Post by david on Oct 21, 2020 16:55:18 GMT
Dear friends,
This article was originally published in the Wiccan magazine Silver Wheel, and had to appeal to Wiccan readers.
Professor Hutton's book, The Triumph Of The Moon, seems to have demolished claims about the genuineness of Wicca's traditional origin but Hutton himself allowed an element of doubt about the claims of Gerald Gardner and Godfrey Leland. Probably this was natural caution but when you are looking for something a lot depends on what you are looking for. The Wiccan historical perspective is that after Christianity Paganism survived by means of religious conservatism before being driven underground when it adapted to secrecy. Hutton never looked for evidence of secrecy before Christianity. Of course not! The Pagans were not secret from themselves, were they?
Yes, they were! The Eleusinian Mysteries were secret. Socrates was executed for introducing religious innovations contrary to the customs of the Athenians. Ah, but we know this was not true because Plato says so. Of course he did! He believed the same innovations.
It never occurs to anyone that Plato may have written cryptically but his mystical philosophy is scattered in fragments throughout his writings so that you have to read a lot to learn a little. He was being circumspect. Commentators do not want to admit that Aristophanes' satire on Socrates, The Clouds, was bitter and personal because the play reveals that Socrates worshipped a female deity and did not believe in the Olympian deities. It also ridicules a profound mystical philosophy. The claim that Plato's Symposium reveals a friendship between Socrates and Aristophanes is ridiculous. There is no indication of friendship. The Clouds ends with an incitement to arson. Aristophanes' plays are generally not accurately translated to obscure the object of his hostility. The translators also improve them artistically, livening up the rhythm and sharpening the humour. You have not read Aristophanes unless you have read him in Greek.
We have here a religion that was dangerous to practise and was already organised for secrecy before Christianity. It was mystical and philosophical. We do not know that they practised magic but they had principles that could be applied to magic. Aristophanes' sneer "How can thought draw water to watercress?" suggests some principle of influencing material things without physical means.
Robert Graves declares Plato's philosophy to be patriarchal but that was because it did not confirm his post Freudian beliefs about feminine irrationality. In The Republic Plato wanted to improve the status of women and even thought they could engage in warfare. In The Frogs Aristophanes links Socrates with his principle butt Euripides who wrote the Bacchantes. It seems something of a startler that Plato believed the Bacchante religion but this does not take into account propaganda. The whole point of the play is that Pentheus was prepared to condemn the Bacchantes on the basis of hearsay. Why did he think it necessary to wear women's clothes in order to spy on them when Teiresias intended to join them in men's clothes? People who have the wrong idea of what is going on sometimes become fascinated by the wrong idea and try to apply it. They create a new religion out of a propaganda image and eventually hybrids form between the two. Euripides clearly tried to soften the image of the Bacchantes. He was a subtle writer as anyone writing on an illegal subject would be. What the Bacchantes really did was drive chariots, thought by the Greeks to be a masculine activity. They turned out to be better at fighting than men. Pentheus thought that meant they were turning into men. Dionysos, their male deity, looked effeminate.
A lot of modern Pagans seem to believe that Greek myths can be taken at face value without an attempt to reconstruct them. This is dubious because it means that propaganda images are not questioned.
How do you recover a muddled tradition? It is not so difficult. When I revised for my school maths exams I discovered that if you understand how the formulae are derived you do not need to memorise them. The secret is always to refer back to first principles. Whenever a tradition gets obscured those who can work from first principles can recover the truth. These are the ones who retain the purest teachings and are the ones who will pass it on to the next generation. This is more reliable than research attempting to find myths or folklore to support a theory, especially folklore since they are bound to be influenced by conventional beliefs and have probably been influenced by the beliefs of folklore researchers themselves who have been publishing theories for long enough to create their own folk culture. There is also the influence of formal education which transmits conventional beliefs. Education impresses even in an occult order and educated people vary in the extent of their critical attitudes to their education.
At what point does the Old Religion stop and the New Religion begin? The oldest known city at Catal Huyuk is ten thousand years old. From this perspective Homer is far closer to the modern world than the most ancient and there may be older cities than Catal Huyuk. This city appears to have known only female images. The transition from this state to Christianity could not have been made with a single leap. Within Christianity there have been conflicts and persecutions. This was not just based on intolerance but was largely created by a shift from the veneration of Jesus's mother and from ritual. Even when your observance of a religion is expedient you are bound to be influenced by taking part in its ceremonies and studying its doctrines. You will pick up their attitudes and arguments. A substantial part of the Goddess movement is trying to absorb this veneration and create veneration for Mary Magdalene. Robert Graves believed that Christianity could be a vehicle for the "poetic truths" of the White Goddess. If you imagine this change taking place in phases you will realise that as each phase becomes persecuted it will join the previous phases and merge with them. In addition to this there are always the beliefs outlawed because they are socially disruptive or corrupting. Add to this the effects of political malcontents who want to lead without bothering to understand and you have a hotchpotch of beliefs.
Professor Hutton left some doubt about whether Gerald Gardner and Godfrey Leland were fakers or genuine. A lot depends on what you think most probable. The most curious detail in Gardner's revelations is the flail. There seems to have been a lot of guilt about its use and it was thought to be used only gently. There are flails depicted in ancient Egyptian art held by statues of Osiris and seem to have been emblems of royalty. In a slave economy they would have been indispensable in getting things done but modern people are not likely to like this interpretation. Is it possible that Gardner read about these Egyptian flails and invented a different use for them? Maybe he was weird.
The only aspect of deity capable of cruelty is one that embodies fate but deities of fate in the ancient world do not seem to be associated with flails. It is a meaning that can very easily be forgotten (the priests of Osiris will not have encouraged them to remember) as people lose understanding of the mystical level of symbolism and replace them with material explanations. The claims of Gardner are of a decentralised religion with no supreme authority. If you object to organised religion we have disorganised religion. Such a religion would fragment with branches going off in different ways. You might say that each coven was a religion by itself. They would vary in the sort of people who comprised them. You can imagine someone attending a coven regularly and always asking why there was a flail there and being told "Because there always has been." There would have to be some use for it and without an explanation sooner or later someone would have made one up.
Written records are a breach of security and the orders which used writing the most would be the ones most lax about secrecy which would be the ones most conventional in their beliefs. The making of converts is also a security risk and writing is really necessary for the teaching of converts. They will need complicated things put into texts so that they can take them home to study. If you are afraid to make converts you will concentrate on teaching your children so the order will become family orientated. People brought up in a family order do not need written teachings.
A religion like this would only convert people who were naturally secretive and secrecy would become part of the religion. They would enjoy doing things in subtle and secretive ways and lose the ability to be direct. They would preserve secrecy long after it was necessary to do so and be always looking for subtle ways to spread influence, such as joining other religions. A possible reason that Gardner was disappointed by the lack of others coming out in support of his revelation was firstly that he was considered heretic and secondly that everybody else was enjoying continued subtlety (Alex Sanders not included) and secret machinations.
Wiccans are not the only ones claiming to have a secret hereditary tradition. In 1973 Lux Madriana began claiming to do so until 1984 when they disappeared. An interesting feature of their religion is that they regarded writing as the result of spiritual degeneration and believed all teaching should be oral and based on memorisation. The religion included a lot of eccentricities such as the wearing of headveils and ankle length dresses and claimed they were able to keep secrecy nonetheless. It did not seem consistent with their claims for an Amazon tradition and some of their principles did not stand up to careful examination but it now seems that it was their intention to grow slowly and deliberately put into their teachings principles that would put people off. It makes it difficult to know what it was they really believed, but they did have an enthusiasm for secrets.
The followers of Gerald Gardner and his opponents only considered whether his claims were true or false. They did not consider other possibilities.
May She be with you,
David.
This article was originally published in the Wiccan magazine Silver Wheel, and had to appeal to Wiccan readers.
Professor Hutton's book, The Triumph Of The Moon, seems to have demolished claims about the genuineness of Wicca's traditional origin but Hutton himself allowed an element of doubt about the claims of Gerald Gardner and Godfrey Leland. Probably this was natural caution but when you are looking for something a lot depends on what you are looking for. The Wiccan historical perspective is that after Christianity Paganism survived by means of religious conservatism before being driven underground when it adapted to secrecy. Hutton never looked for evidence of secrecy before Christianity. Of course not! The Pagans were not secret from themselves, were they?
Yes, they were! The Eleusinian Mysteries were secret. Socrates was executed for introducing religious innovations contrary to the customs of the Athenians. Ah, but we know this was not true because Plato says so. Of course he did! He believed the same innovations.
It never occurs to anyone that Plato may have written cryptically but his mystical philosophy is scattered in fragments throughout his writings so that you have to read a lot to learn a little. He was being circumspect. Commentators do not want to admit that Aristophanes' satire on Socrates, The Clouds, was bitter and personal because the play reveals that Socrates worshipped a female deity and did not believe in the Olympian deities. It also ridicules a profound mystical philosophy. The claim that Plato's Symposium reveals a friendship between Socrates and Aristophanes is ridiculous. There is no indication of friendship. The Clouds ends with an incitement to arson. Aristophanes' plays are generally not accurately translated to obscure the object of his hostility. The translators also improve them artistically, livening up the rhythm and sharpening the humour. You have not read Aristophanes unless you have read him in Greek.
We have here a religion that was dangerous to practise and was already organised for secrecy before Christianity. It was mystical and philosophical. We do not know that they practised magic but they had principles that could be applied to magic. Aristophanes' sneer "How can thought draw water to watercress?" suggests some principle of influencing material things without physical means.
Robert Graves declares Plato's philosophy to be patriarchal but that was because it did not confirm his post Freudian beliefs about feminine irrationality. In The Republic Plato wanted to improve the status of women and even thought they could engage in warfare. In The Frogs Aristophanes links Socrates with his principle butt Euripides who wrote the Bacchantes. It seems something of a startler that Plato believed the Bacchante religion but this does not take into account propaganda. The whole point of the play is that Pentheus was prepared to condemn the Bacchantes on the basis of hearsay. Why did he think it necessary to wear women's clothes in order to spy on them when Teiresias intended to join them in men's clothes? People who have the wrong idea of what is going on sometimes become fascinated by the wrong idea and try to apply it. They create a new religion out of a propaganda image and eventually hybrids form between the two. Euripides clearly tried to soften the image of the Bacchantes. He was a subtle writer as anyone writing on an illegal subject would be. What the Bacchantes really did was drive chariots, thought by the Greeks to be a masculine activity. They turned out to be better at fighting than men. Pentheus thought that meant they were turning into men. Dionysos, their male deity, looked effeminate.
A lot of modern Pagans seem to believe that Greek myths can be taken at face value without an attempt to reconstruct them. This is dubious because it means that propaganda images are not questioned.
How do you recover a muddled tradition? It is not so difficult. When I revised for my school maths exams I discovered that if you understand how the formulae are derived you do not need to memorise them. The secret is always to refer back to first principles. Whenever a tradition gets obscured those who can work from first principles can recover the truth. These are the ones who retain the purest teachings and are the ones who will pass it on to the next generation. This is more reliable than research attempting to find myths or folklore to support a theory, especially folklore since they are bound to be influenced by conventional beliefs and have probably been influenced by the beliefs of folklore researchers themselves who have been publishing theories for long enough to create their own folk culture. There is also the influence of formal education which transmits conventional beliefs. Education impresses even in an occult order and educated people vary in the extent of their critical attitudes to their education.
At what point does the Old Religion stop and the New Religion begin? The oldest known city at Catal Huyuk is ten thousand years old. From this perspective Homer is far closer to the modern world than the most ancient and there may be older cities than Catal Huyuk. This city appears to have known only female images. The transition from this state to Christianity could not have been made with a single leap. Within Christianity there have been conflicts and persecutions. This was not just based on intolerance but was largely created by a shift from the veneration of Jesus's mother and from ritual. Even when your observance of a religion is expedient you are bound to be influenced by taking part in its ceremonies and studying its doctrines. You will pick up their attitudes and arguments. A substantial part of the Goddess movement is trying to absorb this veneration and create veneration for Mary Magdalene. Robert Graves believed that Christianity could be a vehicle for the "poetic truths" of the White Goddess. If you imagine this change taking place in phases you will realise that as each phase becomes persecuted it will join the previous phases and merge with them. In addition to this there are always the beliefs outlawed because they are socially disruptive or corrupting. Add to this the effects of political malcontents who want to lead without bothering to understand and you have a hotchpotch of beliefs.
Professor Hutton left some doubt about whether Gerald Gardner and Godfrey Leland were fakers or genuine. A lot depends on what you think most probable. The most curious detail in Gardner's revelations is the flail. There seems to have been a lot of guilt about its use and it was thought to be used only gently. There are flails depicted in ancient Egyptian art held by statues of Osiris and seem to have been emblems of royalty. In a slave economy they would have been indispensable in getting things done but modern people are not likely to like this interpretation. Is it possible that Gardner read about these Egyptian flails and invented a different use for them? Maybe he was weird.
The only aspect of deity capable of cruelty is one that embodies fate but deities of fate in the ancient world do not seem to be associated with flails. It is a meaning that can very easily be forgotten (the priests of Osiris will not have encouraged them to remember) as people lose understanding of the mystical level of symbolism and replace them with material explanations. The claims of Gardner are of a decentralised religion with no supreme authority. If you object to organised religion we have disorganised religion. Such a religion would fragment with branches going off in different ways. You might say that each coven was a religion by itself. They would vary in the sort of people who comprised them. You can imagine someone attending a coven regularly and always asking why there was a flail there and being told "Because there always has been." There would have to be some use for it and without an explanation sooner or later someone would have made one up.
Written records are a breach of security and the orders which used writing the most would be the ones most lax about secrecy which would be the ones most conventional in their beliefs. The making of converts is also a security risk and writing is really necessary for the teaching of converts. They will need complicated things put into texts so that they can take them home to study. If you are afraid to make converts you will concentrate on teaching your children so the order will become family orientated. People brought up in a family order do not need written teachings.
A religion like this would only convert people who were naturally secretive and secrecy would become part of the religion. They would enjoy doing things in subtle and secretive ways and lose the ability to be direct. They would preserve secrecy long after it was necessary to do so and be always looking for subtle ways to spread influence, such as joining other religions. A possible reason that Gardner was disappointed by the lack of others coming out in support of his revelation was firstly that he was considered heretic and secondly that everybody else was enjoying continued subtlety (Alex Sanders not included) and secret machinations.
Wiccans are not the only ones claiming to have a secret hereditary tradition. In 1973 Lux Madriana began claiming to do so until 1984 when they disappeared. An interesting feature of their religion is that they regarded writing as the result of spiritual degeneration and believed all teaching should be oral and based on memorisation. The religion included a lot of eccentricities such as the wearing of headveils and ankle length dresses and claimed they were able to keep secrecy nonetheless. It did not seem consistent with their claims for an Amazon tradition and some of their principles did not stand up to careful examination but it now seems that it was their intention to grow slowly and deliberately put into their teachings principles that would put people off. It makes it difficult to know what it was they really believed, but they did have an enthusiasm for secrets.
The followers of Gerald Gardner and his opponents only considered whether his claims were true or false. They did not consider other possibilities.
May She be with you,
David.