why do we speak english?

The Roman Empire achieved its greatest geographical extent in the reign of Trajanus, emperor from 98 to 117. His European boundaries, roughly speaking, were the rivers Rhine and Danube. Then there were territories in western Asia with seaports on the eastern Mediterranean; in Egypt and along the coastal strip of northern Africa. In the western part of the Empire the official language was Latin. In the eastern part the lingua franca was the Koiné Greek established there by Alexander the Great some four centuries before.

Trajanus was followed by Hadrianus, emperor from 117 to 138, who began to shorten his lines of communication. On the island called Britannia, for example, Hadrian’s Wall was built to delimit the far northern frontier. South of that barrier (as every schoolboy knows) most of the country was subject to Roman military occupation. The official language was Latin, spoken and written by the ruling élite and the Britons who were closest to them. The remainder of the population spoke – so far as we can ascertain – various Celtic dialects. Of their written language, remains are few and sparse.

In the year later to be denominated as Anno Domini 410, the Roman legions packed up their kit and marched away, leaving behind them a Britannia subjected to raids from the Picts on the northern side of The Wall as well as intermittent forays by seaborne intruders. It was all part of a catastrophic movement of tribes and nations. The Romans with their ‘us and them’ attitudes categorised them all as Barbarians, because their common speech was neither decent Latin nor Koiné Greek. Barbarians they may have been in Roman eyes. Uncultured rabble they were not. Gradually, inexorably, they spilled over the borders of the once impregnable Empire. They came. Some settled. Others walked on. And these incursions were not confined to Europe. Problems with powerful régimes in Asia forced the Empire to move its capital from Roma to Constantinopólis, and to divide the Empire with its Greek East having authority over a Latin West.

In that Western Empire – nominally still to the West and the South of the Rhine-Danube line – there was often turmoil leaving profound cultural changes in its wake. Historians have called these centuries ‘The Age of Invasions’. Another term is Völkerwanderung, typifying the mass migrations which took place as whole tribes and nations poured in while the defences crumbled. Collectively those ‘wanderers’ are labelled ‘Germanic’ in contradistinction to the earlier inhabitants who had formerly been governed from Roma. It is a fascinating time. ‘Dark Ages’ only to historians with too little documentary evidence to contradict the widely held view that civilisation came to and end with The Fall of the Roman Empire and was not regained until the Classical Renaissance associated, in some minds, with the Capture of Constantinopólis by the Turks in 1453, preceded by the exit and transhipment of Byzantine scholars with their precious manuscripts who ‘brought the Light of Learning’ to the Medici in Firenze from whence it flowed delightfully all over Europe to connoisseurs all too thankful to receive it.

It is a distorted view, of course. The ‘barbarian’ infiltrators carried their own cultures with them. They just did not go to the bother of learning to write things down. Only in the eyes of Men of The Book is this a serious flaw of character. When the new arrivals eventually settled in their final locations, they became the foundations of modern European Civilisation.

I have been fascinated by the ways in which some of the immigrant languages survived while others did not. My current paradigm, for what it is worth, has writing as the most significant factor. In the Italy of Theodoric the Ostrogoth (reigned 471 to 526), for example, the written language was the Latin of Boethius (c.475 to 524) and Cassiodorus (c.490 to c.580). The common spoken language eventually became the Italian branch of the Romance family. The Germanic Franks who crossed the Rhine became the Merovingian Kings chronicled in the Latin of the churchmen while the Franks who did not cross the Rhine continued with their own vernacular. By the time of the penning of the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the details were set down twice : one in the Romance tongue of the West; the other in the Germanic of the East.

And what of the country we now call England? Why do we speak English?

Let us mentally go back to the time when global warming and rising sea levels finally cut off our country from the continental mainland. We may consider the islanders who survived as the original inhabitants of Britain. Cheddar Man, or one of his maternal ancestors, may or may not have been among them. We know nothing of their language. It is just possible, though not at all likely, it was not even IndoEuropean.

Before Julius Kaiser came on his exploratory raid, various Celtic dialects were in general use, including the Gallic spoken by those of the Belgae who had migrated from the mainland some decades before. Claudius engineered the landing of his taskforce (AD 43) and the general military annexation of Britannia. In some places they were welcomed. Some Britons assimilated. Others did not and sank into an underclass. Latin was the official spoken and written language. Where the Roman penetration was incomplete, Celtic dialects continued to be spoken and eventually achieved written status. But that was much later. In the year 410, as I have already mentioned, the legions sailed away. The mêlée on their continental frontiers demanded their prior attention. Britannia was expendable.

Enter the Saxons. A few of them had been here before, probing hither and yon, perhaps for trade, perhaps for loot, perhaps for Lebensraum. The story goes that postRoman Britannia was disturbed by the Picts from north of The Wall. Mercenaries were engaged to fight Britannia’s battles. They came in three keels to Ebbsfleet. They fought. They liked it here. They stayed. So the story goes.

More of them came. These were the tribesmen we may conveniently call Saxons. They were fighting men. As the situation resolved, the land now called England was occupied by a strongly stratified hierarchical society. At the top were the Saxon kings, commanding and supported by Saxon military aristocracy. Saxon landed gentry, with obligations of service to their overlords, completed the upper tier. The Saxon landed gentry were slave owners. We may assume that the Romano-British landed gentry assimilated into Saxon society, moved to the Celtic fringes of the islands, or crossed the Channel in sufficient numbers to colonise that part of the NorthWest now called Bretagne. In occupied Former Britannia, Saxon dialects were the official spoken tongues, solidly established and later committed to writing in a flourishing literature along with the scribal Latin of the churchmen.

When Guillaume le Bâtard headed his marauding battalions to victory at Hastings in 1066, they brought with them the Northman-tinted French of their adopted homeland. In their new territory Norman French remained the language of the military aristocracy. Latin the language of the Church. Old English, with its Saxon and Danish elements, survived because it already had, and continued to have, written form. In time English became the general lingua franca. French had its place in the law courts. Latin remained the language of international exchange even after Henry VIII (“Tudwr”) had taken the reins of the Church into his own hands and enacted an ordinance declaring English to the sole official language of his realm. (Some of the Welsh, rightly, have never forgiven him for this, nor have they ever given way to his will.)

Today the use of English is no longer confined to the Former Britannia. And even there its use is enhanced by a multitude of other tongues which arrived with yet more immigrants who also came and settled. The local delights of Regional Englishes are still with us despite, perhaps even because of, the ubiquitous telecasts.

Saxon military invaders brought their own regional variants with them. For six centuries or more their language coalesced, grew in strength and was committed to writing, firmly established and surviving. Spelling and orthography changed. Usage continues to change. Loan words proliferate. Neologisms attain prominence. Some fade away to become archaic or obsolete. Inflexions lose their force. Collective nouns modulate from singular to plural. Agendum is a thing needing to be done. Agendum pluralises as agenda. And like the neuter plurals of medieval Latin agenda in its turn is multiplied into agendas.

.. .. is now and ever shall be. So long as we continue to talk to each other.


© francis cameron
oxford, 15 june 2007

Ronald Hutton's plum gems

The writings of Ronal Hutton are loaded with gems. Here are two from The Druids [2007].

page 7 :: “the Germans of the late fifteenth century were acutely aware both that they had achieved huge economic wealth and cultural sophistication and that the rest of western Europe, and especially the Italians, still regarded them as barbarians, in the style of the classical writers. This fuelled precisely the mixed sense of pride, ambition and resentment which was to make Germany the launch-pad of the European Reformation.”

That very perceptive comment – almost a throwaway line – just jumps out of the page. It is a precious gem I have not found elsewhere. Less complicated histories of the Protestant Reformation are usually couched solely in terms of the rebellious monk Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door of Wittenberg Church in protest against perceived abuses promulgated by the Roman curia. Hutton’s pointing to the seedbed adds a very cogent new perspective for which I, for one, am very grateful.

On a rather lighter note :: page 39 draws attention [yes, this is still relevant] to Dylan Thomas and his play for voices, Under Milk Wood, “set in the fictional and archetypal, small seaport town of Llarregub”; in consequential sequence, page 40 draws attention to Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music which “introduced a nation known as Llamedos, modelled on Wales.” Oh sod it! Bugger it! How come I’d missed that?

© francis cameron
oxford, 13 june 2007

Francis at 70

Barenton, 80 Tutnalls Street, Lydney, Gloucestershire, GL15 5PQ
e-mail : francis@alchemyst.demon.co.uk
phone : +44 (0)1 594 842 363


from an original dated 22 november 1997


SEPTUAGESIMAL SYNOPSIS

I don’t remember much about last time, except that I was killed in the fighting on the Western Front in the Great War of 1914 onwards.

I know much more about the time before that when I set out to become a concert pianist but there was an accident which made this impossible so I turned to composition and to writing about current events in the musical world. Late in life I turned to Spiritualism - and some people thought me mad!

It’s no surprise then to find that this time I was born into a musical household where both my parents were practising Christian Spiritualists.

So I grew up in 1930s London. Of the outside world I remember the funeral procession of King George V, the abdication speech of King Edward VIII, and the coronation celebrations of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In my own microcosm I was only three years old when I showed an aptitude for the piano and began to have regular lessons. I first played in public (by command of Her Royal Highness the Princess Louise) when I was four - and since then most of my life has been spent performing: as a pianist, an organist, a conductor and composer.

On the 3rd of September 1939 (the anniversary of Cromwell’s death in a thunderstorm) I was staying with my Auntie Lilla and Uncle Harry in South Wales. We listened to Mr Chamberlain’s broadcast. Once more we were at war with Germany. A few weeks later I became a pupil at Caerphilly Boys’ Secondary School and stayed there until the end of the particular summer term when we sat the School Certificate examinations.

I returned to wartime London with air raids, shortages, the blackout - and Mercers’ School.

Mercers’ was one of those medieval foundations with no more than 15 boys in a class and a pervasive pre-Raphaelite ethic which prepared us to be English Gentlemen: the 20th century equivalent of medieval knights in shining armour mounted on a white charger, riding out in search of the Holy Grail. Our word was to be our bond. Courtesy our watchword.

And alongside my school work I began a multiple existence which has continued ever since. On Sundays I appeared as the professional organist and choirmaster of an Anglican High Church in Fulham. During the week I attended seances at my parents home. There I witnessed some dramatic physical phenomena and learned extensively from the wisdom of the guides channelling through my mother.

Then in 1944 I was invited to make a professional tour as ‘the sixteen-year-old boy wonder pianist’ in an ENSA concert party. It gave me a taste for working in front of audiences - the larger the better - and improved my playing beyond recognition.

January 1945 was the start of a very happy period. I became a student at the Royal Academy of Music. Just going through the swing doors each day was entering another world, a world where life was transformed. On Sundays I was still a church organist and, on weekday evenings, there were more seances. The orthodox and the nonconformist complemented each other.

September 3rd 1947. Another of those significant days. I reported to an army barracks for two years of National Service where we were thoroughly brainwashed. There was still an aroma of the pre-Raphaelite public school ethic, but coupled with the dulce et decorum est of dying on the battlefield. We would charge out to destroy the enemy, or die gloriously in the attempt. Most of it was a terrible waste of time, though it did help to solve the unemployment problem for a government faced with thousands of servicemen and women returning to civilian life - and it gave me a full driving licence and a grant to study at Oxford.

It was on the day I was demobbed that I said to myself: ‘After two years’ without playing, if you practise for four hours a day you could be a first class pianist.’ Then I thought again: ‘But there are hundreds of first class pianists, and you wouldn’t be satisfied with that. To be outstanding, you’d have to practice for six hours a day. Do you see yourself practising the piano for six hours a day? No. Then you must do something else.’

It was Michaelmas Term of 1949 when I signed the books of University College and began to study in the Faculty of Music. Studying music here was very different from studying music at the Royal Academy of Music. There we were trained in the minutiae of performance. Here we were expected to develop our scholarship and to put the results in writing. It was a good foundation I didn’t really appreciate until later on.

The 1950s were tough. Here was I with a degree from Oxford but without a decent job. I went to work for the Performing Right Society, then became involved in the UNESCO international exchange of persons programme and combined this with a part-time school teaching post until a full time position came my way.

Towards the end of the 50s, my convictions moved me to become a Roman Catholic and to review my life. If I was going to stay in school teaching, then I was in the wrong job. I must find an appointment as Director of Music at a Public School. If I was not going to stay in school teaching, it was time to move out and find something else. A few days later I opened THE TIMES. (Yes, I read THE TIMES in those days.) An advertisement caught my eye. They wanted a suitable person to take charge of the music at Westminster Cathedral. Right up my street! There was a tedious period of waiting, and interviews, and waiting. Then they wanted me at once. The London County Council kindly released me from my teaching contract in time for me to take up my new duties a few days before the boys returned to the choir school.

On the day my appointment was noted on the Court Page of THE TIMES, the Principal of the Royal Academy of Music rang up and invited me to join his staff. So began the 1960s. I stayed only two years at the Cathedral and built a freelance career on the basis of my professorial work at the RAM. It was a marvellous time. Working with wonderful colleagues. All of us immersed in creating fine music. Early in 1965 I flew to New York, gave an organ recital at Columbia University and went on to tour Canada as an adjudicator at their series of competitive music festivals. One of my throwaway lines is: ‘I went to Los Angeles for Holy Week.’ That’s true and I could not have done it without the generous hospitality of my mother’s relatives who lived there. Good Friday found me back in New York and invited, courtesy of a very good friend, to a Jewish family Passover celebration in New Jersey. An occasion I treasure.

Back at the RAM I went on with my work with renewed confidence until my fortieth birthday came in sight. Every paper, every magazine I opened, seemed to have an article confessing that 40 was the time to give up, to realise you had climbed the ladder as far as you were going to go. You were not going to sit on the Board of Directors. There was no point in hoping for further promotion. What was I going to do? I wanted more. I wanted to move up.

Then one Sunday in 1968, a few days before Roy Jenkins was to deliver his first budget speech, I opened the papers (the SUNDAY TIMES and THE OBSERVER, of course) and there was an advertisement. The New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music wanted an Assistant Director. Right up my street! Right after the budget speech I drafted my application. There was waiting. An interview. More waiting. Another interview. More waiting. Then the invitation, packing belongings, selling a house, shipping aboard the P&O Iberia from Tilbury in November and arriving in beautiful Sydney just before a blazing hot Christmas.

Sydney Conservatorium was delightful in a rather old-fashioned way. My specific task was to bring it up to date, re-write its curriculum and establish its staff on the same pay scale as lecturers at the university. So the 70s passed in this way - along with the other attractions of Sydney: the sea, the sand, the steaks, the sunshine and all the rest. Then there were the wider horizons of Australia, an Australia gradually changing, becoming more liberal, more open to new ideas. Instead of knocking in vain on the doors of the BBC, I found myself booked by the ABC for several broadcasts. I conducted on television and at the Sydney Opera House, wrote music for a film and a play, and went hither and yon to talk with colleagues in other states and a public that was not uninterested in what I had to say. In my third year I was elected President of the Musicological Society of Australia (not such a grand position as might be imagined!) and in December was joint leader of its Ethnomusicological Expedition to the New Hebrides. It was another of those experiences that was to change my life. My pre-Raphaelite schooling had told of the White Man’s burden. While waiting two days for a plane in Noumea, I first took in the awful consequences of the white man’s colonial rule. Officialdom, traders and the missionaries - especially the missionaries - took away the native’s culture and left him at the bottom of the heap of an alien importation. Then, on the island of Aoba, I discovered the intricacies of the indigenous music and ceremonial. Not one whit less sophisticated than the white world of Sydney, London and the European homelands. I must learn more about the human race. I must enrol in the Department of Anthropology at Sydney University. And this I did. It took twelve months to do it, but do it I did. London and the Royal Academy of Music had made me a professional musician. Oxford made me a musical scholar: a musicologist. The New Hebrides and Sydney, between them, made me an ethnomusicologist. A man with a point-of-view that did not always sit easily in more constrained academic circles.

The other great adventure emanating from Sydney came in 1977 when I qualified for a year’s sabbatical, was allowed just six months, and returned northwards for a Grand Tour of European music libraries in search of the earliest evidences of music in the Latin West. I wrote a book in the process. It’s 100,000 words long and exists as a dot matrix print-out and a series of files on computer disks belonging to an obsolete operating system and therefore unreadable for all practical purposes. Fortunately my manuscript also exists and from time I time I take it out and continue the painstaking work of transcription.

By the autumn of 1979 (I speak in terms of southern hemisphere seasons) I was ready to return to England. My work in Australia was done. I did not want to stay there in a retirement where I could be car-less and isolated in a demi-paradise. A QUANTAS plane with more crew than passengers took me on board at 4.30 in the afternoon of December 31st. At 6.30 in the morning of January 1st, 1980 I was back on British soil.

I allowed myself the luxury of a self-financed year as a graduate student at Oxford, once again took up the duties of a church organist on Sundays and during the week combined a private teaching practice with an exploration of the expanding neo-pagan scene.

In the autumn of 1981 (northern hemisphere speak, this time) I sat in front of a computer for the first time and became completely hooked. A few years later I joined the university’s computer part-time teaching teams and worked happily with them for more than a decade.

/* I feel sure there was more of this in the original but the final paragraphs appear to have been lost in the process of transferring data from one machine to another and then to another. Never mind. What is already said still stands. I can fill in the 80s and onwards at some other time. */

parallel calendars

PARALLEL CALENDARS

My talk was first composed for Michael de Ward’s
In The Presence II on the evening of saturday 9 june 1996
This version for Jeanette’s Beltane Bash 2006 is a substantial revision of the original

I was brought up as a Christian. Most people were in those days. It was the 1930s. Before the war began again.


paddington chapel

Sunday was very different from weekdays. We put on our best clothes and went to Paddington Congregational Chapel in the morning and to its Sunday School in the afternoon. I don't remember there was much difference from week to week except that, towards the end of the year, we sang

Away in a manger
No crib for a bed
The little lord Jesus
Lay down his sweet head

and a few months later we sang

There is a green hill far away
Outside a city wall
Where our dear Lord was crucified
He died to save us all

Christmas and Good Friday. The birth and death of Jesus, the Son of God.


st mary's bryanston square

When I was a little older, I joined the choir in the church next to our school. It was our Church of England parish church where, on Sunday mornings and evenings, the simple pattern of Matins and Evensong was regulated by a Book of Common Prayer which, by law, established which psalms were to be sung, which passages from the Holy Bible were to be read, and which prayers were to be said on each of the Sundays and major festivals throughout the year. It was a pattern first set up in 1549, during the reign of the boy king Edward VI, and revised in 1662 when the monarchy had been restored after the disastrous years of the Civil War and the Commonwealth.
This liturgical calendar, the pattern of the Anglican church's year, was close to the one common to most of Western Europe from the early days of Latin Christianity onwards. It focussed on the birth of Jesus, which was celebrated on December 25th, and 'his glorious death and resurrection' which was a moveable feast culminating on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox. Soon after this, in the Church of England, came the long succession of Sundays after Trinity, where nothing special seemed to happen until round about the beginning of December when we began to think about Christmas once again.
All this came to and end, so far as I was concerned, when I changed schools and left the choir.


the mercers' school

The main ethos of my new school was that of the English Gentlemen who had fought and died for their king and country in the Great War of 1914 to 1918. Christianity was not a terribly important part of our lives. An English Gentleman went to church on Sundays - that was part of his social obligation – but it was not anything to get too enthusiastic about. Yes, we did have a certain amount of religious instruction based on Bible Stories and the beliefs of the Church of England though, in other lessons, we read about the old gods of Northern Europe : Odin and Thor and Balder the Beautiful, who was killed with a dart made from a sprig of mistletoe. Later on, as we re-established our links with the ancient classical world of Greece and Rome, I began to become familiar with their goddesses and gods. In particular there was Zeus, the Sky Father of the gods on Mount Ólympos. He was married to the goddess Héra. Their children were numbered among the gods. Zeus had sisters. Some of these also became mothers of his children. Zeus had other lovers who were human. He came down to them in various disguises. Some of their children grew up to be heroes like Perseús and Heraklés. Then there was Seméle. She was a princess and she was very special. Zeus was the father of her child Diónysos and Diónysos was a god, the son of a god. And, eventually, Seméle was raised up and also became a goddess on Mount Ólympos. So perhaps it was here, in the dust and bustle of High Holborn, that a seed was planted. In church we had been taught about the young Jewish woman who had given birth to the Son of God. In afterlife, this same Jewish woman was raised up to be Queen of Heaven. So was this really an unique event? How could it be unique when there were so many similar stories of mortal women who gave birth to the sons of gods? It was a question neither answered nor posed in my schooldays.
More important to us was the procession of the seasons. Summer was that wonderful time of long languorous lazy halcyon days which came to an end only when we went back to school in September to begin not just another term but a new school year. Autumn was the fall of the leaf whose rich colours briefly decorated our streets and led us on to Winter when the branches were bare. As the evenings began to draw in. We turned on the lights, closed the curtains, and put another lump of coal on the fire. Winter was the time of frost and snow. There was ice on the pond. Nothing grew. The woods and the fields were asleep. Then, one day, the ice began to melt. The air felt different. There was a quickening. A faster pulse. The earth was beginning to come to life again. It was Spring, the sweet Spring. Poets took up their pens and wrote new verses. Musicians composed new songs and symphonies. Love was in the air. We took out our madrigal books and with Shakespeare and Thomas Morley gave voice ..

It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green cornfield did pass,
In spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.


rozelle

The early 1970s found me living in Australia. One evening I went to visit a friend in that part of Sydney known as Rozelle. My friend introduced me to the man from the house next door. He was a witch, a witch who spoke of an unbroken local tradition of witchcraft stretching back to the arrival of the first convict colonists nearly two hundred years before. I was very impressed by his story. It fitted in with the ideas I had recently come across in the works of Professor Margaret Murray. It is not going too far to say : I was ready for the witch and his story. The time was ripe. We began to practise in ways which incorporated some elements I now recognise as belonging to Alexandrian Wicca. We met. We met frequently. In the night and by candlelight. We often stood skyclad in the back yard. We stood there gazing up at the moon with a sense of connection and a sense of adoration. After dark was fine – but in the broad light of day there were problems. The eight major festivals of the Wheel of the Year just did not resonate. Not only were we living in the Southern Hemisphere where we expected the seasons to be topsy-turvy, but the seasons themselves were radically different. There was no Spring. No signs of rebirth. The ubiquitous gum trees, the eucalypts, were the same all the year round. They never seemed to change. And in December, as the solstice approached, it seemed that on all sides there were singers directing our attention to a 'bleak midwinter' where 'the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even'. It just did not fit with temperatures and humidity jointly reaching a full one hundred degrees.
It was not until I returned to England that I began to enjoy the fullness of our Pagan observances.


oxford

In Australia the hours of day and night changed hardly at all from month to month. In England the gradual transitions, day by day and even hour by hour, are part of the way we experience the world around us.
I have stood before dawn with the Druids on the ramparts at Avebury and scanned the eastern horizon for the first sign of a new day. It seems to take forever. I can well understand why, in times past, when men and women at last saw the first shaft of sunlight, they lit a great bonfire to signal to the watchers on the next high place in line that their time was fast approaching.
When we stand watching for the dawn, for that repeated renewal which comes with the break of day, we may call to mind those former times when the Sun was worshipped as a god in his chariot riding across the sky. This was common practice in the Roman Empire as recently as the 4th century of our common era. When Christianity, by imperial diktat, was instituted as the official statewide religion, priest and people still turned to the east to face the rising sun as they began the day with the divine sacrifice on the altar. The name was changed. The observance remained until 1965. Now its origins are quite obscured

Each day of our week is still marked and honoured by Anglo-Saxon reckoning. The Day of the Sun is followed by the Day of the Moon. Then come days watched over in turn by Tiw, Woden, Thor, Freya or Frigg, and Saturn. So the cycle unwinds and begins again and again. The old gods are still there for everyone who calls their presence into consciousness with each daybreak and nightfall.

For a substantial number of people in our Pagan community, the moon in its phases rides high like a goddess in the night sky. Meetings, celebrations and rituals are timed to coincide with her waxing and waning. It is a practice which has very ancient origins – even as far back as Palaeolithic times. I have already mentioned how the first full moon after the Spring Equinox determines the date of Easter – but that's about as far as it goes in the Christian calendar. For so many Pagans it is quite different. I have heard it said that in Glastonbury, for example, rituals on the night of the full moon take absolute precedence over any other activity. For those who watch the skies, the phases of the moon are one of the great natural rhythms that influence and enhance our lives. And, while this is happening, the thirteen moons of the celestial year are carpentered to construct the twelve months of the civil calendar.

12 is a very special number. Its significance goes back to Babylon and beyond. The ancient astrologers, so I am told, counted with a duodecimal system. But even before Babylon, so we are given to understand, our Indo-European ancestors counted in twelves on the finger joints of one hand - so giving us the old way of counting in dozens. And, by using the finger joints of the other hand, they kept track of the count up to twelve times twelve. It reminds me of the days when I worked in an office and our stationery supplies came in boxes holding twelve dozen items. Twelve dozen was called a 'gross' – a word, I guess, long gone out of custom. Now we count and reckon in a decimal system. On our fingers – and sometimes on our toes! But the significance of 12 percolates into all sorts of nooks and crannies. There are 12 signs of the Zodiac, which may be why we have 12 months in our year. There are (or there were) 12 tribes of Israel. Jesus Christ is reported as having 12 disciples. 12 inches still add up to the imperial foot. But 12 pence no longer equal a legal shilling.


today's pagan festivals

Many of us today order our lives by the rhythms of the earth below and the sky above. Like those from ‘times long past’ we stand, each in our own landscape, and observe the apparent annual voyaging of the sun as it approaches and recedes like a great pendulum in its implacable annual rhythms. It is nearest us on June 21st, Midsummer's Day, when there is great rejoicing, great ritual and festival on this, the longest day of our Northern year. For a moment the sun appears to stand still - the Solstice - then it slowly, oh so slowly ebbs away until December 21st, the Midwinter Solstice when, once again, it appears to pause awhile before its returning to us once more. On its journeyings back and forth, as perceived by us earthbound observers, it passes over the planet’s Equator. On its Southern swing it gives us the Autumn Equinox on September 23rd when day and night are of equal duration. And on its return it gives, on March 21st, the great Spring Equinox which has provoked so much poetry, so much music, so much mythology and religious celebration in our European homeland. These four festivals of the Sun are part of the great Wheel of the Year which today's Pagans integrate into their annual calendar. These are fixed feasts – their dates on the calendar determined by a regularly repeated astronomical phenomenon.
The other four festivals of the Wheel of the Year were once – and still can be – celebrated : not by looking at a calendar which is there for the benefit of city folk but by looking around at the natural evidence of field and forest. As the dark and cold of Winter continue into the Solstice and the weeks beyond, there is a gathering eagerness to watch for the first signs, the first heralds in the advance party of Spring. When the green certainty is established, then is the time of Imbolc; though now for the benefit of city folk remote from the frolickings of newborn lambs, Imbolc is pinned to the second day of February. Similarly, when the corn in the fields stands ripe, ready for the cutting of the first sheaf, it is the time of Lughnasadh - though city folk, with their different furrows to plough, mark the festival on the first day of August.
Then there are Beltane and Samhain now quite fixed on May 1st and the night of October 31st. There is a tradition which links the season of Beltane with the annual movement of sheep and cattle, with all the able-bodied men, from the village to the distant summer pastures. As the time of departure drew near there was much sharing of love and the making of love. Unmarried women were sure to find a mate and, as for the rest, there was absolute freedom for any mutually willing man and woman to couple together. It was a time of great joy and wonderful pleasure. Samhain was the time of returning. More celebrations. More loving. A great awareness of the coming back of those who had departed. And a time for the veil between the worlds to be lifted for the long-departed to be once more near their loved ones and their descendants.
These then are the eight feast days of the Wheel of the Year. A cycle with neither beginning nor end. A great rhythm as of the heartbeat of an immense celestial pendulum mirrored by earth’s awesome terrestrial pulse.


western christendom

The Christian cycle has developed by cross-fertilisation. Jesus was a Jew, and Jewish practices permeate the Christian liturgies. Jewish daily prayers became the monastic daily offices and are still echoed when Mattins and Evensong are recited. Like the Jewish precedence, there is great emphasis on the Book of Psalms and the reading of portions of scriptures enshrined in the sacred books. The Jewish Sabbath has been transformed and transported into the Christian Sunday and the once-a-year Passover meal inspired the daily celebration of the Mass.
Unlike the Pagan cycles, the Christian kalendar really does have a point of initialisation. In the old tradition it begins on the Eve of the 4th Sunday before Christmas with the season of Advent, the time for Christian souls to prepare for the coming of Christ into the world. At one time it was a season of penitence - to cleanse the mind of sin ready to receive the Christ child. It still is for some congregations. The celebration of Christmas itself begins at dusk on December 24th, Christmas Eve, when the candles are lit for the singing of the First Vespers of Christmas. There is a splendid mass at midnight – still honoured as the traditional time of the birth of Jesus. There may be another mass at the dawn or thereabouts, and faithful and faithless, both, flock to local places of worship on the morning of Christmas Day. It is a grand outbursting of joy lasting through various other feastdays and commemorations until January 6th, when Twelfth Night and the Feast of the Epiphany mark the end of the festal season. The Epiphany is a day for remembering the arrival of the Three Wise Men, the Magi from the East, who presented their gifts at the stable in Bethlehem - and in some traditions this is the day for the giving and receiving of presents rather than on the 25th of December.
Preparations for Easter begin well in advance. There is the Sunday called Septuagesima, about 70 days before. It is followed by Sexagesima and Quinquagesima Sundays (a sort of 60 and 50 days before). Then Shrove Tuesday when the faithful go to confession to be shriven for their sins. Today it is Mardi Gras - Fat Tuesday - when the last of the meat products should be used up before the period of Lenten abstinence - there are Jewish overtones in this - and there is much fun and frolicking until dawn brings Ash Wednesday and its own particular retribution for the excesses of the past several hours! Ash Wednesday is the day when the faithful go to mass and their foreheads are marked with the ashes of last year’s Palm Crosses which have been collected and incinerated for this purpose. Traditionally the days and weeks which follow were times of fasting and abstinence - if for no other reason than food stocks were low in agricultural communities. The last of the meat animals had been consumed and the remaining livestock and its feedstuffs had to be carefully conserved to provide the source for next season’s sustenance.
The whole week leading up to Easter Sunday is very special, very poignant. It begins with Palm Sunday processions re-enacting Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem when the people cast down palm branches before him as he rode in to the shouts of ‘Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord’. There is also a reading of one of the four accounts of the Passion of Christ. The others are read, each on their own individual day, later in the week. On Thursday - Maundy Thursday in this country - there is the mass celebrating the Last Supper and the institution of the Holy Eucharist. And in some places still, the re-enactment of the mandatum when Jesus washed his disciples’ feet and gave them a new mandate. ‘Behold, I give you a new commandment : that ye love one another.’ On Good Friday there are the quintessentially elaborate ceremonies recalling the crucifixion death and burial of Jesus.
Then the great interstice until the immensely powerful rituals of Easter Eve. (It begins with a Fire Festival.) The church is empty and in complete darkness. Outside the great west door, New Fire is kindled with flint and steel. The great Paschal candle is blessed and lighted from the fire. From this candle others are lit as clergy choir and people file into the church carrying the ‘Light of Christ’. The Paschal Exultet is chanted. Ancient prophesies are read. There is solemn procession to the font where the priest (as in an ancient fertility rite) ‘breathes upon the face of the water’ then he takes up the Paschal candle. Holding it vertically in both hands - it is about a metre long and proportionally thick - he dips its base three times into the newly consecrated water. The first time, he inserts it just a little; the second time, he takes it deeper; and the third time, it goes all the way. If there are new converts, they will be baptised now. And the first mass of Easter begins on the stroke of midnight. So there we have it - a Christianised fire festival and fertility symbolism still, at the climax of the Christian Year, showing unmistakable signs of its Pagan origins.


hand in hand together

To conclude, let me go gently through a complete year in the order of its significant events. I’ll begin in March because that was the first month of the year until the civil calendar was reformed in September 1752.
In March there are the two celebrations of new life : on the 21st, the Spring Equinox; and on the 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation - when the Angel Gabriel came to the Virgin Mary to tell her she would become the Mother of the Lord - and Mary sang Magnificat.

My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaiden and, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath magnified me and holy is his name.

On a Sunday nearby is Easter Day, still bearing the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess and celebrating the paramount event of the Christian year: the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Sundays after Easter are likely to overlap with May 1st when Beltane revives old memories and when once the Feast of Saint Joseph the Workman called Catholics to their own particular devotion. And the whole of the month of May is dedicated to Mary, Our Lady, Queen of Heaven, who once walked the earth in mortal frame.
On a Thursday, 40 days after Easter, Christians celebrate Christ’s final Ascension into heaven. (Like Moses and Elijah before Him, He was taken up in a cloud.) And in the week before this there have been three Rogation Days with Litanies for blessings on the fields and their crops.
The Sunday 50 days after Easter is Pentecost (Whitsunday in popular parlance) when the first disciples received the promised gift of the Holy Spirit – which descended on their heads like tongues of fire.
June 21st brings the Midsummer Solstice and June 24th follows with the Feast of Saint John the Baptiser, ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness: “Make straight the way of the Lord”’. And in the foothills of the Pyrenees they still light ‘Saint John’s fires’ with appropriate ritual and ceremony.
Our Summer months are certainly times to focus the mind on country (and, therefore, Pagan) events. It was once the time for human resources to be deployed on the land. (Our universities still cleave to the Summer Long Vacation, as once they did to release all and sundry to go home and help in the fields.) The first sheaf from the corn harvest is taken to be ground and baked into a loaf for the first Harvest Eucharist, the thanksgiving for blessings explicitly received. On August 1st we still have Lammas, the Loaf Mass, a day shared by Christians and Pagans alike.
August 25th is marked by the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the Great Mother, the embodiment of all that is fine and good and desirable in the feminine. A transference of attributes from even older personifications of the Mother of us all. It is one of the more recent introductions into the sacred kalendar. The early days of Christianity held to a concentration on the masculine, paternalism, and the power of a patriarchal society. In later times of Crusading, veneration of the feminine returned to the Western World and with it a growth of devotion to Our Lady. Today, the wise ones cherish the balance of the genders, the intercourse of the sexes (without which there can be no new life) and the wholeness that each individual achieves when the masculine and the feminine within meld into one harmonious equality.
The Fullness of the Harvest comes with Pagan Mabon on September 23rd : the Autumn Equinox, a time of thanksgiving, and of setting aside a tangible token for the coming year. Harvest Festivals are a more modern re-introduction into parts of the Christian church when one and all give voice that ‘All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin’. And on the 29th of the month, Michael the Archangel, Guardian of the High Places, looks down benignly on the land and his people below.
The Wheel of the Year turns. Summer metamorphoses into late Autumn. The men and their herds return from the summer pastures. Spirits and souls of the righteous are near at hand for Samhain at the end of October. And on the 1st of November, the church has All Saints’ Day, a remembrance especially for those not given their own particular Saint’s Day at other times in the year. And on the 2nd of November is the Commemoration of All Souls, a day of requiem for ‘those known unto us’ who have passed beyond this earthly bourne. The Christian All Hallows and the Pagan Samhain, how they do interweave!
And so we come to Yule. Midwinter. The solstice. Germanic. Norse. Roman. The Holly King. The fir tree. The sprig of Mistletoe. The Saviour of the World. The Yule log burns on the festive hearth and the candles gleam bright for the Midnight Mass.
Then on to the beginning of February, when the ice begins to melt on frozen rivers and the first tiny shoots creep through earth kept warm by blankets of snow now disappearing. Life quickens in man and maid. The first intimations of new creation appear ever more and more greening the landscape. Imbolc is with us. Bride spans both Pagan and Christian kalendars. Candlemass blesses the waxen cylinders for sacred use in the coming year. Mary goes to the Temple for ritual Purification, taking the babe for Presentation. The agéd Jewish priest Simeon sings Nunc dimittis servum tuum, domine.

Lord, now lettest thou, thy servant, depart in peace. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared before the face of all people to be a light to lighten the gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel.

After the death of Winter, comes new life with the Spring. As surely as, after the going down of the sun with the onset of night, there is new life with each returning dawn. The Wheel turns. My beginning is my end and mine end is my beginning

et in saecula saeculorum amen

So mote it be

the invisible player

Francis Cameron writes :: this is the text of a talk I have recently given to the Ravens Nest Moot in Chingford and to The Secret Chiefs in London.

Spiritualism : the invisible player in the story of the revival of the pagan witchcraft religion.

‘The invisible player’. It’s a wonderful expression. I wish I’d invented it. But I didn’t. My good friend Ronald Hutton did. It’s there in the preface to his Triumph of the Moon [1999] where he explains how he had set about writing his history of ‘the only religion which England has ever given to the world’. He submits it is very possible he has not covered everything which might have been included and his own suspicion is ‘that the greatest invisible player in the story is spiritualism’.

I offer this essay as an act of homage to Professor Hutton.

So let us take a look at Spiritualism as it is today, where it began, what it was like in Gerald Gardner’s lifetime, and how ‘the invisible player’ unwittingly unlocked the door for the pagan witchcraft religion.

It is very easy to gain at least a nodding acquaintance with Spiritualism. There are Spiritualist churches all over the country. In the City of Oxford, where I live, there are two of them. Their services remind me so much of those I used to frequent while I was still a boy at the Mercers’ School in London. Back in those fading years of the 1930s, I played the harmonium for Sunday services at The Temple of Truth in the front room of a first floor flat on the Harrow Road. We began with a hymn from the Spiritualist hymnbook. The words and the music so often reminiscent of Sankey & Moody’s 19th‑century revivalist meetings. One hymn, which I particularly remember, held out the certain promise of ‘a land which is fairer than day’, a land we would reach ‘in the sweet by and by’. After the hymn there was a prayer and a reading; a second hymn followed by an address; a third hymn; a demonstration of clairvoyance; a final hymn; and a blessing. It’s a pattern which shows its origins in the standard practice of 19th-century Nonconformist chapels – with one very significant exception : the demonstration of clairvoyance

Demonstrations of clairvoyance are probably the most significant part of the public face of Spiritualism. They are the means by which ‘life after death’ is illustrated.
Mediums make contact with ‘the other side’ by a combination of clairvoyance (seeing with the inner eye) and clairaudience (listening with the inner ear to voices from the world of spirit). These are not special gifts. We are all born with them (just think of all those little children with their invisible playmates) but these innate abilities are all too often suppressed by parents and by teachers.
Some Spiritualist churches hold special developing circles where those who are more advanced help and guide the less advanced to rejuvenate these natural facilities.

There may be other events during the week. A visiting medium is sometimes engaged for an evening or an afternoon of psychometry. Each of the sitters brings with them a small object, such as a piece of jewellery they normally wear or an article they frequently use or carry about with them. As they arrive, each sitter places their object on a tray which is later set out in front of the medium who takes up the articles one by one, ‘gives off’ the impressions which result, and makes contact with the relevant sitters. The messages which follow do not necessarily involve the spirits of the departed. They are often more of a personal nature.

I teach psychometry as a first stage in the art of divination. I find nearly everyone is sensitive to its possibilities even at their first attempt. It works like this. Objects we wear or use frequently act as recording devices. When I take a small article into my hand and contact it with the tips of my fingers, it is rather like fine tuning a television. I see one or more images, like a succession of stills from a film. I describe these images. They are a trigger to connection with the owner of the article. More images may follow. Sometimes I receive verbal messages as well. There often are questions and answers. Perplexing situations sorted out. I sometimes speak of possibilities but I do not foretell the future.
The advantage of psychometry for my students is that as soon as they feel the vibrations contained within each object and put into spoken words the impressions that make themselves known, more follow. And there are no books of ready-made interpretations to distract them.

At home my parents held a regular weekly healing circle.

Spiritual healers work in different ways. My own practice involves the use of psychic energy. When I hold out my hands a little way in front of me, with the palms facing each other, I feel an interplay, a connection between them which gradually pushes my hands a little further apart as the energy grows in strength. I place one or both hands on or near the patient, close my eyes and tune in. I focus the psychic energy. During this process I experience an interaction between my own consciousness and support and direction from the other side of life.

During the school holidays I was often at home when a Spiritualist friend of my mother’s came to visit. The two of us would sit for ‘the table’. We set up a card table (one of those lightweight folding contraptions with a green baize top). We sat facing each other across the table with our fingertips lightly in contact with its surface. We relaxed. Mentally prepared ourselves. The table began to rock from side to side. We greeted the spirit friends who had come to visit. We reminded them of the usual code. If we asked a question and the answer was ‘Yes’, the table was to rock once. If the answer was ‘No’, the table was to rock twice. In addition to that, the table should be rocked while we recited the alphabet and the rocking was to stop when we reached the intended letter. This is a rather slow and necessarily rudimentary means of communication but it was possible for spirits to identify themselves and to spell out simple abbreviated messages.

All this is reminiscent of the episodes which first brought Spiritualism to the attention of the outside world.

Let me take you across the Atlantic, back to the last days of March in the year 1848. While their own future home was being built, the Fox family – John and his wife Margaret, their eleven-year-old daughter Kate, and her fourteen-year-old sister Maggie – had taken up a temporary residence among the farming community of Hydesville, in the west of New York State. They shared the one large bedroom in the house. The parents in one bed. The two girls in the other. Then the knockings began. There were rappings on the walls and ceiling, bangings on the floor strong enough for the percussion to be felt as well as heard. They searched the house. There was no obvious physical explanation for the sounds. Back in the bedroom, sleep was impossible. On March 31st the women went to bed early to try to get some rest but the rappings were even more insistent. Young Kate snapped her fingers. The rappings replied. She snapped her fingers again and again. The rappings came back with the same number of sounds. When Kate stopped, the knocking stopped. Then her sister Maggie joined in. She called out ‘Do the same as me,’ and she began to clap her hands, counting as she did ‘One, two three, four.’ With each clap came an immediate response. Maggie was too scared to go on. Her mother, Margaret, chimed in. ‘Count up to ten!’ and immediately there were ten taps. Margaret began to ask questions. If there was a positive answer, there were to be two sounds. If not, there was to be silence. In this way Margaret teased out the information that the sounds were being made by the spirit of a man who had been murdered in that house. His body was buried in the cellar. Now John was sent off to fetch a neighbour. When the two of them came back, the knockings continued. More neighbours were brought in. The phenomena went on. In the days following, an alphabetical communication was established and the ghost identified. As the days went by, more and more people came to the house to witness the ghostly hauntings.
Late in April, the eldest Fox daughter, the thirty-five year old Leah, came from Rochester to see for herself what was going on. She found her parents looking old haggard and drawn from the strain of the past weeks. In a mutually agreed effort to put a stop to the disturbances, they decided to separate the two girls. Leah took young Kate back to Rochester. The first night passed peacefully enough, but the nights after that were dominated by poltergeist activity. Ghostly hands made their presence felt. Chairs and tables were moved about. Doors opened and were slammed shut. Leah moved to a different house. Margaret and Maggie arrived from Hydesville. Now the manifestations continued noisier than ever. Round about midnight there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs. They came into the room. There was shuffling of feet, whispering and giggling. Then the bed, with Leah in it, was shaken about and lifted up, almost to the ceiling, and let down with a great bang. Invisible hands stroked and patted the women. It was a terrifying ordeal. The disturbances resumed on the following night. Brass candlesticks were thrown about. Ghostly hands slapped the women. Kate fell into a trance and experienced a full replay of the Hydesville murder.
These were the first few weeks of the physical phenomena which came to be called Spiritualism. By the following year, the manifestations had been demonstrated in front of substantial public audiences. Not long after that, other men and women realised their inherent capacity for mediumship. Spiritualism began to acquire its widespread international reputation.

But there was already a rather different mode of communication which involved spirit beings from the Halls of Learning.

A little more than a century before the noisy hauntings at Hydesville, the Stockholm-born scientist Emanuel Swedenborg [1688 to 1772] had been through a series of profoundly moving mystical experiences. In 1747, he resigned from his official scientific position and devoted the rest of his life to writing - in Latin - a substantial number of volumes describing the celestial realms and detailing his conversations with angels and other spirit beings.
In North America, Andrew Jackson Davis [1826 to 1910] freely entered into trance states where he collaborated with the spirit of Emanuel Swedenborg who shared his experiences of those who existed on the various planes of thought beyond the physical. Andrew Jackson Davis was convinced that the time was at hand when men and women in this world would communicate freely with spirits from beyond the grave and it is in this sense that he has been called the forerunner of the Spiritualist movement.

At home in London, I often joined the regular evening séances when my mother sat in circle with a small group of friends. She cleared her mind and moved into deep trance, willingly allowing her physical faculties to be controlled by a spirit guide from one of the higher realms, a guide who spoke of mysteries metaphysics and the wisdom of the ages. Only years later did I realise how closely akin some of these talks were to the mystical Neoplatonism associated with Plotinus in 3rd‑century Alexandria and Rome, teachings that were certainly not part of my mother’s everyday physical awareness. The guide also encouraged us in the practice of soul consciousness; and bade us tread the pathway towards perfection in this life in preparation for our lives to come.
And so, as I sat in the circle, I gradually came to appreciate the delicate balancings of Karma and how I might best prepare myself in this life to be ready for the transition leading to my next sojourn on the earth plane (and I grew to have a some intimation of what that may involve). Now and then, a cross‑reference in this life sparks off distant memories. From time to time I re‑encounter those with whom I have enjoyed intimate relationships when we were both living together in very different times and places. And I recognise that, as I neared the inevitability of this return, I chose to be born to parents who were Christian Spiritualists. They were both psychic. Clairvoyants and healers. My father was an outstanding public speaker and my mother’s work, especially her séances in deep trance, delighted and enlightened those with whom she came into contact.


Now let us turn the page and consider just how it was that Spiritualism became involved with the revival of our pagan witchcraft religion.

We tell of Gerald Brosseau Gardner, the man who presented this religion to the world. He was in all respects the most visible player in our story. His part began in the last decade of the nineteenth century while he was still a young boy who had only just learned to read. He was wintering in Madeira. The nearest books were those left behind in the hotel by other English visitors. Young Gerald became completely absorbed in Florence Marryat’s There Is No Death, which had been published in 1891 when he was some six or seven years old. The book is a compendious, sometimes rather chatty, account of the author’s experiences with a great many Spiritualist mediums both in England and in the USA. She describes a form of mediumship very different from that usually found today in Spiritualist circles. In the late nineteenth century, a veritable heyday of Spiritualism, mediums sat in a state of deep trance while the spirits used ectoplasm, exuded from the medium’s body, to build up a materialised form which walked about, talked to the sitters, even sometimes sat on their laps. The materialised forms could be touched. Kisses were given and received. On occasion two or even three spirit forms were visible at the same time. And all this while, in the dim lighting of the séance room, the medium remained immobile at a perceptible distance from the materialisations.

In the year 1900, when he was sixteen, Gerald Gardner was sent to learn how to manage a tea plantation on the island now called Sri Lanka. After a couple of years he moved on and stayed a total of thirty-six years in the lands of that distant part of the British Empire.
Gardner was rather different from the general run of Englishmen out there in the colonies. Unlike them he made friends with the natives. He observed their customs, became familiar with their myths and legends, and noted how closely their daily lives were interwoven with spirit presences.
He spent some time among the head-hunting Dyaks in Borneo. These people had a very simple view of magic. It was real and it worked! Gardner often assisted with their shamanic ceremonies. The medium was a young girl. Gardner had come to know her family. They went to the shaman’s house where everyone gossiped for a while until the shaman began his chant, a chant which might last for an hour or more. When he judged everything to be ready, the shaman made the girl to lie down on a special mat provided with a special pillow. He went on with his chanting and continually moved his hands in the air above her body from her head right down to her feet. The girl medium went into trance. The pitch of her voice changed dramatically. She was controlled by one or other of the various spirits ‘owned’ by her shaman. These were ancestors of the families present. The spirits answered questions and gave advice. It was all perfectly matter-of-fact. When humans died, their spirits remained part of the community. These shamanic rituals were one of their normal ways of keeping in touch.

1927 saw Gerald Gardner back home in Blundellsands on compassionate leave. His mother had died in 1920. Two of his closest friends had also passed on. His father was seriously ill and not expected to live. When someone mentioned a Spiritualist church not far from Liverpool, Gardner remembered the books of Florence Marryat from his boyhood days and the shamanic séances he had been party to in Borneo. Now would be a good time to find out for himself the truth about Spiritualism, survival after death and reincarnation.
I suspect the meeting he attended was like those I went to in the late 1930s, all very reminiscent of nonconformist worship. Gardner recalls there being about fifty in the congregation and a service with a man who stood up and preached the equivalent of a sermon. The medium was a woman who came forward, sat down facing the audience, and went into trance. She was quite unconvincing. She called out a variety of common Christian names which might have belonged to anyone. When one was acknowledged, the message that followed was banal in the extreme.
Gardner was bitterly disappointed but his interest had been pricked. He decided to investigate further. He heard that the best mediums were to be found in London. Before he set off he took every possible precaution to disguise his true identity and destination. When he reached the Cromwell Road, he chose a hotel at random.
The next morning, as he was walking towards South Kensington, he spotted a nameplate outside one of the houses. He had arrived at The London Spiritualist Alliance. He had never heard of it before. No one could have known he was going there. This would be the place for the test. He went in and paid in advance for three sessions.
The first medium was a straightforward clairvoyant who saw his sitter ‘out East’ then went on to say Uncle John was present. Gardner refuted the existence of an Uncle John. The medium repeated that Uncle John was present. Gardner repeated his denial.
(Pause)
- Now there’s a fair, blue-eyed lady. She says she’s your cousin Anne.
- I never had a cousin Anne.
- She says she wants to speak to you.
- There’s no point. I never had a cousin Anne.
(Another pause)
- Now there’s another lady here. She says she’s your mother.
- What’s her name?
- She can’t give her name.
- Why not? The others could.
- I don’t know. She just can’t.
- All right. What does she want?
- It’s about your father. She’s afraid he might die. They’re all very worried about him.
- I’m worried too. Can she say any more?
- Only that she’s very fond you.
- Then she can tell me her name.
- No, she can’t. She’s not able to do that.
(Silence)
- Is there anything else?
- No, ‘fraid not. The power’s gone.
And Gardner walked out feeling it had all been an irritating waste of time. He certainly would not have returned had he not already booked and paid for two more sessions.
The medium that afternoon was a tall thin lady who demonstrated automatic writing. She sat quietly for a moment. Moved smoothly into a light trance and allowed each spirit in turn to control the actions of her arm and fingers. The first to sign in was the Uncle John who had been dismissed that morning and was equally quickly dismissed in the afternoon. Cousin Anne followed him. Once again she was disowned. She wrote that she had died of cancer four years before but this meant nothing to Gardner who once more sent her on her way. Now the style of the writing changed. His mother came through. She still was not able to give her name but she identified herself by describing the house they had lived in. She named each of Gerald’s brothers, their wives and their children. Cautiously he began to accept that this might, after all, be a genuine communication. His mother went on writing. She was very anxious about his father, as were all those who had known him on earth. And that was that. The medium came out of trance.
Gardner began to look forward to his final session. Back in his hotel, he made careful notes of the day’s proceedings and was inclined on balance to think that perhaps after all he had been gulled by some rather convincing thought‑reading.
The medium the next morning was a rather gaunt women with a sort of occult feeling about her. She sat down, went into trance, and her control came through. The sequence of the previous day reasserted itself. Uncle John did his best to speak and was brusquely sent packing. Cousin Anne followed. She told Gardner she had died of cancer four years previously and that they had known each other very well. When, for the third time, he objected that he never had a Cousin Anne, the medium interrupted. Cousin Anne had been known as ‘G’. At first he was inclined to continue his scepticism but when he asked if it really was ‘G’, she replied with great animation. The words came pouring out. She had been trying so hard for so long to get hold of him. He was to get in touch with a relative of hers, deliver a stern message and get the girl to change her ways before it was too late. His compassionate leave might be pretty dull at the moment but something very nice would happen soon and he wouldn’t get back to work until Christmas. Gardner thought this quite unlikely. His leave was up in two weeks and his tickets were already booked for the return journey. G chided him. “You’ll jolly well see.” She went on to speak of his father and the legal papers he had recently been signing. His mother was very fond of him but names were difficult on the other side. “Then why do you call yourself Anne?” But there was no answer. The medium returned from her trance. The séance was ended.
As Gardner left the building he was convinced he really had been contacted by the spirit of his dear friend G.
That evening a train of events was set in motion which put thoughts of G and the spirit world completely out of his mind. He took his brother’s sister-in-law to a theatre. A stepdaughter came too. As soon as they shook hands, Gardner knew this was the woman he was going to marry. The next day he took the two of them to afternoon tea at Kew. And the day after that he went to the hospital where Donna was a Sister and told her she would be going back to Malaya with him, as his wife. There was no argument, but she did want a church wedding. That presented a problem. Gardner’s leave was nearly over. There was no time for the banns to be called. They needed a special licence. By persistence and great good fortune, Gardner obtained one from the Bishop of London’s office. There was still the Matron at the hospital and she was not in the least inclined to release Donna. Gardner must have switched on the charm. Matron relented. The wedding took place. Matron was there in the church to give her blessing. Gerald received two months’ additional leave. The couple went off to honeymoon on the Isle of Wight and then he took Donna to Blundellsands where they stayed with his brother Bob.
On their second evening there, the conversation turned to The London Spiritualist Alliance. The business about the insistent Uncle John was quickly settled. Bob knew him. Their Uncle John had died when Gerald was much too young to remember him. They looked at the pages of automatic writing. Their mother’s handwriting was clear as day. It was identical to samples Bob took out of his desk. And, yes, even though his father was very ill, he had signed legal documents for their lawyer brother Harold.
Gerald went to Liverpool to deliver G’s message. When he mentioned Anne, the girl broke down and cried. She knew the message must be authentic. G had been christened Anne Gertrude but only with her mother had she called herself Anne.
Final proof of the spirit messages came to Donna and Gerald as their ship steamed into Singapore harbour. It was Christmas Eve, just as his cousin G had predicted.

Gardner retired from the colonial service in 1936 and the couple returned to England where they rented a flat in London. Gerald joined a nudist club, met new and interesting people, and fell in love with one of them. She was a nudist. She was also a practising witch. Gerald Gardner wrote about the two of them in his first novel A Goddess Arrives [1939] which describes a substantial part of a previous life they had long ago shared on the island of Cyprus. In our story of the pagan witchcraft religion, this woman is known as Dafo. At home near the south coast she was Mrs Edith Woodford-Grimes, in private practice as a teacher of music and elocution. In the month that war began, Gerald Gardner was initiated into the coven she belonged to. They were both part of the 1940 anti-invasion workings in the New Forest and when the war was over they set up their own covenstead at Bricket Wood near St Albans.

In the meantime there had been a very significant event which is not usually chronicled in the witchcraft story.

I remember it well. It made national headline news at the time.

In March of 1944 there was a spectacular trial at the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court. In the dock was Helen Duncan, a Spiritualist medium, accused of ‘pretending to exercise or use a kind of conjuration that ... spirits of deceased persons should appear to be present ... communicating with living persons ... contrary to Section 4 of the Witchcraft Act 1735’. She was found guilty and sentenced to nine months in Holloway prison.
Helen Duncan was a much loved, much respected materialisation medium. She had already attracted official attention when a sailor killed by enemy action had built up and been recognised in one of her séances, much to the distress of the sitter who believed the man was still alive. (The news of the sinking of his ship had been kept secret to avoid giving valuable information to the enemy.) Now, in the last crucial months of preparation for the allied invasion of northern Europe, Helen Duncan was a potential security risk who had to be prevented from making further damaging disclosures. The all-but-obsolete Witchcraft Act of 1735 was brought into action to ensure a custodial sentence, but the real reason for its use was concealed.
Spiritualists were dismayed and angry at this prosecution which seemed to them to be an undeserved attack on their religion. Many in the legal profession had their own misgivings at the use of this antiquated piece of legislation. Objections were raised on both sides but were overtaken by the priorities of war.
It was some years before the matter was raised again. One of the last actions of Clement Attlee’s Labour government was The Fraudulent Mediums Act, 1951, whose first provision repealed the Witchcraft Act 1735. Spiritualists saw this as a long-overdue vindication of their cause.

I doubt if much attention was focussed anywhere else, save for one prominent exception.

Gerald Gardner interpreted the repeal of the 1735 Act as a signal for him to go public, to tell the world about the pagan witchcraft religion. He was already involved with Cecil Williamson’s Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft at Castleton on the Isle of Man. Two years earlier he had written a fantasy novel High Magic’s Aid [1949] which combined the ceremonial magic of The Key of Solomon with the witchcraft religion practised by his coven. The rest, as they say, is history. The revival of pagan witchcraft was well under way by the time Gerald Gardner died in 1964 and the centre stage was beginning to be occupied by Alex Sanders (who had once been known for his Spiritualist activities) and his attractive young wife Maxine.

More than thirty years ago, I was introduced to the Craft by an Australian witch whose tradition stretched back for a full two hundred years. His philosophy had been modified by the writings of Margaret Murray and some of his practices are to be found mirrored in Stewart Farrar’s What Witches Do [1971]. Right from the start I noticed the distinctions between Spiritualism and Pagan Witchcraft. I also noticed where they overlapped.
I continue to work in the Craft with that same kind of psychic energy I first experienced as a London schoolboy in a Spiritualist circle. Moving into a trance state is of primary importance, especially when the Goddess and the God are to be manifested in the ritual of the Chalice and the Blade. Pathworkings and constructive visualisations, including spellcraft, are extensions of techniques I absorbed as a young man. I heal and practise divination as I have always done : when called for. Soul consciousness is at the heart of my Pagan interaction with local landscapes and the procession of the seasons. My perception of the Mystical Cabalah is enhanced by the teachings received through my mother’s mediumship. I am aware of some of my past lives and that, as is common to all of us, I am perpetually creating my own future.

The world between the worlds is my beginning and mine end.


© copyright 2007
francis cameron, oxford


Details of Gardner’s life are taken from Gerald Gardner: Witch (J L Bracelin). This and his two novels are published in modern editions by I-H-O Books, Thame, England.
Talking to the Dead (Barbara Weisberg, 2004) has a good account of the early days of Spiritualism.
Malcolm Gaskill writes of Helen Duncan and her trial in Hellish Nell, last of Britain’s witches [2001].
There Is No Death and much information about Florence Marryat are online.