Since the 1950s such a faith has been re-emerging under the title of ‘Witchcraft’. Witchcraft is not just a pagan religion, however, for it has at least two other interesting components. One is magic and the other encompasses a wide array of traditional crafts, from using herbs in healing to making talismans and charms.
Witchcraft, as a religious impulse, has never gone out to recruit or convert those of other faiths, nor does being a witch prevent you following an orthodox belief as well. Today there are Catholic witches, Quaker and Church of England witches, as well as Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist witches.
The paganism of modern witchcraft is an expansive philosophy which holds all aspects of life as sacred. Its mythology includes many forms of gods and goddesses, both Classical pagan, like the pantheons of ancient Egypt, Greece or the Celtic and Norse lands of the North, as well as the magically born, annually dying and sacrificed hero gods, which can include Attis or Jesus. It is necessary to study all scriptures and holy books, and mythologies too, to reassess their teachings and values for the current world.
It is often thought that witchcraft involves the worship of a character which the Christians call ‘Satan’, but this is not true. The Satanists are not pagan witches but derive from Christianity, perverting the usual understanding of Good and Evil of that religion. Witches, on the whole, do not have any kind of evil deity. They worship Mother Nature, the Great Goddess who also rules over the triple phases of the Moon, and all the Waters, be they springs, rivers or oceans. Her consort, divine Son and Champion is the Lord of wild and tame creatures; he is the Hunter, the Corn King, the dying and reincarnating Sun God, bearing the antlers of the stag or the sun’s rays upon his brow.
Each of these deities rules over patterns of change, the natural rebirth of the Earth’s green bounty in spring, its summer burgeoning, autumnal decay and winter rest. The Goddess is the Earth beneath our feet, our home and the substance from which our physical bodies are created. She is the water that
refreshes and cleanses us, and the moonlight which, with its ever-fluctuating light, enriches our dreams, and if we are wise, awakens our magical powers of psychic vision. The Sun God lights up our world, giving it life, warmth and vital energy. Ultimately, it is from the Sun’s power that we receive our food for all green things are fuelled by solar reaction, and where there is no light there is no life as we know it.
In witchcraft there is no sense of ‘having to believe’ in an Earth Goddess and a Sun God, but each one who comes freely and of their own will to the Old Religion will come to know, through personal revelation and religious experience, that mighty powers can be encountered and prayed to, from whom guidance, strength and healing can be genuinely received. The seasonal festivals which mark the passing year enact the lives of the Goddess and her Son/Consort, bringing their energies into the sacred circle so that they may be communed with by all who seek them. There is no dogma, just a body of myths and legends handed down by country folk, the original paganus, in song and rhyme, in dance and mime, in tale and half-remembered calendar custom or traditional fair.
In earlier times, when almost everyone worked on the land or at crafts and skills connected with natural produce, a sequence of seasonal events punctuated the turning year with feasts and festivals, gatherings and partings. In each village there would be a number of families pursuing inherited crafts: the blacksmith, the baker, the cobbler and, probably, the wise one/herbalist/witch. Just as the blacksmith would teach the magics of his skill with metals to his sons, so would the healer/witch teach her children, so that the old knowledge would be passed down, within the family, to both men and women.
The Cunning Men had their own Mysteries, trade secrets if you like, as did the women, which would help them discover lost cattle, cure sickness in mankind, beast or the land itself, oversee the loves and hates of their community, offering wise advice or charms and potions, as the client requested. They would be the keepers of the community’s songs which spoke, since Celtic times, of every individual’s lineage, his grandsires and traditional crafts. They would know the herbs that aided childbearing, or kept pregnancy from befalling. They knew the plants which would bring peaceful sleep, or death, or dreams of wild frenzy. They would watch the heavens, noting, in their own unwritten code, the births of children, deaths of the old, meetings and partings of lovers and their fingers were always on the pulse of village life, their dark eyes at the knotholes of the shutters, watching their narrow world go by.
Because they knew what was in the hearts of those who came seeking love potions, or vengeance or luck, they could barter or predict or manipulate the outcomes of any activities within their magically delineated patch. They held the secrets of life and death, and were feared or respected for their craft, their skills and their magics.
And these old unwritten wisdoms live on, hidden in the secluded and veiled world of ‘Witchdom’. They are seldom found in books, for most of the old arts are trivial, the spells simple, the crafts are intuitive rather than learned in an academic way. They are seldom found in covens, either, for these modern groups of witches are directed by a High Priestess and a High Priest, in regular rituals often held, perforce, inside a house rather than out in the moonlight, where Mother Nature holds all in her thrall. The covens offer friendship and shared worship, regular activities and initiation for those who
seek that path. But it isn’t the only way. Many excellent books have been written for coven witches, spelling out their ceremonies, degrees, philosophies and mythology, but this offers only one side of the coin.
Social history is very quiet about the lives, beliefs and activities of the common folk. Historians have looked at kings and bishops, leaders in battle or cloistered monks, recording their view of history on vellum. No one bothered with the peasants, nor the secretive crafts folk, plying their individual trades to serve their own community. No one travelled very far from the place they were born, unless service to the lord of the manor entailed their enforced attendance on a battle, uprising or work on his lands held at a distance.
The few freemen, the journeymen carpenters, masons and clerics who did travel often huge distances to ply their specialist trades, were a fairly rare bunch, and they kept their own secrets closely. Many, however, protected and preserved the Old Religion wherever they went. Look in any old church and there you will probably find the Green God of Nature in the rafters as a Green Man, or the Goddess in her guise of deer or hare or rose of the world. These ancient pagan images have spent fifteen hundred years gazing down on followers of a newer faith below, yet they have not lost their magic.
Certain places in the wild have always held the aura of power: the summits of high and lonely hills, sacred springs within the hidden grove, deep caves, and the ancient, stone-encircled dancing grounds, recognised as holy by our long-lost ancestors, marked on their mind-maps which we, with awakened inner vision, may read anew. These are the protected places, the boundaries between earth and water, air and earth, this world and that of Witchdom, hidden only by a veil of dream. Go there alone, in the spirit of adventure and seek out the atmosphere, if nothing else.
Feel the energy of any such place, quietly, inside your head. Ask that the Guardian Deity of the sacred area come to you and sit for a few minutes in silence, relaxed, with your eyes closed. Listen with sharp ears for the tread of the Goddess’s feet on the land of that other world, feel the brush of her silken veil, the warmth of her breath, like the touch of the breeze upon your cheek. Sense the arrival of the Lord of Wild Animals, the heavy tread of a stag or bull, the rasp of hairy hide upon a tree’s rough bark.