and Heinrich Kraemer, professor of theology at the University of Salzburg. It was considered the standard handbook for ferreting out and destroying witches, and went through 28 editions during its 200 years of publication. Gutenberg`s new development, the printing press, was greatly popularized by the vivid tales of abominable deeds and demonic sex-acts contained in the
Malleus Maleficarum, and at several points in time the
Malleus was second only to the bible in sales.
An important thing to note about the the
Malleus Maleficarum was that the behaviors attributed to witchcraft were actually the codified folklore and beliefs of Alpine-region peasants. Whether these beliefs regarding witchcraft were shared by any other groups of peasants in Europe prior to the prolmulgation of the The
Malleus Maleficarum remains an unanswered question - the
Malleus Maleficarum was used by the church as the definition of what witchcraft and the rituals of witchraft were, and as such became accepted as the universal definition of witch behavior throughout Europe within twenty years of its initial publication. The only evidence we have of previously existing peasant beliefs in other areas regarding witches is the early work of folklorists like Jacob Ludwig Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm, recording Germanic peasant's beliefs regarding witches and witchcraft - and, interestingly, the witches in
Grimm's Fairy Tales as well as their other works on folklore often are completely at odds with the description of witches in the
Malleus.
And again, as it literally cannot be stressed enough: During the days of the witch-trials, the
Malleus Maleficarum was used as the handbook for witch heresies, just as the bible was used as the guideline for the 'revealed truth.' Moreover, the
Malleus was not a hand-written book, it was printed with the new development, Gutenberg`s printing press. The vivid tales of abominable deeds and demonic sex-acts contained in the
Malleus Maleficarum made it immensely popular, particularly considering the book was authorized and promulgated by the Church, and at several points in time it was second only to the bible in sales. Thus, even the lowest of peasants was familiar with the work, even if they were utterly illiterate - the stories contained within the work were spread far and wide, both by the Church and by lay-persons. It is this extensive and widespread promulgation of both the Bible and the
Malleus which, many historians argue, unified both the beliefs in Christianity, and the beliefs in heresy. Of course, in both cases, this was precisely the intent of those who published and distributed these books.
The second reason Murray's theories were discredited was because the key elements are unprovable and the key source, the witch trial evidence itself, is tainted. There simply is no evidence that the universal pre-Christian religion she described ever existed outside of the testimony given at the witch-trials, and the evidence given at the witch trials is patently biased - the same accusations that were made against the witches were also made against Jews, and they, too, were forced to confess by torture to engaging in satanic rituals that precisely matched those laid out in the
Malleus. Since we know as fact that both modern and medieval Judaism have nothing like the rites and rituals of the
Malleus (Jews did not and do not eat babies, for instance), the obvious conclusion is not the Murrite answer of the evidence fitting a pattern existing before the
Malleus, but the evidence being forced to fit the pattern prescribed by the
Malleus.
Thus, Murray`s theories were discredited because they are unprovable, and her initial hypothesis contained a key flaw in her assumptions regarding mass communication within medieval and rennaisance Europe - she assumed it did not exist, whereas even historians in her day were aware that it did.
The problem is that any pre-Christian pagan religion we care to talk about is, by definition, also a pre-literate religion. Therefore, there's no actual written records that survive of it. Almost certainly there were pre-Christian religions. It's easily confirmed that the pagan religion of the Norse had widespread influence in Europe, reaching into England, Germany, and down into France (this is the mythology of Thor, Odin, etc). The Romans also reported finding the Celtic Druids, and Julius Caesar described them at length. And certainly there were others besides - probably many others. But specific details of these early pagan religious practices are extremely lacking, simply because their religions were displaced by Christianity - and, really, they had been displaced by Roman Paganism centuries before. We know they existed, and we have a few bits and pieces to indicate some of what they did, but aside from that, we simply don't know.
Put simply, the practices and beliefs held by early inhabitants of western Europe before the Romans came along is almost completely unknown, and probably always will be. What their descendants believed in when the Church later came along and Christianized them also is, at best, only partially understood, and probably never will be fully understood. There are a few tantalizing clues, but there simply isn't enough to draw any solid conclusions. From a historian's point of view, it's much like having a handful of colored stone chips from a mosaic that once might have covered an entire wall. There's simply not enough information to really have any idea what the actual mosaic might have looked like.
Today, many scholars argue that if there was any universal set of Pre-Christian and Pre-Roman beliefs and gods, it was the beliefs and gods of Norse Paganism, as evidence of that can be found in dozens of different cultures, ranging from England to Germany down into France. Meanwhile, others argue that the Celtic Druids may be a good candidate, as they were specifically mentioned by Julius Caesar and we know from archaeological digs across Europe that the Celts were a fairly widespread culture.
It's generally agreed that there almost certainly was other pre-Christian pagan religions in Europe aside from Norse Paganism and Celtic Druidism (probably several other religions), as certainly the people in the rest of Europe believed in
something before the Romans came along with their own pagan gods and the later Christians followed with their God. However, we simply don`t know what those beliefs might have been. These early European pagans were pre-literate - no records of their culture survive.
Many Wiccans defend their views with the idea that their religion really
is tens of thousands of years old, was actively persecuted by early Christians during the "Burning Times" (circa 1450-1792), and "went underground" for centuries. However, this requires a belief in a conspiracy that literally spanned an entire continent and five centuries, involved hundreds of millions of people all the way up to the modern day, and not a peep of it came to light until John Gardener wrote
Witchcraft Today. It should be noted that despite the immense public attention Wicca (and neo-paganism in general) has recieved since the sixties, not a single person outside of Gardener's little coven has ever come forth and said "Yes, I was a member of a coven before the 1950's and we believed what Gardener wrote, a pre-christian universal pagan religion we called Wicca." Put simply, prior to Gardener, Wicca did not exist as a religion, hence the religion is only about sixty years old.
As Wren Walker, a noted American Wiccan writer and commentator wrote; "Lest we fall once again into the mythical trap of claiming that all of the victims of previous witchcraft persecutions practiced various pagan religions, or even followed a set of local customs that are essentially the same as those celebrated by the Witches of today, we must concede that the 'witchcraft' of the past has its own history which may or may not be truly the basis of our own modern Witch community's roots. To put it bluntly, some of those existing definitions ARE true concerning what witchcraft was -or perceived to be- in those varied places and times. But the real question has never been-Were the 'Burning Times' victims really Witches (or witches) and really practicing the remnants of a pagan religion?-but rather what caused people to rise up against and openly persecute certain segments of their own populace? (That is the very real question that still needs to be answered today.)"
And, in that, she's right. The real question is "Why did the witch-burnings happen?" The answer would hold the key to whether or not witchcraft was a social phenomenon of the times, or a true religion that was actively being suppressed. Unfortunately, we simply don't know. All we have is the medieval and renaissance documents of the witch-trials, and they obviously are biased.
Modern Wicca has been the study of various historians, cultural anthropologists and sociologists for many years now - and it can be safely said that nearly all modern Wiccan beliefs trace back either directly or indirectly to the writings of Margaret Murray, who wrote the article for "Witchcraft" for the 14th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1929. Modern historians often debate whether or not witchcraft existed as a cult in its own right, independent of the confessions extracted under torture by the Inquisition. Some historians argue that the Inquisition may have literally created the idea of witchcraft, in a form of self-fulfilling prophecy. The Inquisition promulgated the notion that witches had power granted by Satan to influence or control the lives of others, and this might have been siezed upon by peasants and various other oppressed and powerless people as a method of redressing the inequalities that existed in their society, and possibly ameliorate the simple grinding poverty and drudgery of their day-to-day existence. The
Malleus Maleficarium gave very specific descriptions of "Satanic Rituals", and it was used as a guidebook for what to look for - as such, once the descriptions of rituals within it became common knowledge within European society through simple repetition and word of mouth, it may have spawned imitation in the hopes of achieving true power. Other historians see the satanic practices alleged in the
Malleus as being actual activities of real extremists of the day, the "lunatic fringe" of various heretical cults spawned by the transparent decadence of the medieval Church. This notion, incidentally, isn't too far off base - to the medieval mind, there wasn't a lot of difference between politics and religion, and often the two were one and the same thing. Other historians have suggested that since witchcraft by all appearances was a predominantly female religious practice, it may simply have been a tool used by women of the day to attempt to redress the balance of power in a male-dominated society - and, as time developed, it eventually backfired on them, causing men to mistrust women, and even burn the more politically active ones at the stake. And, still others have suggested that the various outbreaks of witch-hunts and witch-burnings that happened in Europe can be traced to coinciding outbreaks of wheat ergot.
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Ergot (Claviceps purpurea) is a fungus that attacks wheat, deforming the grains and coating them with a white powder that is the source of Lysergic Acid Diethalamide, or LSD. The theory is that, quite literally, the bread the people were eating was laced with LSD, and this caused people to hallucinate and act erratically. There's some evidence the Salem Witch Trials may have been sparked by ergot poisoning, as well.
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Regardless of what the truth may be, it can be safely said that those Wiccans who claim to be practicing the "traditional craeft" of their pre-Christian ancestors probably aren't. With the exception of a few bits of knowledge regarding Druidism and Norse Paganism, we simply have no clue what the actual religion and rituals of pre-Christian Europe was, and probably never will. Wicca can only be definitively traced back to Gardener's
Witchcraft Today, and Gardener himself both cited Murray and admitted including elements of Freemasonry and Crowley's "ceremonial magik" in his beliefs to flesh them out. As such, Wicca can only be definitively traced back to the middle 1950's and the publication of Gardener's book on the subject. The assertion that medieval witches actually existed and were the philosophical and theological ancestors of modern Wiccans is simply unprovable. We don't know what the beliefs of medieval witches were - nor, really, can we even be sure whether medieval witches actually existed, or were simply a fabrication of the Inquisition and various other religious, cultural, social and psychological influences of the time.
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It should be added that from a historian`s perspective, what would be needed to prove the existence of a pre-Christian pagan religion that might fit Murray`s hypothesis is something OTHER than the tainted evidence of the witch trials, and something that can be accurately dated to before the advent of Christianity. We know the Romans were in that area, and we know Julius Caesar wrote about the druidic celts - the Romans were interested in the religions of the peoples they encountered, even if only out of curiosity rather than scholarly or theological interest. If the pre-Christian religion that Murray described did exist, then it`s entirely possible the Romans wrote about it.
We haven`t found every book the Romans ever wrote. Much of their history literally remains buried in Italy and other parts of the world they conquered. Thus, if such evidence exists, it may yet remain buried and waiting to be found. If such evidence ever turns up, this would confirm the link between modern Wicca and medieval witches. Until such time as such an account is found, however, the assertion of a link between the two simply is not provable.
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