Historical Development of Traditional Witchcraft and the Influence of Gerald Gardner

[MorganBlack]

Let me just say I am a black-hearted grim trad magican and I really adore Wiccans.

They are kind and lovely, and throw great parties. I’ve also been thinking a lot about why I adore Wiccans but absolutely loathe the fakelore - specifically because of the toxic sludge that spawns downstream from them.

Hear me out.

Most people don’t realize that the modern magic and pagan revival movements are about 90% English-centric. This creates a huge blind spot for many people who have English as a second language, and so they often take this pagan fakelore at face value, without the historical skepticism we (hopefully) apply to it now.

Modern Wicca and its offshoots originated mostly in 19th-century British academic speculation. As I mentioned above academics like Margaret Murray and James Frazer dreamed up this idea of an "unbroken ancient witch-cult" that survived the Middle Ages. It was romantic, super edge-lord , and it was almost entirely made up. This narrative only really fell apart under serious historical scrutiny in the late 1990s (shoutout to Ronald Hutton for doing the heavy lifting there).

The problem is that while Wicca in the West usually stayed in the realm of feminism and environmentalism (all good, imho) , it spawned similar low-information pagan revivalist movements in other parts of the world that were daker, and very ugly.

Ukraine, for one example. There you have Neo-Nazi pagan factions who have completely weaponized this "ancestral purity" narrative. They view the Orthodox Church not just as a religion, but as an "alien incursion" into a "pure-blooded" Ukraine. We’re talking about pagan religius extremists who have actually burned down historic Orthodox churches because they see Christianity as a "foreign virus" that suppressed their "true" warrior spirit.

Many practitioners are peaceful (I think) but the movement in Ukraine was heavily influenced by Lev Sylenko and Volodymyr Shaian, who framed Christianity as a "Jewish yoke" or a foreign "blood-poisoning" infleunce.

Look, I'm all for whatever mytic worldview people want to use in their own magical pratice, but there's a documented history of radical, so-called "Native Faith" groups in Eastern Europe committing arson against Orthodox wooden churches, viewing them as symbols of "spiritual colonization."

It’s a classic case of a "romantic lie" exported from the West being used as a biological weapon of identity in the East. When you strip away the historical context and replace it with forged texts (like the Book of Veles) and "blood and soil" rhetoric, then "harmless" pgan fakelore becomes a tools for hate and arson.

I’m all for personal spirituality, but we have to call out the Wiccante pipeline where bad history meets radical nationalism.

See also Diabolist Witch Slop for how low-information hot takes get weaponized at the level of neighborhood poitics and opportunism . Diabolist Witch-Slop City

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 5:44 PM

Just to add here.

" RE: Lev Sylenko and Volodymyr Shaian, and other right-wing pagan nationalists who frame Christianity as a "Jewish yoke" - that's also an uneducated hot take. Christianity was actually a Hellenic influence, but this is a huge topic that there is not space for here. Just mentioning this as one example how low-information fakelore puts long-term blinders on people.

 

[L’chaimGoldberg]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE tell me you’ve discovered some material about Caucasian magical practices!!!! . I’ve been looking for years for some threads to pull on for my Baltic and Cossack heritage. DM if you want. 🫶

 

[Ben Gruagach]

... British witchcraft has very little to do with Gardener and the New Forest Coven and the supposed ancient wiccan pagan witch-cults were completely made up to give his new religion more credibility.

I agree that pre-Gardner witchcraft was not at all the way Gardner (or Margaret Murray) presented it, as some sort of pre-Christian intact universal religion. Everything I've read, and I've read a lot, indicates that it was pretty much eclectic do-it-yourself folk magic. Some learned a trick or two from someone else in person (like from parent to child) but it was never as formal as an initiation or as workable as a system. Which is why Gardner said what he'd supposedly stumbled on was so fragmentary that he felt the need to supplement it to the point I think Wicca is 90 to 98 percent "supplemented stuff" and only 2% or if we're really generous 10% material he learned from his New Forest contacts.

With regard to "traditional witchcraft" we have the additional problem that there are groups and individual practitioners today who use that label for themselves who, to be honest, are no more traditional than Gardnerian Wicca. They borrowed material just like Gardner did, and put together their own systems just like Gardner did, and often lied or presented half-truths just like Gardner did to give their version of witchcraft that much-desired credibility. Robert Cochrane did that, as did Alexander Sanders (although Sanders called his stuff "Wicca" too, and did have a sort of roundabout formal initiation from a Gardnerian initiate), as did many others like Sybil Leek and "Lady Sheba" in the USA.

Michael Howard's books "Children of Cain" (about British "traditional witchcraft" groups) and "Modern Wicca" (about Gardner's Wicca) are interesting reads on the topic. In "Modern Wicca" Howard admits to his own role in getting "Lady Sheba" on her road to Wiccan fame.