From: mimir@carson.u.washington.edu (Al Billings)
Subject: Wicca and Crowley
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1992 02:40:13 GMT

 I have found one of the files that details one person's search for the
connection between Wicca and Crowley. Enjoy.


               A TRUE HISTORY OF WITCHCRAFT 

  updated through January 3, 1992. copyright (c) 1992 by Allen 
Greenfield. All rights reserved.] 
   
  "The fact is that the instincts of  ignorant people invariably 
find expression in  some form of witchcraft. It matters little  
what the metaphysician or the moralist may  inculcate; the animal 
sticks to his  subconscious ideas..." 
 
                    Aleister Crowley 
                    The Confessions 

   "As attunement to psychic (occult) reality  has grown in 
America, one often misunderstood  and secretive branch of it has 
begun to flourish also -- magical  religion..." 
                  J. Gordon Melton 
                  Institute for the Study of 
                  American Religion, Green Egg, 1975 
 
 "Curse them! Curse them! Curse them! 
  With my Hawk's head I peck at the eyes of 
  Jesus as he hangs upon the cross 
  I flap my wings in the face of Mohammed & 
  blind him 
  With my claws I tear out the flesh of the 
  Indian and the Buddhist, Mongol and 
  Din..." 
 
   Liber Al Vel Legis 3:50 - 53 
 

 "If you are on the Path, and see the Buddha walking towards 
you, kill him." 
 Zen saying, paraphrased slightly 
 
 "Previously I never thought of doubting that  there were many 
witches in the world; now,  however, when I examine the public 
record, I  find myself believing that there are hardly  any..." 
 
 Father Friedrich von Spee, S.J. , Cautio  Criminalis, 1631 
 


  Having spent the day musing over the  origins of the modern 
witchcraft, I had a  vivid dream. It seemed to be a cold January  
afternoon, and Aleister Crowley  was having  Gerald Gardner over 
to tea.   It was 1945,  and talk of an early end to the war was 
in  the air.  An atmosphere of optimism prevailed  in the "free 
world" , but the wheezing old  magus was having none of it. 
 
 "Nobody is interested in magick any more!"  Crowley ejaculated. 
"My friends on the  Continent are dead or in exile, or grown old;  
the movement in America is in shambles. I've  seen my best
candidates turn against  me....Achad, Regardie -- even that 
gentleman  out in California, what's - his - name,  AMORC, the 
one that made all the money.." 
 
 "O, bosh, Crowley," Gardner waved his hand  impatiently, "all 
things considered, you've  done pretty well for yourself.  Why, you've  
been called the `wickedest man in the world'  and by more than a 
few.  And you've not, if  you'll pardon the impertinence, done 
too  badly with the ladies." 
 
 Crowley coughed, tugged on his pipe  reflectively. "You know" he 
finally ventured,  "it's like I've been trying to tell this  
fellow Grant.  A restrictive Order is not  enough.  If I had it 
all to do over again, I  would've built a religion for the 
unwashed  masses instead of just a secret society.   Why, the 
opportunities! The women!" 
 
 Gardner smiled.  "Precisely.  And that is  what I have come to 
propose to you.  Take  your BOOK OF THE LAW, your GNOSTIC MASS.  
Add  a little razzle-dazzle for the country folk.   Why I know 
these occultists who call  themselves `witches'.  They dance 
around  fires naked, get drunk, have a good time.  Rosicrucians, 
I think. Proper English country  squires and dames, mostly; I 
think they read a lot of Frazier and Margaret Murray. If I could  
persuade you to draw on your long experience  and talents, in no 
time at all we could  invent a popular cult that would have  
beautiful ladies clamoring to let us strip  them naked, tie them 
up and spank their  behinds!  If, Mr. Crowley, you'll excuse my  
explicitness." 
 
 For all his infirmity, Aleister Crowley  almost sprang to his 
feet, a little of the  old energy flashing through his loins. "By  
George, Gardner, you've got something there,  I should think! I 
could license you to  initiate people into the O.T.O. today, and   
you could form the nucleus of such a group!" He paced in 
agitation. "Yes, yes," he mused,  half to Gardner, half to 
himself. "The Book.   The Mass.  I could write some rituals.  An  
`ancient book' of magick.  A `book of  shadows'. Priestesses, 
naked girls.  Yes.  By  Jove, yes!" 
 
 Great story, but merely a dream , created  out of bits and 
pieces of rumor, history and  imagination.  Don't be surprised, 
though, if  a year or five years from now you read it as  
"gospel" (which is an ironic synonym for  `truth') in some new 
learned text on the  fabled history of Wicca.  Such is the way 
all  mythologies come into being. 
 
 Please don't misunderstand me here; I use  the word `mythology' 
in this context in its  aboriginal meaning, and with considerable  
respect. History is more metaphor than  factual accounting at 
best, and there are  myths by which we live and others by which 
we  die. Myths are the dreams and visions which  parallel 
objective history. This entire work is, in fact, an attempt to 
approximate history. 
 
 To arrive at some perspective on what the  modern mythos called, 
variously, "Wicca", the  "Old Religion", "Witchcraft" and  
"Neopaganism" is, we must firstly make a firm  distinction; 
"witchcraft" in the popular  informally defined sense may have 
little to  do with the modern religion that goes by the same 
name. It has been argued by defenders of  and formal apologists 
for modern Wicca that  it is a direct lineal descendent of an  
ancient, indeed, prehistoric worldwide folk  religion. 
 
   Some proponents hedge their claims,  calling Wicca a "revival" 
rather than a  continuation of an ancient cult.  Oddly  enough, 
there may never have been any such  cult!  The first time I met 
someone who  thought she was a "witch," she started going on  
about being a "blue of the cloak."  I  should've been warned 
right then and there. In fact, as time has passed and the 
religion  has spread, the claims of lineal continuity  have 
tended to be hedged more and more. Thus, we find Dr. 
Gardner himself, in 1954,  stating unambiguously that some 
witches are  descendants "... of a line of priests and  
priestesses of an old and probably Stone Age  religion, who have 
been initiated in a  certain way (received into the circle) and  
become the recipients of certain ancient  learning." (Gardner, 
WITCHCRAFT TODAY, pp  33-34.) 
 
 Stated in its most extreme form, Wicca may  be defined as an 
ancient pagan religious  system of beliefs and practices, with a 
form  of apostolic succession (that is, with  knowledge and 
ordination handed on lineally  from generation to generation), a 
more or  less consistent set of rites and myths, and  even a 
secret holy book of considerable  antiquity (The Book of 
Shadows).  
 
 More recent writers, as we have noted, have  hedged a good deal 
on these claims,  particularly the latter.  Thus we find  Stewart 
Farrar in 1971 musing on the  purported ancient text thusly: 
"Whether,  therefore, the whole of the Book of Shadows  is post-
1897 is anyone's guess. Mine is that,  like the Bible, it is a 
patchwork of periods  and sources, and that since it is copied 
and  re-copied by hand, it includes amendments,  additions, and 
stylistic alterations  according to the taste of a succession of  
copiers...Parts of it I sense to be genuinely  old; other parts 
suggest modern  interpolation..." (Farrar, WHAT WITCHES DO,  pp 
34-35.)As we shall discover presently,  there appear to be no 
genuinely old copies of  the Book of Shadows. 
 
  Still, as to the mythos, Farrar informs us  that the "two 
personifications of witchcraft  are the Horned God and the Mother 
Goddess..."  (ibid, p 29) and that the "Horned God is not  the 
Devil, and never has been. If today  `Satanist' covens do exist, 
they are not  witches but a sick fringe, delayed-reaction  
victims of a centuries-old Church propaganda  in which even 
intelligent Christians no  longer believe..." (ibid, p 32).  
 
  One could  protest:, "Very well, some  case might be made for 
the Horned God being  mistaken for the Christian Devil (or should  
that be the other way around?), but what  record, prior to the 
advent 50 years ago of  modern Wicca via Gerald Gardner, do we 
have  of the survival of a mother goddess image  from ancient 
times?" 
 
  Wiccan apologists frequently refer to the  (apparently 
isolated) tenth century church  document which states that "some 
wicked  women, perverted by the Devil, seduced by the  illusions 
and phantasms of demons, believe  and profess themselves in the 
hours of the  night to ride upon certain beasts with Diana,  the 
goddess of pagans, or with Herodias, and  an innumerable 
multitude of women, and in the  silence of the dead of night to 
traverse  great spaces of earth, and to obey her  commands as of 
their mistress, and to be  summoned to her service on certain 
nights."  (Quoted in Valiente, WITCHCRAFT FOR TOMORROW,  Hale, 
1978, p 32.) I do not doubt that bits of pagan folklore survived 
on the Continent through the first millenium -- Northern Europe 
remained overtly pagan until the High Middle Ages. But what has 
this to do with Wicca? 
 
 Farrar, for his part, explains the lack of  references to a 
goddess in the testimony at  the infamous witch trials by 
asserting that  "the judges ignored the Goddess, being  
preoccupied with the Satan-image of the  God.." (WHAT WITCHES DO, 
p 33). But it is the evidence of that reign of  terror which 
lasted from roughly 1484 to 1692  which brings the whole idea of 
a surviving  religious cult into question. It is now  the 
conventional wisdom on the witchburning  mania which swept like a 
plague over much of  Europe during the transition from medieval  
world to modern  that it was JUST that; a  mania, a delusion in the
minds of Christian clergymen and state authorities; that is,  there
were no witches, only the innocent  victims of the witch hunt. 
 
   Further, this humanist argument goes, the  `witchcraft' of 
Satanic worship, broomstick  riding, of Sabbats and Devil-marks, 
was a  rather late invention, borrowing but little  from 
remaining memories of actual  preChristian paganism.  We have 
seen a  resurrection of this mania in the 1980s  flurry over 
`Satanic sacrificial' cults, with  as little evidence. 
 
 "The concept of the heresy of witchcraft was  frankly regarded 
as a new invention, both by  the theologians and by the public," 
writes  Dr. Rossell Hope Robbins in THE ENCYCLOPEDIA  OF 
WITCHCRAFT & DEMONOLOGY, (Crown, 1959,  p.9)"Having to hurdle an 
early church law,  the Canon Episcopi, which said in effect that  
belief in witchcraft was superstitious and  heretical, the 
inquisitors cavilled by  arguing that the witchcraft of the Canon  
Episcopi and the witchcraft of the  Inquisition were 
different..." 
 
 The evidence extracted under the most  gruesome and repeated 
tortures resemble the  Wiccan religion of today in only the most  
cursory fashion. Though Wicca may have been  framed with the 
"confessions" extracted by  victims of the inquisitors in mind, 
those  "confessions" ---  which are more than  suspect, to begin 
with, bespeak a cult of  devil worshipers dedicated to evil. 
 
  One need only read a few of the accounts of  the time to 
realize that, had there been at  the time a religion of the 
Goddess and God,  of seasonal circles and The Book of Shadows,  
such would likely have been blurted out by  the victims, and more 
than once.  The agonies  of the accused were, almost literally, 
beyond  the imagination of those of us who have been  fortunate 
enough to escape them. 
 
  The witch mania went perhaps unequaled in  the annals of crimes 
against humanity en  masse until the Hitlerian brutality of our  
own century. But, no such confessions were  forthcoming, though 
the wretches accused,  before the torture was done, would also be  
compelled to condemn their own parents,  spouses, loved ones, 
even children. They  confessed, and to anything the inquisitors  
wished, anything to stop or reduce the pain. 
 
 A Priest, probably at risk to his own life,  recorded testimony 
in the 1600s that  reflected the reality underlying the forced  
"confessions" of "witches". Rev. Michael  Stapirius records, for 
example, this comment  from one "confessed witch": "I never 
dreamed  that by means of the torture a person could  be brought 
to the point of telling such lies  as I have told.  I am not a 
witch, and I have  never seen the devil, and still I had to  
plead guilty myself and denounce others...."   All but one copy 
of Father Stapirius' book  were destroyed, and little wonder.  
 
 A letter smuggled from a German burgomaster,  Johannes Junius, 
to his daughter in 1628, is  as telling as it is painful even to 
read. His  hands had been virtually destroyed in the  torture, 
and he wrote only with great agony  and no hope.  "When at last 
the executioner  led me back to the cell, he said to me, `Sir,  I 
beg you, for God's sake, confess something,  whether it be true 
or not. Invent something,  for you cannot endure the torture 
which you  will be put to; and, even if you bear it all,  yet you 
will not escape, not even if you were  an earl, but one torture 
will follow another  until you say you are a witch. Not before  
that,' he said, `will they let you go, as you  may see by all 
their trials, for one is just  like another...' " (ibid, pp 12-13) 
 
 For the graspers at straws, we may find an  occasional line in a 
"confession" which is  intriguing, as in the notations on the  
"confession" of one woman  from Germany dated  in late 1637. 
After days of unspeakable  torment, wherein the woman confesses 
under  pain, recants when the pain is removed, only  to be moved 
by more pain to confess again,  she is asked: "How did she 
influence the weather? She does not know what to say and  can 
only whisper, Oh, Heavenly Queen, protect  me!" 
 
 Was the victim calling upon "the goddess"?  Or, as seems more 
likely, upon that  aforementioned transfiguration of all ancient  
goddesses in Christian mythology, the Virgin  Mary.  One more 
quote from Dr. Robbins, and I  will cease to parade late medieval 
history  before you. 
 
  It comes from yet another priest, Father  Cornelius Loos, who 
observed, in 1592 that  "Wretched creatures are compelled by the  
severity of the torture to confess things  they have never done, 
and so by cruel  butchery innocent lives are taken....."  (ibid, 
p 16). The "evidence" of the witch  trials indicates, on the 
whole, neither the  Satanism the church and state would have us  
believe, nor the pagan survivals now claimed  by modern Wicca; 
rather, they suggest only  fear, greed, human brutality carried 
out to  bizarre extremes that have few parallels in  all of 
history. But, the brutality is not that of `witches' nor even of 
`Satanists' but  rather that of the Christian Church, and the  
government. 
 
 What, then, are we to make of modern Wicca?   It must, of 
course, be observed as an aside  that in a sense witchcraft or 
"wisecraft"  has, indeed, been with us from the dawn of  time, 
not as a coherent religion or set of  practices and beliefs, but 
as the folk magic  and medicine that stretches back to early,  
possibly paleolithic tribal shamans on to  modern China's so-
called "barefoot doctors". 
 
  In another sense, we can also say that  ceremonial magick, as I 
have previously  noted, has had a place in history for a very  
long time, and both these ancient systems of  belief and practice 
have intermingled in the  lore of modern Wicca, as apologists are 
quick  to claim. 
 
  But, to an extent, this misses the point  and skirts an 
essential question anyone has  the right to ask about modern 
Wicca --  namely, did Wicca exist as a coherent creed,  a 
distinct form of spiritual expression,  prior to the 1940s; that 
is, prior to the  meeting of minds between the old magus and  
venerable prophet of the occult world  Aleister Crowley, and the 
first popularizer,  if not outright inventor of modern Wicca,  
Gerald Brosseau Gardner? 
 
  There is certainly no doubt that bits and  pieces of ancient 
paganism survived into  modern times in folklore and, for that  
matter, in the very practices and beliefs of  Christianity. 
 
  Further, there appears to be some evidence  that `Old George' 
Pickingill and others were  practicing some form of folk magick 
as early  as the latter part of the last century,  though even 
this has recently been brought  into question.  Wiccan writers 
have made much  of this in the past, but just what `Old  George' 
was into is subject to much debate. 
 
 Doreen Valiente, an astute Wiccan writer and  one-time intimate 
of the late Dr. Gardner  (and, in fact, the author of some 
rituals now  thought by others 
 to be of "ancient origin"),  says of Pickingill that so "fierce 
was `Old  George's dislike of Christianity that he  would even 
collaborate with avowed  Satanists..." (TOMORROW, p 20). What 
George  Pickingill was doing is simply not clear. 
 
  He is said to have had some interaction  with a host of figures 
in the occult revival  of the late nineteenth century, including  
perhaps even Crowley and his friend Bennett.  It seems possible 
that Gardner, about the  time of meeting Crowley, had some 
involvement  with groups stemming from Pickingill's  earlier 
activities, but it is only AFTER  Crowley and Gardner meet that 
we begin to see  anything resembling the modern spiritual  
communion that has become known as Wicca. 
 
 "Witches," wrote Gardner in 1954, "are  consummate leg-pullers; 
they are taught it as  part of their stock-in-trade." (WITCHCRAFT  
TODAY, p 27) Modern apologists both for  Aleister Crowley AND 
Gerald Gardner have  taken on such serious tones as well as  
pretensions that they may be missing places  where tongues are 
firmly jutting against  cheeks. 
 
 Both men were believers in fleshly  fulfillment, not only as an 
end in itself  but, as in the Tantric Yoga of the East, as a  
means of spiritual attainment.  A certain prudishness has crept 
into the  practices of postGardnarian Wiccans,  especially in 
America since the 1960s, along  with a certain feminist 
revisionism. This has  succeeded to a considerable extent in  
converting a libertine sex cult into a rather  staid 
neopuritanism. 
 
 The original Gardnarian current is still  well enough known and 
widely enough in vogue  (in Britain and Ireland especially) that 
one  can venture to assert that what Gardnerian  Wicca is all 
about is the same thing Crowley  was attempting with a more 
narrow, more  intellectual constituency in the magickal orders 
under his direct influence. 
 
  These Orders had flourished for some time,  but by the time 
Crowley ` officially' met  Gardner in the 1940s, much of 
the former's  lifelong efforts had, if not totally disintegrated,
at least were then operating  at a diminished and diminishing level.  
 
  Through his long and fascinating career as  magus and 
organizer, there is some reason to  believe that Crowley 
periodically may have  wished for, or even attempted to create a  
more populist expression of magickal  religion. The Gnostic Mass, 
which Crowley  wrote fairly early-on, had come since his  death 
to somewhat fill this function through  the OTO-connected Gnostic 
Catholic Church  (EGC). 
 
  As we shall see momentarily, one of  Crowley's key followers 
was publishing  manifestos forecasting the revival of  witchcraft 
at the same time Gardner was being  chartered by Crowley to 
organize an OTO  encampment. The OTO itself, since Crowley's  
time, has taken on a more popular image, and  is  more targeted 
towards international organizational efforts,  thanks largely to 
the work under the  Caliphate of the late Grady McMurtry. This  
contrasts sharply with the very internalized  OTO that barely 
survived during the McCarthy  Era, when the late Karl Germer was 
in charge,  and the OTO turned inward for two decades. 
 
   The famous Ancient and Mystic Order of the  Rose Cross 
(AMORC), the highly successful  mail-order spiritual fellowship, 
was an OTO  offspring in Crowley's time. It has been  claimed 
that Kenneth Grant and Aleister  Crowley were discussing relatively
radical  changes in the Ordo Templi Orientis at approximately the
same time that Gardner and Crowley were interactive. 
 
 Though Wiccan writers give some lip service  (and, no doubt, 
some sincere credence) to the  notion that the validity of Wiccan 
ideas  depends not upon its lineage, but rather upon  its 
workability, the suggestion that Wicca is  -- or, at least, 
started out to be,  essentially a late attempt at popularizing  
the secrets of ritual and sexual magick  Crowley promulgated 
through the OTO and his  writings, seems to evoke nervousness, if 
not  hostility. 
 
  We hear from wiccan writer and leader  Raymond Buckland that 
one "of the suggestions  made is that Aleister Crowley wrote the  
rituals...but no convincing evidence has been  presented to back 
this assertion and, to my  mind, it seems extremely unlikely..."  
(Gardner, ibid, introduction)  The Wiccan  rituals I have seen DO 
have much of Crowley  in them. Yet, as we shall observe 
presently,  the explanation that `Crowley wrote the  rituals for 
Gardner' turns out to be somewhat  in error.  But it is on the 
right track. 
 
 Doreen Valiente attempts to invoke Crowley's  alleged infirmity 
at the time of his  acquaintance with Gardner: 
 
 "It has been stated by Francis King in his  RITUAL MAGIC IN 
ENGLAND that Aleister Crowley  was paid by Gerald Gardner to 
write the  rituals of Gardner's new witch cult...Now,  Gerald 
Gardner never met Aleister Crowley  until the very last years of 
the latter's  life, when he was a feeble old man living at  a 
private hotel in Hastings, being kept alive  by injections of 
drugs... If, therefore,  Crowley really invented these rituals in  
their entirety, they must be about the last  thing he ever wrote.  
Was this enfeebled and  practically dying man really capable of 
such  a tour de force?" 
 
  The answer, as Dr. Israel  Regardie's introduction to the 
posthumous  collection of Crowley's late letters, MAGICK  WITHOUT 
TEARS, implies, would seem to be yes.   Crowley continued to 
produce extraordinary  material almost to the end of his life, 
and  much of what I have seen of the "Wiccan  Crowley" is, in any 
case, of earlier origin. 
 
 Gerald Gardner is himself not altogether  silent on the subject. 
In WITCHCRAFT TODAY (p  47), Gardner asks himself, with what 
degree  of irony one can only guess at, who, in  modern times, 
could have invented the Wiccan  rituals. "The only man I can 
think of who  could have invented the rites," he offers,  "was 
the late Aleister Crowley....possibly he  borrowed things from 
the cult writings, or  more likely someone may have borrowed  
expressions from him...."  A few legs may be  being pulled here, 
and perhaps more than a  few. 
 
   As a prophet ahead of his time, as a poet  and dreamer, 
Crowley is one of the  outstanding figures of the twentieth (or 
any)  century.  As an organizer, he was almost as  much of a 
disaster as he was at managing his  own finances...and personal 
life. As I  understand the liberatory nature of the  magical 
path, one would do well to see the  difference between Crowley 
the prophet of  Thelema and Crowley the insolvent and inept  
administrator. 
 
 Crowley very much lacked the common touch;  Gardner was above 
all things a popularizer.   Both men have been reviled as 
lecherous  "dirty old men" -- Crowley, as a seducer of  women and 
a homosexual, a drug addict and  `satanist' rolled together.  
 
  Gardner was, they would have it, a voyeur,  exhibitionist and 
bondage freak with a  `penchant for ritual' to borrow a line from  
THE STORY OF O.  Both were, in reality,  spiritual libertines, 
ceremonial magicians  who did not shy away from the awesome force  
of human sexuality and its potential for  spiritual 
transformation as well as physical  gratification.  
 
 I will not say with finality at this point  whether Wicca is an 
outright invention of  these two divine con-men. If so, more 
power  to them, and to those who truly follow in  their path. I 
do know that, around 1945,  Crowley chartered Gardner, an initiate 
of the Ordo  Templi Orientis, giving him license to  organize an 
OTO encampment. 
 
  Shortly thereafter, the public face of  Wicca came into view, 
and that is what I know  of the matter: I presently have in my  
possession Gardner's certificate of  license  to organize said 
OTO camp, signed and sealed  by Aleister Crowley. The  
certificate and its  import are examined in connection with my  
personal search for the original Book of  Shadows in the next 
section of this  narrative. 
 
  For now, though, let us note in the years  since Crowley 
licensed Gardner to organize a  magical encampment, Wicca has 
both grown in  popularity and become, to my mind, something  far 
less REAL than either Gardner or Crowley  could have wanted or 
foreseen. Wherever they  came from, the rites and practices which 
came  from or through Gerald Gardner were strong,  and tapped 
into that archetypal reality, that  level of consciousness 
beneath the mask of polite society and conventional wisdom which  
is the function of True Magick. 
 
  At a popular level, this was the Tantric  sex magick of the 
West. Whether this  primordial access has been lost to us will  
depend on the awareness, the awakening or  lack thereof among 
practitioners of the near  to middle-near future.  Carried to its 
end  Gardnerian practices, like Crowley's magick,  are not merely 
exotic; they are, in the  truest sense, subversive. 
 
 Practices that WORK are of value, whether  they are two years 
old or two thousand.   Practices, myths, institutions and  
obligations which, on the other hand, may be  infinitely ancient 
are of no value at all  UNLESS they work.  
 
           The Devil, you say 
 
  Before we move on, though, in light of the  furor over real and 
imagined "Satanism" that  has overtaken parts of the popular 
press in  recent years, I would feel a bit remiss in  this 
account if I did not take momentary note  of that other strain of 
left-handed occult  mythology, Satanism.  Wiccans are correct  
when they say that modern Wicca is not  Satanic, that Satanism is 
"reverse  Christianity" whereas Wicca is a separate,  
nonChristian religion. 
 
  Still, it should be noted, so much of our  society has been 
grounded in the  repressiveness and authoritarian moralism of  
Christianity that a liberal dose of  "counterChristianity" is to 
be expected. The  Pat Robertsons of the world make possible the  
Anton LeVays.  In the long history of  repressive religion, a 
certain fable of  Satanism has arisen. It constitutes a mythos  
of its own. No doubt, misguided `copycat'  fanatics have 
sometimes misused this mythos, in much the same way that Charles
Manson  misused the music and culture of the 1960s. 
 
  True occult initiates have always regarded  the Ultimate 
Reality as beyong all names and  description. Named `deities' 
are, therefore,  largely symbols. "Isis" is a symbol of the  
long-denied female component of deity to some  occultists.  "Pan" 
or "The Horned God" or  "Set" or even "Satan" are symbols of   
unconscious, repressed sexuality. To the  occultist, there is no 
Devil, no "god of  evil." There is, ultimately, only the Ain Sof  
Aur of the Cabbalah; the limitless light of  which we are but a 
frozen spark. Evil, in  this system, is the mere absence of 
light.  All else is illusion. 
 
 The goal of the occult path of initiation is  BALANCE. In 
Freemasonry and High Magick, the  symbols of the White Pillar and 
Black Pillar  represent this balance between conscious and  
unconscious forces. 
 
  In Gardnarian Wicca, the Goddess and Horned  God - and the 
Priestess and Priest, represent  that balance. There is nothing, 
nothing of  pacts with the "Devil" or the worship of evil  in any 
of this; that belongs to misguided  exChristians who have been 
given the absurd  fundamentalist Sunday school notion that one  
must choose the Christian version of God, or  choose the Devil.  
Islam, Judaism and even  Catholicism have at one time or another 
been  thought "satanic," and occultists have merely  played on 
this bigoted symbolism, not  subscribed to it. 
 
   As we have seen, Wicca since Gardner's  time has been watered 
down in many of its  expressions into a kind of mushy white-light  
`new age' religion, with far less of the  strong sexuality 
characteristic of  Gardnerianism, though, also, sometimes with  
less pretense as well. 
 
   In any event, Satanism has popped up now  and again through 
much of the history of the  Christian Church. The medieval 
witches were  not likely to have been Satanists, as the  Church 
would have it, but, as we have seen,  neither were they likely to 
have been  "witches" in the Wiccan sense, either. 
 
  The Hellfire Clubs of the eighteenth  century were Satanic, and 
groups like the  Process Church of the Final Judgement do,  
indeed, have Satanic elements in their (one  should remember) 
essentially Christian  theology. 
 
 Aleister Crowley, ever theatrical, was prone  to use Satanic 
symbolism in much the same  way, tongue jutting in cheek, as he 
was given  to saying that he " sacrificed millions of  children 
each year, " that is, that he  masturbated. Crowley once called a 
press  conference at the foot of the Statue of  Liberty, where he 
announced that he was  burning his British Passport to protest  
Britain's involvement in World War One.  He  tossed an empty 
envelope into the water. He was dead serious, though, about the 
"Satanism" of Miltonian eternal rebellion, and the "Satanism" of 
fundamentalism's dark fear of sexuality. The Devil, however; the 
Satanic "god of evil" was an absurdity to him, as to all thinking 
people, and he freely said so. 
 
  The most popular form of  "counterChristianity" to emerge in 
modern  times, though, was Anton Szandor LaVey's San  Francisco-
based Church of Satan, founded  April 30, 1966. LaVey's Church 
enjoyed an  initial burst of press interest, grew to a  
substantial size, and appeared to maintain  itself during the 
cultural drought of the  1970s.  But LaVey's books, THE SATANIC 
BIBLE  and THE SATANIC RITUALS, have remained in  print for many 
years, and his ideas seem to  be enjoying a renewal of interest, 
especially  among younger people, 
 punks and heavy metal  fans with a death-wish mostly, beginning 
in  the middle years of the 1980s. By that time  the Church of 
Satan had been largely  succeeded by the Temple of Set. This is 
pure  theatre; more in the nature of psychotherapy  than 
religion. 
 
   It is interesting to note Francis King's  observation that 
before the Church of Satan  began LaVey was involved in an occult 
group  which included, among others, underground  film maker 
Kenneth Anger, a person well known  in Crowlean circles.  Of the 
rites of the  Church of Satan, King states that "...most of  its 
teachings and magical techniques were  somewhat vulgarized 
versions of those of  Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis."  
(MAN MYTH AND MAGIC, p 3204.) To which we  might add that, as 
with the OTO, the rites of  the Church of Satan are manifestly 
potent,  but hardly criminal or murderous. 
 
  LaVey, like Gardner and unlike Crowley,  appears to have "the 
common touch" -- perhaps  rather more so than Gardner. 
 
 I determined to trace the Wiccan rumor to  its source. As we 
shall see, in the very year  I "fell" into being a gnostic 
bishop, I also  fell into the original charters, rituals and  
paraphernalia of Wicca. 
 
                          THE CHARTER AND THE BOOK 
 
Being A Radical Revisionist History of the  Origins of the Modern 
Witch Cult and  The Book  of Shadows. 
 
              "It was one of the secret  doctrines of paganism 
that the Sun was the  source, not only of light, but of 
life...The  invasion of classical beliefs by the  religions of 
Syria and Egypt which were  principally solar, gradually affected 
the  conception of Apollo, and there is a certain  later 
identification of him with the  suffering God of Christianity, 
Free - masonry  and similar cults..." 
 
                       Aleister Crowley  in  Astrology, 1974 
 

 "...if GBG and Crowley only knew each other  for a short year or 
two, do you think that  would be long enough for them to become 
such good friends that gifts of personal  value would be 
exchanged several times, and  that GBG would have been able to 
aquire the  vast majority of Crowley's effects after his  death?" 
 
                       Merlin the Enchanter, personal letter, 1986 
 
 "...On the floor before the altar, he  remembers a sword with a 
flat cruciform brass  hilt, and a well-worn manuscript book of  
rituals - the hereditary Book of Shadows,  which he will have to 
copy out for himself in  the days to come..." 

                            Stewart Farrar in What Witches Do, 1971 
 
 "Actually I did write a scholarly book about the Craft; its 
title was Inventing Witchcraft. . . But I spent most of the last 
fifteen years failing to persuade Carl Weschcke of Llewellyn or 
any other publisher that there was a market for it." 

                  Aidan A. Kelly, Gnosis, Winter, 1992                     
                         
  "...the Gardnerian Book of Shadows is one of  the key factors 
in what has become a far  bigger and more significant movement 
than  Gardner can have envisaged; so historical  interest alone 
would be enough reason for  defining it while first-hand evidence 
is  still available..." 
 
               Janet and Stewart Farrar in 
                The Witches' Way, 1984 
 

 "It has been alleged that a Book of Shadows  in Crowley's hand-
writing was formerly  exhibited in Gerald's Museum of Witchcraft 
on  the Isle of Man. I can only say I never saw  this on either 
of the two occasions when I  stayed with Gerald and Donna Gardner 
on the  island.  The large, handwritten book depicted  in 
Witchcraft Today is not in Crowley's  handwriting, but 
Gerald's..." 
                       
                          Doreen Valiente in 
                           Witchcraft for Tomorrow, 1978 
 

 "Aidan Kelly...labels the entire Wiccan  revival `Gardnerian 
Witchcraft....' The  reasoning and speculation in Aidan's book 
are  intricate.  Briefly, his main argument  depends on his 
discovery of one of Gardner's  working notebooks, Ye Book of Ye 
Art Magical,  which is in possession of Ripley  International, 
Ltd...." 
     
                  Margot Adler in 
                 Drawing Down the Moon, 1979 
     
 


                  PART ONE 
       WAITING FOR THE MAN FROM CANADA 
 

  I was, for the third time in four years,  waiting a bit 
nervously for the Canadian  executive with the original Book of 
Shadows  in the ramshackle office of Ripley's Believe  It or Not 
Museum. 
 
 "They're at the jail," a smiling  secretary-type explained, "but 
we've called  them and they should be back over here to see  you 
in just a few minutes." 
 
 The jail?  Ah, St. Augustine, Florida. "The  Old Jail,"  was the 
`nation's oldest city's'  second most tasteless tourist trap, 
complete  with cage-type cells and a mock gallows.  For  a moment 
I allowed myself to play in my head  with the vision of Norm 
Deska, Ripley  Operations Vice President and John Turner,  the 
General Manager of Ripley's local  operation and the guy who'd 
bought the Gerald  Gardner collection from Gardner's niece,  
Monique Wilson, sitting in the slammer.  But  no, Turner apparently had
just been showing  Deska the town.  I straightened my suit for the 
fiftieth time, and suppressed  the comment. We  were talking BIG 
history  here, and big bucks, too.  I gulped.  The  original Book 
of Shadows.  Maybe. 
 
 It had started years before. One of the last  people in America 
to be a fan of carnival  sideshows, I was anxious to take another  
opportunity to go through the almost  archetypally seedy old home 
that housed the  original Ripley's Museum. 
 
  I had known that Ripley had, in the  nineteen seventies, 
acquired the Gardner  stuff, but as far as I knew it was all  
located at their Tennessee resort museum. I  think I'd heard 
they'd closed it down. By  then, the social liberalism of the 
early  seventies was over, and witchcraft and  sorcery were no 
longer in keeping with a  `family style' museum. It featured a 
man with  a candle in his head, a Tantric skull  drinking cup and 
freak show stuff like that,  but, I mean, witchcraft is 
sacrilegious, as  we all know. 
 
 So, I was a bit surprised, when I discovered  some of the 
Gardner stuff - including an  important historical document, for 
sale in  the gift shop, in a case just opposite the  little 
alligators that have "St.Augustine,  Florida - America's Oldest 
City" stickered on  their plastic bellies for the folks back home  
to use as a paper-weight.  The pricetags on  the occult stuff, 
however, were way out of my  range. 
 
 Back again, three years later, and I  decided, what the hell, so 
I asked the  cashier about the stuff still gathering dust  in the 
glass case, and it was like I'd pushed  some kind of button. 
 
 Out comes Mr. Turner, the manager, who  whisks us off to a store 
room which is  filled, FILLED, I tell you, with parts of the  
Gardner collection, much of it, if not "for  sale" as such, at 
least available for  negotiation. Turner told us about acquiring  
the collection when he was manager of  Ripley's Blackpool 
operation, how it had gone  over well in the U.S. at first, but 
had lost  popularity and was now relegated for the most  part to 
storage status.  
 
 Visions of sugarplums danced in my head.   There were many 
treasures here, but the  biggest plum of all, I thought, was not  
surprisingly, not to be seen.  
 
 I'd heard all kinds of rumors about the Book  of Shadows over 
the years, many of them  conflicting, all of them intriguing.  
Rumor  #1, of course, is that which accompanied the  birth (or, 
depending on how one looked at it,  the revival) of modern Wicca, 
the  contemporary successor of ancient fertility  cults. 
 
 It revolved around elemental rituals, secret  rites of passage 
and a mythos of goddess and  god that seemed attractive to me as 
a  psychologically valid alternative to the  austere, antisexual 
moralism of Christianity.  The Book of Shadows, in this context, 
was the  `holy book' of Wicca, copied out by hand by  new 
initiates of the cult with a history  stretching back at least to 
the era of  witchburnings. 
 
  Rumor number #2, which I had tended to  credit, had it that 
Gerald Gardner, the  `father of modern Wicca' had paid Aleister  
Crowley in his final years to write the Book  of Shadows, perhaps 
whole cloth.  The rumor's  chief exponent was the respected 
historian of  the occult, Francis King. 
 
  Rumor #3 had it that Gardner had written  the Book himself, 
which others had since  copied and/or stolen. 
 
 To the contrary, said rumor #4, Gardner's  Museum had contained 
an old, even ancient  copy of the Book of Shadows, proving its  
antiquity. 
 
 In more recent years modern Wiccans have  tended to put some 
distance between themselves and Gardner, just as Gardner, for  
complex reasons, tended to distance himself  in the early years 
of Wicca (circa 1944-1954)  from the blatant sexual magick of 
Aleister  Crowley, "the wickedest man in the world" by  some 
accounts, and from Crowley's  organization, the Ordo Templi 
Orientis. Why  Gardner chose to do this is speculative, but  I've 
got some idea.  But, I'm getting ahead  of myself. 
 
 While Turner showed me a blasphemous cross  shaped from the body 
of two nude women  (created for the 18th century infamous  
"Hellfire Clubs" in England and depicted in  the MAN MYTH AND 
MAGIC encyclopedia;I bought it, of course) and a statue of 
Beelzebub from  the dusty Garderian archives, a thought  occurred 
to me. " You know," I suggested, "if  you ever, in all this 
stuff, happen across a  copy of The Book of Shadows in the  
handwriting of Aleister Crowley, it would be  of considerable 
historical value." 
 
 I understated the case. It would be like  finding The Book of 
Mormon in Joseph Smith's  hand, or finding the original Ten  
Commandments written not by God Himself, but  by Moses, pure and 
simple. (Better still,  eleven commandments, with a margin note,  
"first draft.")  I didn't really expect anything to come of it, 
and in the months ahead,  it didn't. 
 
 In the meantime, I had managed to acquire  the interesting 
document I first mistook for  Gerald Gardner's (long 
acknowledged)  initiation certificate into Crowley's  Thelemic 
magickal Ordo Templi Orientis.  To  my eventual surprise, I 
discovered that, not  only was this not a simple initiation  
certificate for the Minerval  (probationary-lowest) degree, but, 
to the  contrary, was a license for Gardner to begin  his own 
chapter of the O.T.O., and to  initiate members into the O.T.O. 
 
 In the document, furthermore, Gardner is  referred to as "Prince 
of Jerusalem," that  is, he is acknowledged to be a Fourth Degree  
Perfect Initiate in the Order. This, needless  to say would 
usually imply years of dedicated  training. Though Gardner had 
claimed Fourth  Degree O.T.O. status as early as publication  of 
High Magic's Aid,(and claimed even higher  status in one edition) 
this runs somewhat  contrary to both generally held Wiccan and 
contemporary O.T.O. orthodox understandings  that the O.T.O. was 
then fallow in England. 
 
 At the time the document was written, most  maintained, Gardner 
could have known Crowley  for only a brief period, and was not 
himself  deeply involved in the O.T.O. The document is  undated 
but probably was drawn up around  1945. 
 
 As I said, it is understood that no viable  chapter of the 
O.T.O. was supposed to exist  in England at that time; the sole 
active  chapter was in California, and is the direct  antecedent 
of the contemporary authentic Ordo  Templi Orientis. Karl Germer, 
Crowley's  immediate successor, had barely escaped death  in a 
Concentartion Camp during the War, his  mere association with 
Crowley being  tantamount to a death sentence. 
 
 The German OTO had been largely destroyed by  the Nazis, along 
with other freemasonic  organizations, and Crowley himself was in  
declining health and power, the English OTO  virtually dead. 
 
 The Charter  also displayed other  irregularities of a revealing 
nature. Though  the signature and seals are certainly those  of 
Crowley, the text is in the decorative  hand of Gerald Gardner! 
The complete text  reads as follows: 
                                                  
 
  Do what thou wilt shall be the law. We 
  Baphomet X Degree Ordo Templi Orientis 
  Sovereign Grand Master General of All 
  English speaking countries of the Earth 
  do hereby authorise our Beloved Son Scire 
  (Dr.G,B,Gardner,) Prince of Jerusalem 
  to constitute a camp of the Ordo Templi 
  Orientis, in the degree Minerval. 
 
  Love is the Law, 
            Love under will. 
                                       o 
  Witness my hand and seal   Baphomet X 
 


 Leaving aside the  misquotation from The  Book of the Law, which 
got by me for some  months and probably got by Crowley when it  
was presented to him for signature, the  document is probably 
authentic.  It hung for  some time in Gardner's museum, possibly  
giving rise, as we shall see, to the rumor  that Crowley wrote 
the Book of Shadows for  Gardner. According to Doreen 
Valiente,and to  Col. Lawrence as well,  the museum's  
descriptive pamphlet says of this document: 
 
 "The collection includes a Charter granted  by Aleister Crowley 
to G.B. Gardner (the  Director of this Museum) to operate a Lodge  
of Crowley's fraternity, the Ordo Templi  Orientis. (The Director 
would like to point  out, however, that he has never used this  
Charter and has no intention of doing so,  although to the best 
of his belief he is the  only person in Britain possessing such a  
Charter from Crowley himself; Crowley was a  personal friend of 
his, and gave him the  Charter because he liked him." 
 
 Col. Lawrence ("Merlin the Enchanter"), in a  letter to me dated 
6 December, 1986, adds  that this appeared in Gardner's booklet, 
The  Museum of Magic and Witchcraft. The  explanation for the 
curious wording of the  text, taking, as Dr. Gardner does, great  
pains to distance himself from Crowley and  the OTO, may be 
hinted at in that the booklet  suggests that this display in the 
"new upper  gallery" (page 24) was put out at a  relatively late 
date when, as we shall  discover, Gardner was making himself  
answerable to the demands of the new witch  cult and not the 
long-dead Crowley and (then)  relatively moribund OTO. 
 
 Now, the "my friend Aleister" ploy might  explain the whole 
thing. Perhaps, as some  including Ms. Valiente believe, Aleister  
Crowley was desperate in his last years to  hand on what he saw 
as his legacy to someone.  He recklessly handed out his literary 
estate,  perhaps gave contradictory instruction to  various of 
his remaining few devotees (e.g.  Kenneth Grant, Grady McMurtry, 
Karl Germer),  and may have given Gardner an "accelerated  
advancement" in his order. 
 
 Ms. Valiente, a devoted Wiccan who is also a  dedicated seeker 
after the historical truth,  mentions also the claim made by the 
late  Gerald Yorke to her that Gardner had paid  Crowley a 
substantial sum for the document.  In a letter to me dated 28th 
August, 1986,  Ms. Valiente tells of a meeting with Yorke  "...in 
London many years ago and mentioned  Gerald's O.T.O. Charter to 
him, whereon he  told me, `Well, you know, Gerald Gardner paid  
old Crowley about ($1500) or so for that...'  This may or may not 
be correct..." Money or  friendship may explain the Charter. 
Still,  one wonders. 
 
 I have a Thelemic acquaintance  who, having advanced well along 
the path of  Kenneth Grant's version of the OTO, went back  to 
square one with the unquestionably  authentic Grady McMurtry OTO. 
Over a period  of years of substantial effort, he made his  way 
to the IVo `plus' status implied by  Gardner's "Prince of 
Jerusalem" designation  in the charter, and has since gone 
beyond. 
 
  I am, myself, a Vo member of the OTO,  as well as a chartered 
initiator, and can  tell you from experience that becoming a  
Companion of the Royal Arch of Enoch, Perfect  Initiate, Prince 
of Jerusalem and Chartered  Initiator is a long and arduous task. 
 
  Gardner was in the habit, after the public  career of Wicca 
emerged in the 1950s, of  downgrading any Crowleyite associations 
out  of his past, and, as Janet and Stewart Farrar  reveal in The 
Witches' Way (1984, p3) there  are three distinct versions of the 
Book of  Shadows in Gerald Gardner's handwriting which  
incorporate successively less material from  Crowley's writings, 
though the last (termed  "Text C" and cowritten with Doreen 
Valiente after 1953) is still heavily influenced by  Crowley and 
the OTO. 
 
 Ms. Valiente has recently uncovered a copy  of an old occult 
magazine contemporary with  High Magic's Aid and from the same 
publisher,  which discusses an ancient Indian document  called 
"The Book of Shadows" but apparently  totally unrelated to the 
Wiccan book of the  same name.  Valiente acknowledges that the  
earliest text by Gardner known to her was  untitled, though she 
refers to it as a "Book  of Shadows." 
 
 It seems suspicious timing; did Gardner take the title from his 
publisher's  magazine? Ms. Valiente observed to me that  the 
"...eastern Book of Shadows does not seem  to have anything to do 
with witch-craft at  all....is this where old Gerald first found  
the expression "The Book of Shadows" and  adopted it as a more 
poetical name for a  magical manuscript than, say `The Grimoire'  
or `The Black Book'....I don't profess to  know the answer; but I 
doubt if this is mere  coincidence...." 
 
 The claim is frequently made by those who  wish to `salvage' a 
preGardnarian source of  Wiccan materials that there is a `core' 
of  `authentic' materials. But, as the Farrars'  recently 
asserted, the portions of the Book  of Shadows "..which changed 
least between  Texts A, B and C were naturally the three  
initiation rituals; because these, above all,  would be the 
traditional elements which would  have been carefully preserved, 
probably for  centuries...." (emphasis added) 
 
 But what does one mean by "traditional  materials?" The three 
initiation rites, now  much-described in print, all smack heavily 
of  the crypto-freemasonic ritual of the Hermetic  Order of the 
Golden Dawn, the OTO, and the  various esoteric neorosicrucian 
groups that  abounded in Britain from about 1885 on, and  which 
were, it is widely known, the  fountainhead of much that is 
associated with  Gardner's friend Crowley. 
 
   The Third Degree ritual, perhaps Wicca's  ultimate rite, is, 
essentially, a nonsymbolic  Gnostic Mass, that beautiful, 
evocative,  erotic and  esoteric ritual written and  published by 
Crowley in the Equinox, after  attending a Russian Orthodox Mass 
in the  early part of this century.  The Gnostic Mass  has had 
far-reaching influence, and it would  appear that the Wiccan 
Third Degree is one of  the most blatant examples of that 
influence. 
 
 Take, for example, this excerpt from what is  perhaps the most 
intimate, most secret and  most sublime moment in the entire 
repertoire  of Wicca rituals, the nonsymbolic (that is,  overtly 
sexual) Great Rite of the Third  Degree initiation, as related by 
Janet and  Stewart Farrar in The Witches' Way (p.34): 
 
 The Priest continues: 
 `O Secret of Secrets, That art hidden in the being of all lives, 
Not thee do we adore, For that which adoreth is also thou. Thou 
art That, and That am I. [Kiss] I am the flame that burns in the 
heart of  every man, And in the core of every star. I am life, 
and the giver of life. Yet therefore is the knowledge of me the  
knowledge of death. I am alone, the Lord within ourselves, Whose 
name is Mystery of Mysteries.' 
 
 Let us be unambiguous as to the importance  in Wicca of this 
ritual; as the Farrars'put  it (p.31) "Third degree initiation 
elevates a  witch to the highest of the three grades of  the 
Craft. In a sense,a third-degree witch is  fully independent, 
answerable only to the  Gods and his or her own conscience..."  
In  short, in a manner of speaking this is all  that Wicca can 
offer a devotee.  
 
 With this in mind, observe the following,  from Aleister 
Crowley's Gnostic Mass, first  published in The Equinox about 80 
years ago  and routinely performed (albeit ,usually in  symbolic 
form) by me and by many other  Bishops, Priests, Priestesses and 
Deacons  in  the OTO and Ecclesia Gnostica (EGC) today.  The 
following is excerpted from Gems From the  Equinox, p. 372, but 
is widely available in  published form: 
 
 The Priest. O secret of secrets that art  hidden in the being of 
all that lives, not  Thee do we adore, for that which adoreth is  
also Thou. Thou art That, and That am I. 
 I am the flame that burns in every heart of  man, and in the 
core of every star. I am  Life, and the giver of Life; yet 
therefore is  the knowledge of me the knowledge of death. I  am 
alone; there is no God where I am. 
 
   So, then, where, apart from the Thelemic  tradition of Crowley 
and the OTO, is the  "traditional material" some Wiccan writers  
seem to seek with near desperation?  I am not  trying to be 
sarcastic in the least, but even   commonplace self - references 
used among  Wiccans today, such as "the Craft" or the  refrain 
"so mote it be"are lifted straight  out of Freemasonry (see, for 
example,  Duncan's Ritual of Freemasonry). And, as  Doreen 
Valiente notes in her letter to me  mentioned before, "...of 
course old Gerald  was also a member of the Co-Masons, and an  
ordinary Freemason..." as well as an OTO  member. 
 
                  PART TWO 
         THE REAL ORIGIN OF WICCA 
 


 We must dismiss with some respect the  assertion, put forth by 
Margot Adler and  others, that "Wicca no longer adheres to the  
orthodox mythos of the Book of Shadows." 
 
  Many, if not most of those who have been  drawn to Wicca in the 
last three decades came  to it under the spell (if I may so term 
it)  of the legend of ancient Wicca. If that  legend is false, 
then while reformists and  revisionist apologists (particularly 
the  peculiar hybrid spawned in the late sixties  under the name 
"feminist Wicca") may seek  other valid grounds for their 
practices, we  at least owe it to those who have operated  under 
a misapprehension to explain the truth,  and let the chips fall 
where they may. 
 
  I believe there is a core of valid  experience falling under 
the Wiccan-neopagan  heading, but that that core is the same  
essential core that lies at the truths  exposed by the dreaded 
boogy-man Aleister  Crowley and the` wicked' pansexualism of  
Crowley's Law of Thelema.  That such roots  would be not just 
uncomfortable, but   intolerable to the orthodox traditionalists  
among the Wiccans, but even more so among the  hybrid feminist 
"wiccans" may indeed be an  understatement. 
 
 Neopaganism, in a now archaic "hippie"  misreading of ecology, 
mistakes responsible  stewardship of nature for nature worship.   
Ancient pagans did not `worship' nature; to a  large extent they 
were afraid of it, as has  been pointed out to me by folk 
practioners.   Their "nature rites" were to propitiate the  
caprice of the gods, not necessarily to honor  them.  The first 
neopagan revivalists,  Gardner, Crowley and Dr. Murray, well  
understood this.  Neopagan wiccans usually do  not. 
 
 In introducing a "goddess element" into  their theology, Crowley 
and Gardner both  understood the yin/yang, male/female  
fundamental polarity of the universe.   Radical feminist 
neopagans have taken this  balance and altered it, however  
unintentionally, into a political feminist  agenda, centered 
around a near-monotheistic  worship of the female principle, in a 
bizarre caricature of patriarchal Christianity. Bigotry, I 
submit, cuts both ways. 
 
  I do not say these things lightly;  I have  seen it happen in 
my own time. IF this be  truth, let truth name its own price.  I 
was  not sure, until Norm and John got back from  the Old Jail. 
 
 A couple of months earlier, scant days after  hearing that I was 
to become a gnostic bishop  and thus an heir to a corner of 
Crowley's  legacy, I had punched on my answering machine, and 
there was the unexpected voice of  John Turner saying that he had 
located what  seemed to be the original Book of Shadows in  an 
inventory list, locating it at Ripley's  office in Toronto. 
 
 He said he didn't think they would sell it  as an individual 
item, but he gave me the  name of a top official in the Ripley  
organization, who I promptly contacted.  I  eventually made a 
substantial offer for the  book, sight unseen, figuring there was 
(at  the least) a likelihood I'd be able to turn  the story into 
a book and get my money back  out of it, to say nothing of the 
historical  import. 
 
  But, as I researched the matter, I became  more wary, and 
confused; Gardner's texts "A"  "B" and "C" all seemed to be 
accounted for.   Possibly, I began to suspect, this was either  a 
duplicate of the "deThelemized" post1954  version with segments 
written by Gardner and  Valiente and copied and recopied (as well 
as  distorted) from hand to hand since by Wiccans  the world 
over.  
 
   Maybe, I mused, Valiente had one copy and  Gardner another, 
the latter sold to Ripley  with the Collection.  Or, perhaps it 
was the  curious notebook discovered by Aidan Kelly in  the 
Ripley files called Ye Book of Ye Art  Magical, the meaning of 
which was unclear. 
 
 While I was chatting with Ms.Deska,  Norm returned  from his 
mission, we introduced in best  businesslike fashion, and he told 
me he'd get  the book, whatever it might be, from the  vault. 
 
 The vault?! I sat there thinking god knows  what . Recently, I'd 
gotten a call from  Toronto, and it seems the Ripley folks wanted  
me to take a look at what they had. I had  made a considerable 
offer, and at that point  I figured I'd had at least a nibble.  
As it  so happened  Norm would be visiting on a  routine 
inspection visit, so it was arranged  he would bring the 
manuscript with him. 
 
 Almost from the minute he placed it in front  of me, things 
began to make some kind of  sense.  Clearly, this was Ye Book of 
Ye Art  Magical.  Just as clearly, it was an unusual  piece, 
written largely in the same hand as  the Crowley Charter- that 
is, the hand of  Gerald Gardner. Of this I became certain,  
because I had handwriting samples of Gardner,  Valiente and 
Crowley in my possession.  Ms.  Valiente had been mindful of this 
when she  wrote me, on August 8th, 1986: 
 
 I have deliberately chosen to write you in  longhand, rather 
than send a typewritten  reply, so that you will have something 
by  which to judge the validity of the claim you  tell me is 
being made by the Ripley  organisation to have a copy of a "Book 
of  Shadows" in Gerald Gardner's handwriting and  mine. 
If this is..."Ye Book of Ye Art Magical,"  ....this is 
definitely in Gerald Gardner's  handwriting. Old Gerald, however, 
had several  styles of handwriting....I think it is  probable 
that the whole MS. was in fact  written by Gerald, and no other 
person was  involved; but of course I may be wrong.... 
 

  At first glance it appeared to be a very  old book, and it 
suggested to me where the  rumors that a very old, possibly 
medieval  Book of Shadows had once been on display in  Gardner's 
Museum had emerged from. 
 
  Any casual onlooker might see Ye Book in  this light, for the 
cover was indeed that of  an old volume, with the original title  
scratched out crudely on the side and a new  title tooled into 
the leather cover.  The  original was some mundane volume, on 
Asian  knives or something, but the inside pages had  been 
removed, and a kind of notebook --  almost a journal -- had been 
substituted. 
 
  As far as I could see, no dates appear  anywhere in the book.  
It is written in  several different handwriting styles,  
although, as noted above, Doreen Valiente  assured me that 
Gardner was apt to use  several styles.  I had the distinct  
impression this "notebook" had been written  over a considerable 
period of time, perhaps  years, perhaps even decades. It 
may, indeed, date from his days in the 1930s when he  linked up 
with a neorosicrucuian grouping  that could have included among 
its members the legendary Dorothy Clutterbuck, who set  Gardner 
on the path which led to Wicca.  
 
 Thinking on it, what emerges from Ye Book of  Ye Art Magical is 
a developmental set of  ideas.  Much of it is straight out of  
Crowley, but it is clearly the published Crowley, the old magus
of the Golden Dawn, the A.A., and the O.T.O. 
  
     Somewhere along the line it hit me that I  was not exactly 
looking at the "original Book  of Shadows" but, perhaps, the 
outline Gardner  prepared over a long period of time, apparently 
in secret (since Valiente, a relatively early initiate of 
Gardner's, never heard of  it nor saw it, according to her own 
account,  until recent years, about the time Aidan  Kelly 
unearthed it in the Ripley collection  long after Gardner's 
death). 
 
 Dr. Gardner kept many odd notebooks and  scrapbooks that perhaps 
would reveal much  about his character and motivations. Turner  
showed me a Gardner scrapbook in Ripley's  store room which was 
mostly cheesecake  magazine photographs and articles about 
actresses. Probably none are so evocative as Ye Book of Ye Art 
Magical, discovered,it has  been intimated,hidden away in the 
back of an  old sofa. 
 
  I have the impression it was essentially  unknown in and after 
Gardner's lifetime, and  that by the Summer of 1986 few had seen  
inside it; I knew of only Kelly and my own  party. Perhaps the 
cover had been seen by  some along the line, accounting for the 
rumor  of a "very old Book of Shadows" in Gardner's  Museum. 
 
  If someone had seen the charter signed by  Crowley ("Baphomet") 
but written by Gerald  Gardner, and had gotten a look, as well, 
at  Ye Book, they might well have concluded that  Crowley had 
written BOTH, an honest error,  but maybe the source of that 
long-standing  accusation.  There is even a notation in the  
Ripley catalog attributing the manuscript to  Crowley on 
someone's say-so, but I have no  indication Ripley has any other 
such book.  Finally, if the notebook is a sourcebook of  any 
religious system, it is not that of  medieval witchcraft, but the 
twentieth  century madness or sanity or both of the  infamous 
magus Aleister Crowley and the  Thelemic/Gnostic creed of The 
Book of the  Law. 
 
  As I sat there I read aloud familiar  quotations or paraphrases 
from published  material in the Crowley-Thelemic canon. This  is 
not the "ancient religion of the Wise" but  the modern sayings of 
" the Beast 666 " as  Crowley was wont to style himself. 
 
 But, does any of this invalidate Wicca as an  expression of 
human spirituality?  It depends  on where one is coming from.  
Certainly, the  foundations of feminist Wicca and the modern  
cult of the goddess are challenged with the  fact that the 
goddess in question may be  Nuit, her manifestation the sworn 
whore, Our  Lady Babalon, the Scarlet Woman.  Transform  what you 
will shall be the whole of history,  but THIS makes what Marx did 
to Hegel look  like slavish devotion. 
 
 What Crowley himself said of this kind of  witchcraft is not 
merely instructive, but an  afront to the conceits of an era. 
 
  "The belief in witchcraft," he observed, "  was not all 
superstition; its psychological  roots were sound. Women who are 
thwarted in  their natural instincts turn inevitably to  all 
kinds of malignant mischief, from slander  to domestic 
destruction..." 
 
 For the rest of us, those who neither  worship nor are 
disdainful of the man who  made sexuality a god or, at least,  
acknowledged it as such, experience must be  its own teacher. If 
Wicca is a sort of errant  Minerval Camp of the 
OTO, gone far astray  and far afield since the days Crowley gave  
Gardner a charter he "didn't use" but seemed  to value, and a 
whole range of rituals and imagery that assault the senses at 
their most  literally fundamental level; if this is true  or sort 
of true,, maybe its time  history be owned up to.  Mythos has its 
place  and role, but so, too, does reality.  
 
                 PART THREE 
         WICCA AS AN OTO ENCAMPMENT 
 
 The question of intent looms large in the  background of this 
inquiry.  If I had to  guess, I would venture that Gerald Gardner  
did, in fact, invent Wicca more or less whole  cloth, to be a 
popularized version of the  OTO.  Crowley, or his successor Karl 
Germer,  who  also knew Dr. Gardner, likely set "old  Gerald" on 
what they intended to be a  Thelemic path, aimed at 
reestablishing at  least a basic OTO encampment in England. 
 
 Aiden Kelly's research work on all this is most impressive, but 
at rock bottom I can't help feeling he still wants to salvage 
something original in Wicca. In a way, there is some 
justification for this; the Wicca of Gerald Gardner, OTO initiate 
and advocate of sexual magick produced a folksy, easier version 
of the OTO, but by the middle nineteen fifties some of his early 
"followers" not only created a revisionist Wicca with relatively 
little of the Thelemic original intact, but convinced Gardner to 
go along with the changes. 
 
  It is also possible, but yet unproven,  that, upon expelling 
Kenneth Grant from the  OTO in England, Germer, in the early 
1950s,  summoned Gardner to America to interview him  as a 
candidate for leading the British OTO.  Gardner, it is confirmed, 
came to America,  but by then Wicca, and Dr. Gardner had begun  
to take their own, watered-down course. Today most Wiccans have 
no idea of their origins. 
 
  Let me close this section by quoting two  interesting tidbits 
for your consideration. 
 
  First consider Doreen Valiente's observation to me concerning 
"the Parsons  connection". I quote from her letter  
abovementioned, one of several she was kind  enough to send me in 
1986 in connection with  my research into this matter. 
 
 ...I did know about the existence of the  O.T.O. Chapter in 
California at the time of  Crowley's death, because I believe his 
ashes  were sent over to them. He was cremated here  in Brighton, 
you know, much to the scandal of  the local authorities, who 
objected to the  `pagan funeral service.' If you are referring  
to the group of which Jack Parsons was a  member (along with the 
egregious Mr. L. Ron  Hubbard), then there is another curious  
little point to which I must draw your  attention. I have a 
remarkable little book by  Jack Parsons called MAGICK, GNOSTICISM 
AND  THE WITCHCRAFT.  It is unfortunately undated,  but Parsons 
died in 1952.  The section on  witchcraft is particularly 
interesting  because it looks forward to a revival of  witchcraft 
as the Old Religion....I find this  very thought provoking.  Did 
Parsons write this around the time that Crowley was getting  
together with Gardner and perhaps  communicated with the 
California group to  tell them about it? 
 
 We must remember that Ms. Valiente was a  close associate of 
Gardner and is a dedicated  and active Wiccan. She, of course, 
has her  own interpretation of these matters. The OTO recently 
reprinted the Parsons "witchcraft" essays in Freedom is a Two 
Edged Sword , a postumous collection of his writings. It does 
indeed seem that Gardner and Parsons were both on the same wave-
length at about the same time. 
 
 The other matter of note is the question of  the length of 
Gardner's association with the  OTO and with Crowley personally. 
My informant  Col. Lawrence, tells me that he has in his  
possession a cigarette case which once belonged to Aleister 
Crowley. Inside 
 
"is a note in Crowley's hand that says  simply: `gift of GBG, 
1936, A. Crowley'." 
        (Personal letter, 6 December, 1986) 
 
  The inscription could be a mistake, it  could mean 1946, the 
period of the Charter.   But, as Ms. Valiente put it in a letter 
to me  of 8th December, 1986: 
 
If your friend is right, then it would mean  that old Gerald 
actually went through a  charade of pretending to Arnold Crowther 
that  Arnold was introducing him to Crowley for the  first time - 
a charade which Crowley for some  reason was willing to go along 
with.  Why? I  can't see the point of such a pretence; but  then 
occultists sometimes do devious  things... 
 
 Crowley may have played out a similar scene with G.I. Gurdjieff, 
the other enlightened merry prankster of the first half of the 
twentieth century. 
 
 Gnosticism and Wicca, the subjects of Jack  Parsons' essays, 
republished by the OTO and  Falcon Press in 1990, are the two 
most  successful expressions to date of Crowley's  dream of a 
popular solar-phallic religion.   Maybe I'm wrong, but I think 
Aleister and  Gerald may have cooked Wicca up. 
 
 If Wicca is the OTO's prodigal daughter in  fact, authorized 
directly by Crowley, how  should Wiccans now relate to this? How 
should Crowley's successors and heirs in the OTO deal with it? 
 
 Then too, what are we to make of and infer  about all this 
business of a popular  Thelemic-Gnostic religion?  Were Crowley,  
Parsons, Gardner and others trying to do  something of note with 
regard to actualizing  a New Aeon here which bears scrutiny?  Or 
is  this mere speculation, and of little  significance for the 
Great Work today?  
 
 If the Charter Crowley issued Gardner is,  indeed, the authority 
upon which Wicca has  been built for half a century, then it is  
perhaps no coincidence that I acquired that  Charter in the same 
year I was consecrated a  Bishop of the Gnostic Catholic Church.  
Further, it was literally days after my long  search for the 
original of Gardner's BOOK OF  SHADOWS ended in success that the 
Holy Synod  of T Michael Bertiaux's Gnostic Church  unanimously 
elected me a Missionary Bishop,  on August 29, 1986. 
 
 Sometimes, I muse, the Inner Order revoked  Wicca's charter in 
1986,placing it in my  hands. Since I hold it in trust for the 
OTO,  perhaps Wicca has, in symbolic form, returned  home at 
last. It remains for the Wiccans to,  literally (since the 
charter hangs in my  temple space), to read the handwriting on 
the  wall.  
  
 " Witchcraft always has a hard time, until it becomes 
established and changes its name."  - Charles Fort