the witch next door

Twice in the last couple of weeks I’ve been asked how I first became involved with the Wicca. It’s never happened quite like that before. Perhaps it’s because my pentacle is now all too visible on an area of shirtfront not obscured by the long white beard. (I was called ‘Gandalf’ in the pub last night. It was a friendly greeting. They were a very welcoming little crowd.)

So let’s answer the question. How?

The year was 1974. My professional career had taken me to Australia. On the evening in question I’d gone to visit a friend who lived in one of the older parts of Sydney. Down alongside the working harbour. A terrace of single story houses with rust-coloured corrugated iron roofs. Not uncommon in those pars. We were sitting in the kitchen. The front doorbell rang. It was the man from the house next door. He was expected. He came and joined us. Introduced himself as a witch. And began to talk about the Craft.

Now it happened that, although my headquarters were at the Conservatorium of Music, I’d recently felt the need to study anthropology. I’d been welcomed with open arms by the Faculty at the University. (Anthropologists are like that. Music is part of their remit but they are convinced that special attributes are needed to study music. I’ve never even tried to disturb that illusion.) Studying witchcraft – or, rather, studying books about witchcraft – is an obligatory part of the course in any anthropology department I’ve ever come across.

As I sat listening to our visiting witch, more and more of his words were familiar. They were straight out of Margaret Murray. I’d read all three of her witchcraft books only a few weeks before. But then he went on to other things which were not from Margaret Murray. Some of them I could compare with my experience of Spiritualist séances in my parents’ home. Other parts were quite new to me. Importantly, they all made sense, including his explanation that when the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay on 22 January 1787, there were witches among the convicts on board. The Craft had been handed down from them through the generations and was now flourishing quietly and discretely even as we spoke.

That was not the only time he came to visit. I was hooked right from the start. At this very crucial time of my own life, the teacher had made himself known. We began the practical work.

Looking back at it from what I’ve learned since, I guess there was a good deal of the hereditary still present, plus knowledge and practices with a Gardnerian flavour brought in from contacts with witches from England.

Eventually the witch from the house next door moved away with his Priestess partner. We continued working. Always skyclad. Always standing skyclad out at the back on the nights of the Full Moon. At certain times it seemed very near. Large and softly glowing. Low on the skyline.

We found ourselves alone. Just the two of us. We needed to consolidate and to move on. I found the Craftsman Bookshop in Sydney’s Kings Cross. The book I bought was ‘What Witches Do’ by Stewart Farrar, which had been published in 1971, only a few years before. It’s a book I still use from time to time. Its two hundred or so pages contain so much of the essence of the old witchcraft religion. It was a splendid foundation.

I may have moved on quite a long way since then, but every step along the path has been worth it.

francis cameron

oxford, 30 june 2009

turning points

When we look back at the past, those of us who are occupied with the writing and teaching of history find it useful to pick out certain significant events as markers separating before from after.

In my early schooldays, the first such event I learned about was 1066, the Norman Conquest, which conveyed the idea that this was when English history began. (And I well remember the cigarette cards issued in 1937 to mark the coronation of King George V and Queen Elizabeth. The set of ‘Kings and Queens of England’ began with William the Conqueror!)

At the Mercers’ School, I took in the date 1453, when Constantinople was finally conquered by the Turks, the scholars picked up their precious manuscripts, tucked them under their arms, moved to Italy, and the Renaissance began.

All good scholarly stuff, serving a (temporarily) useful purpose, but a bit far-fetched so far as implications go. (No one so much as mentioned Gutenberg and his printing press : the great revolutionary invention of that mid-century.)

In the past week or so, I find the date 1951 popping up here and there in various books I’ve been reading. !951. I remember it well. It was the year of the Festival of Britain, originally proposed as a centenary celebration of the Great Exhibition of 1851, but more specifically as an antidote to the postwar years of drab austerity, an indicator that Britain was on its feet again, standing on the brink of another brilliant future. A Dome of Discovery and a Skylon were erected on the South Bank of the Thames and a Heath Robinson pleasure gardens transformed Battersea Park.

Yes, 1951 also proved to be a significant turning point for the government. Labour lost the General Election in October and remained in opposition until 1964.

I’ve begun to consider the possibility of 1951’s having rather deeper implications. When I was lecturing on the history of the Arts, especially classical music, the years round about 1900 seemed to be crucial. The great works of 19th century Romanticism were coming to an end. A new generation was exploring – even desperately searching for – new ideas. Then came The War (1914 to 1918, that is) followed by the reaction of the 1920s, the very arid 1930s, and the renewal of The War (1939 to 1945). The first part of The War took out a whole generation of young men. The second part was widespread devastation. Twice in a handful of decades artistic impetus were shattered.

Perhaps, then, 1951 did mark a re-start, a fresh imperative, though it was more than a little infected by the attractive delusion that we remained the Great Nation of the days when the genial Edward VII was our monarch. (1951 was not the last time British troops were to engage in Suez.)

For tens of thousands of us, 1951 has a special significance, for that was the year when Parliament passed the Fraudulent Mediums Act to regularise the position of Spiritualists still smarting from the effects of the Witchcraft Trial of 1944 which had sent one of their leading mediums to prison. The first clause of the 1951 Act repealed the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Spiritualists would no longer be subject to prosecution. And there it might all have ended, a chapter closed, save that a single alert individual saw his chance and seized it.

For Gerald Gardner this was the liminal moment. He stood on the threshold. Behind him was more than a decade of enthusiastic personal involvement in the Wica (his spelling). Out there in front was a whole wide world where he could spread his eager word. And so it was. He stepped forward. He went public, spreading the news of a surviving and renewed pagan religion whose roots were flourishing even in the days ‘Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode’.

francis cameron

oxford, 28 june 2009

legendary

In the mid-1970s as part of my studies in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, I read in translation The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours. It’s quite a fat little volume in the series of Penguin Classics. A long and complex tale. I admit it required no little persistence on my part to complete my scrutiny from cover to cover. And right away the text bothered me.

Gregory writes in a sequence of episodes neatly ruled off from each other. I find myself reminded of Herodotus. Many – indeed, most – of Gregory’s episodes come across as reliable accounts of genuine historical events. This, after all, is Gregory’s prime purpose. By showing how the genealogy of the Frankish people fits smoothly and auspiciously into the patterns of the past – from the moment of Creation onwards - Gregory validates the authenticity of the Merovingian royal line which, in his own portion of linear time (Gregory died in the year 594 of our era), asserted its authority over the former Roman province of Gaul.

So much for the histories. But Gregory includes episodes belonging to a more intense perception : a perception where miracles and the interventions of the Holy Saints are as normal and expected as human mortality ; a perception where the sacred and the profane exist side by side in the same ambience, but where the sacred is to be regarded and approached with a special reverence and respect. I found myself asking : if we regard the mundane episodes as historically true, are we thereby to regard the miraculous episodes as historically true? On the other hand : if we regard the miraculous episodes simply as products of the imagination, what reliance can we place on the remainder of the material?

After more than three decades, I begin to see a possible resolution : a resolution which requires an exchange of categories, a setting aside of a current orthodoxy of historiography in favour of allowing an equal validity to legendary history for, in the middle of the first western millennium, the past was re-invented in ways which allowed, even ‘required’, genuine historical figures to be clothed in the raiment of legend : real mortal people enhanced with the attributes of immortality.

I am reminded of Tintagel where the tangible artefacts of history are subtly interpenetrated by the intangibles of legend. I am also reminded of Brocéliande where Merlin and Morgana still hold sway and where ‘the once and future king’ is worshipped as a saint and portrayed in the stained glass of sacred fenestration.

francis cameron

oxford, 25 june 2009

academic expositions of 'the burning times'

Barry, Hester & Roberts (eds)

Witchcraft in early modern Europe : studies in culture and belief

ISBN 0-521-55224-9

Once again I have been re-reading this study. It’s a collection of thirteen essays originating from a 1991 conference held at the University of Exeter on the cultural contexts of the European witch hunts. It’s admirable academic stuff. Full of details and bountifully provided with footnotes showing where the writers unearthed their material. And that material comes from the books on the shelves they were surrounded with as they read and as they wrote.

As the subtitle indicates : this is a book about historical attitudes towards witchcraft rather than a book about witchcraft itself. ‘Early Modern Europe’, in this context, means mostly the 1500s and the 1600s, though Ian Bostridge on ‘Witchcraft repealed’ is actually about the events leading up to and surrounding the passing of the Witchcraft Act of 1735 (which he treats as belonging to March 1736 without explaining why). Only in his very last footnote does he mention ‘14 and 15 Geo. 6. ch. 33. Fraudulent Mediums Act, 1951. (An Act to repeal the Witchcraft Act, 1735, and to make in substitution .. .. )’. That, and leads to a handful of 1990 newspaper articles of the more sensational persuasion. Not a word about Gerald Gardner and the witchcraft revival. But that could be par for the course in certain academic surroundings even so recently as a score of years ago. I can remember being advised that my own department actively avoided contact with 20th-century witches (unless they were in a distant part of the world and, preferably, pre-literate).

So there we have it. A useful collection of detailed information about ‘the burning times’ by a respectable table of academics paying due homage to Keith Thomas and his ‘Religion and the Decline of Magic’, a classic work of the genre.

francis cameron

oxford, 24 june 2009