The News of the World exposé had farcical repercussions when Alex Sanders appeared on a short-lived chat show on London Weekend Television in March 1970 called The Simon Dee Show. During the program he mentioned the newspaper articles and produced a wax image depicting Charles Pace, who Sanders said was the person responsible for the exposé and a traitor to the Craft. He then proceeded, on live television, to stab the poppet several times with pins. He boasted that the end result of this cursing ritual would be that Pace would suffer a heart attack. Apparently it did not work and was one of Sanders’ publicity stunts, as a few days later the two men were seen happily drinking together in a London public house. Shortly afterwards, the chat show host, Simon Dee, lost his job and vanished into obscurity—blamed by some on the so-called “death ritual.”
Doreen Valiente said that as a result of the News of the World articles and Alex Sanders’ theatrical performance on television, some people in political power decided legal action should be taken to curb witchcraft activities. Gwilym Roberts, a Labour politician and Member of Parliament, actually raised the matter in the House of Commons in April 1970. He asked the then Home Secretary to introduce new legislation at the earliest opportunity against anyone who claimed to practice witchcraft. Valiente decided to arrange a meeting with the MP to discuss the matter and he invited her to tea at the Commons. She was surprised to find he was not a religious bigot and was only responding to letters he had received from concerned voters. After a long talk, the politician agreed to drop his call for new legislation to deal with what he now realized was the media-created “evil menace of witchcraft” (Valiente 1989: 80).
Despite his problems with negative publicity, Alex Sanders went out of his way to court it. It was alleged he had an affair with “possibly the most famous rock star in history” (Deutch 1977: 102), and was certainly fascinating by rock groups. In 1968, the manager of the heavy metal band Black Widow contacted him about a joint project. They were rehearsing a musical drama about a magician who summons up the demon Ashtaroth, previously an ancient pagan goddess. One of the members of Sanders’ coven volunteered to play the role of the goddess, naked except for body paint depicting a serpent coiled around her body. However, when she fell ill, Sanders volunteered his wife Maxine to play the role instead and invited the press to attend the performance.
When June Johns’ biography of the King of the Witches was published in 1969, a theater producer suggested a stage production featuring witchcraft rites might be an interesting, and presumably commercial, venture. Sanders obtained permission from Black Widow to adapt a version of their show to be performed in front of an audience made up of the paying public. Unfortunately the first performance went awry as the press photographers caused a delay to the start that upset the audience, and the theater manager had to deal with Christians demonstrating outside against the show. The London fire brigade were also standing by because of the risk from burning candles and incense, and Maxine Sanders realized the other participants in the “ritual [were] mumbling, stage-frightened incompetents” (2008: 157).
Despite this initial disaster, the show went on the road and was performed at various public venues all over southern England. Further problems followed, and during one performance in Poole, Dorset, a drunken man climbed on to the stage, as he wanted to get close to one of the female witches. Sanders was forced to push him off the stage using a candlestick with iron prongs, causing the man to bleed profusely (Ibid., 158). At another performance a ritual was performed in a cinema to call up the demon Asmodeus. When he refused to put in an appearance the disgruntled audience besieged the stage demanding their money back. Ignoring these incidents, the show went on in the true show business tradition and performances were held at night-clubs in Weston-super-Mare in Somerset and at the Civic Center in Barnsley, Yorkshire (Crowther 1998: 73).
In 1971, the Sanderses decided to look for a second home in the countryside outside London. One of their witches lived in the small village of Selmeston in Sussex on the south coast and they managed to rent a cottage there. The house was converted from a pair of farm workers’ dwellings, and was large enough for several people to live in. It also had a garden suitable both for outdoor rituals and for growing flowers and vegetables. Maxine Sanders seems to have enjoyed the horticultural opportunities provided by the cottage garden, as she became a “fanatical gardener” during her time living in Selmeston (2008: 165).
Selmeston was a village boasting an ancient Saxon church built on a mound with a circular churchyard, suggesting it was once a pagan site of worship. Alex Sanders later discovered it was once the shrine of a Celtic water goddess. To the south of the churchyard was a paddock where Sanders thought he saw ancient druids walking among the trees. He soon realized the church mound and its burial ground were points of earth energy, connected by a ley line to the hill figure of the Long Man of Wilmington, which had been used as a ritual working site by Robert Cochrane’s coven in the 1960s, an Iron Age hill fort at Mount Caburn, and the famous Pook Hill immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in his famous children’s book Puck of Pook Hill (Sinha, Samhain 1979).
Maxine Sanders claimed the cottage had been built on the site of a Roman barracks—villagers told her they had seen the ghostly figures of centurions marching down the lane outside it (Maxine Sanders 2008: 165). Alex was busy having his own visions, including one of a “tall, dour looking individual [who came] sailing through the wall” of the cottage. He introduced himself as Cardoc, the “priest and guardian of the ancient dead,” and told Sanders the building stood on a high place where in olden times a tower stood watch over the burial ground. When Sanders did some research, he found the local museum in Lewes housed the remains of five Saxon warriors that had been unearthed from the cottage garden, complete with their swords, shields, and helmets (Sinha, Samhain 1979).
The population of Selmeston was made up a few locals with mostly wealthy incomers who commuted to nearby towns or London to work. Maxine Sanders said the village was divided between Roman Catholics and Church of England Protestants. As soon as the Sanderses moved in, residents united in a discussion of whether they wanted “the witches” living in the village. The older inhabitants accepted the newcomers, and notes were posted through the letterbox of the cottage addressed to “Mrs. Witch,” asking for help (Maxine Sanders 2008: 166).
The witches from the Sanders coven who had remained behind in West London attended meetings at the weekends in Sussex and participated in the regular rituals held on the surrounding Sussex Downs. At the same time a new coven was forming around Sanders. This consisted of people who came down from London, and locals from nearby towns such as Brighton and Eastbourne. This new group began working with the ley energies to “wake up the power of the hills,” as one member put it.
At first during the winter the coven met in the large sitting room of the cottage, but when spring came they started to convene outside. It seemed like “a scene from a medieval woodcut: the witches’ fire, the crude altar with wild flowers, naked bodies through the shadows, lonely flute music, and the little drum” (Sinha, Samhain 1979). Sanders had discovered his primitive self and he “traveled across country in the tireless lope of the savage. In the Middle Ages this odd gait, stooped forward with arms hanging loosely and knees drawn up to the chest, may have given rise to the werewolf legend, but it covered enormous tracts of ground” (Ibid.).
This romantic description of life at Selmeston hid the fact that trouble was brewing between the Sanderses. Maxine had noticed the level of training was less intense in the new coven and Alex was not so demanding that its members exercise their personal skills. She also noticed an “awkward atmosphere that should not have existed in a healthy coven.” The situation came to a head after Sanders brought in a young gay man whom she disliked on sight. To her concern, when the young man was initiated, Sanders invited his mother and her boyfriend to witness the rite.
Because they could not afford to keep two hom
es running, the Sanderses returned to London, and Maxine decided she no longer wanted to hold the position of “Witch Queen” to the Alexandrian covens. In 1972, she retired from that position and ritually burnt her garters, robe, and the many crowns acquired over years in the role. At about the same time her husband began to treat her in a derogatory and demeaning way. Finally he announced he was in love with one of the male witches in the coven and wanted him to move in with them. Maxine refused to accept this new situation. After a violent scene, Alex and his new lover moved back to Sussex, leaving Maxine alone in London with their children, and taking solace in alcohol (Maxine Sanders 2008: 166–169).
Chapter Twleve
The Politics of Wicca
In the late 1960s, Laurie Cabot (b. 1933), the “Witch of Salem,” represented the public face of witchcraft in the United States. Her father’s ancestry was British—he was born on Jersey in the Channel Islands. Cabot, like so many before and after her, claimed she was descended from a long line of hereditary witches. As a child she was psychically aware, and inherited a love of science from her father that she later combined with witchcraft to create a unique version of the Craft. While living in Boston in the 1940s, she studied comparative religion in high school. This meant spending hours doing research in the library. She said that one of the librarians revealed herself as a witch, and as a result the teenage Cabot was initiated in a ritual that involved her being anointed with oil and dubbed with a sword (Guilley 1989: 48).
After a short career as a dancer, Laurie Cabot married twice and had two daughters. After her second divorce in the late 1960s, she made a vow that from then on she would live openly as a witch and devote the rest of her life to practicing and promoting witchcraft. Part of this vow was to wear only black, outline her eyes in black make-up, and wear a pentagram in public. In this respect she was probably the first goth witch. A friend suggested that if she was going to take on this public role as a witch she should move to Salem, scene of the famous seventeenth-century witch trials. The two women rented a house in the town’s historic quarter, and Cabot discovered it had been built in the 1700s by the father of a young woman she believed she had once been after experiencing a past-life regression.
Once in Salem, Cabot began teaching witchcraft courses as a science. She taught adult education classes at Salem State College, gave tarot readings, and offered her psychic assistance to the local police department to solve crimes. She also opened one of the first occult stores in America and established an annual Witches’ Ball at Hallowe’en that is still held today. In 1977, Cabot was made the official “Witch of Salem” by Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts and an ex-presidential candidate. She also joined the Salem Chamber of Commerce, and in 1986 founded the Witches League of Public Awareness, specifically to protest plans to film the movie Witches of Eastwick in the county. The League also took on other civil rights issues relating to witches, including harassment by the police and Christian fundamentalists.
In one of the programs in his BBC television documentary series Stephen Fry in America broadcast in 2008, the British comedian, writer, and actor interviewed Laurie Cabot in her shop. Fry was also invited to attend the Witches’ Ball at a Salem hotel. He commented it was “a very charming party” in which Cabot-style witches from all over the world dressed up and danced to retro 1970s and 1980s music. At the end they came together in a circle in which “a sword is waved, incantations are made and ‘energies’ invoked.” Fry commented that as far as he was concerned all religions were equally nonsensical, and that how Christians with their “invisible friends, virgin births, immaculate conceptions, and bread turning into flesh could mock people like Laurie Cabot was appalling humbug” (Fry 2008: 34).
Around the same time Laurie Cabot was establishing herself in Salem, the second publication (after Charles Cardell’s 1964 book), and the first in America of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows took place. It was published by Lady Sheba (Jessie Wicker Bell, 1920–2002) and she claimed it had been passed to her nearly forty years before. Bell was born in the hills of Knott County, Kentucky, of Irish and Native American (Cherokee) ancestry. She claimed her family had been practicing witchcraft for seven generations, and that as a child her grandmother taught her about Irish faery lore and Cherokee spirit guides. In the late 1930s, Bell was initiated into a local coven and took the witch name “Lady Sheba,” a name she’d once had in a previous incarnation.
By 1950, Jessie Bell had moved to Michigan and started her own coven practicing her family’s Celtic tradition, now called “American Celtic Wicca.” She also founded a more public group called the American Order of the Brotherhood of Wicca (AOBW), which was accepted as a legal religious organization in August 1971. The aim of the AOBW was, like the old Witchcraft Research Association in England, to bring together the different witchcraft traditions in the United States. According to the website PaganWiki on the Internet, American Celtic Wicca practiced rituals that were very similar to the Gardnerian and Alexandrian ones, but also drew heavily on ceremonial magic.
Following the publication of The Book of Shadows and a follow-up called The Grimoire of Lady Sheba in 1972, Jessie Bell became involved in the newly formed American Council of Witches. This group put forward thirteen principles that all Wiccans could adhere to, and that were later incorporated into the US Army’s handbook for its chaplains. Unfortunately, not all American witches wanted to sign on to these principles and became suspicious of Lady Sheba when she started referring to herself as “America’s Witch Queen.” According to an Internet article on “Wicca Fundamentalism” by Ben Gruagach (dated August 11, 2007), Jessie Bell declared she was the leader of all American witches at a WitchMeet gathering in 1974. She also proposed that a single, definitive Book of Shadows should be written so everyone could follow it.
Doreen Valiente and other British and American Gardnerian elders criticized Jessie Bell’s decision to publish her Book of Shadows. Valiente was particularly annoyed because Bell’s version of the BoS contained one of her poems, reprinted without her permission and infringing her copyright. The Gardnerians said Bell had stolen the BoS, changed some of it, and was guilty of placing oath-bound material into the public domain. It has to be understood this was before Janet and Stewart Farrar had written their books revealing the Wiccan rites, or the many Wicca 101 books that followed. Also, the Gardnerians were still recovering from the betrayal by Charles Cardell. They were less than pleased to see their rituals published in a commercial book from a mainstream occult publisher that became a bestseller.
In her defense, Jessie Bell claimed she was told by the Goddess herself to publish the book. She continued to say she had been initiated in the 1930s and had copied out the coven’s BoS and then added other material from Gardnerian, Alexandrian, and other sources. However, faced with a mounting tide of criticism for both her books and her attempt to control the American witchcraft movement, Jessie Bell retired from public life at the end of the 1970s and returned to her native Kentucky. When she died in 2002, her final ironic wish was that her body be cremated with her personal copy of the Book of Shadows. Her ashes were scattered in the Wicker family cemetery in Knott County, Kentucky.
If Jessie Bell did not receive the Book of Shadows when she was initiated into the Craft in the 1930s, where did she get it? I was in correspondence with Jessie Bell in 1969–1970, when I was living at Harrow-on-the-Hill in Middlesex. At that time she was associated with a Cincinnati coven that combined the practice of Wicca with ceremonial magic. They worshipped the Horned God in the form of the Knights Templar deity Baphomet and invoked the four archangels at the quarters of their circle (see Holzer 1971: 138–150 and 1973: 77–78). Sybil Leek tried to join this hybrid coven, but was rejected. Margot Adler, later the author of the classic Drawing Down the Moon, was more successful. The coven sent her letters containing rituals and examination papers, and after a probationary period of a year and a day she was initiated.
During our correspondence, Jessie Bell expressed her desire to be initiated into British Gardnerian Wicca. This was obviously logistically difficult, if not impossible, because of the long distance involved and the fact she could not afford to fly over to England. However, as we have seen, there was a precedent with the Glasgow coven set up by Charles Clark with Gerald Gardner’s help, and the initiation of Margot Adler into the Cincinnati coven. Reluctantly, I was persuaded by my own Gardnerian initiator Rosina Bishop to pass on a copy of the version of the Book of Shadows we were using so Bell could be initiated into Wicca by proxy. This is also done in traditional pre-Gardnerian witchcraft where “the power” can be passed through a written text or a magical object.
However, as was the trend among other Gardnerians, we had made some important changes to the BoS. This included amending the Craft Laws and also adding a poem written by Doreen Valiente originally published in the WRA newsletter Pentagram. We had deleted the last few lines of the poem to make it more suitable for our purposes and were using it as an invocation to the Horned God. As our version of the BoS was for our personal use only, and it was never meant to be published, we did not see the private use of this poem to be a problem. However, as soon as it was published we were embarrassed, as its publication infringed on Doreen’s copyright.
One night I received a transatlantic telephone call from Jessie Bell, informing us that she was going to publish the BoS. I pointed out that despite the fact her initiation was long distance by proxy, she was still bound by the oath promising not to reveal the Wiccan rites and rituals to cowans, or outsiders. However, Bell was determined to go ahead, and said the Goddess had told her to publish the book. In her mind, this direct instruction from a divine source overruled any oath she had taken, and she was going ahead to find a publisher. The rest, as they say, is history.
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