In 1971, Z. Budapest founded the Susan B. Anthony Coven, named after a leader of the American suffragette movement who had campaigned for women’s right to vote. The coven practiced Dianic Wicca, founded by Morgan MacFarland and Mark Roberts in Dallas, Texas, in the 1960s, and based on matriarchal lunar worship. Budapest also opened a shop called The Feminist Wicca and was arrested in 1975 by an undercover policewoman for illegally “foretelling [the future] for a fee” during a tarot reading under an archaic Californian statute. In the same year, she published The Feminist Book of Shadows, which was followed shortly afterwards by The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries.
One of Z. Budapest’s initiates was Ruth Barratt (b. 1954). She went on to found the Moon Birch Grove and the Circle of Aradia, the largest organization of Dianic Wiccans, whose open meetings in Los Angeles were attended by from fifteen to two hundred women. Budapest’s most famous student, however, was a Jewish woman called Miriam Simos (b. 1951), who adopted the pseudonym of “Starhawk.” She went on to form her own group known as the Compost Coven, and recruited its members from the women attending a class on witchcraft she taught at the Bay Area Center for Alternative Education in San Francisco.
Starhawk also formed another all-female group called the Honeysuckle Coven, and she was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca and Victor Anderson’s Feri witch tradition, dating back to the 1920s. After achieving a master of art degree in psychology at Antioch University in 1983, Starhawk became a member of the faculty of the Institute of Creation Spirituality. This institute was founded by the heretical Catholic priest Father Matthew Fox, and it had moved from Chicago to Holy Names College at Oakland, California.
Along with other feminist witches in the 1970s, Starhawk thought “the Goddess does not rule the world. She is the world.” Many neopagans believed this statement had a scientific basis—this was proved when, in 1979, the British scientist Dr. James Lovelock published his groundbreaking and highly controversial treatise, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. In it, he put forward the theory that the Earth was a self-regulating, living organic entity, and he called it Gaia, after the Greek earth goddess. Dr. Lovelock never believed there was a spiritual or religious dimension to what was a scientific theory. When neopagan witches and followers of the emergent New Age movement eagerly took on board his concept, it was to his amusement and sometimes consternation. In fact he was embarrassed that environmentalists and the new nature religionists had hijacked his Gaian idea.
In the same year Dr. Lovelock’s book was published, Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess also appeared, and it was destined to become a best-selling classic. Professor Ronald Hutton has described Starhawk as “a writer of remarkable talent.” He praised her book, saying it was impossible to make notes from it without copying out whole sentences, “so perfectly are her thoughts expressed and so marked is her genius for aphorism.” He says that her prose is enhanced “by an underlying passion of feeling,” so that it “seems to heave with emotion” (Hutton 1999: 345–346). He thinks the virtue of Starhawk’s book is that it reworked the image of witchcraft, re-presenting the old coven concept as a modern training group. In this, women could be liberated from patriarchy, men could be educated about the feminine, and new forms of human relationship, free from gender stereotyping and power structures, could be established. She has even suggested that new covens of this type were capable of helping the transformation of society for the better.
Starhawk followed up her first book with Dreaming the Dark, in 1982, which applied her new image and concept of modern witchcraft to direct political action. This view may have been influenced by the anti-Vietnam demonstrations she took part in while at high school. She believed that magic was “the art of evoking power from within” to transform the individual, the community, and culture. This belief led her into advocating and taking direct action against the patriarchal system and manifested in a series of demonstrations at nuclear power plants, military bases, and atomic weapon sites. As a result, she and her fellow demonstrators were arrested several times and thrown into prison.
Starhawk believed passionately that witches should not be politically passive, but get involved in agitprop against the use of nuclear power to produce electricity and the international arms trade. She was arrested once outside the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California, which had been constructed over a known earthquake fault. During her imprisonment, Starhawk organized a skyclad ritual with two hundred female inmates and they danced in a circle to the improvised beat of a drum and a guitar. The women had been strip-searched, handcuffed, and herded into a gym used as a temporary prison, with only a blanket and a mat to sleep on. The idea behind the ritual was to prove to the (male) guards and those who had ordered their imprisonment that even in that situation the women were still empowered.
The Reclaiming Collective was founded by Starhawk in 1980 and still exists today. It arose from a teaching course she did with a colleague, Diane Baker, and was based on her experiences as a student of Z. Budapest and Victor Anderson. It was titled “Elements of Magic,” and consisted of a six-week series of workshops teaching women Goddess spirituality and basic magical practice such as casting a circle, trancework, and spellcasting. This initial course extended into several others and then finally led to the establishment of the Reclaiming Collective with workshops and public rituals open to all comers. It was a radical departure from the old coven system where members had to be vetted and then initiated before they could be trained and participate in rituals.
In 1985, the Reclaiming Collective held an extensive apprenticeship course for a week in the homes of members or in public parks. Students traveled from all over the States to attend and Reclaiming members in San Francisco provided their accommodation. Because of the success of this new venture, the next year a farm was rented as a country retreat with a series of training sessions for both the Reclaiming teachers and their students. Known as WitchCamps, these events have now become a regular occurrence with an international scope. Today they are held in Canada, England, Germany, and Norway. The English camps are held at the New Age capital of Glastonbury in Somerset and have proved very successful.
The key elements of the Reclaiming tradition, distinguishing it from orthodox old-style Wicca, is its emphasis on non-hierarchal groups that have no specific pantheon. There is no formal requirement for intiation into these groups and no set ritual liturgy. In addition, political activism related to the environment, feminism, sexual equality, pacifism, and social responsibility is encouraged. At a philosophical and ritual level, Reclaiming members are expected to cultivate self-experiment, self-discovery, and their own innate creativity. In the few rules it has, there is a focus on the achievement of ecstatic states of altered consciousness. This is achieved without the use of narcotics and through the traditional magical techniques of chanting, deep breathing, and dancing.
One of Starhawk’s closest associates in her environmental activism was the late Tom Delong (1946–1982), known by the Welsh pseudonym Gwydion Pendderwen. At the age of thirteen, he got in a fight with a fellow schoolboy who was the son of his neighbor Victor Anderson (1917–2001). As a result of this violent encounter he became friendly with Anderson and his wife Cora. Victor Anderson claimed he had been inducted into the pre-war Harpy Coven, and in the 1950s had founded his own Feri (Faery) tradition. Pendderwen attended California State University studying theater, obtained a bachelor of arts degree, and became an actor. He also learned Welsh by corresponding with a pen pal in Wales, and later visited the country, where he was inducted into a secular order of bardic druids. He also visited England in the 1970s, and met Alex Sanders and Stewart Farrar. He was initiated into Alexandrian Wicca, and on his return to the States incorporated elements of it into the Feri tradition.
In 1970, with his fellow Feri initiate Alison Harlow, Pendderwen founded an environmental group called Nemeton. The name was taken from the Celtic term
for a sacred grove, and its aim was to preserve the surviving remnants of America’s ancient forests. Seven years later he founded a similar group called Forever Forests with the task of planting new trees across the country to replace those cut down by logging operations or killed by disease. Forever Forests survived his premature death in an automobile accident in 1982, and its work now continues under the auspices of the neopagan Church of the All Worlds. Pendderwen was also politically active with Starhawk at a demonstration outside the Lawrence Livermore Weapons Laboratory in California shortly before his death.
In the same year that Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance was published, Margot Adler produced her classic guide Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and Other Pagans in America. Adler had been a radio producer and journalist since 1968 and pioneered talk shows discussing religion, politics, women’s issues, and ecology. She went on to be the New York bureau chief for National Public Radio and the host of Justice Talking, a radio program dedicated to constitutional issues.
Margot Adler was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in the so-called Deep South of the United States, but grew up in the metropolis of New York. From 1964 to 1968, she was involved in the civil rights movement and the infamous demonstrations at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. While visiting England, Adler read a copy of The Waxing Moon, a magazine produced by Joe Wilson and Tony Kelly of the Pagan Movement. She then joined the Welsh Traditionalists’ coven in New York and in 1973 was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca. In 1988, she was married Wiccan-style in a handfasting ceremony conducted by Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary. This was favorably reported in the New York Times.
Basically, Margot Adler wanted to write a book “which treats the resurgence of the Craft and Paganism as a response to a planet in crisis.” She planned to “talk at length about the relationship of the Craft to our environment, the technology, the ecological theory, to society and even politics” (letter to John Score of the Pagan Front dated December 11, 1975, in the MOW archive). In a sense, this reflected the current developments in Wicca and its transition in the United States from a magical mystery cult to an environmentally friendly nature religion.
When Margot Adler began researching her book in the early 1970s by meeting and studying neopagan groups and Wiccan covens, she came across the term “nature religion” in use for the first time to describe these organizations. She also read an article in the Earth Religion News magazine, founded by Herman Slater in 1974, that referred to “pre-Christian nature religions.” Around the same time, Tim Zell of the pantheistic Church of All Worlds published a pamphlet describing modern paganism as a “natural religion.” Under this heading Zell included witchcraft, animism, pantheism, the pre-Christian old religions of the ancient Britons, Irish, Gauls, Germans, and Norse people. He also added the indigenous religious beliefs of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Australasia (Rabinovitch and Lewis 2002: 166–167). While this was to define how neopagan witchcraft was to be seen and experienced in the coming decades, Margot Adler was also surprised that some of the Wiccans she encountered, especially the older ones, were not interested in environmental matters at all.
Chapter Thirteen
The Pagan Federation Emerges
In 1973, the Gardnerian Wiccan community suffered yet another shock when Monique and Scotty Wilson decided to sell the contents of the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic on the Isle of Man. Part of the reason was that, following the News of the World revelations in 1969 that they were letting their daughter attend Wiccan rites, they were excluded by the more conservative members of the Craft. Monique Wilson was also experiencing bad health and the couple were in financial difficulties. As early as 1968, Doreen Valiente heard the Wilsons were sent writs by staff at the museum because they had not been paid. At the time the couple were supposed to be “virtually broke” (DV notebook entry February 27, 1968, in MOW archive).
The Wilsons sold the museum collection to the Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” organization based in Canada. The company was founded by Robert Ripley, a cartoonist and adventurer who was born in 1890. He started his exhibition of the weird and wonderful with a collection of shrunken heads obtained while traveling in Ecuador. Ripley was an eccentric character, as well as an excellent businessman. He owned a pet boa constrictor and chipmunks and squirrels who played around him as he drew his cartoons. Ripley traveled the world, collecting the most bizarre artifacts he could find, and made a living displaying these to the public.
Ripley’s paid £120,000 for the ten thousand items in the museum collection, three thousand books from Gerald Gardner’s library, and his personal ritual tools, including a silver chalice, an ivory wand, and his altar. An old friend of Gardner, Angus McLeod, burned most of his remaining private papers and destroyed the items left over from the sale. Ripley’s shipped the collection to the United States and it formed the core of the display in their Museum of Witchcraft and Black Magic at the popular tourist attraction of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco (“Witches Treasure Will Go To America,” The Manx Star, January 15, 1973).
The Witches Mill was sold separately and changed hands several times in the following years. It was finally purchased by a property developer in 1995 for £225,000 and completely restored at a cost of £1 million. The ruined tower of the original windmill without its sails was converted into a three-bedroom dwelling complete with a Victorian spiral staircase. The adjoining granary was made into luxury apartments, and the former farmhouse, office, and workshop from Gardner’s day were turned into two-bedroom cottages. In 2000, the whole site was being offered for either sale or lease.
Once the sale of the museum collection had been completed in 1973, the Wilsons moved to Torremolinos, near Malaga in Spain. This resort on the Spanish coast was popular with British tourists and the couple bought and ran a café in the town. Monique Wilson continued practicing witchcraft after she left the Isle of Man and founded a coven in Germany. She is reported to have died nine years after selling the museum collection, possibly in an automobile accident. Scotty Wilson was rumored to have moved to either the United States or Australia after her death, and in 2004 was reported to be still alive and a member of a coven (pers. comm. from Julia Phillips).
The Museum of Witchcraft and Black Magic in San Francisco closed down in the late 1970s and the Gardner collection was transferred to another Ripley museum in St. Augustine, Florida. It stayed on view until the 1980s, when it was then placed in storage. From then onwards, items from the collection were gradually sold off or auctioned to the public in small lots. When Dr. Allen Greenfield visited the museum in Florida, he even found several magical artifacts from the collection for sale in its souvenir shop. In 1986, he negotiated with Ripley’s to buy the famous OTO charter given to Gardner by Crowley, and the original manuscript of Ye Bok of Ye Magical Art. The next year Richard and Tamara James of the Church of Wicca in Toronto managed to purchase the bulk of Gardner’s manuscripts, books, and his personal correspondence with his various High Priestesses.
Another (unknown) person representing a company called A & B Trading purchased a large quantity of items from the collection and then offered them for sale by mail-order through placing advertisements in occult magazines. In 1998, some of the collection consisting of lucky charms, amulets, talismans, and magical pendants, bracelets, brooches, necklaces, and rings, was offered for sale on the Internet by an American collector. The prices for the items ranged from $100 for a small amulet to $95,000 for an ancient Egyptian necklace. Among the more out-of-the-ordinary items were a witch’s poppet, a nineteenth-century ceremonial dagger, a fourteenth-century moon amulet, Lady Olwen’s (Monique Wilson) personal seal insignia, a sixteen-inch-long animal tail (allegedly worn by a Wiccan High Priest in rituals), and an instrument used for “pricking” suspected witches once owned by the seventeenth-century Witchfinder-General, Matthew Hopkins.
In 2005, more items from the Gardner collection, including an antique kil
t pin for $249, a hairpin for $4,449, the image of a imp or devil for the same price, a genuine shell rattle for $325, a brooch depicting the Roman moon goddess Diana for $850, a medieval crusader’s ring for $559, a pentacle for $700, plus a silver potion bottle, a bottle of Holy Water that once belonged to an exorcist-priest, a ceremonial agate ring, a glass bead amulet, a carved bear head and claw, and various magical charms and amulets were offered for general sale.
Meanwhile, if the politicization of Wicca was happening in the United States in the early 1970s, in Britain the movement was being led as early as 1968 by a Gardnerian Wiccan High Priest called John Score (1914–1979). Like many other early Gardnerians, he had a military background and served with the Royal Air Force in the Second World War. He joined up in 1931 and became a flight lieutenant in the Signals Intelligence Branch. When Score left the RAF in 1946, he organized the telecommunications for the Olympic Games when they were held in London two years later.
He then settled in his hometown of Poole in Dorset and married his wife, Jean, the daughter of a colonel in the Army Medical Corp who was working at the local hospital as an almoner. Between them they were later to run the Acorn Coven. Score retired from work in 1963 due to ill health, and at first devoted his spare time to constructing a transmitter/receiver device for communicating with the dead. However, in July 1968, he published the first two-page edition of a witchcraft newsletter called The Wiccan, with an initial mailing list of only eight subscribers.
Score later claimed he was descended from a hereditary branch of witchcraft and said he owned a male ancestor’s serpent staff presented to him in 1928 (letter to Richard Coward September 13, 1976, in MOW archive). Whether this was true or not, in 1961 John Score wrote to Gerald Gardner on the subject of reincarnation. Three years later he joined the newly formed Witchcraft Research Association and also attended some of the public meetings of The Regency. The editor of the WRA’s newsletter, Pentagram, put Score in touch with Eleanor Bone, the High Priestess of the Gardnerian Streatham Coven. Score wrote to her and said he had some psychic abilities, including telepathy, “traveling clairvoyance” (now known as remote viewing), and the recognition of past lives. In 1946, he told Bone, he was involved with a group operating on the “inner planes” to eradicate some black magicians during an out-of-body experience. He said it took him about a year to recover from this incident.
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