Witchcraft:

Ancient Religion of the Primal GODDESS.

A LECTURE GIVEN TO THE CHESTERFIELD ALISTER
HARDY SOCIETY ON NOVEMBER 7th, 2008.
About four years ago I gave my first lecture to this society, setting forth
some unorthodox opinions on the subject of ancient and modern
Witchcraft. Since then, youve had the opportunity of hearing my
thoughts on a number of related topics, including the pre-history of
religions in Britain, Death and my own changing attitude to it, and the
lives of two disreputable people whom I hold in great respect: Rasputin
and Jezebel.
I should like to express my deep gratitude, first to Mike and then to
every one of you who has come to hear my talks and discuss them. It
has been very enjoyable for me, after a lifetimes consideration of these
dark subjects, to have the opportunity of putting my ideas in order and
presenting them to a generally sympathetic group of people. Partly
because in writing these lectures Ive been obliged to crystallize my
opinions; partly because in group discussion a number of fruitful ideas
have been suggested to me; but mainly because you have sat patiently
and listened with interest and respect to ideas that have often been
controversial, and sometimes, perhaps, even shocking.
Nothing lasts for ever, and this series of lectures seems to have
reached a natural point of termination. Apart from anything else, I have
to devote a year or so to my fiction. Tonight Im going to look back
over the last four years: summarize the main ideas developed in my
lectures, and explore some of their implications.

OUT OF THE BROOM-CLOSET.

The first time I came here we watched a video about the witch-hunts in
16th-century Scotland; and a Unitarian lady expressed her disgust that
any modern people might want to identify themselves as Witches.
 To tell the truth I wasnt then in the habit of calling myself a Witch,
partly because it upsets people, but mainly because to most modern
English-speakers the noun is a feminine.
In common parlance, the word for a male practitioner of Witchcraft
is Warlock: it has a common origin with words of a similar meaning in
Scandinavian and East European languages, and may even be a
loanword from some pre-Aryan speech, so I would have been happy
with that; but for some reason many modern pagans dislike the word
intensely and tend to look down on people who use it rather like black
people and the N-word. So I used to settle for the vaguer designation
pagan, or Goddess-worshipper. But of course the name of Witch was in the
Middle Ages applied to men as well as women, and people whom I
respect have tried to reclaim it as a gender-free word. The first
biography of the founder of Modern Witchcraft was memorably entitled
Gerald Gardner: Witch.
So hearing that Unitarian lady dissing the Witches made me very
conscious that I was one of the people of whom she disapproved; and
that impelled me to out myself and try to explain some of the truth
about Witchcraft, as I saw it, to the group. Because I enjoyed talking
about this subject, and some people seemed interested, I went on to
write my first lecture:

WITCHCRAFT: ANCIENT & MODERN.

In this lecture I took a very wide view of Witchcraft in the ancient and
modern world, looking at the similar beliefs which could be found in
such diverse places as West Africa, Aztec Mexico, and the ancient
Roman Empire.
The belief that has been most important historically is that witches
can use vaguely-conceived-of supernatural powers to put hexes on their
enemies; hence those accused of witchcraft have often been held
responsible for unexpected misfortunes, and horribly mistreated as a
result. There can be no doubt that many, if not all, of the people
executed on such charges were completely innocent; but priests,

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shamans, and doctors have often found it useful to have someone to
blame when things went wrong. This aspect of witchcraft beliefs has
been most extensively discussed, but it isnt really where my interest lies.
If real Witches ever did curse anyone, I expect the effectiveness of
their curses would have been mainly down to the power of suggestion
or maybe, sometimes, to poisoning, since witches were generally
supposed to know about herbs. No doubt these processes would
sometimes work, and sometimes not; and people, being people, would
tend to remember the times that they did. But in any case, the number
of Witches who ever did this kind of thing must have been a tiny
fraction of the number of innocent people who were executed for the
offence.
So much of the Witchcraft belief one can understand the priests and
shamans inventing: it was often useful for them to have someone to
blame when things went badly wrong and supposedly righteous people
suffered. But why would the priests and shamans invent all the other
beliefs about Witches? For example, that they met secretly by night to
perform transgressive rites: chanting, dancing naked (or nearly so),
feasting on forbidden foods, having group sex, and adoring a Great
Goddess of Nature, called in Africa Ayibarau, in Mexico Tlazolteotl, and
in Europe Diana, Hekate, Freyja, Erodia, Hel, and many other names. And
yet across the continents and over the millennia we hear the same
stories. I compared these beliefs about Witches meetings with the very
similar and well-documented practices of the secretive cult of Left-Hand
Shakta Tantra, which is widely considered to be a form of Witchcraft in
India, and suggested that Witchcraft had been a real, and widespread,
ancient cult, which has to this day survived in India under the name of
Shakta Tantra.
An important question here is whether any such rites have ever
actually been celebrated, or if they are just parts of a widespread cultural
fantasy of otherness. Most modern academics would take the latter
view.

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 In India, however, it seems quite certain that some Tantrics have
really done the transgressive things theyre supposed to do though not,
of course, the impossible things! No Tantric can ever have flown
through the air to a meeting, but many do seem to have eaten human
flesh or taken part in orgies when they got there, for example. The
Tantrics were actually carrying out such transgressive rituals as late as the
last century, and probably are doing so still.
And though Witches in most pagan communities have been
persecuted nearly as energetically as they have been in Christendom, still
one hears anecdotes, some of them told by professional anthropologists,
from Africa, Asia, and America, which make it seem likely that here and
there, in out-of-the-way places, a few people have until quite lately been
stealing off to witch-meetings, keeping their attendance a closely-
guarded secret. As late as the 20th century, Professor Mayer saw what
looked like the fires of dancing Witches in the lands of the Gusii, as did
Evans-Pritchard among the Azande. Of course in scientific circles such
anecdotes dont count for much; but when youre researching a secret
cult, sometimes theyre the best evidence youre likely to get.
Something which also counts for little in the world of scholarship,
but which is still very powerful for me, is the indubitable fact that when
I read stories of Witches who lived long ago and far away, the stories
make sense to me: my deepest, strongest intuition tells me that these
people were my people, and their Goddess was my Goddess.
I discount absolutely the tales of magic and all the supernatural stuff
that people have imagined about Witches: no Witch ever turned herself
into a bird and flew through the night sky, except in her imagination!
Probably some people got the wrong idea about Witchcraft through
hearing Witches talk about what modern Witches call pathworking
experiences, or shamanic journeys. These are vivid daydreams,
sometimes chemically induced, in which all kinds of dreamlike things
can happen, such as flying through the air, changing into an animal or a
bird, talking with the dead and travelling to places distant in space and
time. If an outsider had taken tales of such things literally, he would

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have concluded that the powers of these Witches were awesome indeed.
And when whimsical storytellers took up the theme all kinds of fantastic
inventions were added, like the Greek story that Witches used to call the
Moon down from the sky, or the West African belief that they could
remove their heads and put them back on again, and often did so at their
meetings!
My lecture suggested that real Witches probably healed the sick, or at
least tried to, using sometimes herbs and sometimes forms of faith-
healing that looked rather like magic. We dont know their success-rate,
but I cant imagine it was anything like as good as that of modern
medicine. Still, people would tend to remember the impressive cures and
think of these well-meaning folk-healers as powerful miracle-workers.
But the stories of Witches meeting in a secluded place at night,
dancing naked, feasting and having sex as the worship of an ambivalent
Goddess, at once beautiful and terrifying: these strike me as much more
credible and more interesting than the supernatural tales. Witches have
been said to meet like this in many distant lands, from Africa to Mexico
and Europe, of course. In India, Tantric practitioners still did so until
quite recently, and they can tell us why: the aim is to induce ego-loss and
mystical experience. Theirs is a hedonistic mysticism based on pleasure,
rather than asceticism; and their Goddess is an awesome personification
of Nature, with a thousand beautiful names, of which perhaps the best-
beloved is Kali.
A common image of Kali shows her dancing naked in a cremation-
ground, holding the severed head of a dead white male. For Tantrics this
symbolizes surrender of the ego to the Goddess and merging with her
Cosmic Dance. I showed how this image helped to explain a common
name of the Witches Goddess in Europe: Herodias, corrupted into
Erodia, Aradia, Arada, Arozza, and other forms; since to medival people
Herodias was the name of the graceful, ruthless dancing-girl whom we
call Salome. (I was wrong, however, to attribute this to a mistake in the
Latin version of the Bible: apparently the ambiguitys in the original
Greek.) I supposed that Early Medival Witches, exposed to Christian

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teaching, recognized their Goddess in the gospel tale, and joyfully learnt
a new name for their Kali-like Mistress, whom they already knew under
such names as Diana and Hekate. A single surviving ancient text tells us
that Mesopotamian Witches prayed to Ishtar, who is recognizably the
same figure as her counterparts in Europe and India, at once beautiful
and terrible, the giver of both life and death. Precisely the same
description fits the Aztec Goddess Tlazolteotl, worshipped in gatherings
of naked Witches in pre-Columbian Mexico; or indeed the African
Ayibarau, She who Generates and Destroys.
As yet I offered no theory on the origins of the Witch-cult, merely
observing that, from its distribution, it seemed likely to be very old.
In the course of researching my next lecture I would discover some
information tending to confirm these views.

RASPUTIN: A WITCHS VIEW.

This lecture was about a man whose personal charm had affected me as
it affected many of his contemporaries, and from whose name it was my
intention to remove a little mud. Rasputin wasnt a plaster saint, but he
really was a much nicer man than most people think, and if anyone who
wasnt here would like to know more about him, then please read my
lecture, or Alex de Jonges biography. Here Im just going to speak of
how my theories about Witchcraft were developed by learning about
him.
From that perspective the most interesting thing was that Rasputin
had been involved in practices remarkably similar to those of the Indian
Tantrics. This is generally supposed to have been due to his
membership of an underground sect called the Khlysty, a secret society
organized in groups like covens, each with male and female leaders who
in their rites incarnated respectively Christ and his Divine Mother.
Khlysty group-meetings were remarkably like the fabled rites of
Witchcraft, with naked circle-dancing, repetitive chanting, the adoration
of a naked woman as the Divine Mother made manifest, and a
voluptuous feast often succeeded by a promiscuous orgy. Of the rites of

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witchcraft the Khlysty lacked only goat-sacrifice, as they were strict
vegetarians. Russian writers often say loosely that the Khlysty were an
old pagan cult, superficially Christianized. I suggested a more precise
origin: that the cult in question was Witchcraft. According to my theory
the Divine Mother of the Khlysty was the ancient Goddess of the
Witches, under a new name; and their Christ was a newcomer whose
presence was due to the influence of Christianity. Some might prefer to
believe that he was the survival of a pre-Christian phallic god, an ancient
husband of the Goddess, like Shiva, Frey, or Tyrian Baal, concealed
under a new name. The evidence will, I think, support either
interpretation; and perhaps the very phallic nature of the Khlysty Christ
might be thought to favour the second view.
One of Rasputins power-raising practices would assume some
importance in my later work: he sometimes got women to stand naked
while he gazed at them not as a preliminary to sex but as an end in
itself and we have his own account of what he did then, mentally
shifting the sexual energy up his spine, through his heart and up to his
head. This sounds remarkably Tantric. I suggested that he was doing
something similar to what Khlysty are known to have done in their
meetings, when their female leader stands naked to be worshipped as the
incarnation of the Divine Mother: that Rasputin was adoring the
Goddess in the particular form of the woman before him. I suggested
that sex was also an act of worship for him, and that bringing his partner
to orgasm was at the heart of it: his service to the Goddess in this
womans body. Since writing the lecture Ive found, in Alex de Jonges
book, a first-hand account of sex with Rasputin that rather bears out my
idea about the orgasm.
Another interesting thing about Rasputin is that, like other Khlysty,
he healed the sick, and indeed believed that his religious experiences
empowered him to do so. When his techniques were observed
scientifically they were seen to be basically very similar to those of
modern hypnosis. If it be granted that the Khlysty are a survival of the
ancient Witch-cult, then it seems very likely that these techniques of

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Rasputins were derived from those of the ancient Witches; and if
Witches had ancient knowledge of hypnosis, that would, of course,
explain a lot of the stories about their supposedly supernatural powers.
Just as interesting is the other part of this: that after his religious
ecstasies Rasputin felt not only empowered but obliged to pass the love
along by healing and otherwise helping people: his experiences had left
him acutely sensitive to the sufferings of others. This might help to
explain the hitherto obscure connexion between Witchcraft as a
transgressive mysticism and Witchcraft as a practice of folk-healing.
Readers of The Journal of George Fox may recall a passage in which, after a
spiritual ecstasy, Fox felt driven to become a physician to help the poor
and suffering; and how he felt certain of a god-given intuition telling him
of the healing powers of various herbs when he looked at them. Its easy
to imagine ancient Witches having similar religious experiences and
taking up healing practices as a consequence; and thus coming into
competition with shamans, medicine-men, priests, and doctors, with
predictable consequences.
So a picture was coming together of what the ancient Witch-cult had
actually been like. I had shown you a picture of the beliefs and practices
of this shadowy, hedonistic, underground religion: its nocturnal
meetings, its transgressive rites, its worship of a graceful, ruthless
Nature-Goddess; and its practitioners, gentle mystics who between
meetings had vivid, chemically-induced, daydreams, and sometimes
attempted to heal the sick using hypnosis or herbalism. This cult had
been widespread across the planet, and seemed likely to be very old: but
how old? As yet I had no answer.

A MATERIALIST LOOKS AT THE GODDESS.

My next lecture, A Witch Looks at Death, was a bit of a change of
direction, being shorter and rather more personal: a kind of spiritual
autobiography, in which I talked about the complicated beliefs that I
used to have about Death and the straight-forward way that I look at it
now, as a born-again Materialist. In this lecture I said about as much as

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Im ever likely to about my own mystical experiences: how the Goddess
appeared to me in 1978, and in 2000, and since. Again, if youre
interested in such things, please read it. What Id like to talk about now
is a thealogical issue that perhaps could stand a bit more explication than
it got in the original lecture: how a Materialist can be a Goddess-
worshipper.
I dont believe in a Creator, or any kind of a supernatural otherworld.
It looks to me as if this unthinkably vast, complicated, and beautiful
universe is the whole shebang! Maybe there are other universes more or
less beautiful than this, and maybe not. In any case, we can never know
any of them except this; and probably this one hospitable place in it, the
Earth, is all of it that most of us will ever know. But we are hardly
missing out: this place is gorgeous, and really interesting, I think. To be
given a chance to spend some time here is quite a privilege!
Often our conscious minds get screwed up, and we cease to take
conscious pleasure or interest in life, but deep down our Unconscious
Mind knows were lucky to be alive: the joy of meditation is that Deep
Knowing welling up into consciousness. Another thing that the Deep
Mind knows is that selfhood is illusory: we are not really separate from
the Cosmic Dance. In mystical states the consciousness knows this too.
In communicating its knowledge to consciousness, the Deep Mind
may use symbols. The Oneness of Everything may be represented in
dreams or visions as a pattern, like a Mandala; as an object, like a Jewel
or the Holy Grail; a living thing, like the Tree of Life; or as a person.
The Goddess is the Oneness of Everything represented as a person: its
easy to equate her with the Jungian concept of the Anima and
interesting to note that on Jungs first meeting with the Anima, during a
pathworking experience, she appeared in the form of Salome.
Though Jung noted that the Anima seemed to be cosmic, he tended
to think of her primarily as a personification of the Unconscious Mind;
and of course she is that too. The thing is that the Unconscious Mind
knows that it is one with the cosmos, so the Anima is both, and cant be
one without being the other. Shes everything. But in her capacity as

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personification of the Unconscious Mind, she is the Voice of
Inspiration, the Muse; the Inner Teacher, Sophia. She gives me songs,
and paintings, and stories: ideas for worship, and ideas for talks like this.
One of her most precious gifts is the Form in which she appears to me.
Its not my creation, but hers.
Now if I wanted Goddess-worship to be the universal religion, the
way that some Muslims want Islam to be, I should have to find
arguments why personifying the Oneness of Everything or the Deep
Mind as a Goddess makes more sense than using any other symbol, or
none at all. But I dont. I cant presume to dictate the forms of other
peoples religious experiences. Saint Paul, for example, and the author of
the Bhagavad-Gita, seem to have experienced the Oneness in masculine
guise, as Christ or Krishna, and I suppose that must have been the right
Form for them at that time perhaps the only one their conscious
minds could accept. Of course, theyve mixed some uninspired ideas of
their own into their writings, but on the whole the genuineness of their
experiences is evident; and so I have to say that the One who appeared
to me as the Goddess appeared to them as a god. And what the Chinese
sages say of the Dao sounds to me like the Goddess in an abstract form.
Goddess-worship is clearly not the only way to find enlightenment,
but it is an ancient mystical path which has been widespread in time and
space; and its a form of spirituality that still seems to come naturally to
quite a lot of people. When I read accounts of other Goddess-
worshippers experiences, both ancient and modern, from Apuleius
through Ramakrishna to Starhawk and Vicki Noble, I cant doubt that
theyve had essentially the same experience as I did. Many human beings
just seem to be wired for this path and maybe most of us are, on
account of our having had mothers.
For centuries the path of the Goddess has been tabooed and ridiculed
in our culture; now it is again becoming respectable, and I hope that
these lectures may have contributed to that process in a small way.

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 PAGANISM IN BRITAIN.
In my next three lectures I tried to do a very difficult thing, for which it
was necessary to draw on a lifetimes learning and reflection: to tell the
whole story of pre-Christian religions in these islands from earliest times
to the present day.
As I said in the lectures, there are fashions in ideas as there are in
other things: some of the interpretations of prehistory which were
generally accepted fifty or a hundred years ago have fallen from favour
in modern academia, not because they have been disproved but simply
because other ideas have become fashionable. Professor Hutton quotes
the jibe of a modern academic about a colleague: He still believes in the
Beaker People; which is to say, he believes in the arrival of substantial
numbers of armed invaders from Continental Europe in the mid-third
millennium B.C.E. There is much evidence some of it recent in
favour of this unfashionable theory, and none that disproves it; yet it has
become, for the moment, something almost unsayable.
Perhaps this is because of the obnoxious use that Nazis and other
right-wingers have made of such ideas. Yet just because Hitler was
inspired by the notion of the primitive Aryans as warlike conquerors
spreading across Europe doesnt mean they werent really like that.
Mussolini was inspired by the Romans, after all and they were certainly
like that!
As an outsider to Academe, I am, thankfully, not bound to follow its
cultural fashions. I too believe in the Beaker People; I also believe, for
example, with the prehistorians of fifty or a hundred years ago, that the
earlier Neolithic, the age of the first farmers, was characterized by the
worship of a Great Nature-Goddess. That really does seem to me the
most plausible interpretation of the archological evidence, while all the
objections of more skeptical modern scholars amount to no more than
We cant be certain. Indeed we cant: in the absence of written evidence,
and the lamentable non-existence of H. G. Wellss Time Machine, the
best we can hope for is rational and well-informed speculation. I think

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many of the old prehistorians gave their readers that; and you got the
same in my lecture. If anyone would like to study my arguments, please
read the whole thing: here I can only hope to summarize the chief
conclusions.
My lecture began with an examination of Britain as the Romans found
it. The evidence from this period of British Paganism is about as good
as it gets. From the scanty records I conjured up the picture of a land of
little kingdoms ruled by a warlike Aryan warrior-aristocracy and their
priesthood, the Druids; where the mass of the people were peasants and
slaves, of non-Aryan origin these being the descendants of the islands
original, Stone Age population, subjugated by the Aryans in relatively
recent times. In lots of ways this society looks a lot like that of ancient
India; and the resemblance is equally striking when we consider religion.
In both cases, ones first impression is of an extraordinary multiplicity
of deities, but on closer inspection most of the gods come to look like
aspects of a single archetype, and so do the Goddesses.
The archetypal god was much like the Biblical Jehovah although he
usually had a penis and often a wife, as indeed did Jehovah in early
times. He was a warrior and a protector of his chosen tribe, associated
with the sky and the weather; but also had the role of fertility god, and
husband of the local Goddess.
She looks like a personification of the Earth and Nature, shown
bearing symbols of fertility. Sometimes she is represented naked;
sometimes in triple form, as the Matres, or (once) as the Three Witches.
I am skeptical about Robert Gravess suggestion that such divine
triptychs represent the Goddess as Mother, Maiden and Crone: the
images are never labelled or described as such, and generally the three
faces look much alike. My intuition tells me that three is just a symbolic
way of saying many, and the images thus represent the Goddess as being
at once One and Many, like the Goddess of the Witches in the later
Roman Empire: Diana, who could appear both as a single person and as
a host of Nature-spirits, the Dian.

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 THE DAWN OF RELIGION.
In the second part of the lecture we went further back and looked at the
evidence for the development of religious beliefs and practices here
from the Old Stone Age down to the time of the Celts.
We saw that there is no evidence for religion anywhere until about
30,000 years ago. Neanderthals and their rather ape-like predecessors
may have had mystical experiences, but if they did they probably just
enjoyed them while they lasted and went on playing the game of life;
which is quite a sensible thing to do in the circumstances. I dont think
they can have had any religious beliefs as yet, because one would need
quite a sophisticated language to have such ideas, and their speech was
probably rudimentary. Our own ancestors, the Cro-Magnons, were the
first to leave any evidence of art or religion.
The most characteristic object from the human races first explosion
of artistic creativity, starting around 30,000 BCE, is the Venus figurine: a
small, portable statuette in the form of a naked woman, of child-bearing
age, often with her sexual characteristics exaggerated. There are loads of
these things, found from Western Europe to Siberia, and even in the
New World; with quite a variety of body-types, but generally with an
arresting sexiness, of the kind that draws a mans attention. The purpose
of these objects is much debated: some say they are religious; some, that
theyre pornographic.
Pondering this question, I thought of Rasputin kneeling before a
naked woman and gazing on her beauty, not as a preparation for sex but
as part of his rather Tantric spiritual practices; thought of the Khlysty
and the Witches adoring the naked bodies of their priestesses; and of the
troubadour who wrote: Lady, I think I see God when I gaze on your naked
form. In India, of course, the practice of woman-worship is common
among the Tantrics. My own experience is that the body of a naked
woman makes a marvellous focus for meditation; and a small, stylized

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representation can be just as effective as the real thing. Gazed on with
devotion, it can become radiant with divinity.
My intuition tells me that the Venuses were used in this way; and that
while at first they were made and used just for the effect they produced,
and no one spoke of them as representing anything, in the course of
time the idea that they represented the Goddess became current; and by
the Goddess, then as now, people meant the Whole Shebang, Mother
Nature, She that Is because thats the One whom they had
encountered in their meditation. In Jungian terms, I suppose, one might
say that men used these figurines for Anima Projection. But I think
women would have made and used them too, just as modern female
Witches do. The naked female form is a very powerful attention-
grabbing image for most people, irrespective of sex, which is partly why
the Tantrics say it is the best of Yantras.
I had wondered about a common origin for the Witches sabbat, the
radniye of the Khlysty, and the chakrapuja of the Indians: such an
origin would have to be way back in prehistory; and the nature of the
rites themselves suggested that they might easily have occurred to people
at a very date. So this is my educated guess: that for tens of millennia
people had been doing such things, when they could. The attractions of
a party, singing, dancing, food and sex, are obvious and perennial. I
suggested that such meetings were first held for purely hedonistic
reasons. When ecstatic revellers reported spontaneous mystical
experiences of losing their egos and merging with the Oneness the
meeting could be said to have become religious; yet it would never cease
to be a great, wild party, since through pleasure it was that these early
people induced religious ecstasy.
So by this theory, the roots of Witchcraft go back to the Ice Age, and
perhaps long before: it is the oldest human religion, and the Venus
figurines are ikons of its Goddess.
Such figurines continued to be produced in the next era of human
development, the early Neolithic.

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 THE GREAT GODDESS OF THE NEOLITHIC.
As I said, until fairly recently the received opinion in Academia was that
right across Europe and Asia this period had been characterized by the
worship of a Great Goddess of Nature. Such is the obvious
interpretation of the art of the first farmers: their Venus-figurines, rock-
carvings, and their womb-like tomb-temples. Modern skeptics, like
Professor Hutton, have merely pointed out that this is an interpretation
and not a known fact; and of course they are right. We have no writings,
and no time machine, so interpretations are all weve got. But such
theories can still be judged on their inherent plausibility and their
correspondence to the evidence; and by those criteria this interpretation
still seems to me most likely to be correct.
Of course modern Goddess-worshippers are mostly of my opinion in
this matter; and from many of them one hears eulogies of this distant
period as a Golden Age of peace and equality, when priestesses used
magical powers to do wondrous things. This is not entirely unjustified:
the archological record does seem to tell of a time when warfare was
much rarer than it would become in later periods; and the people of the
Early Neolithic dont seem to have been divided into haves and have-nots.
Everyone lived much alike, and fairly simply. The idea of the magical
priestesses has this much truth in it: that the techniques of later
Witchcraft, herbalism and hypnosis, would have been all that people had
in the way of healing techniques back then, and I suppose some of their
priestesses would have been as effective as Rasputin was. But we
shouldnt get carried away: skeletons of this period show that people
worked hard, died young, and suffered from a variety of unpleasant
ailments. Life was tough, and given the choice Id sooner live now.
But whats interesting to me is this: that throughout the later history
of these islands we find a warrior-aristocracy and their tame priesthood
lording it over a mass of oppressed and over-worked peasants; while
back in the Early Neolithic we see the peasants when they had no
masters, but were running the place themselves. Free peasants! It looks
as if they lived in small clans, recognizing no authority higher than that

15
of their own, quasi-parental, clan-leader; but got together with the
people of neighbouring clans for periodic festivals. By my interpretation
they worshipped a Great Goddess of Nature, perhaps hypostasized as
Mother and Daughter, like Demeter and Persephone. My interpretation
of their mortuary customs is that they didnt believe in an afterlife, but
celebrated Death as a necessary part of the process of Life. Theirs was a
Goddess of Nature, and their religion was a very this-worldly one,
concerned with pleasure and prosperity here on Earth. This is
recognizably the same Goddess-worship that we observed in Celtic
Britain; I cant doubt that we are dealing here with the same cult, passed
on among the peasantry for countless generations.
By Celtic times, though, the Goddess seems to have fragmented into
many local forms, and was often worshipped alongside a Jehovah-like
god of whom there is no trace in the Early Neolithic. How did these
changes come about?

THE COMING OF THE SKY-GOD.

The big change came here about 3,000 B.C.E.; but it was only part of a
wider wave of religious change sweeping through Europe and indeed the
rest of the world, from an origin somewhere (I believe) in Central Asia.
The older prehistorians, and many modern feminist writers, associate
this change with the arrival of armed invaders imposing a new religion
by force. Here, at least, the archological record indicates that the idea
came before the invaders did: about 500 years before, in fact.
Philologists have endeavoured to reconstruct the primitive religion of
the Aryan people at around this very time, and since the Aryans were
fairly close to the centre of the new ideas dispersal, their reconstructions
probably give us a glimpse of its primitive form.
It was, of course, the worship of the sky-god: the first thing in
prehistory that looks anything like the modern idea of a religion, with a
transcendent deity, commandments, and an afterlife (for some).
Archology shows us that the new faith came as part of a package with
social hierarchy, the subjugation of women, and wars of conquest; and

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later written evidence, such as the Bible and the Vedas, shows us that
these were all things which the sky-god commanded. On purely
Darwinian lines, one can see why such an idea would tend to spread, and
how it would transform the cultures which absorbed it.
Although the Aryan sky-god had a family, mostly consisting of
personifications of striking celestial phenomena, these seem to have
been considered as not really separate entities but just forms of the same
transcendent being, just as the sun and the rainbow might be considered
as particular appearances of the unfathomable entity called sky. This
was God, and he had just been invented.
I didnt consider the origins of the sky-gods cult in my lecture
because the subject was British Paganism, and the sky-god certainly
originated far to the east of here. We have no evidence on the subject;
but if you want my educated guess, at the root of the new religion there
was someone like Muhammad: a charismatic prophet preaching what his
private religious experiences had revealed to him, and gradually winning
the support of a whole society.
I suppose this is the man whom Siberian cultures remember as the
First Shaman, and may be considered not only as the First Prophet but
as the founder of shamanism. The similarity between shamanic
journeying and Witches pathworking suggests to me that the First
Shaman must have had a background in Witchcraft. So we may imagine
him to have been trained in what Jung would call the technique of
Active Imagination, which may well have involved the use of
hallucinogenic drugs. He used this method, however, to get in touch, not
with the Goddess, but with a reflection of his own ego as indeed did
Jung.
Thats what my fancy shows me: a failed Witch gone over to the Light
Side, rejecting the Goddess in favour of an imaginary sky-god who
embodied all his nastier traits. I think of Elijah; of Muhammad; and of
modern gurus like the aptly-named Elijah Muhammad. This unhappily
deluded First Prophet changed the world, as his strange religion was
carried into almost every part of it, often mutating a little on the way.

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 One way in which the religion mutated was that it sometimes
absorbed the local Goddess-cult, by admitting the Goddess (on her best
behaviour) as the new gods wife. Tolerance of the Old Religion was
patchy. In some places it was completely eradicated, as the prophets
tried to eradicate it in Israel; but often, as in India and Greece, the
ancient Goddess was worshipped alongside the new god.
Britain was one of those places, I suggested. In the inner Sarsen circle
at Stonehenge is carved a crude image of her, similar to those in earlier
Breton tombs; facing it across the circle is a carving of daggers and
battle-axes. I suppose that, like Thors Hammer or the sword
worshipped by the Scythians, these were aniconic symbols of the warlike
sky-god. Naturally I was delighted to hear of the recent theory about the
shadow of the Heel Stone phallically penetrating the circle during the
Midsummer sunrise, thus dramatically enacting the marriage of sky-god
and Earth-Goddess. It sounds right to me. But I suppose that all over
Britain, in less spectacular stone circles, the same divine couple was
venerated. Some would naturally favour one above the other of the
divine pair: one may suppose that warriors and priests would be more
drawn to the god, peasants to the Goddess.
It seems likely to me that among these peasants there would persist a
hardcore, old-school version of Goddess-worship, in whose secret
meetings the now-shocking ancient rituals were enacted. The obvious
analogy is with Rasputins Russia, where alongside the socially-
acceptable worship of the Divine Mother in Orthodox churches there
persisted the secret, sexual worship of the Khlysty. In ancient Britain
this ancient religion would only have received the name of Witchcraft
when it went underground: before that it had been just what people did.
Now it became a cult of the shadows, something not to be spoken of
before unsympathetic priests and warriors.
As I showed in a later lecture, there is good evidence of a Goddess-
worshipping Witch-Cult in Britain in the Middle Ages, and reason to
believe that it had survived here since Roman times. I suggest that the
cult which perished in the mid-fourteenth century was the same whose

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beginnings I have traced in the late Neolithic: the Old Religion of the
peasants of this land, who were always the bulk of the population, and
from whom most modern Britons are mostly descended.
About 2,500 B.C.E. we got our first Aryan invasion, in the form of
the controversial Beaker People. They would in time be followed by
others: Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans; and what
were talking about in every case is a relatively small number of warlike
invaders imposing their ways and language on a subject population. The
Beaker People were originally from whats now Hungary, but spread
until theyd subjugated most of Western Europe, from Iberia to
Scandinavia. In this country they took up many elements of the native
culture, including the building of spectacular stone circles. I suppose
they must have intermarried with the native aristocracy, though probably
not so much with the peasants. The upper classes of society would soon
have become Aryan-speaking, and the peasants would have had to learn
a new language to communicate with their betters. Their old language
would tend eventually to be used only in certain contexts, and one of its
last refuges would surely have been in the chants of the Witches.
Of the many useful functions served by stone-circles, and what
exactly was done there, I have written at length in my lecture; if anyone
would like to know more about such things, please read that. We had
sky-god worship, stone circles, and their associated culture of priests,
kings, warriors, and downtrodden peasants, for about 1800 years, which
means it must have been a pretty stable system. It could not, however,
withstand an awful catastrophe that befell the Earth around 1200 B.C.E.

THE GREAT CATASTROPHE; & ITS AFTERMATH.

What exactly happened is a subject of some dispute; some blame a
volcano and others a comet. There may have been other factors
involved as well. Anyway for years on end the weather was atrocious;
harvests failed; the population declined steeply; the old kingdoms fell,
and society fragmented. Some of the old European warrior-aristocracy
moved down south into the Mediterranean and for some years lived like

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Vikings raiding the ancient empires, before settling down to exploit a
different set of peasants. In Northern Europe too there is much
evidence of warfare in this period: its when swords first come into use.
The result of these changes on religious life would presumably have
been to fragment it: each little community, being in conflict with its
neighbours, would tend to devise distinctive forms of religion, calling its
god, Goddess, or divine couple by a unique local name.
In the course of the last millennium B.C.E. came the invasions of the
Celts from whats now France, giving us a new set of warrior-aristocrats
and a new language to learn. The Celts built new kingdoms in Britain,
welding the fragmented communities into larger political units. They
dont seem, however, to have been much concerned about religious
uniformity; so all the local cults continued, though sometimes with their
divine names translated into a Celtic form. No doubt the Druids, like the
Brahmins in India, would have considered that all these local deities
were just aspects of the One; and Witches would surely have recognized
the unity of their Goddess in her many guises. An uninitiated observer
would see only an extravagant polytheism. This was the religious
situation in these islands at the time of the Roman invasion.

THE CHRISTIAN ERA.

In my lecture I gave some account of religious life in Roman Britain;
here I am concerned only with tracing the history of Witchcraft, which I
suppose to have remained popular among the peasantry during the
period of the Roman occupation. Paganism only became illegal late in
the fourth century C.E., and early in the fifth, the Romans pulled out of
Britain. On the continent, where records are a little better, we see that
during the next couple of centuries there was among the peasantry a
thriving cult of a Nature-Goddess sometimes called Diana and
sometimes by local names. Gregory of Tours mentions the incantations
and debaucheries which characterized their meetings. It seems very likely
that in Britain, too, this was the most resilient of the pagan cults.

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 What happened next was the Anglo-Saxon invasion, though this
seems to have been mainly a change of the ruling class which left the
peasantry in place, producing the food which the warrior-aristocracy
consumed; and the same may be said of the subsequent Viking
invasions. We saw that the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings had their own
traditions of Witchcraft as Goddess-worship, and as something scary
and transgressive, with which respectable people wouldnt want to get
involved. Old Norse descriptions of the trollathing, or Witch-meeting, are
very similar to those from other parts of the world. Both the
Scandinavians and the Anglo-Saxons seem to have a healthy respect for
the power of witches incantations, and it is possible that some of the
runic inscriptions in an unknown tongue are in fact transcripts of these
ancient peasant chants. This seems particularly likely in the case of one
inscribed on several Anglo-Saxon rings, in several variant forms,
implying an original something like:

ERI:RIUF:DOL
YRI:URI:ThOL
GLESTE:POTE:NOL

This seems clearly to be in regular verse, of a form quite different from

that of the Anglo-Saxon or indeed of any other ancient Aryan metre, but
which has obvious parallels among the earliest Welsh literature, and in
that of the other peoples of Western Europe in the Dark Ages the
early songs from Spain and Provence, for example. My guess is that
accentual metre and end-rhyme, such as we find in this Early Medival
verse, had always been characteristic of the poetry of European
peasants, right back to the early Neolithic, and that the roots of modern
folk-music also go back to that distant time. In my meditation I have
been given a folky-sounding tune for the runic incantation, and find that
it makes an excellent mantra, sung as an act of worship when I stand at
my altar.

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 After the last Aryan invasion of Britain, in 1066, our records of
folklore get a little better; and, as I showed in my lecture, there is pretty
good evidence of a Goddess-worshipping Witch-cult among the poorer
classes in Britain, at least down to the mid-fourteenth century, when it
seems to have died out, probably as a consequence of the Black Death.
Though later folklore, particularly in Scotland, retained many memories
of the Witches and their Goddess, there seem to have been no real
Witches among the victims of the British witch-hunts. Folk-healers there
were, for sure, some of them using techniques derived from those of the
ancient Witches; but Witchcraft as a religion, the Cult of the Dark
Goddess, was no more.

THE RETURN OF THE WITCH.

And yet, astonishingly, this most ancient of religions has been revived in
the last sixty years. In earlier lectures I have spoken at some length about
the revival, and in particular the crucial part played in it by that
remarkable old gentleman Gerald Gardner: how he drew on his
knowledge of Indian Tantra and European folklore, such as that
preserved in Lelands Aradia, to make an imaginative reconstruction of
what ancient Witchcraft might have been; and how he presented this re-
invented Witchcraft as the genuine original religion, which had
supposedly been passed on by underground oral tradition through the
centuries.
There are things I dislike about Gardners version of Witchcraft or
Wicca, as its often known. Most significantly, that he confused
Witchcraft with magic, and with that great hodge-podge of pretence and
misinformation that goes by the name of the Western Esoteric
Tradition. If you read one of the popular modern books on how to be a
Witch, most of what youll find there will be Tables of Correspondences
and Planetary Hours and suchlike stuff, derived from the work of
Renaissance magicians and having nothing whatever to do with real
Witchcraft; and Gardner must bear some of the responsibility for this.
Even in the rituals that he devised for his coven, there is a great deal of

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symbolism derived from Esoteric sources like Masonry and the Golden
Dawn: the four elements, pentagrams, and so on, which again have
nothing to do with real Witchcraft.
In my first lecture I criticized Gardner for introducing a male god into
his religion, and pointed out that the Hornd God that he took from
the books of Margaret Murray was simply her paganizing interpretation
of the Christian Satan. There is a great deal of evidence that real Witches
worshipped a Goddess; however, in the light of subsequent research, I
have to concede that there is, here and there, some evidence suggesting
that some Witches, sometimes, may have worshipped a male god too.
Im thinking of the Iberian Dianus, the consort of Diana; of the
Scandinavian Frey; of Shiva in India and Baal in Canaan the last of
these being perhaps the best-documented ancient example of the type.
What this god does is serve the Goddess, certainly as a lover and
sometimes in other ways; as Baal he dies and rises again, thanks to her. I
had thought that this god played no part in my own devotional practice,
but on consideration I see that although I dont worship him I could be
said to incarnate him during an act of worship. I suppose he is basically a
symbol of selfhood, sacrificed in the course of the ritual and restored to
life, changed, at the end of it. His death signifies not only the many ego-
deaths one experiences in meditation, but also, of course, that real and
final death that comes when the Goddess takes one back into herself at
the end of life. So I can see the point of the Wiccan god rather better
now than I could four years ago; though I still find it irritating to see him
dressed up in the horns and tail of Satan, or the leafy swathings of the
so-called Green Man, since, as I have demonstrated in earlier lectures,
neither of these figures had anything to do with Witchcraft.
Nevertheless, when I read Gardners books, particularly his last one,
The Meaning of Witchcraft, I feel quite sure that he and I were of the same
religion. He had known the Goddess, and devised rituals to lead others
to the same experience. Despite the pentagrams and other Esoteric
symbolism, there was much in his practices that Witches of ancient
times would have recognized: the nudity, the firelight, the adoration of

23
the Goddess in the body of her priestess, the dancing, chanting and
feasting. All of that is right enough, and still works today just as it did
back in the Stone Age.
I think there is enough thats authentic about Gardners version of
Witchcraft for it to be classified as a modern variant of the ancient
religion of the primal Goddess; just as the Jehovahs Witnesses are
considered as Christians or the Nichiren sect as Buddhists, despite their
peculiar innovations. Through Crowley, Gardner had an initiatory link to
Indian Tantra; and through Leland and others he had access to folk-
traditions of European witchcraft. So I dont see any problem in saying
that this was the revival of an old religion rather than the invention of a
new one.
It has been asked whether I consider modern Wiccans as my co-
religionists, and Id say, generally, Yes, I do. Of course some seem to be
mainly interested in making magic, by means of Tables of
Correspondences, &c, which looks like foolishness to me; but most
Wiccans I talk to seem to be on the same path as myself, making contact
with the Dark Goddess through ritual, music, nature, psychedelics and
sex. We might have different rituals and different ideas about history or
science, but basically our hearts are in the same place. I can dig their art,
and they can dig mine: we all worship the same Goddess.

OTHER PAGAN TRADITIONS.

One thing that I didnt have time to discuss in my final Paganism lecture
was the revival of other pagan religions in modern Britain. This mostly
happened after the appearance of Wicca, and was largely influenced by
it. The modern pagan variety of Druidism, for example, was founded by
a friend of Gardners, Ross Nichols, and many of its outstanding
practitioners, such as Emma Restall-Orr, have a background in Wicca.
Her partner Philip Shallcrass has written with elegance and passion of
his experiences of the Goddess, and is clearly a Shakta even if he calls
himself a Druid. And perhaps some of the ancient Druids were also into
the Goddess, as we know that some Indian Brahmins have been.

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 Another type of modern pagans are the people who call themselves
shamans. These mostly go in for a lot of pathworking, with a bit of
healing practice on the side; their rituals and their chants usually have
something approximating to a kind of Native American or Siberian style.
Nothing wrong with any of that, of course: its very much like what
Witches used to do. When a modern shaman is a Goddess-worshipper,
as is often the case, there is really no difference between the shaman and
a Witch. Some of the modern shamans, however, do stick to the
worship of the male sky-god, as practised by shamans in America and
Siberia. In those places, shamans often blame their clients misfortunes
on the malice of Witches, but so far weve not heard of that in modern
Britain, and I hope we never shall.
Ive got more of a problem with some of the Heathens, who are trying
to revive ancient Germanic religions; not because theres anything
particularly bad about those traditions but because some of the people
who are into that stuff are Nazis, who twist the old religions into a
celebration of violence and intolerance though admittedly, in the case
of the cult of Thor, not very much twisting is necessary. I dont really
care to see the revival of the cult of that hammer-wielding bully-boy.
Nevertheless, there is a lot in the Northern traditions that I love, and
many of the new Heathens are into that. A devotee of Freyja practising
seid and there are many who do, these days is to all intents and
purposes a Witch.
Its just Witchcraft with a different style: Scandinavian for the
Heathens, Native American or generic primitive for the shamans, and
Celtic for the Druids; but were all worshipping the same Goddess.

JEZEBEL: WITCH-QUEEN OF ISRAEL.

My last lecture could be seen as a companion-piece to my Rasputin: an
attempt to wash the mud from the name of someone widely
remembered as a by-word for wickedness, but whose actions and
intentions seem to me a good deal more humane and intelligent than
those of their enemies. Queen Jezebel has been much abused, in her

25
own time and later. Through a Witchs eyes, as I showed you in my
lecture, she looks like an avatar of the Goddess; and I suggest that she
was widely regarded as such in her lifetime, like Cleopatra eight centuries
later. This might help to explain why Elijah and Elisha were so
preoccupied with ensuring that her body be totally destroyed one
thinks of Moses destroying the golden idol, or the Frankish hermit
ordering the image of Diana beaten to powder. I now make a new
suggestion, which archology may easily test: that the carvings of a
beautiful woman looking out of a window, generally supposed to be
depictions of Astarte, are indeed of the Goddess, but in the particular
form of her avatar Jezebel; that they testify to a posthumous cult of the
Queen among Israelites and Phnicians alike.
What did this lecture contribute to my general theory? Well, it was
interesting to see something of the Canaanites: a population largely
descended from the farming people of the Early Neolithic, and still in
Jezebels time devoted to their ancient Goddess. The Bibles vague
descriptions of sexual goings-on in Canaanite holy places make it seem
likely that such practices were part of the old Neolithic Goddess-
worship elsewhere. It was also interesting to see how closely the early
prophets of Jehovah resembled the Witches of Europe, suggesting an
early take-over of Witchcraft practices by devotees of the new sky-god.
Perhaps the most startling thing that I discovered while researching
the prehistory of Canaan was how alike were the primitive Aryans and
the primitive Semites: both patriarchal, nomadic pastoralists with
knowledge of how to make bronze, both devoted to the cult of the sky-
god and his celestial family, and both emerging to trouble the settled
world of the first farmers about five thousand years ago. There are even
a handful of words in the vocabularies of Aryan and Semitic languages
which seem to be related: for example, the words for bull, goat, lamb,
grain, honey, axe, sacrifice, star, silver, and seven. It looks rather as if the
Aryans learned much of their culture from the Semites, or vice versa; or
perhaps they both learned from another ancient people, of whom no
trace remains. This seems to imply that the Semites came to the Middle

26
East from the north, perhaps from a location in or near the Caucasus
Mountains; which would fit with the Bibles account of the ancestors of
Israel entering Canaan from whats now Turkey. Further research may
confirm or disprove these conjectures.

SUMMING UP.
In 2004, when I started writing these lectures, I knew a lot about
paganism and Witchcraft, but my knowledge wasnt very well organized.
Having to communicate it to you has led me to make connexions
between data, and suggest some theories as to how these things fit
together. I have discovered, rather to my surprise, that a good case can
be made for Goddess-worshipping Witchcraft being the oldest religion
on Earth; and that there really is good evidence that it survived here
until the 14th century, and in continental Europe perhaps another three
hundred years. I hope Ive also communicated something of what its
like to be a Witch, and the joy of serving the Goddess. Though that
Unitarian lady never returned, in a way all my lectures have been
addressed to her, and those who think like her, hoping to make such
people see that Witchcraft is a religion worthy of their respect.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

My previous lectures may currently be read on the Net for nothing.

Obviously the bibliographies for those works are also pertinent to this
one. Some other books that Ive found useful are listed here.

Blain, Jenny. Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic. 2000.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. 2007.
De Jonge, Alex. The Life & Times of Grigorii Rasputin. 1982.
Hutton, Ronald. Witches, Druids & King Arthur. 2003.
Kripal, Jeffrey J. Kalis Child: The Mystical & the Erotic in the Life &
Teachings of Ramakrishna.
1995.

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Mallory, J. P. & Adams, D. Q. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-
European & the Proto-Indo-European World. 2006.
Noble, Vicki. Shakti Woman. 1991.
Pound, Ezra. The Spirit of Romance. 1910.
Shallcrass, Philip. Druidry: A Practical & Inspirational Guide. 2000.

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