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[from http://www.oakgrove.org/GreenPages/bos/1781.txt ] 1781 Subject: THE CHARTER AND THE BOOK Being A Radical Revisionist History of the Origins of the Mod ern Witch Cult and The Book of Shadows. "It was one of the secret doctrines of paganism that the Sun was the source, not only of light, but of life...The invasion of clas sical beliefs by the religions of Syria and Egypt which were principally solar, gr adually affected the conception of Apollo, and there is a certain later identifica tion of him with the suffering God of Christianity, Free - masonry and similar cul ts..." Aleister Crowley in Astrology, 1974 "...if GBG and Crowley only knew each other for a short year or two, do you think that would be long enough for them to become such good friend s that gifts of personal value would be exchanged several times, and that GB G would have been able to aquire the vast majority of Crowley's effects after his d eath?" Merlin the Enchanter, personal letter, 1986 "...On the floor before the altar, he remembers a sword with a flat cruciform brass hilt, and a well-worn manuscript book of rituals - the hereditary Book of Shadows, which he will have to copy out for himself in the d ays to come..." Stewart Farrar in What Witches Do, 1971 "Actually I did write a scholarly book about the Craft; its t itle was Inventing Witchcraft. . . But I spent most of the last fifteen years fai ling to persuade Carl Weschcke of Llewellyn or any other publisher that there was a market for it." Aidan A. Kelly, Gnosis, Winter, 1992 "...the Gardnerian Book of Shadows is one of the key factor s in what has become a far bigger and more significant movement than Gardner can ha ve envisaged; so historical interest alone would be enough reason for definin g it while first-hand evidence is still available..." Janet and Stewart Farrar in The Witches' Way, 1984 "It has been alleged that a Book of Shadows in Crowley's han dwriting was formerly exhibited in Gerald's Museum of Witchcraft on the Isle of Man . I can only say I never saw this on either of the two occasions when I stayed with Gerald and Donna Gardner on the island. The large, handwritten book depicted in Witchcraft Today is not in Crowley's handwriting, but Gerald's..." Doreen Valiente in Witchcraft for Tomorrow, 1978 1782 "Aidan Kelly...labels the entire Wiccan revival `Gardnerian Wi tchcraft....' The reasoning and speculation in Aidan's book are intricate. Bri efly, his main argument depends on his discovery of one of Gardner's workin g notebooks, Ye Book of Ye Art Magical, which is in possession of Ripley Internat ional, Ltd...." Margot Adler in Drawing Down the Moon, 1979 PART ONE WAITING FOR THE MAN FROM CANADA I was, for the third time in four years, waiting a bit nerv ously for the Canadian executive with the original Book of Shadows in the ramshackle office of Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. "They're at the jail," a smiling secretary-type explained, " but we've called them and they should be back over here to see you in just a few mi nutes." The jail? Ah, St. Augustine, Florida. "The Old Jail," was the `nation's oldest city's' second most tasteless tourist trap, complete with ca ge-type cells and a mock gallows. For a moment I allowed myself to play in my he ad with the vision of Norm Deska, Ripley Operations Vice President and John Turner, the General Manager of Ripley's local operation and the guy who'd bought the Gera ld Gardner collection from Gardner's niece, Monique Wilson, sitting in the slammer. But no, Turner apparently had just been showing Deska the town. I straighte ned my suit for the fiftieth time, and suppressed the comment. We were talking B IG history here, and big bucks, too. I gulped. The original Book of Shadows. Ma ybe. It had started years before. One of the last people in Ameri ca to be a fan of carnival sideshows, I was anxious to take another opportunity to go through the almost archetypally seedy old home that housed the original Ripley's Museum. I had known that Ripley had, in the nineteen seventies, acq uired the Gardner stuff, but as far as I knew it was all located at their Tennes see resort museum. I think I'd heard they'd closed it down. By then, the social li beralism of the early seventies was over, and witchcraft and sorcery were no longer in keeping with a `family style' museum. It featured a man with a candle in his head, a Tantric skull drinking cup and freak show stuff like that, but, I mean, wit chcraft is sacrile- gious, as we all know. So, I was a bit surprised, when I discovered some of the Gar dner stuff - including an important historical document, for sale in the gift shop, in a case just opposite the little alligators that have "St.Augustine, Flor ida - America's Oldest City" stickered on their plastic bellies for the folks back h ome to use as a paper-weight. The pricetags on the occult stuff, however, we re way out of my range. 1783 Back again, three years later, and I decided, what the hell, s o I asked the cashier about the stuff still gathering dust in the glass cas e, and it was like I'd pushed some kind of button. Out comes Mr. Turner, the manager, who whisks us off to a st ore room which is filled, FILLED, I tell you, with parts of the Gardner collecti on, much of it, if not "for sale" as such, at least available for negotiation. Turn er told us about acquiring the collection when he was manager of Ripley's Blac kpool operation, how it had gone over well in the U.S. at first, but had lost pop ularity and was now relegated for the most part to storage status. Visions of sugarplums danced in my head. There were many tr easures here, but the biggest plum of all, I thought, was not surprisingly, not to b e seen. I'd heard all kinds of rumors about the Book of Shadows over the years, many of them conflicting, all of them intriguing. Rumor #1, of cour se, is that which accompanied the birth (or, depending on how one looked at it, the revival) of modern Wicca, the contemporary successor of ancient fertility cults. It revolved around elemental rituals, secret rites of passag e and a mythos of goddess and god that seemed attractive to me as a psychologi cally valid alternative to the austere, antisexual moralism of Christiani ty. The Book of Shadows, in this context, was the `holy book' of Wicca, copie d out by hand by new initiates of the cult with a history stretching back at least to the era of witchburnings. Rumor number #2, which I had tended to credit, had it that Gerald Gardner, the `father of modern Wicca' had paid Aleister Crowley in his fina l years to write the Book of Shadows, perhaps whole cloth. The rumor's chief exp onent was the respected historian of the occult, Francis King. Rumor #3 had it that Gardner had written the Book himself, which others had since copied and/or stolen. To the contrary, said rumor #4, Gardner's Museum had contain ed an old, even ancient copy of the Book of Shadows, proving its antiquity. In more recent years modern Wiccans have tended to put some distance between themselves and Gardner, just as Gardner, for complex reasons, tended to distance himself in the early years of Wicca (circa 1944-1954) from t he blatant sexual magick of Aleister Crowley, "the wickedest man in the world" by some accounts, and from Crowley's organization, the Ordo Templi Orientis. Why G ardner chose to do this is speculative, but I've got some idea. But, I'm gettin g ahead of myself. While Turner showed me a blasphemous cross shaped from the b ody of two nude women (created for the 18th century infamous "Hellfire Clubs" in Eng land and depicted in the MAN MYTH AND MAGIC encyclopedia; I bought it, of course) a nd a statue of Beelzebub from the dusty Garderian archives, a thought occur red to me. " You know," I suggested, "if you ever, in all this stuff, happen a cross a copy of The Book of Shadows in the handwriting of Aleister Crowley, it wou ld be of considerable historical value." I understated the case. It would be like finding The Book of Mormon in Joseph Smith's hand, or finding the original Ten Commandments writte n not by God Himself, but by Moses, pure and simple. (Better still, eleven command ments, with a margin note, "first draft.") I didn't really expect anything to come of it, and in the months ahead, it didn't. 1784 In the meantime, I had managed to acquire the interesting docu ment I first mistook for Gerald Gardner's (long acknowledged) initiation certific ate into Crowley's Thelemic magickal Ordo Templi Orientis. To my eventual surpr ise, I discovered that, not only was this not a simple initiation certificate f or the Minerval (probationary-lowest) degree, but, to the contrary, was a lic ense for Gardner to begin his own chapter of the O.T.O., and to initiate members into the O.T.O. In the document, furthermore, Gardner is referred to as "Pri nce of Jerusalem," that is, he is acknowledged to be a Fourth Deg ree Perfect Initiate in the Order. This, needless to say would us ually imply years of dedicated training. Though Gardner had claimed Fourth Degree O.T.O. status as early as publication of High Magic's Aid,(and claimed even hi gher status in one edition) this runs somewhat contrary to both generally held W iccan and contemporary O.T.O. orthodox understandings that the O.T.O. was then fallo w in England. At the time the document was written, most maintained, Gardn er could have known Crowley for only a brief period, and was not himself deeply i nvolved in the O.T.O. The document is undated but probably was drawn up around 194 5. As I said, it is understood that no viable chapter of the O. T.O. was supposed to exist in England at that time; the sole active chapter was i n California, and is the direct antecedent of the contemporary authentic Ordo Tem pli Orientis. Karl Germer, Crowley's immediate successor, had barely escaped dea th in a Concentartion Camp during the War, his mere association with Crowley being tantamount to a death sentence. The German OTO had been largely destroyed by the Nazis, alon g with other freemasonic organizations, and Crowley himself was in declini ng health and power, the English OTO virtually dead. The Charter also displayed other irregularities of a reveal ing nature. Though the signature and seals are certainly those of Crowley, the t ext is in the decorative hand of Gerald Gardner! The complete text reads as follows: Do what thou wilt shall be the law. We Baphomet X Degree Ordo Templi Orientis Sovereign Grand Master General of All English speaking countries of the Earth do hereby authorise our Beloved Son Scire (Dr.G,B,Gardner,) Prince of Jerusalem to constitute a camp of the Ordo Templi Orientis, in the degree Minerval. Love is the Law, Love under will. o Witness my hand and seal Baphomet X Leaving aside the misquotation from The Book of the Law, wh ich got by me for some months and probably got by Crowley when it was presented to hi m for signature, the document is probably authentic. It hung for some time in Gar dner's museum, possibly giving rise, as we shall see, to the rumor that Crow ley wrote the Book of Shadows for Gardner. According to Doreen Valiente,and to Col . Lawrence as well, the museum's descriptive pamphlet says of this document: "The collection includes a Charter granted by Aleister Crowl ey to G.B. Gardner (the Director of this Museum) to operate a Lodge of Crowley's fraternity, the Ordo Templi Orientis. (The Director would like to point out, howe ver, that he has never 1785 used this Charter and has no intention of doing so, although to the best of his belief he is the only person in Britain possessing such a Cha rter from Crowley himself; Crowley was a personal friend of his, and gave him t he Charter because he liked him." Col. Lawrence ("Merlin the Enchanter"), in a letter to me da ted 6 December, 1986, adds that this appeared in Gardner's booklet, The Museum of Magic and Witchcraft. The explanation for the curious wording of the text, taking, as Dr. Gardner does, great pains to distance himself from Crowley and the OTO, may be hinted at in that the booklet suggests that this display in the "new upper gal lery" (page 24) was put out at a relatively late date when, as we shall discover , Gardner was making himself answerable to the demands of the new witch cult and n ot the long-dead Crowley and (then) relatively moribund OTO. Now, the "my friend Aleister" ploy might explain the whole t hing. Perhaps, as some including Ms. Valiente believe, Aleister Crowley was desperate in his last years to hand on what he saw as his legacy to someone. He recklessly h anded out his literary estate, perhaps gave contradictory instruction to various of his remaining few devotees (e.g. Kenneth Grant, Grady McMurtry, Karl Germer), and may have given Gardner an "accelerated advancement" in his order. Ms. Valiente, a devoted Wiccan who is also a dedicated seeke r after the historical truth, mentions also the claim made by the late Gerald Yorke to her that Gardner had paid Crowley a substantial sum for the document. In a le tter to me dated 28th August, 1986, Ms. Valiente tells of a meeting with Yorke ".. .in London many years ago and mentioned Gerald's O.T.O. Charter to him, whereon he told me, `Well, you know, Gerald Gardner paid old Crowley about ($1500) or so for that...' This may or may not be correct..." Money or friendship may explain the Ch arter. Still, one wonders. I have a Thelemic acquaintance who, having advanced well alo ng the path of Kenneth Grant's version of the OTO, went back to square one w ith the unquestionably authentic Grady McMurtry OTO. Over a period of years of subs tantial effort, he made his way to the IVo `plus' status implied by Gardner's " Prince of Jerusalem" designation in the charter, and has since gone beyond. I am, myself, a Vo member of the OTO, as well as a chartere d initiator, and can tell you from experience that becoming a Companion of the Roya l Arch of Enoch, Perfect Initiate, Prince of Jerusalem and Chartered Initiato r is a long and arduous task. Gardner was in the habit, after the public career of Wicca emerged in the 1950s, of downgrading any Crowleyite associations out of his past, and, as Janet and Stewart Farrar reveal in The Witches' Way (1984, p3) there a re three distinct versions of the Book of Shadows in Gerald Gardner's handwriti ng which incorporate successively less material from Crowley's writings, though th e last (termed "Text C" and cowritten with Doreen Valiente after 1953) is still hea vily influenced by Crowley and the OTO. Ms. Valiente has recently uncovered a copy of an old occult magazine contemporary with High Magic's Aid and from the same publisher, which dis cusses an ancient Indian document called "The Book of Shadows" but apparently totally unrelated to the Wiccan book of the same name. Valiente acknowledges that the earliest text by Gardner known to her was untitled, though she refers to it as a "Book of Shadows." It seems suspicious timing; did Gardner take the title from h is publisher's magazine? Ms. Valiente observed to me that the "...eastern Bo ok of Shadows does not seem to have anything to do with witch-craft at all....is th is where old Gerald first found the expression "The Book of Shadows" and adopted it as a more poetical 1786 name for a magical manuscript than, say `The Grimoire' or `The Black Book'....I don't profess to know the answer; but I doubt if this is mere coincidence...." The claim is frequently made by those who wish to `salvage' a preGardnarian source of Wiccan materials that there is a `core' of `authentic' ma terials. But, as the Farrars' recently asserted, the portions of the Book of Shad ows "..which changed least between Texts A, B and C were naturally the three initi ation rituals; because these, above all, would be the traditional elements which wou ld have been carefully preserved, probably for centuries...." (emphasis ad ded) But what does one mean by "traditional materials?" The three initiation rites, now much-described in print, all smack heavily of the crypto-free masonic ritual of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the OTO, and the various esoteric neorosicruci- an groups that abounded in Britain from about 1885 on, and w hich were, it is widely known, the fountainhead of much that is associated wit h Gardner's friend Crowley. The Third Degree ritual, perhaps Wicca's ultimate rite, is , essentially, a nonsymbolic Gnostic Mass, that beautiful, evocative, erotic and esoteric ritual written and published by Crowley in the Equinox, after atten ding a Russian Orthodox Mass in the early part of this century. The Gnostic Mass has had far-reaching influence, and it would appear that the Wiccan T hird Degree is one of the most blatant examples of that influence. Take, for example, this excerpt from what is perhaps the mos t intimate, most secret and most sublime moment in the entire repertoire of W icca rituals, the nonsymbolic (that is, overtly sexual) Great Rite of the Third Degree initiation, as related by Janet and Stewart Farrar in The Witches' Way (p .34): 1787 The Priest continues: `O Secret of Secrets, That art hidden in the being of all liv es, Not thee do we adore, For that which adoreth is also thou. Thou art That, and That am I. [Kiss] I am the flame that burns in the heart of every man, And in the core of every star. I am life, and the giver of life. Yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death. I am alone, the Lord within ourselves, Whose name is Mystery of Mysteries.' Let us be unambiguous as to the importance in Wicca of this ritual; as the Farrars'put it (p.31) "Third degree initiation elevates a wi tch to the highest of the three grades of the Craft. In a sense,a third-degree witc h is fully independent, answerable only to the Gods and his or her own c onscience..." In short, in a manner of speaking this is all that Wicca can off er a devotee. With this in mind, observe the following, from Aleister Crow ley's Gnostic Mass, first published in The Equinox about 80 years ago and routin ely performed (albeit ,usually in symbolic form) by me and by many other Bishops, Priests, Priestesses and Deacons in the OTO and Ecclesia Gnostica (EGC) today. T he following is excerpted from Gems From the Equinox, p. 372, but is widely a vailable in published form: The Priest. O secret of secrets that art hidden in the being of all that lives, not Thee do we adore, for that which adoreth is also Thou. Th ou art That, and That am I. I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am Life, and the giver of Life; yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death. I am alone; there is no God where I am. So, then, where, apart from the Thelemic tradition of Crow ley and the OTO, is the "traditional material" some Wiccan writers seem to seek w ith near desperation? I am not trying to be sarcastic in the least, but even comm onplace self - references used among Wiccans today, such as "the Craft" or t he refrain "so mote it be"are lifted straight out of Freemasonry (see, for exampl e, Duncan's Ritual of Freemasonry). And, as Doreen Valiente notes in her letter to me mentioned before, "...of course old Gerald was also a member of the Co-Masons, and an ordinary Freemason..." as well as an OTO member. PART TWO THE REAL ORIGIN OF WICCA We must dismiss with some respect the assertion, put forth b y Margot Adler and others, that "Wicca no longer adheres to the orthodox mythos o f the Book of Shadows." Many, if not most of those who have been drawn to Wicca in the last three decades came to it under the spell (if I may so term it) of the lege nd of ancient Wicca. If that legend is false, then while reformists and revisioni st apologists (particularly the peculiar hybrid spawned in the late sixties under the name "feminist Wicca") may seek other valid grounds for their prac tices, we at least owe it to those who have operated under a misapprehension to explain the truth, and let the chips fall where they may. 1788 I believe there is a core of valid experience falling under t he Wiccan-neopagan heading, but that that core is the same essential core that li es at the truths exposed by the dreaded boogy-man Aleister Crowley and the` wi cked' pansexualism of Crowley's Law of Thelema. That such roots would be not just uncomfortable, but intolerable to the orthodox traditionalists among the Wiccans, but even more so among the hybrid feminist "wiccans" may indeed be an underst atement. Neopaganism, in a now archaic "hippie" misreading of ecology , mistakes responsible stewardship of nature for nature worship. Ancient pagans did n ot `worship' nature; to a large extent they were afraid of it, as has been pointe d out to me by folk practioners. Their "nature rites" were to propitiate the cap rice of the gods, not necessarily to honor them. The first neopagan revivalists, Gardner, Crowley and Dr. Murray, well understood this. Neopagan wiccans usually do not. In introducing a "goddess element" into their theology, Crow ley and Gardner both understood the yin/yang, male/female fundame ntal polarity of the universe. Radical feminist neopagans have taken this balanc e and altered it, however unintentionally, into a political feminist agenda, ce ntered around a near-monotheistic worship of the female principle, in a bizar re caricature of patriarchal Christianity. Bigotry, I submit, cuts both ways. I do not say these things lightly; I have seen it happen i n my own time. IF this be truth, let truth name its own price. I was not sure, unt il Norm and John got back from the Old Jail. A couple of months earlier, scant days after hearing that I was to become a gnostic bishop and thus an heir to a corner of Crowley's leg acy, I had punched on my answering machine, and there was the unexpected voice of J ohn Turner saying that he had located what seemed to be the original Book of Shadows in an inventory list, locating it at Ripley's office in Toronto. He said he didn't think they would sell it as an individual item, but he gave me the name of a top official in the Ripley organization, who I promptly contacted. I eventually made a substantial offer for the book, sight unsee n, figuring there was (at the least) a likelihood I'd be able to turn the story in to a book and get my money back out of it, to say nothing of the historical impor t. But, as I researched the matter, I became more wary, and co nfused; Gardner's texts "A" "B" and "C" all seemed to be accounted for. Possi bly, I began to suspect, this was either a duplicate of the "deThelemized" po st1954 version with segments written by Gardner and Valiente and copied and recop ied (as well as distorted) from hand to hand since by Wiccans the world over. Maybe, I mused, Valiente had one copy and Gardner another, the latter sold to Ripley with the Collection. Or, perhaps it was the curious notebook discovered by Aidan Kelly in the Ripley files called Ye Book of Ye Art Mag ical, the meaning of which was unclear. While I was chatting with Ms.Deska, Norm returned from his mission, we introduced in best businesslike fashion, and he told me he'd get the bo ok, whatever it might be, from the vault. The vault?! I sat there thinking god knows what . Recently, I'd gotten a call from Toronto, and it seems the Ripley folks wanted me to take a loo k at what they had. I had made a considerable offer, and at that point I figured I 'd had at least a nibble. As it so happened Norm would be visiting on a routi ne inspection visit, so it was arranged he would bring the manuscript with him. 1789 Almost from the minute he placed it in front of me, things beg an to make some kind of sense. Clearly, this was Ye Book of Ye Art Magical. Jus t as clearly, it was an unusual piece, written largely in the same hand as the Cr owley Charter- that is, the hand of Gerald Gardner. Of this I became certain, bec ause I had handwriting samples of Gardner, Valiente and Crowley in my possession. M s. Valiente had been mindful of this when she wrote me, on August 8th, 1986: I have deliberately chosen to write you in longhand, rather than send a typewritten reply, so that you will have something by which to judge the validity of the claim you tell me is being made by the Ripley organis ation to have a copy of a "Book of Shadows" in Gerald Gardner's handwriting and m ine. If this is..."Ye Book of Ye Art Magical," ....this is definitely in Gerald Gar dner's handwriting. Old Gerald, however, had several styles of handwriting....I t hink it is probable that the whole MS. was in fact written by Gerald, and no othe r person was involved; but of course I may be wrong.... At first glance it appeared to be a very old book, and it s uggested to me where the rumors that a very old, possibly medieval Book of Shadow s had once been on display in Gardner's Museum had emerged from. Any casual onlooker might see Ye Book in this light, for th e cover was indeed that of an old volume, with the original title scratched out crudely on the side and a new title tooled into the leather cover. The original was some mundane volume, on Asian knives or something, but the inside pages ha d been removed, and a kind of notebook -- almost a journal -- had been substituted. As far as I could see, no dates appear anywhere in the book. It is written in several different handwriting styles, although, as noted above , Doreen Valiente assured me that Gardner was apt to use several styles. I had the distinct impression this "notebook" had been written over a considerab le period of time, perhaps years, perhaps even decades. It may, indeed, date fro m his days in the 1930s when he linked up with a neorosicrucuian grouping that could have included among its members the legendary Dorothy Clutterbuck, who set Gardner on the path which led to Wicca. Thinking on it, what emerges from Ye Book of Ye Art Magical is a developmental set of ideas. Much of it is straight out of Crowley, but it is c learly the published Crowley, the old magus of the Golden Dawn, the A.A., and the O .T.O. 1790 Somewhere along the line it hit me that I was not exactly looking at the "original Book of Shadows" but, perhaps, the outline Gardner prepared over a long period of time, apparently in secret (since Valiente, a relati vely early initiate of Gardner's, never heard of it nor saw it, according to her own account, until recent years, about the time Aidan Kelly unearthed it in the Ripley collection long after Gardner's death). Dr. Gardner kept many odd notebooks and scrapbooks that perh aps would reveal much about his character and motivations. Turner showed me a Gardne r scrapbook in Ripley's store room which was mostly cheesecake magazine pho tographs and articles about actresses. Probably none are so evocative as Ye Book of Ye Art Magical, discovered,it has been intimated,hidden away in the back of a n old sofa. I have the impression it was essentially unknown in and aft er Gardner's lifetime, and that by the Summer of 1986 few had seen inside it; I knew of only Kelly and my own party. Perhaps the cover had been seen by some along the line, accounting for the rumor of a "very old Book of Shadows" in Gardner's Museu m. If someone had seen the charter signed by Crowley ("Baphome t") but written by Gerald Gardner, and had gotten a look, as well, at Ye Book, they might well have concluded that Crowley had written BOTH, an honest error, bu t maybe the source of that long-standing accusation. There is even a notation in t he Ripley catalog attributing the manuscript to Crowley on someone's say-so, bu t I have no indica- tion Ripley has any other such book. Finally, if the notebook is a sourcebook of any religious system, it is not that of medieval witchcraft, but the twentieth century madness or sanity or both of the infamous magus Aleis ter Crowley and the Thelemic/Gnostic creed of The Book of the Law. As I sat there I read aloud familiar quotations or paraphra ses from published material in the Crowley-Thelemic canon. This is not the "anci ent religion of the Wise" but the modern sayings of " the Beast 666 " as Crowley was wont to style himself. But, does any of this invalidate Wicca as an expression of h uman spirituality? It depends on where one is coming from. Certainly, the foundati ons of feminist Wicca and the modern cult of the goddess are challenged with the fa ct that the goddess in question may be Nuit, her manifestation the sworn whore, Our Lady Babalon, the Scarlet Woman. Transform what you will shall be the whole of history, but THIS makes what Marx did to Hegel look like slavish devotion. What Crowley himself said of this kind of witchcraft is not m erely instructive, but an afront to the conceits of an era. "The belief in witchcraft," he observed, " was not all supe rstition; its psychological roots were sound. Women who are thwarted in th eir natural instincts turn inevitably to all kinds of malignant mischief, from slan der to domestic destruction..." 1791 For the rest of us, those who neither worship nor are disdainfu l of the man who made sexuality a god or, at least, acknowledged it as such, ex perience must be its own teacher. If Wicca is a sort of errant Minerval Camp of th e OTO, gone far astray and far afield since the days Crowley gave Gardner a charter h e "didn't use" but seemed to value, and a whole range of rituals and imagery tha t assault the senses at their most literally fundamental level; if this is true o r sort of true, maybe its time history be owned up to. Mythos has its place and ro le, but so, too, does reality. PART THREE WICCA AS AN OTO ENCAMPMENT The question of intent looms large in the background of this inquiry. If I had to guess, I would venture that Gerald Gardner did, in fact, inven t Wicca more or less whole cloth, to be a popularized version of the OTO. Crowle y, or his successor Karl Germer, who also knew Dr. Gardner, likely set "old Ger ald" on what they intended to be a Thelemic path, aimed at reestablishing at l east a basic OTO encampment in England. Aiden Kelly's research work on all this is most impressive, b ut at rock bottom I can't help feeling he still wants to salvage something origina l in Wicca. In a way, there is some justification for this; the Wicca of Gerald Gard ner, OTO initiate and advocate of sexual magick produced a folksy, easier version of the OTO, but by the middle nineteen fifties some of his early "followers" not only created a revisionist Wicca with relatively little of the Thelemic original intact, but convinced Gardner to go along with the changes. It is also possible, but yet unproven, that, upon expelling Kenneth Grant from the OTO in England, Germer, in the early 1950s, summoned Gardner to America to interview him as a candidate for leading the British OTO. Ga rdner, it is confirmed, came to America, but by then Wicca, and Dr. Gardne r had begun to take their own, watered-down course. Today most Wiccans have no ide a of their origins. Let me close this section by quoting two interesting tidbits for your consider- ation. First consider Doreen Valiente's observation to me concernin g "the Parsons connection". I quote from her letter abovementioned, one of se veral she was kind enough to send me in 1986 in connection with my research into this matter. 1792 ...I did know about the existence of the O.T.O. Chapter in Cal ifornia at the time of Crowley's death, because I believe his ashes were sent ov er to them. He was cremated here in Brighton, you know, much to the scandal of the local authorities, who objected to the `pagan funeral service.' If you are refer ring to the group of which Jack Parsons was a member (along with the egregious Mr. L. Ron Hubbard), then there is another curious little point to which I must dra w your attention. I have a remarkable little book by Jack Parsons called MAGICK, GNOSTICISM AND THE WITCHCRAFT. It is unfortunately undated, but Parsons died in 1952. The section on witchcraft is particularly interesting because it looks forward to a revival of witchcraf t as the Old Religion....I find this very thought provoking. Did Parsons write this around the time that Crowley was getting together with Gardner and perhap s communicated with the California group to tell them about it? We must remember that Ms. Valiente was a close associate of Gardner and is a dedicated and active Wiccan. She, of course, has her own int erpretation of these matters. The OTO recently reprinted the Parsons "witchcraft" e ssays in Freedom is a Two Edged Sword , a postumous collection of his writings. It d oes indeed seem that Gardner and Parsons were both on the same wave-length at about the same time. The other matter of note is the question of the length of Gar dner's association with the OTO and with Crowley personally. My informant Col. Lawrence, tells me that he has in his possession a cigarette case which once belo nged to Aleister Crowley. Inside is a note in Crowley's hand that says simply: `gift of GBG, 1936, A. Crowley'." (Personal letter, 6 December, 1986) The inscription could be a mistake, it could mean 1946, the period of the Charter. But, as Ms. Valiente put it in a letter to me of 8th Decembe r, 1986: If your friend is right, then it would mean that old Gerald a ctually went through a charade of pretending to Arnold Crowther that Arnold was intr oducing him to Crowley for the first time - a charade which Crowley for some reason was willing to go along with. Why? I can't see the point of such a pretence; b ut then occultists sometimes do devious things... Crowley may have played out a similar scene with G.I. Gurdjie ff, the other enlightened merry prankster of the first half of the twentieth century. Gnosticism and Wicca, the subjects of Jack Parsons' essays, republished by the OTO and Falcon Press in 1990, are the two most successful express ions to date of Crowley's dream of a popular solar-phallic religion. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think Aleister and Gerald may have cooked Wicca up. If Wicca is the OTO's prodigal daughter in fact, authorized directly by Crowley, how should Wiccans now relate to this? How should Crowley's s uccessors and heirs in the OTO deal with it? 1793 Then too, what are we to make of and infer about all this busi ness of a popular Thelemic-Gnostic religion? Were Crowley, Parsons, Gardner and others trying to do something of note with regard to actualizing a New Aeon here which bears scrutiny? Or is this mere speculation, and of little significance for the Great Work today? If the Charter Crowley issued Gardner is, indeed, the author ity upon which Wicca has been built for half a century, then it is perhaps no coin cidence that I acquired that Charter in the same year I was consecrated a B ishop of the Gnostic Catholic Church. Further, it was literally days after my long search for the original of Gardner's BOOK OF SHADOWS ended in success that t he Holy Synod of T Michael Bertiaux's Gnostic Church unanimously elected me a Mi ssionary Bishop, on August 29, 1986. Sometimes, I muse, the Inner Order revoked Wicca's charter i n 1986,placing it in my hands. Since I hold it in trust for the OTO, perhaps Wicc a has, in symbolic form, returned home at last. It remains for the Wiccans to, literally (since the charter hangs in my temple space), to read the handwriting on the wall. " Witchcraft always has a hard time, until it becomes established and changes its name." - Charles Fort
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