From: SL500000@brownvm.brown.edu (Robert Mathiesen)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: Family passed religions
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 03:51:18 EST
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Many thanks, Ashley; you have now given me enough to see where your friend's
tradition fits into the whole spectrum of what is out there, in a general
kind of way, and in her case I am indeed inclined to think her claims of an
unbroken, underground family tradition of magical non-Christian religion are
reasonable.  The key elements, for my understanding at least, were your ref-
erences to Eastern Europe and to Matthew's article.  There are two such liv-
ing Eastern European traditions of which I have heard something; and as Ash-
ley said, they are not precisely Wicca, but similar enough to suggest some
relatedness.  Many of the regions in question were officially Christianized
very late indeed, and superficially Christianized, at that, so that it was
possible in principle for a shrewd folklorist to have recovered in the last
century, or even to recover now, not just relics, but a whole more-or-less
intact pre-Christian magical religion.  Lithuania, for example, became of-
ficially Christian in the 1300's, if memory serves me rightly -- and that
was just the elite, not the peasants. And Hungary, though Christianized
much earlier, kept a strong sense of difference from the rest of Christian
Europe, including a living tradition of a kind of native Hungarian shamanism
that survives until today.

However, these traditions were already known to some extent, and had been
described in print in English or French (Gardner read both languages),
before 1939, and even before 1929; indeed, they had had something of a
vogue in Western European occult circles for a time prior to those dates.
Consequently, it is *possible* that Gardner drew his materials from these
publications rather than from contact with a group such as Matthews
describes, or the other one that Ann Ross has found (if indeed it is
another one, and not the same one that Matthews encountered).

Also, a genuine survival in Eastern Europe does not in principle prove
that an analogous practice in the British Isles represents survival,
rather than revival.  The little I know about Ann Ross's group -- just a
sentence or two in one of her books -- could in principle be true of a
late 19th century revival as well as a genuine survival.  Matthews'
group is more visible from his article, but he warns that the edges have
been blurred and that there is a bit of fuzziness at the line between
fact and fiction.  If it is a revival, my guess would be that it was a
much earlier revival, which took on a life of its own and evolved into
what Matthews found.  There is some evidence that interested people were
actively looking for survivals of English pre-Christian religions as
early as the 1600's, and not adverse to reconstructing whatever they
could not recover.  It would be only a small step to put one of these
reconstructions into practice, and such a 17th-century reconstruction
might have survived, if some family or group of families became
committed enough to its survival.  Reconstructions, after all, can work
as well as survivals *now,* so they could do so *then,* too.

Do I need to say, for absolute clarity, that I don't doubt the *logical*
possibility that Gardner found a genuine survival?  What I've been
saying, rather, in that everything in Gardner's tradition points clearly
and naturally to a semi-scholarly reconstruction made ca. 1929-1939, so
that one doesn't need to assume that the religion into which he was
initiated was a genuine survival.  I do think that such a group existed
for perhaps ten years before Gardner's initiation, and -- human nature
being what it is -- they may have told him falsely that it was much
older, or may have let him come to that conclusion himself from hints
alone.

Anyway, Ashley, many thanks, and my regards to your friend and her family.
There are many kinds of family traditions out there, of varying ages, so
it's not just a binary choice between recent revival and survival from
the stone age.  Hers, so far as I can judge, may be one of the older and
more interesting ones.  -- Robert

PS  The Eastern European tradition I know the most about is the Russian
one.  If someone reminds me in a week or two, when I'm done discussing
the different Bibles of Christianity with Drake, then I'll post a bit on
Russian witchcraft.  It's a matter for families of solitaries, mostly, and
not for covens.
Newsgroups: alt.pagan,talk.religion.misc