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So what then, is witchcraft?
Witchcraft is a form of pagan ritual and
knowledge
carried forward from ancient times, and although
adapted by each generation to suit the times in which
they lived, it contains certain truths and erudition
that never change. With specific reference to Celtic
witchcraft the survival of this knowledge and
tradition is easily traced; Too powerful to fight, the
peoples’ love for their goddesses was sublimated into
a cult of the Virgin Mary in the Christian church;
many rituals and traditions surviving under the
watchful eye of the parish priest. (notably the August
games at Taillte (Tealtown) whose origins lie in the
mourning games ordered by the god, Lugh at the death
of his foster mother, Tailtu) The veneer of
Christianity hid but perversely also preserved the
pagan ways, aided by the fact that up to and beyond
Elizabethan times Ireland was largely isolated and
unlike Britain and Gaul never fell prey to the
influences of continental Europe. A rich oral
tradition encoded the story of the Old Religion into
legend and myth, and the Christian monks were of
inestimable help in writing down over the centuries
many of these tales, (albeit with a liberal dose of
Christian moralizing). The invasion of the English
from the eleventh century onwards did eventually
result in the destruction of Irish culture, the
outlawing of our Brehon laws, the persecution of the
Bards and the outlawing of our language, religion,
culture, music, and indeed at one point of the entire
nation, all this came late enough in our history to
ensure that the age-old knowledge was less diluted and
polluted than elsewhere. And yet again, persecution
aided the Old Religion as the determination of our
neighbors to destroy our history induced both the
catholic church and the few inheritors of the ways, to
preserve it in the teeth of all opposition.
Another contributing factor was the encoding within
the landscape itself of the Goddess and her story.
From Newgrange to Cnoc
Aine, the land itself speaks of
the pattern of settlement from earliest times, and the
spread of a matriarchal, lunar worshipping religion
outwards from Beara in Kerry to the edge of Ireland
and across the sea to Britain and Europe. Furthermore
it tells the story of the struggle between this
religion and the sun-worshipping cults, and their
compromise and integration.
So there is the provenance of Celtic paganism
and its
attendant forms, notably witchcraft.
Easy to prove the survival and almost
unbroken links
between our Celtic present and pagan past, but what of
the survival of the knowledge and arts of our
ancestors? There are those even today, whose own
families bear the threads of the past into the present
and are themselves the preservers of the old ways,
known as the Few. With the rise of Wicca there has
also been a smaller but welcome rise in the followers
of traditional witchcraft, a very close cousin to the
family witchcraft under discussion in these pages.
With respect to the traditional secrecy surrounding
these matters, a delicate subject at the best of
times, it is permissible to state that there are
approximately six families in Ireland who are true
examples of hereditary Traditional Family Witchcraft.
In each family,
there is one in each branch who is a
practitioner, so there are usually several in each
generation, cousins rather than siblings. As a rule
there is one main branch of the family, centering on
the matriarchal line, around which all this occult
activity centers, preventing it from becoming too
widespread and diluted as the bloodline expands.
Should circumstances dictate
that a practitioner die
without issue, or the her family and bloodline is cut
short by death, pestilence or violence the knowledge
and expertise will be passed to the nearest female
blood relative.
What lends traditional family witchcraft its more
bizarre aspects is, that while the practitioner is
initiated into the secrets of the clan, her immediate
family, sometimes including parents & siblings may
well be almost entirely unaware of this. Or while
accepting that their own parent or sibling was
possessed of some psychic ability or other they
persist in seeing it as a mild gift, an odd little
ability that the practitioner seems to have inherited.
This has led to generations of hereditary witches
being persecuted by the following sentence; ‘you know,
you’re the image of your Granny’
On a more serious note, in some cases where the
practitioner has been unable to properly initiate her
successor into the craft, the unfortunate inheritor is
doomed to spend a great portion of her life and
certainly her adolescence seeking restlessly, feeling
lost, worried by unusual abilities and badly channeled
energies…
When properly initiated, even if abandoned before any
in-depth exploration
of her abilities or without a
great deal of instruction the practitioner is likely
to find her path with greater ease and to find the
practical aspects of witchcraft a lot easier than many
who come to the craft without much family background;
as Celtic culture is extremely ancestor-fixated, the
longer the line of witches in one bloodline, the
greater the repository of energy at the disposal of
the witch.
However many adept and intelligent practitioners have
found their way into the craft in recent years,
choosing traditional witchcraft and bringing to it
fresh energy and perspective. I would be loath to
suggest that their contribution is in any way less
valuable than that of hereditary witches, rather that
each has their strengths and weaknesses.
Accepting then the history of
and general aspects of
traditional family witchcraft, it remains to examine
and compare it to its main rival Wicca. Unlike Wicca
it is not necessarily a religion. It can be practiced
perfectly well as a Craft or Art rather than as a
religion. Many hereditary witches have been devout
catholic or Christian in one generation, atheistic in
the next and pagan after that. Often there has been a
duality of expression, with the natural inclination of
the practitioner being towards spirituality rather
than atheism, and with the god/desses of the old
religion seen as complementary to, rather than in
conflict with, the Christian church. Many older
practitioners would be horrified to think of
themselves as pagan; being firmly Christian, but
seeing the use of the old sacred names as rather like
saying ‘abracadabra’, as it were.
In the new generation the trend is toward
an
affectionate and reverent sense of the old deities,
each seen as individuals and at the same time,
manifestations of the universal power that is. Family
traditional witchcraft also enshrines a complex and
highly developed philosophy called by different names
but often by the Story of the Homeland or The Concept
of the Homeland. This is too complex to explain in a
short essay but is, roughly, a visualization of the
homeland (Ireland) and the sacred Isles surrounding it
as representative of the journey of life; drawing on
myth, legend, gods and goddesses, archetypes and
meditations. This is the spiritual and philosophical
basis of traditional family witchcraft and its
practical manifestation is spell-casting and
summoning, channeling of energy and divination, work
with the elements etc, all done in conjunction with a
sincere spiritual quest for growth and knowledge.
On a mundane level, the differences between Wicca and
Witchcraft manifest themselves as follows; traditional
witches do not keep a book of shadows, but a Grimoire,
into which is recorded many things, herbal lore and
lunar dates, details of ailments, phenomenon,
elements, seasons, etc but not magic. Spells and
Spell-craft, with rituals etc are not written into the
Grimoire but safely encoded elsewhere.
The other glaring difference
between Traditional
Family witchcraft (and mainstream traditional
witchcraft) and Wicca is that traditional
practitioners do not adhere to the rede or rule of
three but rather to an older rule; do what ye wilt an
ye know what ye do. This means that if you are
knowledgeable you can impose your will on the world
with great power and also, whatever you choose to do
you must be prepared for the consequences, and
understand them. The system of magic practiced by
traditional witches is based on an idea of balance,
that life and death are balanced; that when you take
you also must give; when you create you also destroy
and vice versa. This is a very simplistic stating of
the concept but it serves to illustrate briefly the
difference between it and the rede.
SO, WHAT NOW FOR TRADITIONAL WITCHCRAFT?
Where then does Traditional Family Witchcraft stand in
the modern world? It is a source of great frustration
to family witches that almost everyone thinks of Wicca
when they think of witchcraft, and assumes it to be
all the same. And, that the principles and ethics or
Wicca are applied to traditional witches, when they
are in fact very distinct from our idea of ethics.
But perhaps most of
all it is the militancy of Wiccans
that most alienates the Family practitioner.
After centuries of careful and discreet practice,
after countless generations of witches refining and
extending the knowledge and power of their
predecessors, the eruption of modern Wicca onto the
scene has come with all the force of the proverbial
bull in the china shop; inexperienced and in some
cases, downright ignorant acolytes of Wicca run amok
through the once secluded glades of Hecate. Spells,
like baking recipes are exchanged across the Internet
and through New Age publications. People practice for
a year and day and on day 367 start campaigning for
days off around the winter solstice and the right to
wear pentagrams to work. Nowhere is this strange new
attitude more evident than in reference to what has
become widely known as the Burning Times.
In other words, this refers to
the medieval, and more
particularly Seventeenth Century persecution of
Heretics and Witch-hunts.
For most American Wiccans, and of course, others,
this has become a rallying point as the Salem Witch
Trials are re-interpreted not as the tragedy of
political machinations, religious fanaticism and land
greed that they were but as a holocaust, a pogrom
against a religious minority, redefining the victims
of Salem as practicing witches who died for their
beliefs and also as a distinct ethnic and religious
group.
That not one of the victims of the Salem Witch Trials
was a witch seems to be irrelevant in this
reconstruction; as indeed, is the evidence that the
accusers were suffering from a form of LSD poisoning
because of a fungus on their wheat. This disease has
also been proven to have played a role in many other
instances of witch hunting and supernatural plagues.
Across Europe in
the middle ages women were indeed
burned at the stake under charges of witchcraft, but
these were with few exceptions midwives and herbalists
persecuted by the new rising male profession of
Doctor. Indeed to get the populace to trust them
rather then the midwife, doctors portrayed them in
unflattering imagery, giving us the modern picture of
a witch; as incompetent, greedy and often sick
themselves (hence the green skin) and old-fashioned
(wearing the by-now out-dated pointy hat, therefore
provincial and rustic and old fashioned).
In the seventeenth century the church began to
formulate an idea that there was a church of Satan,
just as there was a church of Christ, and the devil
had his followers. ‘Witch’ took on a new meaning, as
the follower of Satan and the church set out to ‘find’
the unholy church. Naturally not only did they find
it but they convinced so many of its existence that
idiots across Europe called themselves Satanists and
confessed to being his followers. For a full
exploration of this phenomenon read Hugh Trevor
Roper’s The rise of Witchcraft in Seventeenth Century
Europe
Through out all this true hereditary Witches emerged
relatively unscathed. They could practice neither
their beliefs nor healing, but they could and did
protect the knowledge even from their nearest and
dearest. Witches really suffered no more and
certainly far less than midwives and the local senile
Crone.
But this realistic view of our history is unpopular to
those who seek a cause and once again the ‘victim’
culture of America rushes to canonize the dead, in
order to galvanize the living. Activism has become
the single most divisive factor in modern witchcraft
and by this I do not mean protesting against the
destruction of the earth or writing letters for
amnesty international. I mean the militant insistence
upon witchcraft being recognized as a world religion,
Wicca being accepted as its acceptable form and the
very mysteries at its heart being accessible to all,
regardless of merit or training. It is an odious from
of egalitarianism that wishes to allow the tailor
access to the surgeon’s trade, on the grounds that
they can both cut and sew. And to those who have spent
many years in pursuit of excellence in these Arts, the
just-add-Llywellyn instant ‘expert’ phenomenon is
depressing and insulting. And for every Wiccan with
either natural talent or a genuine appreciation for
the craft, there are dozens who deal in misconception
and misinformation.
Even those Wiccans who are gifted have glaring
misconceptions of the craft, its history and its
purpose. Many have fallen so heavily in love with the
idea of a Goddess-centric religion, celebrating
womanhood, that they fail to realize that witchcraft
has its (honorable) secular tradition as well; and
because they invest so heavily in emotional terms,
coming out to foe and friend alike they tend to react
bitterly towards any suggestion that the tenets upon
which they have based their life are less than
accurate.
The idea of hereditary or traditional witchcraft being
privy to secrets, rituals, spells or knowledge not
shared by the Wiccan is unbearable to them; some write
angrily about traditional witches being unwilling to
share (duh!) and others post snippy articles using
phrases such as ‘so-called’ hereditary witches and
‘self-styled’ traditional witches. One wonders how
they would like to be called ‘amateur witches’ or
‘pseudo-witches’. There are few traditional witches
and almost no family witches who would not be
horrified at the calls for protests and law suits that
abound on American Internet sites. They seem unwilling
to stop until they have dragged the sacred Arts out
into the florescent light. In fact at times one
wonders whether they will be content until they have
reduced it to another fast-food for the soul.
So what way forward for the be-leaguered traditional
Family Witch, and her cousin-in-arms, the Traditional
Witch? By avoiding the Internet and its ubiquitous
wicca-ness we run the risk of increasing isolation and
dwindling numbers, while we allow –by our passivity-
the misconceptions and deceptions of the wiccan
industry to bury our proud tradition under its cloak
of conformity. By joining the internet, we become in
effect part of the vast army of ‘One True Paths’
clamoring for the attention of teenagers and pre-
pubescent newbies (O! detested phrase) that surf for
net looking for instant coolness.
While we dither and debate, day after
day our craft
becomes more and more defiled and even the tag ‘
traditional witchcraft’ has been high-jacked by those
claiming to be traditionals, or hereditaries without
much evidence of this apparent, in either their
spell-craft, their vocabulary or their understanding
of the very tradition they espouse.
ARE WE LUDDITES?
So is there nothing of value in the sea of modern
publications and websites? Well, there are several
excellent traditional witchcraft sites, and clubs (see
list below) and for books, there are a couple of
excellent authors. Caitlin Mathews, although popular,
retains an erudite and well-researched stance on
Celtic paganism. Cheryl Straffon is an excellent
source for travelogues and guides to sacred
landscapes, lively and well written. Some of the
Collins gem series are invaluable as pocket
consultants. Some web sites are very enjoyable and
exemplify the best use of the web, most notable the
Witches Web Forum and Witch Vox; as a rule of thumb
Pagan rather than wiccan sites are the way to go.
CAUTION IS ADVISED
But even if we use the web, in a limited way, there is
a clear need for caution.
I know some of our younger members will be throwing
their eyes up to heaven and groaning, as I am very
well aware that many of them are on web sites and
discussion forums and newsgroups. However I know that
there are limits to the type of thing they will
discuss and there are secrets and topics that even the
most devout netophile amongst them would not dream of
divulging; add to this the possibility of a back lash
against this new age militancy when people may very
much regret their public avowals of wicca-hood. It is
not unheard of for the moral majority to seek out
their potential victims on the net. Do we want to
throw away years of safety and discretion just to
prove a point?
And finally . . . .
There are few things more frustrating than knowing
yourself to be right and being unable to voice this
satisfactorily, but for the moment at least the way
forward is to accept limited contact with wiccan
groups, taking care to always distance yourself from
their misquotes and misinformation. To explain the
basics of traditional family witchcraft is acceptable
but anonymity on the web is no excuse for laxity where
the code is concerned, besides rest assured, I’ll
know who you are!
Be clear on who you are and why you are a witch; do
not insult anyone else’s beliefs but feel free to
defend the truth as strongly as possible. And please
whenever possible make it clear what the historical
facts are. For my sake. Think of my blood pressure.
Please.
CAN WE TALK?
‘Only by overcoming our natural inclination towards
solitude can we hope to survive the great
vulgarization of our craft’
Eblanna Ui Bhroinn, rep. of The Clan Beirn Noafa, June
2000
*.(Ignoring the fact that Alice Kettler escaped the
flames instead allowing her hapless and illiterate
maid to burn, that most of the charges brought against
her were leveled by a bishop of dubious moral standing
and that she herself while almost certainly a
practioner of sorts come from no known line, the
socio-political factors at work in the Kilkenny of
that period are too complex to admit of much clear
finger pointing at either Alice or her brother)
Source: (http://www.whywiccanssuck.com/twessay.html)
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