WICCA AND THE CHRISTIAN HERITAGE What is Wicca? Is it witchcraft or Paganism? Occultism or esotericism? Are Wiccans witches? Since it was fi rst publicised in 1954 by Gerald Gardner, Wicca has been associated with magic, spirituality, mysticism, nature religions, secrecy, gnosis, the exotic and the Other. Over the past thirty years, anthropologists, sociologists and historians have defi ned and explored Wicca within all these contexts, but there has been a tendency to sublimate and negate the role of Christianity in Wicca’s historical and contemporary incarnations. Joanne Pearson ‘prowls the borderlands of Christianity’ to uncover the untold history of Wicca. She argues that Christian traditions are inherent in the development of contemporary Wicca, and makes a groundbreaking analysis of Wicca’s relationship with Christianity. Focusing on the accusations which have been levelled against Catholicism, heterodoxy and witchcraft throughout history, Pearson explores the importance of ritual, deviant sexuality and magic in Christian and Wiccan contexts, and addresses the problematic nature of the Wiccan claim of marginality. Joanne Pearson, a scholar of contemporary Wicca and its history, is author of A Popular Dictionary of Paganism (Routledge, 2002) and editor of Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World (1998) and Belief Beyond Boundaries: Wicca, Celtic Spirituality and the New Age (2002). WICCA AND THE CHRISTIAN HERITAGE Ritual, sex and magic Joanne Pearson First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2007 Joanne Pearson This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pearson, Joanne. Wicca and the Christian heritage : ritual, sex, and magic / Joanne Pearson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Witchcraft–History. 2. Neopaganism–Relations–Christianity. 3. Christianity and other religions–Neopaganism. I. Title. BF1566.P43 2007 299´.94–dc22 2006034909 ISBN 0-203-96198-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–25413–2 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–25414–0 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–96198–6 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–25413–7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–25414–4 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–96198–8 (ebk) Shall I give up the friend I have valued and tried, If he kneel not before the same altar with me? From the heretic girl of my soul should I fl y, To seek somewhere else a more orthodox kiss? No! perish the hearts, and the laws that try Truth, valour, or love, by a standard like this! Come, Send Round the Wine Thomas Moore (1779–1852) CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction 1 1 England’s ‘old religions’ 11 2 Episcopi vagantes and heterodox Christianity 27 3 Churches gnostic and agnostic 43 4 Rediscovering ritual 59 5 Sex and the sacred 77 6 The magic of the margins 94 Afterword: the Christian heritage? 112 Notes 114 Bibliography 151 Index 169 vii PREFACE Over the past thirty years Wicca has been explored by scholars in a variety of fi elds. Anthropologists have found within it fertile ground for a new investigation of magic, a subject which has appeared in anthropological literature since its beginnings as a discipline,1 and Wicca has appeared in the ethnographies of Paganism which have emerged in the last decade.2 Historians have regarded it as an ‘undiscovered country’, a religion or spirituality with little knowledge of its own origins and thus ripe for investigation.3 Sociologists have categorised it in terms of earlier studies of occult deviance,4 or have regarded it as a signifi er of closure in the late/high modernism- postmodernism debate.5 The present book is primarily a work of cultural and religious history. This is partly as a result of assessing the literature on Wicca produced over the past twelve years, and partly as a consequence of looking back at my own contribution to that literature. In the former, I detected a distinct tendency to sublimate or otherwise negate the role of Christianity in the historical and contemporary contexts of Wicca.6 In the latter, I recognised traces of an interest in the various contributions to Wicca that might be accredited to Christianity. The present study thus had a long gestation period, which with hindsight I am now able to recognise. My fi rst academic conference was also one that I organised – Nature Religion Today, hosted by Lancaster University at their Ambleside centre in April 1996. Here, the Christian theologian Linda Woodhead presented a paper in which she outlined an argument suggesting that Wicca was not a new religion, but a new reformation. Also present was the Wiccan priestess and scholar Vivianne Crowley, who delivered a paper on Wicca as Nature Religion. In this paper, she discussed the attraction of Wicca, speculating ‘that Wicca’s emphasis on the feminine in the form of the Goddess and its use of ritual might be more novel and therefore attractive features to those of a Protestant background’ (Crowley, 1998: 171). In the process of editing the book that emerged from the conference, I was reminded of this again and became increasingly convinced that there might be something in it. Possibly this was because my own religious upbringing had been within a Methodist church which seemed to me to be devoid of any ritual. At the same time, however, I was receiving responses to a questionnaire I had circulated ix PREFACE in 1995 and 1996, which seemed to suggest that it was not just my own personal feelings and that there could be some truth in Crowley’s assertion. Aside from the early modern association of witches with a conspiracy against Christendom, and the identifi cation of ‘Pagan’ as non- or anti-Christian, I was also becoming aware of the prevalence of esoteric and heterodox Christianity among key fi gures in the occult world of late-Victorian England and fi n de siècle France.7 In this world, only Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky seemed virulently anti-Christian, and even in these cases fault was laid at the door of the Church rather than at the foot of the cross. In a paper delivered at the Sociology of Religion conference held at Exeter University in April 2000, I therefore raised questions concerning the relationship between Wicca and Christianity. I had noted the very small number of respondents of Catholic background to my questionnaire, together with the fact that responses from Europe outside Britain arrived from Wiccans in Scandinavia, Germany and the Netherlands rather than Spain, Portugal and Italy,8 and this suggested that Vivianne Crowley’s speculation might be correct. I sought to explore the relationship between Wicca and Christianity in two ways. The fi rst was to outline the location of Wicca in the religious milieu of the late twentieth century, noting the spectrum of Wiccan responses to Christianity, from outright rejection to involvement in interfaith forums. The second was to provide a few examples of the ways in which Christianity and occultism were either combined or considered compatible by members of those magical orders which were infl uential in the development of Wicca. Since it formed only a small part of a much broader paper – later published as a chapter in an edited volume from the conference proceedings in 2003 (Pearson, 2003a) – this exploration was limited to a section of just over a thousand words. It seemed to me, even at the time, to warrant deeper investigation. Processes of de-Christianisation in post-Revolutionary France and Victor- ian Britain have been well documented in scholarly and other literature.9 Likewise, the place of esoteric Christianity in the occult subculture of Britain and France from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries has been included in studies of occultism, witchcraft and Wicca.10 What is left unnoted, however, is the prevalence of practising and lapsed Roman Catholics within this occult subculture, and the latter’s overlap with Anglo-Catholicism and heterodox forms of Christianity. The fi rst omission may well be in keeping with the general tendency in British scholarship to dismiss Roman Catholicism as irrelevant and to ignore its infl uence on the development of modern society. As David Blackbourn has pointed out, the Roman Catholic Church has been consigned to an historiographical ghetto for the past two centuries: [h]istorians in the mainstream have commonly considered Catholicism, if they considered it at all, as a hopelessly obscurantist force at odds with the more serious isms that have shaped the modern age.11 (Blackbourn, 1991: 779) x PREFACE This situation, as he notes, is now changing, with studies being produced which do concern themselves with the interaction between church, culture and society in the years after the French Revolution, and it is of course an essential component of the study of sixteenth-century Europe. However, it is as a result of the ascendancy of Protestantism in England during that century that the impact of Roman Catholicism has tended to be marginalised or ignored.