Art by Glyn Smith
Religion so often goes against its own aims, and nowhere more than in answering the question of its origins. We are supposed to be engaged in the struggle for truth and for love, but because of a lack of love, begin to spin a truth that never was. Young Tradition certainly sits in that vague field of modern Craft that is usually called "Traditional." The idea is that, unlike Wicca, this is a form of Craft which is rooted in what was happening for centuries, that this thing begin done was handed down secretly, sometimes through families. This is actually a variation of what Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders said about their own schools of witchcraft.
But making up stories about where what we did came from is lying, and this is called the Craft of the Wise. Supposedly we are looking for truth, and truth cannot be found in intentional deception. Having a conversation with Laurelai Black about the things I did that originally came out of her American Folkloric Witchcraft but which had been adapted to my vision, she said, insightfully, "That's what it means to be part of a Tradition". I am not going to talk about AFW for too long, only say that there is no pretense there of having a Tradition handed down from generations of venerable witches in woods, but a very real understanding that visions and honest understandings were linked with the actual practices in existense, and that adopting these practices to your path is what makes a tradition a tradition. This is what I have done in Young Tradition, and the thing about that is that, just like all children, just like all families, there is a chance that what is born this time around might look like its brothers and sisters or like its parent,s or it might be a throwback to older ancestors. Genes are funny that way, and so is spirituality, and that is why I want to, as honestly as possible, map out a sort of family tree of this Craft I am doing.
Young Tradition began as a branch of 1734 heavily influenced by AFW. AFW is NOT 1734, it is its own thing, but its founders were very much steeped in Cochrane's Craft and 1734 is a form--a somwhat poorly developed form--of Cochrane's Craft. Cochrane, like Gerald Gardner and like Alex Sanders, claimed to have a tradition he'd inheritted from a secret coven of English witches who had passed it on for centuries, and yet we know two things about Cochrane: he despised Gerald Gardner and, according to Doreen Valiente, who was part of Cochrane's coven after being part of Gardner's, what he did was pretty identitical to what Gardner did. It was not his rituals that made his Craft different, but his emphasis on wisdom over either power or the idea of God and Goddess and the witch as pagain fertility priest. To Cochrane the name witch was insufficient, a misnomer partially accepted and witchcraft only part of what he was doing. He was, in the true sense, an occultist attempting to link all strangs of wisdom together into something alchemical, transformative. Some would call him a bit of a liar--his real name was Roy Bowers, and the covern he said he'd been a part of may have never existed, but scholar Ronald Hutton gets it right when he says that Cochrane believed that, "By saying a thing he made it so." By picking up and old cup and calling it a long lost chalice it became such. Imagination and story were the gateway to true knowledge and true power. This insight would distinguish Cochrane from Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders.
Around the same time Cochrane was doing his work (the mid to late 1960's in England) Alex and Maxine Sanders, who had started out as Gardnerians, were refining their practice into what they would eventually call Alexandrian Witchcraft, and though Alex Sanders claimed to have inherited his witchcraft from his grandmother, his practice was Garderian and, in structure and ritual, so is his Book of Shadows. Members of he Clan of Tubal Cain have claimed that the difference between what they do and what Gardner did was that Wicca was a holdover from the middle classes in the Romantic Era (larger middle part of the 1800's) but that Cochrane's Craft was directly descended from folk magic and the people. This is what we call legend and not fact. If one is looking for truth, they should not have a problem with facts. The difference between Cochrane and Gardner was that Cochrane was more interested in the truth found through legends, poems and stories than Gardner seemed to be, but the source of his practice is, as many Gardnerians have said, undoubtably Gardnerian.
What Cochrane did was loose his version of the the Craft from being reliant on Gardner's rituals or the concept of a Book of Shadows as well as his priestly structure, and the Cochrane Craft that exists now is nothing like Wicca, but nevertheless, that is how it began. Beyond Cochrane there were other forms which emerged, all claiming ancient lines of ancestry that were pre Wicca, all taking a little bit from Cochane, many claiming ethnic and familiar descent, and we call these Traditional Crafts. Ofetn Cocrhane is seen as part of it, since they came out of him, just as broad form Wicca came out of Gerald Gardner's very strict and classical Wicca, but I'm going to hold Cochrane's Craft as distinct from Traditonal Crafts in that it has a definite ritual and moral component to it which is not necessarily seen in the Traditionals.
Now, since no matter what grand claims they laid, it seems Cochrane Craft and Alaxandrian both originaned--thoguh they are very different in form now--from Gardnerian Wicca, from whence did Wicca come? Was there actually a coven that Gardner was initiated into? I don't know. Did he have his own coven? Yes. We know this and it gave us the likes of Patricia Crowther, Ray Bone and Doreen Vailente. Valiente gave us the Charge of the Goddess, one of the most recognizable products of Gardner's Craft, but anyone who knows much of Aleister Crowley must note that Valiente adapted her Charge from Aleister Crowley's writings and there is no doubt, at least from where I am standing that, far from being the child of ancient English covens, Wicca is the better dressed son of Aleister Crowley's Thelema, with perhaps modern druidry for a mother. Gardnerians and Alexandrians wanted to reproduce a fertility and nature cult. They wanted to be pagan. Crowley wasn't concerned with this at all. He was intentionally perverting ceremonial magic and Christian iconography to bring about his new Aeon.
It should be stated, that though Gardner and the Wicca he spawned clearly identified as and one might even argue gave birth to paganism, Alexandrians to this day do not acknowledge themselves as pagans, but rather a mystery cult and this applies to those in Cochrane's Craft as well. Cochanre's dichotomy was not between the pagan and the Christian, but between deep knowledge and that which was merely surface deep. The Gardnerian and certainly the Alexandrian practices dealt with angels, demons and medieval Christian magic, and it is in part two of this article that we will dig a little deeper and look at Thelema and the forebearers of the modern occult.
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