From: SL500000@brownvm.brown.edu (Robert Mathiesen)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: Documented Evidence
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 12:45:35 EST
Organization: Brown University - Providence, Rhode Island  USA
NNTP-Posting-Host: brownvm.brown.edu
News-Software: BNN via BNN_POST v1.0 beta

In article <1ikv5kINNflt@shelley.u.washington.edu>,
mimir@hardy.u.washington.edu (Al Billings) said:

>>
>>       On that note, I remembered a book on my shelf the other day that was
>>supposedly written by someone who has a English family passed tradition. What
>>does everyone think of the book "West County Wicca" by Rhiannon Rhylls?
Marion
>>Weinstein wrote the intro, so apparently she thinks it's authentic. Looks
>>pretty good to me, a lot of kitchen magick which is what I would expect from
>>any tradition that survived under the conditions she claims hers did. A lot
of
>>standard Wicca too, but most of the ceremonial or high magick (which is what
>>I think gardner added) present in modern day Wicca is conspiciously absent.
>>
>>       Anyone else here read it or have an opinion of it?
>
> There have been quite a number of reviews. The summary is that she's
>lying. A lot of her details don't jibe, such as illiterate English
>peasents right before WWII when the literacy in England was almost 100%.
>Of course, that's why they didn't have a written book, she says, because
>they couldn't read...
>

I haven't seen many critical reviews of Ryall's _West Country Wicca_
myself, but have noticed that her account of a First Degree initiation
(pp. 21-22), where the initiate is left alone in a cave, bound and
blindfolded, and eventually has to crawl out through the legs of the
coveners (still bound and blindfolded), which Ryall says she herself
underwent in the 1940's, is surprisingly like the stone-age initiation
rite envisioned in a trance by Patricia Crowther during her own
Gardnerian initiation in 1960.  See her _Witch Blood! The Diary of a
Witch High Priestess_ (1974), chapter 4.  Here's a quote (pp. 40-41, 43):


[Crowther kneels bound at the altar and falls into a trance.]  "In this
visionary state I felt myself being lifted up in the air and found I was
being carried above the heads of a group of naked females.  Othersformed
a procession behind, while those in the lead carried flaming torches.
They carried me along with them and entered a cave in a hillside.  When
they arrived at the main cavern, I was hurled through the air and landed
on the floor.  Then the procession turned and marched out, leaving me in
complete darkness.

"My body began to ache, but I was unable to move much as my bonds
restricted my movements.  A number of bats flew down and I felt them
brush my naked body in the darkness.  I began to get frightened -- what
other strange creatures lurked in the cave.  My imagination began to
play havoc with me.  I started to panic.  I was bathed in a cold sweat
and my hair stood on end.  I was suffering a nightmare that seemed
never-ending.  Suddenly I became clam and my courage returned.  At that
moment the cave became illuminated -- the women had come back.

"They formed a large circle round me and began to chant.  Several came
towards me and stood in a line, one behind the other.  They put their
hands on each other's shoulders and spread their legs apart.  Two more
women came forward; one stood by at the top of the line, while the
other, who appeared to be the leader, bent down and whispered in my ear.
She told me to drag myself, the best way I could, through the avenue of
legs.  This was a difficult task, as I was still tied up, but after
repeated efforts, I achieved my objective.  All the time I was
struggling through the archway of legs, the women kept on howling and
screaming as they swayed to and fro.  I had started at the end of the
row, and as soon as I had passed the first woman, I was seized under the
arms, by the leader and another, and lifted to my feet.  Then, the
leader cut the cords, with a knife, and released me.  She dropped the
knife on the ground and held up her breasts, while the other woman
signed to me to kiss them.  After this, I was sprinkled with water and
told that I was now one of them.

"The leader then took me aside and explained the meaning of the rite to
me.  I had been reborn into the priesthood of the Moon Mysteries.  The
cave represented the womb of Mother Earth, into which I had been cast so
that I could be born again, after a period of time alone in the
darkness.  The tunned formed by the women's legs represented the vagina,
through which a newly born baby would pass.  The screaming was that of a
mother in labor.  The leader had offered me her breasts to symbolize
that she would suckle and protect me as she would her own children.  The
cutting of my bonds symbolized the cutting of the umbilical cord."

[Crowther sudddenly comes to again, and the Gardnerian initiation
proceeds to its completion.  Afterwards, she tells Gardner her vision,
and he comments as follows:] "You must have gone way back into a
previous life, long before men entered the craft, and taken part in an
ancient initiation ceremony, which has long been forgotten.  For a long
time, I had an idea that it used to be performed something like you have
described, and now I know I wasn't far wrong.  It must have been
centuries ago, long before verbal rituals were adopted by the craft."


The point of most interest here is the contrast between Ryall's
testimony that such a rite was still being practiced in the 1940's, and
Gardner's testimony that he had *no* certain knowledge of such a rite,
though he had long suspected some such thing had once existed, centuries
ago, at a time when men were not yet admitted to the craft.  However, I
think I also see some literary dependency, perhaps mediated by
Crowther's own revision of what she experienced, this time told as a
general account of an ancient ritual rather than as a personal
experience, in her and her husband's book _The Secrets of Ancient
Witchcraft_ (1974), ch. 1 (see esp. pp. 26-29).  My own view is that
Ryall has read the Crowthers and drawn upon their works for her own
book.

I've got to go now; next time I'll respond to the request for more in-
formation about Eastern European family traditions.  -- Robert


(Robert Mathiesen, Brown University, SL500000@BROWNVM)