Modern Wicca

by Michael Howard

  Although the witches were solitary practitioners, they were believed to be subject to the power of a mysterious individual known as the “Master of Witches,” or witch master in the late nineteenth century. In Canewdon, this position was held by Old George Pickingill, whom Eric Maple described as “the last and perhaps greatest of the [Essex] wizards.” He was born in Hockley, Essex, in 1816, and in the latter years of his life lived and worked as a farm laborer in Canewdon. Pickingill was a widower with two sons. He lived in a cottage in the High Street and later in the lane near the Anchor Inn leading up to the church. Maple described him as a tall and unkempt man, with long fingernails and intense eyes. He was solitary and uncommunicative, and practiced openly as a wizard or cunning man. He could find lost or stolen property, cure warts and other ailments by “muttering charms and making mysterious passes,” and could talk to and control animals. The cunning man cured one woman of her rheumatism by transferring it to her father.

  As with most of the witches and cunning folk of the past, there was a dark side to Pickingill’s magical arts. The villagers were fearful of his powers and if he wanted to draw water from the village pump the local boys would run to do it for him. People believed he could make someone ill merely by staring hard at them, and they would not recover until he decided to lift the spell. He also carried a blackthorn walking stick and used this as a “blasting rod.” If he touched a person with it they would be paralyzed and unable to move. They would only regain their senses and the movement of their limbs when the old wizard touched them again with his stick.

  At harvest time, Pickingill wandered around the fields threatening to bewitch the farm machinery or the horses that drew the hay wagons. For this reason the local farmers bribed him with beer and food, and his landlord allowed him to live rent-free in his cottage. However, when he was in a good mood, the wizard could cut a whole field of corn in half an hour. He achieved this feat by using his imps or familiar spirits to do the job, while he sat in the hedgerow smoking his clay pipe. One of his alleged powers was that as the witch master he could summon and control all the local witches by blowing on a wooden whistle. This forced them to reveal themselves and Pickingill would then make them dance in the churchyard. This suggests he was regarded as the leader of the local coven.

  Eric Maple says that, in his old age, visitors “came from great distances” to seek the advice of “the wise man of Canewdon,” as he was known. Brave souls who ventured out after dark and dared to peep through the grimy cobwebbed windows of his cottage saw the wizard dancing with his imps. It was like a scene from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence in the Walt Disney movie Fantasia with the clock, ornaments, crockery, and furniture joining in the merry dance.

  A woman who visited Pickingill shortly before his death saw him lying in on the bed “like a skeleton,” with his familiars in the shape of mice scurrying over the covers. When he died in April 1909, the old cunning man was buried in unconsecrated ground in the churchyard. As a last act of defiance, he told the villagers that he would even demonstrate his magical powers at his own funeral. Allegedly, when the horse-drawn hearse drew up to the church gate, the animals stepped out of their harnesses and trotted away down the lane.

  The account given by Charles Lefebure in his 1970 book promotes a more sensational and satanic image of Pickingill. However, it is interesting, as it confirms the version of him as the Master of Witches in Bill Liddell’s articles. Lefebure said, perhaps significantly, that Pickingill still had the same status as Crowley and Gerald Gardner in occult circles. He described him as “the Devil incarnate,” who had discovered the famed Elixir of Life and eternal youth. Apparently the whole Pickingill family had been feared all over eastern England for generations as “a race apart” of witches, wizards, and warlocks, with a pedigree dating back to the days of Merlin.

  According to Lefebure, the cunning man was popularly believed to have sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his remarkable magical powers, and he held nocturnal rites in the churchyard with his Romany kin. Pickingill terrified the locals with his supernatural powers and anyone who dared cross him fell ill immediately. His reputation spread far and wide and he became so infamous as a wizard that black magicians [sic] from all over Europe traveled to the remote Essex village to consult him and receive instruction in the Black Art.

  Charles Lefebure was right to think that the Pickingills were well known all over eastern England. Sybil Webster, who lived in Canewdon in the 1960s and studied the local history, found numerous references to them in church registers and census records. The family was variously known as Pickingale, Pippingale, Pettingale, and Pitengale, as well as Pickingill, and this has led to some confusion. George Pickingill was baptized in Hockley on May 25, 1816, and in 1908 an article in the local Southend Standard and Essex Advertiser newspaper described him as the oldest man in the country, but this was incorrect. The reporter took Pickingill for a ride in the first car seen in the village, and a photograph of the event was published in the newspaper (Webster 2005: 178). Pickingill said he had never been to London on the train, but Sybil Webster told me that he was supposed to have traveled to Norfolk regularly in a pony and trap. This was probably to see his relatives in Castle Rising, a village that, like Canewdon, has a reputation for witchcraft (letter dated January 16, 2008).

  The version of George Pickingill’s life and activities described in Bill Liddell’s articles contrasts with the folk traditions collected by Eric Maple. Liddell said that he was not an illiterate drunken old man, but came from an established line of hereditary witches who had been priests of the Horned God since Saxon times. The Craft that Pickingill allegedly practiced a unique amalgam of Danish paganism, Arabic mysticism, Christian heresy, and French Witchcraft. Danish Viking invaders had settled in East Anglia, and in fact Canewdon was founded by the Danish king Cnut, who also became the king of England. A later influx of French and Flemish weavers into this area in the Middle Ages allegedly introduced elements of French witchcraft and the heretical beliefs of the Cathars (Liddell 1994: 24).

  Pickingill, it was said in the articles, was a radical reformer and modernizer within the Old Craft, and he introduced goddess worship, female-led covens, and working skyclad, or naked, in the circle. This horrified his peers as traditionally the “robed covens” of the traditional and hereditary Craft were led by a Magister or witch master who initiated both men and women. Liddell said that in his later years Pickingill, who was of Romany descent, was a horse dealer and in that profession he traveled around southern England. While doing this, he recruited women he believed had the witch blood. Under his guidance they formed nine autonomous covens in Hampshire, Sussex, Hertfordshire, Essex, and Norfolk.

  In his articles, Liddell claimed that the Hampshire coven of the nine covens, founded by George Pickingill, was the same one as the group in the New Forest into which Gerald Gardner was initiated in 1939. It stopped convening during World War I, but several of its elderly members attempted to revive it in the 1920s. This revival met with limited success until several hereditary witches and solitary practitioners joined. During the 1930s there was an influx of middle-class intellectuals drawn from the ranks of the Crotona Fellowship.

  The Hampshire coven had retained some of Pickingill’s reforms, including the ranks of High Priestess and her female deputy known as the Maiden taking precedence over the male leader, skyclad rituals, and more reverence given to the Goddess than the God. They had also been influenced by the theories put forward by Dr. Margaret Murray in her book The Witch Cult in Western Europe and kept some of the traditional aspects of the historical Craft. This included the use of the French name Janicot for the witch-god, a Black Book of the Devil’s Art, the use of material from medieval grimoires such as the Key of Solomon, sexual congress as part of the induction rite, the diablo stigmata or Devil’s mark, the taking of a new witch name by initiates, a dance and drop technique to raise power in the circle, and the use of a flying o
intment (1994: 150–151 and May 2000).

  Liddell further claimed that his initiation into the New Forest Coven was not the only contact that Gerald Gardner had with what he calls “the true persuasion.” He said his Elders told him that Gardner did not advance very far with his parent coven. However he did contact a hereditary group of witches in Hertfordshire in 1945 and they were also a surviving remnant of one of Pickingill’s Nine Covens. Gardner contacted this coven after being sponsored into a Co-Masonic lodge by Madeline Montalban, where he met one of its members. Liddell described this lodge as being similar to the Rosicrucian Theatre because it was being used as a recruiting ground for various occult groups. Gardner also advanced to the third grade of the Hereditary Craft in another surviving coven of the Nine in Norfolk and is supposed to have held the rank of Magister in the Pickingill Craft through induction into a coven in Essex (1994: 83, 103, 153, and 158).

  Before he founded his coven at Brickett Wood in Hertfordshire in the late 1940s, several writers have claimed that Gardner was already associated with witchcraft activities in the area. Francis King referred to the existence of a pre-Gardnerian coven in St. Albans, near Brickett Wood, but stated he did not believe its origins went back before 1900. He speculated that it might have been founded after the publication of Dr. Margaret Murray’s book in 1921 (1971: 11–12). Robert Graves also associated Gardner with an earlier Hertfordshire coven in an essay on modern witchcraft published in an anthology in 1969.

  Tony Steele has also claimed he made contact with the owners of narrow boats or barges that used to carry cargo on Britain’s canals and were so-called water witches practicing a form of traditional witchcraft. One of the most influential of these witch families, Steele claims, was founded in Hertfordshire in the 1880s by Edward “Grandad” King, nicknamed the “King of the Witches” by the canal people. He had inherited a form of witchcraft from his ancestors, who came from Lincolnshire and were of Dutch extraction.

  Steele was told by his contacts that in 1945 Gerald Gardner was inducted into his family coven. Prior to this, no outsider ever joined, but after King’s death the family were free to act as they wanted and relaxed the rules. Allegedly, Gardner’s interest in folklore had led him to make contact with the narrow-boat people. The water witches were flattered by the attentions of an upper-middle-class and wealthy man like Gardner, and welcomed him into their ranks with open arms (1998: 10–12).

  In 1941, Gardner had also been sponsored by a colleague in the New Forest Coven to join a so-called “cunning lodge.” This was a quasi-Masonic group that combined the practice of Freemasonry, ceremonial magic, paganism, and traditional witchcraft. The lodge emphasized the worship of the Horned God, was led by a male Magus (magician), and cast the circle using passages from the Key of Solomon (Ibid., 158–159). This type of cunning lodge had a membership made up of witch masters who were either wealthy farmers or landowners. Socially, they inhabited both the world of the landed gentry and the peasantry, who included rural cunning folk. Many of the lodge members were Freemasons or, like George Pickingill, belonged to quasi-Masonic groups such as the Order of Ancient Woodsman or the Society of the Horseman’s Word. They mixed freely with occultists and Rosicrucians, and also had links to neopagan magical groups attempting to revive the classical Mysteries of Eleusis and Hellfire Club-type organizations practicing devil worship and sexual rites (Ibid., 170).

  Bill Liddell said that his Craft Elders told him that George Pickingill disbanded the Canewdon Coven several years prior to his death, probably about 1899, which is a significant date, as we shall see later. The coven was composed of seven female witches, with Pickingill as the male leader, or Devil. Liddell has claimed that it was the use of this archaic title for a witch master that led to the accusations by more conservative members of the Craft that the cunning man was a Satanist, and had sold his soul to the Devil (1994: 89).

  The tradition passed down in the Pickingill Craft was that the coven had been formed in the fifteenth century by a local landowner after he returned from fighting in a war between France and England. He had been inducted into witchcraft while he was abroad. The church tower in Canewdon featured in the witch legends of the village because it dates from the fifteenth century and was built by the landowner to celebrate the English victory at the Battle of Agincourt. On the outside of the tower are carved the heraldic arms of France and England (Ibid.: 8 and 88).

  Bill Liddell’s articles in The Wiccan and The Cauldron were initially greeted with a delight by Gardnerian Wiccans. They seemed to provide evidence of an authenticity and legitimacy for modern Wicca, linking it with a surviving tradition of historical witchcraft that did not previously exist. In letters to his correspondents, John Score quoted from the “Lugh” material as evidence that Gardnerian Wicca was descended from George Pickingill, and the New Forest group was one of his Nine Covens. In her book Witchcraft for Tomorrow, Doreen Valiente referred to “some new and curious information” originating from a correspondent to The Wiccan whom she describes as “my East Anglian source, [and] my informant,” although she never knew Bill Liddell. At the time, she was happy to accept the Lugh material at face value and asserted that George Pickingill had played an important part in the present-day revival of witchcraft (1978: 20).

  However, by the time she had written The Rebirth of Witchcraft ten years later, Valiente had changed her mind about Pickingill’s significance and the authenticity of the material. She spent eight pages analyzing and criticizing the articles by Bill Liddell before concluding he was either a genuine holder of secrets or a dreamer providing his readers with disinformation. Likewise the Alexandrian initiate, Vivianne Crowley, mentions the articles in the first edition of her influential book Wicca: The Old Religion In a New Age, but this section is strangely missing from later editions.

  Not all modern witches had a high opinion of George Pickingill. In a letter written to one of his Australian students, Simon Goodman, Alex Sanders said in reference to the wise man of Canewdon that he might well have moved farm machinery by his magical power. However, “[so what] to me that is not Wicca … the Wicca is the worship of the Great Mother and the Mighty One who grants her the power.” Sanders ends the letter by using a four-letter word referring to the female genitals to describe Goodman for believing in Pickingill (letter dated September 5, 1983, in the MOW archive).

  In his book Crafting the Art of Magic (1991), Aidan Kelly claimed that Bill Liddell (or Lugh, as he calls him) was “purposely creating a phony history in order to throw researchers off the trail.” In fact, according to Kelly, his articles represented “a purposeful policy of disinformation instigated by Gardner and carried out by some of his successors in the leadership of the Craft movement.” He added that Liddell “was pursuing a course built on foundations laid by Gerald [Gardner].”

  Bill Liddell refuted this alleged pro-Gardnerian conspiracy in his book The Pickingill Papers (1994). He dismissed Kelly’s “erroneous allegations and wild speculations,” and said he had a problem distinguishing guesswork from history. This was a direct reference to the highly speculative membership list of the New Forest Coven that Kelly had published in his book. On the Pagan Network forum on the Internet, Bill Liddell has said: “My Elders believed totally in the material they gave me. I also believed it at the time of publication. There was never any question on my part, or on others, of distributing false information” (August 22, 2006).

  One of the most controversial claims made in the original Lugh material published in The Wiccan was that George Pickingill had cooperated with various ceremonial magicians and occultists, and influenced the formation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This has caused confusion and misunderstanding, and led to statements such as Pickingill “organising rituals for the Golden Dawn and also writing their Book of Shadows [sic]” (Webster 2005: 175). In fact, on his own website, Bill Liddell has said that the information about Pickingill and the GD had been supplied to him only by “t
hree Pickingill [Craft] ladies,” and they had been told the story when they were young women.

  They said that what had happened was that one of Pickingill’s students was the Rosicrucian writer and researcher Hargrave Jennings. He had allegedly copied out some of the notes made by Pickingill about the Cabbalistic Tree of Life, astrology, and geomancy. These ended up in the library of the Rosicrucian Society in England in London and were later read by Samuel MacGregor Mathers, who then incorporated them into the GD teaching papers. This is not so fanciful as it seems. Francis King mentioned a Lincolnshire cunning man called John Parkin. He was a student in London of both the astrologer Ebenezer Sibly, and of Francis Barrett, the author of the modern grimoire The Magus (1801). Parkin used his own system of geomantic divination—eighty years later this was being taught to the students of the Golden Dawn (King 1992).

  Another contentious claim is that George Pickingill was visited by occultists who sought his advice and instruction in the magical arts. We have already seen that both Eric Maple and Charles Lefebure also made that claim. Pickingill’s obituary, published in a local newspaper in 1909, said “the deceased had received many visitors and was the recipient of various kind and thoughtful gifts.” In the stories about the other famous Essex cunning man James Murrell, it was said he had clients who visited him from far and wide. Essex girls often got jobs as servants in London and told their employers about Murrell. As a result, wealthy women visited the cunning man, wanting to consult him about their domestic problems and hoping he could foretell their futures.