Modern Wicca

by Michael Howard

  John Score’s targets over the years often included his fellow Crafters as he promoted his idiosyncratic views on a wide range of subjects. These included such oddities as his opposition to the American custom of printing the month before the date of the day in correspondence. In TW #10 (May 1970) he launched an attack on witches who claimed the title of king or queen. He said that (in Gardnerian Wicca) the term “witch queen” was sometimes used, but only applied to a High Priestess controlling more than one coven. In a later issue, he attacked those who followed the so-called “Left hand path” of occultism, and warned “we now have the Inner Plane Contacts and Organisation able to deal effectively with them should there be any attempt to expose or interfere” (TW #13, September 1970). He also chastised Herman Slater for offering a “Gardnerian Coven Sword” for sale in his Warlock Shop in Manhattan. His comment was, “There ain’t no such animal’” (Pengelly, Hall and Dowse 1997), which is an odd remark, as most Gardnerians of the time used a sword in their rituals. Gerald Gardner certainly always used to do so.

  Score also attempted to rewrite some of the dogma of Wicca using his own theosophical occult ideas, and in TW #45 (October 1975) tackled the thorny issue of the Law of Threefold Return. This says that if a witch practices an act of negative magic such as a curse, the energy he or she sends out will rebound and come back to them threefold. Score said that for some time he had considered this law was in conflict with the purpose behind reincarnation, i.e., the evolution of the human soul. He had therefore “passed the problem back [to] ‘Old Gerald’ for consideration,” and apparently he agreed this law did conflict with it. Score said he was asked to make an announcement in the newsletter that the law was to be abandoned. This was because as long as it was retained “the Wheel of Rebirth cannot be ‘broken’ with release from the need to reincarnate.”

  When I launched my own witchcraft newsletter The Cauldron in 1976, John Score greeted it with some derision and was suspicious of my motives. He also thought it was a deliberate and blatant attempt to copy The Wiccan. This was partly because both our publications were printed on electric Roneo duplicators, cutting-edge technology back then, in a foolscap newsletter format stapled at the left-hand corner. That was as far as the similarities went, as TC was not political, we were not really interested in campaigning for the human rights or religious freedom of our readers by taking on the media and the government, and it was not the official publication of an organization. Instead our initial purpose was to bring together witches from different traditions and provide an independent forum for discussion. In that respect, we took our lead from the Witchcraft Research Association.

  Although John Score seemed paranoid about the appearance of TC, ironically it was his Gardnerian initiator, Madge Worthington, who first suggested the idea and encouraged its creation. In the autumn of 1975, she voiced her opinion to me that there was the need for another witchcraft publication as a non-political alternative to The Wiccan. At the time I was not that interested, as I was already editing and publishing a general occult magazine called Spectrum, which lasted for ten issues. However, after giving the matter some thought, I decided the idea had legs, as they say.

  We were already running a column in Spectrum called “Ceridwen’s Cauldron” so I dropped the Ceridwen bit and used it for the name of the new publication. It was launched at Candlemas 1976 with a first print-run of one hundred copies. Twenty of those were sold through the Atlantis bookshop in London. Because I could not run two magazines side by side, I closed down Spectrum and transferred the outstanding subscriptions to the newsletter. Today TC is a professionally printed A4 magazine with fifty-two pages, and we have published over 130 issues since 1976. We have a wide readership in the United Kingdom, Europe, the USA, Canada, and Australasia. There is also an electronic version published on the Internet from Brazil in Portuguese, under the editorship of Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold.

  However, when he was not busy criticizing his fellow witches, Score continued to attack what he called “the gutter press” and their gross misrepresentations of the Craft. He reported with satisfaction that since the 1969 exposé, there had been one premature death among the staff of The News of the World, an abduction, a murder, and the editor at the time had been sacked (TW #7 March 1970). Seven years later, he reported there had been a fire on the newspaper’s premises, which he had apparently predicted several issues earlier. He claimed this was in “line with the sort of incidents that have followed excursions by this newspaper against the Children of the Goddess.” He was hopeful The News of the World would now stop the “misreporting and sensationalizing of our entirely legitimate religion” (TW #62 July 1978 quoted in Pengelly, Hall and Dowse 1997: 31 with the added comment: “But they didn’t learn did they? And we doubt very much if they ever will”).

  John Score’s wrath was also aimed at popular entertainment when he believed it was misrepresenting or defaming the “Craft of the Wise.” One of his targets was an episode of the American science-fiction television series Star Trek, broadcast by the BBC. This episode featured aliens disguised as human witches, and Score claimed this was an example of anti-witchcraft propaganda. Oddly, he blamed the BBC’s alleged domination by their (then only Christian) Religious Advisory Committee. In 1972, he also wrote to the Home Secretary to complain about a new glossy magazine called Witchcraft associated with Alex Sanders. Rather melodramatically and inaccurately he described it as “pornographic” and “salacious filth,” although by modern standards it was pretty tame. The Home Office replied by saying that it was for the courts to take action against any magazine that contravened the Obscene Publications Act. Score was advised to report the matter to his local police station and give them the address of the magazine’s publisher. Ironically, Doreen Valiente had considered writing an article for a similar exoteric magazine on “Naked Magic: Ritual Nudity Through the Ages” (DV notebooks in MOW archive).

  Despite his devotion to alternative therapies, health foods, herbalism, and vegetarianism, John Score suffered from ill health for a long time and had an ongoing heart condition. In 1979, he finally succumbed to abdominal cancer and died on November 30. Doreen Valiente presided at his funeral service and also wrote an obituary for the popular occult magazine Prediction. Those who started the Pagan Front nearly ten years earlier were determined it would survive the passing of its primary founder. After a short hiatus, in October 1981 the PF was taken over by a leading Wiccan High Priestess and Cambridge University graduate, Leonora James (aka Prudence Jones). The name of the organization was immediately changed from the Pagan Front to the Pagan Federation. This was to avoid any possible association with the neo-Nazi National Front political party that had become prominent in British politics in the 1970s.

  In 1985, the quango English Heritage obtained a court order banning all visitors to Stonehenge at the summer solstice. This was primarily to prevent the annual rock festival that had developed in recent years adjacent to the stone circle. An exclusion zone was created around the area with razor-wire, road blocks, and a cordon of riot police to keep out unwanted intruders. The Pagan Federation, under its new leadership, decided this interfered with the religious rights of the Druid Order because they had been allowed to celebrate the solstice at Stonehenge since 1902. It was considered the druids were just the type of people the PF was set up to support and defend, as they were classified as pagans following “an ancestral Nature-revering religion of Europe.” This was a departure from PF policy, as John Score always regarded the organization as exclusively representing followers of the Craft of the Wise (Wiccans).

  Before she became the PF’s leader, Prudence Jones had run an affiliated group called the Pagan Anti-Defamation League (PADL) with a friend of hers, the Earth Mysteries writer and researcher Nigel Pennick. It used the same London postbox as the PF and was to provide the public face of the organization. The PADL began a campaign of letter writing and radio and television interviews in an attempt to persuade Engl
ish Heritage to allow limited access to Stonehenge at the summer solstice for religious celebrations. Representatives from the PADL also attended meetings with English Heritage to mediate between the authorities, the druids, and the “New Age travelers” who wanted to resurrect the free festival at the stones. Even though they failed at the time and the PADL was disbanded in 1989, its activities changed the face of the Pagan Federation forever (Prudence Jones in Pengelly, Hall, and Dowse 1997: 23).

  In the 1980s, Christian fundamentalists began to spread propaganda imported from the United States about so-called “satanic ritual abuse” (SRA). There were several high-profile cases where children were seized from their parents in dawn raids by the police and social services, and put into foster care. The PF got involved in supporting and helping families who were the victims of this campaign, even though nearly all of them were not pagans or witches. Supported by the Christian Reachout Trust, a Member of Parliament, the late Geoffrey Dickens, made another attempt to reintroduce anti-witchcraft legislation. He claimed that this was necessary because witches were involved in child abuse and human sacrifice. Dickens was not regarded as a serious person by his fellow MPs and had demeaned his position by appearing in a music video with an all-female pop group. For this reason, his attempt to introduce a law licensing occult practitioners and limiting their public activities was laughed out of the House of Commons.

  Geoffrey Dickens also blamed the current high levels of unemployment in Britain on witchcraft. He said people with no jobs got bored and with too much time on their hands “the Devil made work for idle hands.” The MP seems to have become quite paranoid and began to claim he was being victimized by the witches. He alleged a dossier on witchcraft he had compiled mysteriously got lost in the post, as things sometimes do. He blamed the witches who were campaigning against his proposed legislation for intercepting it before it reached its destination.

  During the 1980s, the main political work undertaken by the PF was concerned with the problems arising from the allegations about SRA. This included the organization providing information to the (non-pagan) parents of children on Orkney in Scotland. Their children were taken into care following unfounded allegations of a satanic group operating on the island. The group was allegedly practicing ritual child abuse and animal sacrifice. One of the chief suspects was the local minister, and police seized a clerical garment from his home, claiming it was used in black magic rites. In 1990, the PF produced a booklet for police officers and social workers entitled Something Out of Nothing, attacking the concept of SRA. This coincided with the introduction of a “pagan parenting” feature in the PF’s magazine Pagan Dawn, which had replaced The Wiccan.

  In May 1988, the first Pagan Federation Committee was set up at a meeting held in the London house of the Wiccan writer and psychologist, Vivianne Crowley. A new editor was chosen for The Wiccan and a constitution was drafted, a bank account was opened, and the first PF information pack was written. This was based on a leaflet for Hallowe’en already produced for the media by the PADL and written by Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick. The format of The Wiccan was also changed from a duplicated newsletter to a printed magazine. As a result of this important meeting, the PF also announced its attention to form a dialogue with other non-Wiccan neopagan religious groups such as druids, followers of Asatru, and urban shamans. It also said it would forge links with surviving indigenous religions in North America, Japan, and Africa.

  The first annual Pagan Federation Conference was held at the Linkup event in Leicester. This was organized by another organization called Pagan Link, founded by Richard and Kate Westwood, and the newly formed Pagan Council of Elders (not to be confused with the Alexandrian Council of Elders). The PF also sent representatives to the Festival of Faith and the Environment held in Canterbury Cathedral in Kent, the site of the first Roman Catholic church in Britain in the fifth century CE. Vivianne Crowley led a pagan ceremony at the event, which was the beginning of the PF’s involvement in the new interfaith movement, designed to bring together followers of different religions in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. In the same year, local PF groups from all over the country celebrated Earth Healing Day (formerly Earth Day) and this has now become an annual event. Two years later the first democratic elections were held, and rank and file members were allowed to elect candidates to the organization’s committee.

  The fundamental changes to the Pagan Federation in the 1980s were based on Prudence Jones’ realization that “Paganism, as the ancestral tradition of Europe, took many other forms besides Wicca …” (in Pengelly, Hall, and Dowse 1997: 23). This led to a broadening of the appeal of the PF to include non-Wiccans in an attempt to live up to its new name as a broad federation of all pagan beliefs. As a direct result of this new policy, membership increased considerably in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1992 the PF had twelve hundred full members and an equal number of associate members. Five years later, the number of advance tickets for its annual conference had doubled from 850 the previous year to 1,500. With people also buying tickets at the door, this figure increased to about 2,000 attendees. In 2001 it was claimed there were 4,500 PF members and subscribers to Pagan Dawn.

  In 1990, Prudence Jones decided to resign as the president of PF. Her place was taken by Elen Williams, the High Priestess of Gardner’s old coven at Brickett Wood, now based in North London. In recent years membership has decreased due partly to competition from rival organizations such as the Children of Artemis. Some members also became unhappy at the PF’s increased political role and activities. These included trying to get official state recognition of Wicca and paganism as legitimate religious beliefs, the appointment of pagan chaplains to hospitals and prisons, its continued support for interfaith, and a perceived lack of democracy. Some members left when the PF’s database of members was passed to the printing company producing Pagan Dawn and copies of the magazine were posted in transparent plastic envelopes. However the strength of the PF today for many members still lies in its original contact and networking capabilities, which include national, regional, and now international conferences, local groups, and meets.

  Despite the apparent setbacks the Pagan Federation experienced in recent years it continues to provide a service to newcomers and the more experienced. Its mission remains to “make Paganism accessible to people genuinely seeking a nature-based spirituality” (Pagan Dawn #169, Samhain-Yule 2008). Now headed by a fully elected committee and administrative officers, the PF has over sixty regional coordinators who stay in contact with members, provide information and answer queries, organize local events, and produce newsletters. The PF also organizes and hosts seasonal rituals for all comers, workshops, and camps. Annually, they still celebrate Earth Healing Day with members from all over the world assembling on that day to perform rituals to heal Mother Earth.

  In addition, the PF works politically for the religious rights of pagans and Wiccans so they can worship and hold jobs without fear of discrimination or persecution. It liaises with the Home Office, Members of Parliament, the civil service, hospitals and prisons, the police, social services, and interfaith groups to promote a positive image of Wicca and neopaganism. It also provides expert witnesses in court cases and industrial tribunals to assist pagans and Wiccans who have been discriminated against in their employment or child custody issues. As a media resource it provides information and handles over a thousand enquiries each year from radio, television, newspapers, and magazines. It also produces educational information leaflets for distribution to academic libraries, teachers, social workers and the police. In this respect it has come a long way in the last thirty years since it was founded as a contact network for Wiccans.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wicca International

  In the early 1980s, the political aspects of Wicca and neopaganism as they had emerged in the previous decade were still evident. The Cold War was at its height in the Reagan-Thatcher years with NATO and the Warsaw Pact na
tions indulging in nuclear saber rattling and brinksmanship. One part of this was the controversial decision taken by the UK government to accept the basing of US cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire. This led to demonstrations and the setting up of a peace camp outside the base’s perimeter fence. The demonstratons were mostly made up of women who each day had to endure obscene misogynistic insults from the military police and private security guards.

  Many of these thirty thousand women demonstrators were witches, and Doreen Valiente commented: “In spite of the derision of the media, it has become apparent that many of the actions of the women who gathered there were ritual actions. Their protest was often a magical protest, and feminist witches from the USA were among those who joined in to support them” (1989: 191). In an interview in the magazine Northern Earth Mysteries in 1982, one of these women, Hilary Byers, said: “We were all taking part in a sort of spiritual experience in which the concentrated devotion of all these people had somehow been able to neutralize whatever nasty things might be happening or being planned at the base” (NEM #20, Winter Solstice 1982).

  In the early 1980s, other witches were also getting involved with anti-nuclear and environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the Ecology Party (now the Green Party). An anti-nuclear power and anti-nuclear weapons pressure group specifically set up by witches was Pagans Against Nukes (PAN). This was founded by Phillip and Kate Cozens in Reading. They were originally members of the Gardnerian Whitecroft tradition. Later Philip Cozens changed his name to Rufus, and continued PAN in West Wales with his new partner, Nicola Beechsquirrel. PAN campaigned throughout the 1980s, using magical rituals in an attempt to close down nuclear power plants and neutralize nuclear missile systems.