In 1966, Raymond Buckland contacted Margaret and Eric St. Clair, a couple living in California, and initiated them. One of Margaret St. Clair’s friends was Ed Fitch, an ex-trainee of the Virginian MIT Institute. He had joined the US Air Force and served in Japan as a military intelligence officer. When Fitch returned stateside he worked as a technical writer and electronic engineer. Later he served in Vietnam where he studied Buddhism and learned Eastern martial arts. On his return, he joined the aerospace industry as a research and development engineer, working on missile systems. While Fitch was in the USAF, he was stationed in Massachusetts and, knowing his interest in witchcraft, the St. Clairs told him about Raymond Buckland and his coven. He visited the Bucklands on Long Island and was eventually initiated by Rosemary Buckland.
In 1970, Ed Fitch was responsible for the founding of the influential Pagan Way, designed to provide an open forum for beginners wanting to be initiated into covens. He became involved with Joseph B. Wilson, the founder of the American 1734 Tradition based on the teachings of Robert Cochrane and Ruth Wynn Owen of the Plant y Bran, and the British Gardnerian witch John Score. Fitch published a neopagan magazine called The Crystal Well, and the rituals devised for the Pagan Way spread far and wide after they were printed in booklet form. Some of the ritual material in the booklet was written by the late Donna Cole Schutz. She was running her own coven in Chicago and had been initiated by somebody who based their rituals on the ones published by Charles Cardell.
In 1968, Donna and her husband traveled to England, where they made contact with the Wiccan community and stayed for a year. As a result of their contacts, the Coles received a second-degree initiation from Madge Worthington and Arthur Eaglen of the Gardnerian Whitecroft tradition. Donna Cole then received her third degree from Theos and Phoenix in New York State, who had inherited the American Gardnerian tradition from Ray and Rosemary Buckland. In the Whitecroft Coven, the Coles took part in rituals working magic for animal rights, and they did one rite to stop the clubbing of baby seals in the annual cull by Canadian fur traders. During their stay in the United Kingdom, the Coles also met Ruth Wynn Owen, an ex-actress and drama teacher who was a member of The Regency and ran her own neo-Celtic Welsh group known as Plant y Bran (The Children of Bran). On their return to the States, the Coles started their own coven, known as the Temple of the Sacred Stones, in their hometown of Chicago (Donna Cole Schultz, August 2003).
One of those associated with Ed Fitch and the Pagan Way was Herman Slater (1938–1992), owner of the pioneering Warlock Shop in New York, later known as Magickal Childe, with his partner, Ed Buczynski. Raised as a good Jewish boy, Slater was initiated by Buczynski into his coven of Welsh traditionalist witches in 1972. The Welsh Traditionalists were among the first covens to take in gay people at a time when other Craft traditions refused to accept them. They worshipped the Welsh deities Ceridwen, Mabon, Arianrhod, and Blodewedd as described in the medieval legends of the Mabinogion. It was a robed coven and the High Priestess wore a crown made of a copper band surmounted by a silver crescent. The High Priest was known as the “King of the Woods,” and he wore a crown of bronze surmounted by a gold disc representing the sun. There were four degrees of initiation and the circle was cast using a wand instead of the athame. It was opened by evoking the elemental spirits of earth, air, and water, and closed by calling on the spirit of fire (Holzer 1971: 37–38). In 1974, Herman Slater was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca. Following this, the Welsh Traditionalists changed their name to the Earthstar Coven, practicing a mixture of Gardnerian Wicca and Celtic paganism.
Another leading American pagan and witch in the 1970s was the controversial Philip Isaac Bonewits (b. 1949), widely credited with the invention of the term “Burning Times” to describe the medieval witch-hunt. He attended the University of Berkeley in 1966 and was inducted into Reformed Druids of North America. He also spent eight months as a member of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in San Francisco. In 1970, he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in magic. Bonewits was the first person to be granted such a degree by a university anywhere in the world. Unfortunately the university authorities were so embarrassed by the ensuing publicity they banned the study of witchcraft and the magical arts from the curriculum. As a result of his degree, Bonewits was offered a publishing contract, and his first book, Real Magic, appeared in print in 1971.
Isaac Bonewits went on to start the Aquarian Anti-Defamation League (AADL) promoting the civil rights of followers of alternative spiritualities such as witches, neopagans, Rosicrucians, and Theosophists. In 1973 he was the first insider to publicly state that the claims for antiquity put forward by Wiccans were “hogwash.” He said that modern witchcraft only dated back to the 1950s and was the product of a collaboration between Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente. For the many Gardnerians who still clung tenaciously to the belief that Wicca was the genuine survival of a Stone Age fertility religion, this statement was heresy, and his views were dismissed out of hand.
In the early 1980s, Bonewits upset many Wiccans and neopagans again by recommending the setting up of a specialist social services network to deal with the problems of drug abuse and domestic dysfunction in the pagan movement. He claimed 80 percent of neopagans came from nonfunctional or dysfunctional family backgrounds. At the same time, he was the first person to call for the establishment of a professional, paid neopagan priesthood. Again he was far ahead of his time, and the idea was rejected by his peers. In the 1990s, groups like Circle Sanctuary, founded by Selena Fox and Dennis Carpenter, and the Pagan Federation UK were actively supporting and promoting the concept.
Professor Chas S. Clifton of Colorado University has said that “When the new Pagan religion of Wicca arrived in the United States from England in the 1960s, it presented itself as the Old Religion, the ancestral Paganism of the British Isles, and as a mystery cult of both fertility and magic” (2006: 41). However, in the 1970s it changed from a magically based religion into a nature-based neopagan one concerned with environmental matters, feminism, “Goddess spirituality,” and the legal rights of its followers. It was the birth of “ecofeminist neopaganism,” and this was to have a dramatic and important influence on the future of Wicca. In fact, American Wicca “evolved from its British Wicca roots through the influence of four factors: (1) a ritual style developed by large outdoor gatherings or pagan festivals, (2) the presence of workshops on shamanic techniques, (3) the concept of Gaia or the Earth as a divine living organism or goddess, (4) the presence of a psychotherapy model and its application to political activism” (Orion 1995).
These developments that influenced the evolution of American Wicca, and later the British variety, arose out of the alternative counter-culture of the late 1960s. As early as 1968, a radical political group had formed called the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy (WITCH). It was created by a collective of feminist revolutionary guerilla fighters dedicated to opposing, by violence if necessary, what they saw as a patriarchal society. Its membership was mostly drawn from female college and university students wearing black cloaks, witches’ pointed hats, and crone masks. They famously marched on Wall Street in New York’s financial district to confront the “imperialist phallic society” ruled by men, with the “ancient magics” of the female witches. They danced outside the Federal Reserve Bank bearing the papier-mâché head of a pig on a silver platter (representing a capitalist banker) and also demonstrated outside the Stock Exchange. They told the security guards at the door they had an appointment inside with “Satan,” i.e., the Exchange’s CEO. The witches also demonstrated outside night-clubs and “girl bars,” chanting the magical mantra: “We are Witch. We are liberation. We are one [and] nine million women burned as witches,” and calling for a matriarchal insurrection and revolution (Morgan 1978: 70–79).
It is difficult to know how serious the WITCH was supposed to be. It has been described as “a combination of the put-on, the serious, the deliberately comic, and the profan
ely agonized, of the bizarre and the holy” (quoted in Guilley 1989: 367). Its leaders taught its members they did not need to be initiated into a coven to be a witch, and this was subversive in itself. All they had to do was repeat the self-empowering magical words “I am a witch,” and they became one. They also taught the concept of the Burning Times, during which allegedly nine million innocent women were burnt as witches in a patriarchal conspiracy instigated by the Roman Catholic Church.
In fact, this imaginary figure of nine million victims was invented by the nineteenth-century pioneering American feminist writer, Matilda Joslyn Gage. She had been in the campaigns to abolish slavery during the Civil War, women’s suffrage, and improved conditions for the Native Americans living on government reservations. In the 1880s, Gage became interested in Theosophy, Spiritualism, and witchcraft, and published her major work Woman, State and Church in 1890. In it, she argued the witches executed during the witch-hunt were murdered because they were militant feminists. In her view they were also early scientists, mesmerists, and workers with plant extracts, elemental spirits, and psychic forces (Gibson 2007: 112–117).
In the 1950s, Cecil Williamson used Gage’s nine-million figure in media interviews, and set up a memorial plaque at his Isle of Man museum to these victims of the witch craze. As a result, it entered Wiccan mythology along with the term “the Burning Times,” and is still repeated today in popular Wicca 101 books. It was widely circulated because it compared favorably with the six million Jews killed during the wartime Holocaust and reinforced the ghetto mentality and persecuted victim syndrome prevalent in early Wicca. In fact, the real figure of men, women, and children executed for allegedly practicing witchcraft as been put by modern researchers at about 100,000.
As late as 1990, a documentary called The Burning Times was produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It traced the roots of the historical witch-hunt and included interviews with prominent neo-pagan Wiccan feminists such as Margot Adler and Starhawk (Miriam Simos). The term “Burning Time,” is a misnomer as it was only on the Continent and in Ireland and Scotland that suspected witches were burned at the stake if they were found guilty. In some European countries they were beheaded instead. In England, and later the American colonies, convicted witches were hanged. The only possible exception to the rule was in the rare cases where a wife was found guilty of bewitching to death her husband. This was legally classed as “petty treason,” and the punishment for that was burning.
The new feminist movement that was emerging in the 1970s possessed a radical Marxist political base. Many of the first feminists adopted a materialist approach to religion in general and they rejected both the patriarchal misogynistic Christian Church and witchcraft and paganism. However, some of those who had rejected Christianity were looking for an alternative spiritual viewpoint compatible with their new feminist outlook. Some of these seekers found what they were looking for in Wicca with its worship of a female deity. However they also discovered that Wicca could be both patriarchal and misogynistic, and they set about changing and adapting it to suit their politics and world-view.
Although Wiccans worshipped a goddess, and women played a prominent part in its rites, Doreen Valiente said in 1989, “… it has only been in recent years that witchcraft has become feminist; and not all witchcraft by any means comes into that category.” She went on to say that although modern Wicca has priestesses, this was a role Gerald Gardner had designed for women to play within the Craft. Valiente said: “We were allowed to call ourselves High Priestess, Witch Queen, and similar fancy titles; but we were still in the position of having men running things and women doing as men directed. As soon as the women started seeking real power, trouble was brewing.” This was possibly a reference to the problems when she left the Brickett Wood Coven in 1957. Women in Wicca were told: “You may not be a witch alone.” Therefore, as a woman in Gardnerian Wicca, you have to have a man initiate you before you could call yourself a witch. Also you were required to find a man to work magically with before you could practice the Craft (1989: 182–183).
Oddly enough, it was a man who had the greatest impact on the emerging Goddess spirituality and feminist Wicca in the United States—the poet and writer Robert Graves, author of The White Goddess (1948). In 1973, Elizabeth Gould Davis, the feminist author of the classic The First Sex, wrote to Graves, hailing him as the “god” of the new women’s spirituality movement. She said it had many names because it was not coordinated yet. However, she told the poet, small groups of dedicated goddess worshippers were forming across the country from New York to California. These groups were rejecting Christianity and honoring the feminine principle in an attempt to bring back the ancient religion of the Great Goddess (Richard Perceval Graves 1995: 481).
One anthropologist who has studied modern Wiccan groups said: “The basis of much feminist witchcraft ritual is about re-connecting with an idealized previous state of existence, and healing the wounds of patriarchy” (Greenwood 2000: 109). This concept was reinforced by several influential books written in the 1970s and 1980s by a new breed of radical revisionist feminist historians. Books such as Merlin Stone’s When God Was A Woman (1976) and The Paradise Papers (1979), Monica Sjoo’s The Ancient Religion of the Great Cosmic Mother of All (1982), and the writings of the Lithuanian anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, claiming Neolithic society was a pacifist Goddess-worshipping matriarchy destroyed by patriarchal invaders, inspired neopagan feminists. Feminist historians such as Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin interpreted the witch-hunt as a patriarchal conspiracy aimed at suppressing survival of the old pagan worship of the Goddess, and the social role of women as healers. They overlooked the fact that accusations of witchcraft were often made by women against women, and were often the result of neighborhood feuds, family disagreements, and social tensions.
In 1978, a Goddess conference was held at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Five hundred people listened to a talk by a feminist Christian theologian from Yale University with the unlikely name of Carol Christ. She argued that the divine should not be exclusively represented as male in nature, but must also be symbolized in a feminine form. Another speaker, Naomi Goldenberg, even coined the term “thealogy” to denote the teachings of female-based religions and the role taken by women in spirituality. She later taught classes in the new academic discipline of Goddess spirituality studies in the Department of Religious Studies at a Michigan University, and a graduate program at the University of Ottawa in Canada with Carol Christ and Starhawk (Rabinovitch and Lewis 2003: 117)
In his own study of the development of American neopagan witchcraft, Professor Chas S. Clifton has seen the celebration of the new environmental Earth Day as a turning point in the transformation of Wicca from a magical religion to a nature religion. He quotes Susan Roberts, author of Witches USA (1970), describing how a witch friend of hers was caught up in a traffic jam in New York on Earth Day. Afterwards her friend told her: “Now, no one loves the Earth and the purity of our air more than a witch,” and she did not feel the need to explain this comment further (Clifton 2006: 43).
However, not everyone shared these fashionable left-wing views, and it has to be remembered that the Wiccan old guard were often socially conservative ex-colonials who came from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds. Many of these held private political views that leaned towards the right and they did not approve of their beliefs being politicized. Referring to the American neopagan magazine Green Egg, one prominent British Wiccan said its editors were trying to turn the Craft into an anti-establishment and anti-social movement with left-wing political overtones advocating drug use and sexual militancy (Holzer 1973: 188).
One of the leading figures in this process of the political radicalization of Wicca in the early 1970s was Dr. Leo Louis Martello (1930–2000), a homosexual Italian-American who said he had been initiated into a hereditary Sicilian witch tradition. He had also received a Gardnerian initiation from
Patricia Crowther. In 1970 Martello founded the Witches’ Liberation Movement (WLM) and at Samhain that year organized a “witch-in” in Central Park in New York. He was refused a permit to hold the gathering by the city parks department, and with the support of the New York Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue them for religious discrimination. Later he founded other pressure groups such as the Witches Anti-Defamation League (WADL) and the Witches International Craft Association (WICA), dedicated to campaigning for the religious rights of witches. He condemned the Roman Church for its historical persecution of alleged witches and issued a lawsuit against the Vatican claiming $500 million in compensation. He also threatened to sue the Salem Town Council for another $100 million.
Another radical crusader for the civil rights of witches, especially female ones, was a Hungarian émigré named Zsusanna Mokcsay, who used the pseudonym of Z. Budapest, after her home country’s capital. She claimed her grandmother had been a herbalist and healer, and her mother was an artist who made nude statues of pagan goddesses. The family fled Hungary after the 1956 popular uprising against the Soviet Red Army, arriving in the United States in 1959. Z. Budapest enrolled at the University of Chicago and married an American citizen. After her marriage broke down and she moved from Chicago to California in the 1970s, Budapest saw the need for a feminine-centered spiritual theology and rebelled against the Marxist elements in the so-called “women’s liberation” movement, as it was dubbed by the media.
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