Origins: Part Two

It's just an uncomfortable truth that you can't help who your family is, and no one chooses their brothers and sisters. It seems that, though they distanced themselves from it, Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente as well as who knows how many other people were trying to do something with Thelema and this became Wicca. Aside from the adapted Crowley verses which become The Charge of the Goddess, much of Gardner’s Book of Shadows, which is adapted into Alex Sander’s Book, deals in the same demonology, sacred names and elemental terms not of paganism or some ancient pre Christian British past, but of a very Christian medieval magic. Crowley was working to turn this Christianity over on its head, but it seems Wicca was attempting to make what Crowley was at respectable, even placing very Christian ideas of community and the need to suffer, the need to do good and to meditate and study in an almost monk like way to attain magical power. This may be a reason why, though people who practice a broad and devolved form of Wicca regard themselves as pagans, at least Alexandrians have steered away from that term and only very recently and very reluctantly did Maxine Sanders accept the term pagan for herself.

Before we move on I want to say here that pagans are often eager to draw a very superficial line between pagans and Christians while at the same time choosing to have some knowledge and borrow some practices from every culture around the world and then barring Christianity, Islam or Judaism, thus making those religions as special and different as they claim to be. In this and all articles, religion is simply religion and no specific kind is being ignored. Maxine Sanders was a raised a devout Catholic, and met the occult through her mother who was a devout Catholic all her life. Janet Farrar claimed to have a vision of the Virgin Mary opening up her robe and revealing a pentagram before saying, “And now you know.” Here, and in all articles, I will not draw the difference between anything as simple as Christianity and paganism, but orthodox and heterodox, exoteric and esoteric, mainstream and occult.

But the founders of the two branches of Wicca were not the only ones working with Crowley’s material. On the other side of the world there were Americans who were trying to work with Thelema to bring about Crowley’s Scarlet Woman. Jack Parson’s, the rocket engineer turned occultist was inducted into Crowley’s Thelema and along with new friend L.Ron Hubbard sought to bring about the Scarlet Woman who would give birth to the Dark Child of the new Aeon. Even Crowley in his old age was disgusted by their plans, and they seemed to have failed, Parson’s falling into madness and dying early. But Hubbard kept up with Crowley’s archetypes and ideology until it became radically transformed into what he would call Scientology. Scientology, which has done and continues to do untold harm to its members was born in America around the same time Wicca was born in England, and it was born from someone intentionally practicing dark arts. For someone who is not occult it is hard to see how something so apparently dark can control and hurt so many people for so long, but for an occultist it is hard not to see a powerful and negative magic at work here.

Despite Aleister Crowley's inability to escape his own lusts and megalomania which would lead to poverty and low reputation at the end of his life, some aw the value of the system and redeemed it. Thelema is a full functioning high magic today. In fact, as a wisdom tradition and not a fertility cult or a brand of paganism, Thelema has ties to Cochrane Craft and formal Wicca. The latter two are wilder and less regulated than Thelema, but I imagine Thelema itself was wilder than the father from which it sprang: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Founded by Samuel Mathers, William Westcott and William Woodman, Golden Dawn was part of a Romantic movement reconnecting the people of the nineteenth century to Martinism, Rosicrusianism and the other mystery schools of the Middle Ages and early modern period.  Golden Dawn has several branches and several incarnations, but its distinguishing signs are being alchemical, and being Christian while being deeply concerned with ancient Egypt and the Khemetic Gods.  The rituals are a reconstruction of Egypt, Greek geometric rituals and Catholic ceremony. Amongst others, William Butler Yeats was a member and so, if these people were Christian, it was their own type of Christianity. Golden Dawn was coming into being at the same time as Theosophy and other spiritualist movements by people who did not forsake Christianity so much as radically (and heretically) expand its meaning. Golden Dawn is the very opposite of pagan. It is mystic, it is occult. Members of Golden Dawn would never regard themselves as a fertility cult, but it is from Golden Dawn that we get most of our modern concepts of magic and spell casting including, yes, the Tarot deck. It is the opinion of some that these people were theoretical magicians and did not get their hands dirty with actual magic as Crowley and his spiritual descendants would, but if they didn’t practice magic much, it seems they did as much as most modern pagans.

Of course, the Golden Dawn and the groups that sprung up around it came from a fertile soil and parents just as interesting and in our last section, we will turn to those beginning with the movements that would arise from men meeting in British pubs in the 17^th century, Freemasonry and modern druidry.