NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/alt/pagan/14783

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-01 | 10.5 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Robert Mathiesen)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: Re: Documented Evidence
Date: Fri, 1 Jan 1993 10:56:32 EST
Organization: Brown University - Providence, Rhode Island  USA
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The good discussion on documenting family traditions in Witchcraft, and
on how one might prove a claim to antiquity, leads me to say a bit about
my own, broken tradition -- which is NOT witchcraft, nor ceremonial ma-
gic, but magic of another kind -- and the problems in *interpreting* any
documentation that one may have.  First of all, what I have comes from
my mother, and I learned it when I was very young, perhaps 7 or 8 years
old (in the late 1940's).  As a child, I suffered greatly from horrible
nightmares, and also had several serious illnesses (penicillin was just
beginning to be widely available in those days, so more illnesses were
serious then than is the case now).  My mother showed me ways to guard
against empty fear, and also to reduce pain and terror, by appropriate
kinds of mental action, requiring skills which I much, much later learned
were also used by witches and ceremonial magicians, and were called by
them concentration, visualization and pathworking.  Later, I applied them
pretty much on my own to other problems and learned to use them effectively;
and eventually, in my early 30's, I was even able to figure out how they
could be employed to accelerate some kinds of healing in myself (e.g. of
minor kitchen burns).

My mother, however, was uncomfortable with this kind of knowledge, and I
think had shown it to me only as a kind of last resort, when she had no
other way of coping with my nightmares.  Even now, when I am 50 and she
is 80, she will not talk much about it, though she clearly believes that
it is real, and is not surprised that I have been able to make it work
for myself.  Her reticence is not religiously motivated, nor does it lie
in a desire for secrecy; rather, the knowledge in question has far too many
extremely unpleasant associations for her, and she finds it *far* too
painful to remember her own childhood, when she was shown what she knows.

What she can talk about are her religious beliefs, and those of her
family: she calls herself a pantheist, and uses Christian Science as a
"respectable" cover religion when she wants to avoid going into details;
and her mother and grandmother did the same before her (further back
than that she does not know).  She will also talk about genealogy, which
has interested me since I was old enough to know what a relative was,
and so I know that she is Edris Elva Leatherman Mathiesen, daughter of
Zena Huberta Lussier Leatherman, daughter of Alice May Osgood Lussier,
daughter of Ella Maria Acker Osgood, daughter of Sarah Ann Cushman
Acker, daughter of Rebecca Green Cushman.  Further back than that I have
only the Cushman line (back to the 1500's), not the Green one; and the
Cushman line is not important for what we are discussing here.

There is also a certain amount of documentation, which had once belonged
to my great grandmother (Alice May), and survives because I insisted on
keeping it when great grandmother died in 1951 (I was 9 at the time, and
already knew the value of such things); had I not done so, my mother
would have thrown it all out in the trash, as too full of memories for
her to be comfortable with.  What it is is photographs (back to Sarah
Ann Cushman, who died in 1883) and great grandma's notebooks and
scrapbooks.  Also there are a number of objects that were of value to
her: her father's sword and some of his personal possessions; and also a
human skull, two very large paste jewels, which I am pretty sure served
as gazing crystals, and other, less interesting things.  The paste
jewels are gone now; with age they crumbled into powder sometime in the
late 1950's.  Great grandma also used opium, and consorted with outcast
folk, such as gypsies and carnival workers; and she was sufficiently
eccentric that she chose to live in a black neighborhood, where she
wouldn't count as part of the neighborhood and be subject to community
pressures, instead of in a white one.  (The family was white.)  From
family stories, it is pretty clear that she had occult interests, and
these interests are probably reflected in the rather unusual first names
of her daughter (Zena) and her two granddaughters (Edris and Muriel).
Edris, in particular, is the same as Idris, the Islamic Enoch-type
figure (an antediluvian patriarch who never died, but was taken living
up to heaven, and derived from that source all his arcane lore, which he
passed on to his children and ultimatelty to all mankind); and the
immediate source from which Zena took it was an occult novel by Marie
Corelli.  Muriel is originally one of the cabalistic angels, and also
was taken from Corelli.  I'm not sure what the source for Zena was.

To sum it all up: what we have are some techniques like some of those
used by witches now; some family artifacts, including a human skull and
at one time some gazing crystals; a long genealogy; some old notebooks
and scrapbooks which contain a very small amount of occult stuff among
lots and lots of quite mundane matters (recipes, old valentines, etc.);
some stories which make it very clear that occult interests go back on
my mother's side at least as far as my great grandmother; and a short
tradition of uncommon, magical first names which begins only with great
grandmother's daughter, and did not get continued even as far as my
brother and me (for we both have quite ordinary names; and my mother's
sister had no children of her own to name).

This would clearly be enough to let me pass for a fam-trad within
Witchcraft, and some of my witch friends have suggested that I should
regard myself as one; yet neither my great grandmother nor my mother and
my aunt would agree with that (my grandmother died before I was born, so
I never knew her).  And there are some discrepancies: the deity which is
embodied in all nature is not the Wiccan Goddess, but something much
less like a human, who is both male and female at once, and may be
addressed as "Father-Mother" (this last is also a Christian Scientist
style of address, and may heve been borrowed from that religion); and
the magic is best done entirely in the mind, without any material props
(props work, but a really competent worker shouldn't need them).  There
is no shielding procedure, no circle, no ritual activity, no
initiations, and no tradition of secrecy.

Although it is not Witchcraft, it is very much a religion that values woman,
maybe even above man, and so may have something to offer to a present-day
feminist.  --  A few years ago, as a kind of experiment, I gave my mother
a copy of _Drawing Down the Moon_; her comment, when she finished it, was:
"Interesting; that's almost exactly what I believe."  -- This despite the
very real differences in details of belief between her and what Adler de-
scribes.

I have only really begun to find out where all this came from, in
historical terms, within the last year.  A new book by Catherine
Albanese, _Nature Religion in America from the Algonkian Indians to the
New Age_ (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), has documented for the first
time a tradition of 19th-century Pantheism which sounds exactly like
what my mother's side of the family believed; and this is connected by
Albanese to some extent with a 19th-century tradition of "mind-over-
matter" magic reflected in a number of the alternate American religions
of the time.  The best source for this kind of magic that I have found
is a series of books by a certain William Walker Atkinson (whom Albanese
does not mention, but should, for he was associated with the religious
traditions which she is researching), with titles such as _The Secrets
of Mental Magic_, _Mind Power_ and so forth.  These are almost certainly
the kind of book from which my gread grandmother took her magic, just as
the Pantheism described by Albanese has to be the source of her
religion.  (Incidentally, Gardner also owned Atkinson's books, for they
are still among the remains of his library which the James's now own in
Toronto, so this may have some bearing on the resemblance between the
visualization I learned as a child and the visualization used in
Witchcraft.)

What this all means, in terms of the need for documentation for Wicca
before Gardner, is that there may well be some suggestive written
documents out there to be found, and also some families in which
techniques like those used in Wicca have been handed down; BUT such
documents and such families do NOT prove the survival of Gardner-style
Witchcraft from time immemorial.  What would be needed for that would be
(1) either documentation of a specific family's magical history which
would be so detailed that that family could only have been practicing
Witchcraft, not some kind of 19th-century Pantheism plus
Mind-Over-Matter Magic like that of my own family, or (2) a really old
copy of some or all of the Book of Shadows.  As to (1), it would
probably have to be written documentation to give the depth of detail
needed, unless the family had an uncommon ability to keep its children
from rebelling against its training and values, and rejecting its
heritage, as well as an uncommon degree of skill in the arts of memory.
As to (2), I personally do not expect ever to learn of the existence of
a genuine 18th-century copy of any large part of the Book of Shadows,
since it is permeated with borrowings from occult books published only
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

There is an alleged Medieval Book of Shadows, or a fragment of one, owned
by a coven in England; and its text of the Five-fold Blessing was discussed
at some length on ANSAX-L some months ago; but that particular text of the
Five-fold Blessing is not like the OLDEST documentable form of the Five-
fold Blessing within Gardner's own manuscripts and publications; rather,
it resembles one of Gardner's later revisions.  I am confident, therefore,
that this particular alleged Medieval Book of Shadows is a fake one, albeit
a fake of considerable sophistication by a pretty skillful forger.  We will
now have to start examining our documentation for traditional Witchcraft
with all the skills of a forensic document examiner, since the forgers among
us have begun to ply their trade in our area of interest.

(Robert Mathiesen, Brown University, SL500000@BROWNVM)