I was taught, as most witches of my generation were, that the Craft was the old religion of Europe, driven underground and never quite put out. It is a beautiful story. It is not true, and I am still a witch.
When I came into the Craft in 2003 I was given, along with a great deal else, a history. It went like this. Before the Church there was an older faith in these islands, of a Goddess and a Horned God, kept by the country people. When the Church came, the old faith went into hiding. Its priestesses and priests were the witches. For three hundred years they were hunted, and nine million of them were burned. A few families kept the knowledge alive in secret, handing it from mother to daughter, until in 1939 one of the last surviving covens admitted a retired civil servant named Gerald Gardner, who in the nick of time brought it into the light.
I was told this by people I loved and respected, who had been told it by people they loved and respected. I believed it, with the part of the mind that believes things it has not examined. And I can still feel the pull of it. To stand in a circle and think that you were doing what had been done on that spot in the Bronze Age is a powerful thing.
Hardly a word of it is true.
What the evidence says
I am a joiner, not a scholar, but I read, and over about three years I read the historians. I did it with a sinking feeling, like a man going through the accounts of a firm he has invested in.
There was no organised pagan religion surviving in medieval England. The people who were tried as witches were, with very few exceptions, Christians, accused by their neighbours of doing harm. They were not priestesses of anything. The figure of nine million is an invention of the eighteenth century, and the true number for the whole of Europe is nearer fifty thousand, which is terrible enough. In England they were hanged, not burned. The theory that the witches had been pagans was put together by a few writers in the nineteenth century and given its final form by Margaret Murray in 1921, and it was challenged by other historians in her lifetime and taken apart for good soon after her death.
As for our rites, I can show you where most of them come from. I mean that literally. I have the books on a shelf in the workshop. Here is the circle, in a handbook of magic printed in English in 1889. Here are the three degrees and the working tools, in the rituals of the lodges. Here is the opening of the Charge, in Leland. Here, in a book of Kipling's, is a verse we sing on May Eve. And here, running through all of it and lifting it, is the hand of Doreen Valiente, who joined in 1953 and was a better writer than any of them.
The Craft as we have it is not older than my grandfather. That is the long and the short of it.
The bad year
I will not pretend that this did not shake me. For most of a year I kept the esbats and the Sabbats with a divided mind. I stood in the circle and a voice in the back of my head said: this was made up. A retired customs officer with a taste for theatricals put it together out of library books, and you are standing in his invention with no clothes on.
I said some of this to Wystan, who was then my High Priest. I expected an argument. He heard me out, and then he asked me a question about my work.
He asked how old the chair was that I had just finished. I said, about a fortnight. He asked how old the oak was. I said the tree had been two hundred years growing and the boards ten years seasoning. He asked how old the joints were, the mortise and the tenon. I said, older than the Pyramids. He asked who had taught me to cut them. I told him the name of the man I was apprenticed to, and the name of the man who taught him.
Then he asked: so is it an old chair or a new one? And is it a real chair?
What is old and what is new
I have been turning that over for twenty years, and this is where I have come to rest.
The Craft is a new thing made of old timber. The form is recent. The circle as we cast it, the degrees, the Book: all of that was put together within living memory, by people whose names we know. But the things it was made from are not recent. People have been marking midwinter in these islands since before there was a word for it. They have been pouring out drink to the earth, and seeing a woman's face in the moon, and lighting fires on the first of May, for longer than any church has stood. Gardner did not invent the gods. He did not invent the solstice. He built a new house, on a new plan, and every beam in it came out of an older one.
That is not a lesser thing than a survival. In some ways I think it is better. A survival is an accident. What we have was chosen. A handful of people in the 1940s and 1950s looked at the religion on offer in the England of their day and found that it had no place in it for the earth, or the body, or the feminine face of the divine, and they did not just complain about it. They made what was missing. They made it out of whatever came to hand, they got a great deal wrong, they told some tall stories about it, and it worked. It is still working, on me among others.
Lineage without legend
None of this touches the thing that actually matters to a Gardnerian, which is the lineage. My initiation is exactly as real as it was before I read a word of history. A woman who had been properly initiated put her hands on me in a cast circle and made me a witch. A man had done the same for her, and so on back to a house in Hertfordshire in the 1950s. That chain is a matter of fact. It does not reach back to the Stone Age. It never needed to. It reaches back to the people who made the thing, which is as far back as any lineage can honestly go.
Seventy-five years is not nothing, either. It is three generations of people handing something on carefully. I knew a man who knew a woman who knew Gardner. When I started I thought that was a short chain. Now I think it is a remarkable thing to be so close to the beginning of a religion that you can nearly touch it.
What I tell seekers
When someone comes to our outer court, the first thing I give them to read is the history: the real one, with the dates. I do it at the very beginning, for two reasons.
The first is that they will find out anyway. It is all in print. If we had told them the old story and they learned the truth later, they would wonder, and rightly, what else we had told them that was not so. A tradition that asks for perfect trust had better deserve it.
The second reason is that I want to know how they take it. Some are disappointed, and one or two have left over it, feeling that they had been promised an ancient mystery and offered a modern one. I am sorry about those, but I think they wanted a costume and not a religion. The ones who stay are the ones who hear that the Craft was made by fallible people within living memory, and say: good. Then it can be made well or badly, and I can help.
Those are the ones we are looking for. I think that they are the ones Gardner was looking for too. He told a good many stories. But he also wrote, in the plainest words, that the witches did not know where their rites had come from, and that he was only setting down what he had found. Somewhere under the showman there was an honest antiquary. It is that part of him I try to be faithful to.
It is a new chair. It is a real chair. You can sit on it, and it will hold.