Chapter 123. The Old Gods Return: Wicca, Neopaganism, Ásatrú, Rodnovery and Chaos Magic

The twentieth century produced the Satanist, and it also brought back the pagan. The new pagans presented themselves as survivors or restorers of pre-Christian religions. The movements that followed range widely. At one end is a nudist witch-cult in Hertfordshire, at another are Germanic and Slavic “native faiths” bound up with national identity, and at a third is “chaos magic”, which treats belief itself as a tool. This chapter follows these currents as the library’s sources describe them, from Margaret Murray’s thesis to the “meme magic” of 2016, and pays attention throughout to how far the revival of old gods has carried political projects with it.

Murray’s Thesis and the Birth of Wicca

Nevill Drury, in the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, gives Margaret Murray (1862-1963) as the source of the modern witch-cult narrative. Her “controversial book The Witch-cult in Western Europe (1921)” argued that “as a broad-based fertility religion, the roots of pagan medieval witchcraft could be dated back to Paleolithic times”. In The God of the Witches (1933) she focused on “the figure of the Horned God whom she believed to be the oldest male deity known to humanity” [Drury, in Pizza & Lewis (eds.), Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, #43393]. Margot Adler describes Murray as “foremost an Egyptologist and secondarily a folklorist and anthropologist”. She also records the historian Norman Cohn’s dismissal of the thesis: Cohn argued that Frazer’s Golden Bough “launched a cult of fertility cults” and was “completely contemptuous of Murray” [Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, #66021]. Hugh Urban says that “although Murray’s accounts are not taken very seriously by most modern historians, Murray provided the basic narrative that underlay much of the neo-pagan revival” [Urban, Magia Sexualis, #43699].

The Handbook dates Gerald Gardner’s initiation to “the New Forest in September 1939”. There Gardner “was told by his initiators ‘The law has always been that power must be passed from man to woman or from woman to man, the only exception being when a mother initiates her daughter or a father his son'”. In a note, Patricia Crowther, “a friend of Gardner’s”, suggests that if the rite fell on the first new moon after the outbreak of war, Gardner “would have been initiated on 13 September 1939” (citing Heselton, Wiccan Roots). Drury adds Heselton’s view that Gardner “may have met [Murray] in late 1938 or early 1939” [Handbook, #43393, Drury, notes 156, 171, 181]. Carr-Gomm and Heygate locate the first coven: “in a reconstructed Elizabethan cottage in the grounds of the Five Acres Country Club”, the Bricket Wood naturist resort that Gardner partly owned. “From the 1940s right through into the 1960s, the club attracted not only witches, but Druids in the shape of Ross Nichols, founder of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, and a leading Sufi, Idries Shah, who wrote Gardner’s biography” [Carr-Gomm & Heygate, The Book of English Magic, #63013].

How Original Was the “Old Religion”?

The academic and practitioner-historian sources cited here treat Wicca as largely assembled in the modern period. Carr-Gomm and Heygate quote Ronald Hutton, author of “the definitive history of modern pagan witchcraft, The Triumph of the Moon“: “No academic historian has ever taken seriously Gardner’s claim to have discovered a genuine survival of ancient religion.” They also cite Justine Glass on Gardner: “Some view Gardner as a rogue – and he certainly was cavalier with the truth. Others believe that he was an inspired genius” [Carr-Gomm & Heygate, #63013]. Urban writes that Gardner “had great admiration for Crowley and drew freely from his poetry and rituals”. He says The Book of Shadows is “essentially a ritual guide which bears strong influences from Crowley, the OTO, Golden Dawn, Freemasonry, and other esoteric traditions”. In his account the consecration of the wine was, in Hutton’s words, “probably modeled upon the sixth degree initiation of the OTO itself” [Urban, #43699]. Urban also quotes Crowley’s 1914 call to “be the founder of a new and greater Pagan cult”, and says that “Gardner and others would soon take Crowley up on this call” [ibid.].

Adler reports the inside debate. Aidan Kelly’s manuscript questioned “the Wiccan movement’s claim to historical continuity”. In reply, in “the summer 1985 issue of Iron Mountain“, Doreen Valiente “said that she did contribute many things to the present-day Book of Shadows… but she said her contribution was by no means as extensive as Kelly believed. She said she was not the first Gardnerian priestess and that Gardner already had a working coven when she was initiated in 1953” [Adler, #66021]. Adler also notes that Robert Graves always treated The White Goddess as “poetic metaphor” and that “certain members of the Craft have interpreted Graves too literally” [ibid.].

Theology, Sex and Seasons

Urban places Wicca within the history of sexual magic. He quotes Gardner’s Witchcraft Today: “Ours is a religion of love, pleasure and excitement… comfort on earth, not in some far-distant paradise beyond the grave”. The goddess “of the witch cult is obviously the Great Mother, the giver of life, incarnate love”. Urban says that Gardner, “an enthusiastic nudist himself”, made “nudity and ritualized sexual intercourse in the form of his ‘Great Rite’ key parts of his ritual practice”. The energy theory behind this comes from Dion Fortune, whom Urban quotes: in sexual union “a whirlpool or vortex is set up: this vortex extends up the planes”. The section opens with a Wiccan declaration: “Witchcraft does not need to apologize for involving sex magic. It is other religions which need to apologize for the miseries of puritanical repression they have inflicted on humanity” [Urban, #43699, “The Goddess and the Great Rite”]. Urban also links Wicca’s goddess emphasis to second-wave feminism, while criticising its “highly essentialist and narrow construction of female (and male) gender” [ibid.]. The ritual year is the eight-festival wheel. Mike Nichols’ Eight Sabbats of Witchcraft explains Samhain, “summer’s end”, as the counterpart of Beltane in “their ancient two-fold division of the year”, and calls Halloween “Beltane’s dark twin” [Nichols, Eight Sabbats of Witchcraft, #79373].

Heathenry, Ásatrú and the “Folkish” Question

Germanic revivalism split early over method and over ethnicity. Robert Sass distinguishes “Heathenry (reconstructionist Germanic Heathenry)” from “Asatru (neo-pagan tradition involving the Germanic Gods)”, and states plainly: “in the book I teach that Asatru and Heathenry are two different paths”. He insists that “family ritual comes first” and that his book concerns “a historical religion, not a religion with modern or made up holidays” [Sass, Heathenry: The Old Ways for Today, #43492]. Adler records Stephen McNallen’s theology of the gods as models and personifications, but also as “a numinous logic-defying reality, something apprehended only by means of symbols”. She quotes Ben Waggoner of the Troth on the ethnic dispute: “Some ‘folkish’ types say that Heathenry can only be practiced by those of northern European descent. Others say that it comes most naturally to those of European descent, but that non-Europeans are capable of being Heathen if they choose” [Adler, #66021]. E. S. Wynn reconstructs Norse star-lore, including a “Sun-Hart” stag constellation that, he suggests, “may even go back to a common paleolithic root from which the antlered goddess (and later, antlered god) sprung” [Wynn, Sky Wolves, #87384].

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke describes the racial edge of the same revival. In the United States, Britain, Germany and Scandinavia, “racial pagan groups ponder runes, magic and the sinister mythology of the Norse gods Wotan, Loki and Fenriswolf”, and “the runes are celebrated as magical signs of ancestral heritage and a mystical blood loyalty”. As a parallel he gives Christian Identity, which “mixes motifs of heretical Christian dualism with a vicious theology of anti-Semitism, which regards the Jews as the ‘spawn of Satan'” [Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun, #76349, “Introduction”]. He records that British C18 magazines carried “the ’14 Words’ of David Lane, a member of The Order now serving a life sentence for his part in the murder of a Jewish radio commentator in Denver” as a masthead motto [Black Sun, #76349, ch. 2]. He frames the whole phenomenon as a “neo-völkisch revival” acting “as a defensive ideology of white identity against multiculturalism”, and he anticipates that his study “may well offend politically correct sensibilities” [ibid., “Introduction”].

Rodnovery: The Slavic Native Faith

The reference shelf defines Rodnovery as “a polytheistic religion” that scholars class as a new religious movement. Its organisations “often characterise themselves as ethnic religions”, which “frequently manifests as nationalism and racism” [Wikipedia: Slavic Native Faith]. Its theology centres on Rod, “the absolute, primordial God, supreme ancestor of the universe”. Rod expresses itself as Prav, “Right” or “Order”, which the article compares with the Vedic Ṛta. Prav works through the duality of Belobog and Chernobog and gives rise to “the world in its three qualities, Prav-Yav-Nav”, namely “the world of bright gods, the world of mankind, and the world of dark gods”. The movement draws on borrowings from “Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Germanic Heathenry”, which is one more echo of Part 1 [ibid.]. The scholar Schnirelmann argues that it was “built up artificially by urbanised intellectuals who use fragments of early pre-Christian local beliefs” [ibid.].

Among its founders the article names Volodymyr Shaian in Ukraine, Lev Sylenko, whose Ridna Vira (1964) first used the term, Valery Yemelyanov, “one of the founders of Russian neopaganism”, and Alexey Dobrovolsky (Dobroslav). Dobroslav “denounced the ‘Judeo-Christian obscurantism'” and prophesied that “the Yarilo-Sun would soon burn” those most sensitive to ultraviolet light, “to which he attributed primarily the Jews”. Rodnovers call Christianity and its secular offspring (Marxism, capitalism, Enlightenment rationalism) “mono-ideologies”. The article records church vandalism in Russia and Belarus. It describes a “politicised current” ranging “from extreme right-wing nationalism and racism, to Stalinism”, and it states that “Rodnovery has a significant role in the War in Donbas”, where Rodnovers formed the Svarozhich Battalion and the Rusich Company. Some strains support Eurasianism, “the dominant ideology of the Russian central state under Vladimir Putin” [ibid.]. Population figures are uncertain. Aitamurto thought “several tens of thousands” of active practitioners in Russia plausible, while the 2012 Sreda Arena Atlas counted 1.7 million self-described “Pagans” or followers of traditional religions. Ivakhiv estimated 5,000-10,000 practitioners in Ukraine in 2005 and later reported surveys suggesting 90,000 [ibid.].

Chaos Magic: Belief as Instrument

Jimmy Lee Shreeve traces chaos magic back to Austin Osman Spare, who treated the subconscious as the “greatest magickian”. Shreeve quotes Spare’s Book of Pleasure (1913): “All desire, whether for pleasure, knowledge or power, that cannot find ‘natural’ expression, can by sigils and their formula find fulfilment from the subconscious” [Shreeve, Blood Rites, #75608, ch. 4]. Gary Lachman adds Spare’s “death postures” and the “Neither-Neither” [Lachman, Dark Star Rising, #63636]. Peter Carroll’s Liber Null & Psychonaut says that “the magic of the IOT is an intensely practical, personal, experimental art”, based on the idea “that altered states of consciousness are the key” and that magical abilities “can be developed without any symbolic system except reality itself”. In Carroll’s text “the death posture is chief among the rites of Thanateros” [Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut, #45278]. In “Paradigm Shifts and Aeonics” Carroll argues that “all the philosophies, creeds, dogmas and beliefs that humanity has evolved are variants of three great paradigms, the Transcendental, the Materialist and the Magical” [Carroll, Paradigm Shifts and Aeonics, #82831]. Lachman names “the Deptford Olympic Goat Roast, coinciding with the 1976 Montreal Olympics” as chaos magic’s “foundational” event. He quotes Dave Evans that a history of chaos magic is “oxymoronic”, because like postmodernism it “affects an atemporal, ahistorical character” and treats “truth” as “anathema” [Lachman, #63636].

Lachman’s political thesis follows from this. After Trump’s 2016 victory, Richard Spencer said the National Policy Institute had “dreamed” Trump into office. Lachman writes: “When it comes to the alt-right ‘magicians’ who willed and dreamed Trump into the White House, the meme in question is a frog who goes by the name of Pepe”. He says the “magic” end of meme magic “comes from its link to what is known as ‘chaos magick'”. One “Pepe/Kek devotee” claimed that an Egyptian statuette of the frog goddess Heqet showed a figure before “what looks like a computer screen” [ibid.].

Keshe’s Counterpoint

Mehran Keshe’s KSW 411 (16 December 2021) turns the winter-solstice birth of Mitra from Part 1 into an inner event: “What we call, the birthday of Mitra in coming days, is the enlightenment of the man… in the essence of the confirmation of the Soul of the Man, not the Soul of Physicality”. Those “expecting to see the physical D[imension] of the birth will have a lot to learn” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 411, #378123]. Taken with KSW 518’s charge that modern believers remain “Pagans worshipping statues” [Keshe, KSW 518, #378230], this sets him against every revival in this chapter. The neopagans try to restore rite, festival and image, while Keshe says maturity lies in giving them up.

Key points

• Margaret Murray’s 1921 witch-cult thesis supplied the founding story of neopaganism. Adler records Norman Cohn’s contempt for it, Urban says most modern historians do not take it seriously, and Hutton (quoted by Carr-Gomm and Heygate) says no academic historian has accepted Gardner’s survival claim [#43393; #66021; #43699; #63013].
• The Handbook dates Gardner’s initiation to the New Forest in September 1939, with 13 September proposed by Crowther. His first coven met at the Five Acres naturist club [#43393; #63013].
• Urban traces the Book of Shadows to Crowley, the OTO, the Golden Dawn and Freemasonry. Valiente’s 1985 reply limited Kelly’s claims about her own authorship [#43699; #66021].
• Heathens divide over reconstruction versus neo-pagan practice and over “folkish” ethnicity. Goodrick-Clarke documents racial paganism and David Lane’s “14 Words” [#43492; #66021; #76349].
• According to the reference shelf, Rodnovery joins Rod-centred theology to anti-Christian “mono-ideology” critique, and in some branches to militant nationalism, including in Donbas [Wikipedia].
• Chaos magic, from Spare’s sigils to Carroll’s IOT, treats belief as a tool. Lachman links it to the alt-right’s “meme magic” of 2016 [#75608; #45278; #63636].
• Keshe reads the birth of Mitra as inner enlightenment and calls symbol-worship paganism, which rejects the revivalist project as a whole [#378123; #378230].