PAN’s manifesto said it had been formed as an activist group dedicated to banishing all nuclear technology from Earth and creating a culture in harmony with nature. A gathering of about a hundred people was held in 1984 in Sherwood Forest at the summer solstice, probably because of its past associations with Robin Hood, regarded by some neopagans as a human version of the witch god. In London, meetings of local branches of PAN took place in public parks and involved Wiccan-type rituals that were closely monitored by the police (Luhrmann 1989: 80–81). Oddly, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War at the end of the 1980s, PAN was suddenly disbanded, despite the fact nuclear power still existed and the USA and Russia held huge stocks of nuclear weapons.
A group similar to PAN was formed in Canada in 1984 by Samuel Wager. At university he had become a feminist and anarchist, joined the Trotskyist League for Social Action, and was involved in political protests. In 1982, Wager experienced a revelation about the Goddess after attending a friend’s funeral, and he applied to join the Wiccan Church of Canada. Following this, he joined forces with a fellow Wiccan, Bill Lewis, and together they founded Pagans For Peace (PFP). This brought together pacifists with politically left-wing Wiccans and neopagans to protest against the international arms trade and nuclear weapons.
An anarchist commune was set up on a farm in Ontario and this was followed in 1986 by the formation of a coven run by Wager, based on Alexandrian Wicca and Starhawk’s feminist Reclaiming tradition. PFP also published a newsletter with a readership of just over 250 people. Strangely for a radical political group its contents were mostly on general Wiccan subjects. A typical issue featured articles on “Ethics and the Wiccan Rede,” “A Wiccan Funeral Rite,” “What are the Wiccan Mysteries?” “The Triple Goddess,” “A Christian Speaks on Faith and the Path of Wicca,” and “Charging Money for Wicca.” In 1994, Wager decided to go politically mainstream and applied to be a candidate for the New Democratic Party in the Canadian Parliament. When the party found out he was a practicing witch they rejected him. Wager filed a compliant with the Human Rights Commission and eventually the case was settled out of court in his favor (Rabinovitch and Lewis 2003: 280–281).
Similar cases of religious discrimination against Wiccans and neopagans occurred in the 1980s as the new laws supporting human rights were tested in the US courts. In March 1985, Pete C. Davies of the Aquarian Tabernacle Church, an initiate of Wicca and the Kingstone tradition, was retained as an expert witness by the Washington State attorney general in a federal court case about the right of a Wiccan convict to practice his religion in prison. As a result of the outcome of this case, the Washington State Department of Corrections recognized that Wicca was a legitimate religious belief worthy of respect like any other faith. It was accepted that Wiccan rites could be openly practiced by the inmates in the state’s prisons. Wicca was also included as a genuine religion in the department’s Handbook for Religious Beliefs and Practices issued to all Christian prison chaplains.
While these human rights issues were being contested, Wicca was also spreading and expanding beyond Britain and the USA to other countries worldwide. We have already seen how it arrived in Australia in the early 1960s with Anton Miles, an ex-member of Gardner’s Brickett Wood Coven. In 1971, Stewart Farrar’s book What Witches Do and Jessie Bell’s Grimoire of Lady Sheba were published in Australia, leading to a new interest in witchcraft, mostly by the younger generation. This was despite the fact that in some Australian states anti-witchcraft laws still existed. For instance, the old 1735 Witchcraft Law in New South Wales was not repealed until as late as 1967. In South Australia, the Vagrancy Law of 1958 still outlawed anyone who “exercised any kind [of] witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration,” and was not removed from the statute book until 2005.
In the 1980s, one of the leading Wiccans in Australia was Simon Goodman (aka Ian Watts). He was an Alexandrian initiate, and had studied with Maxine and Alex Sanders when they lived together in Sussex. The so-called “Council of Grand Elders” of Alexandrian Wicca gave Goodman a charter to found covens when he returned to Australia. He also met Patricia Crowther when he was in England, but it is not known if she gave him a Gardnerian initiation. Goodman was associated with the pagan magazine Panthology, and in 1983 founded the Australian Pagan Information Centre in Perth as a historical archive of the history of witchcraft in Australia. In 1999, its database held four thousand news cuttings dating back to the 1950s, as well as photographs, audio recordings, and videos.
Simon Goodman had already been associated with an earlier Alexandrian coven established in Australia in the early 1970s by Damian Paltridge (aka “Jesse”). Goodman is also supposed to have been in contact with Doreen Valiente around this time. In 1965, it is claimed, he was inducted into the traditionalist Sussex Craft. This tradition got its name from the fact it originated from a coven in the village of Etchingham in Sussex and came to Australia through Peter Barwick. Goodman became a member of a traditional coven of the Sussex Craft called Corventus Quercus and its Magister (Master) initiated both men and women. They worshipped the Horned God, whom they called “the Devil,” and used ritual tools that included a stang (forked staff), cauldron, besom, and a human skull. Simon Goodman met Bill Liddell and Bill told me that he believed the Etchingham coven might have been connected with Old George Pickingill (pers. comm.).
Simon Goodman was also the High Priest of the Boucca Coven in New Zealand, a group associated with a Golden Dawn lodge, known as the Society of Guardians, and led by the late Michael Freedman. The Boucca Coven was started by an Alexandrian initiate belonging to a magical order called Ordine Della Luna. This order was founded by Alex Sanders and his lover Derek Taylor. The coven also had links with an Alexandrian couple in Shropshire, England who had visited New Zealand. The couple held the ranks of Priest and Priestess.
If you google “Australian Wicca” today, you will find yourself with a choice of from one to six million websites. In 2006, just over 8,200 people declared themselves as Wiccans on the national census (source: Australian Bureau of National Statistics). Two years later the ABNS acknowledged Wicca as the fastest-growing religion in the country. It was also reported that the glossy magazine Witchcraft had a monthly print-run of 16,000 copies. In 1989, the Church of Wicca Australia had been registered as the first legal neopagan and Wiccan church in the country. It was run by Tamara Von Forslin, who claimed to have been initiated into witchcraft in 1972. In 1991, a British-born Alexandrian and Gardnerian High Priestess, Julia Philips, founded the Pan-Pacific Pagan Alliance (now known as the Pagan Alliance). She had emigrated from England some years earlier, after working for the Australian Tourist Board. In London she had run a coven and a magical lodge, was a member of the Pagan Federation and Pagan Anti-Defamation League, and a friend of Prudence Jones.
Philips started the PPPA after watching a television news report about the satanic ritual abuse scare in Britain and the USA. She found that Australian Wiccans were totally ignorant of the threat to their religious rights and freedom posed by Christian fundamentalists. Philips spoke to Prudence Jones about setting up an Australian organization similar to the PF in the United Kingdom. During the winter of 1991, the basic structure of the new group was drafted and it was launched at the national Wiccan Conference in the spring. Its structure was loosely modeled on PFUK, and it adopted the Three Principles created by Doreen Valiente, but with the motto “Strength Through Diversity” signifying it was inclusive of both Wiccan traditions and neopagan belief systems. It also published general information booklets and leaflets designed to inform the media, government agencies, and the general public. A public relations officer and a media officer were also appointed.
A newsletter called Pagan Times was produced that is now printed in a magazine format. Each state had its own semi-autonomous organization—the plan was to have three coordinators representing three different Wiccan and neopagan traditions. In practice this was not p
ossible, as it was difficult enough to find even one person willing to volunteer for these positions. A central coordinator was based in Sydney, where Julia Philips was living at the time. The late Michael Freedman of the Boucca Coven and Society of Guardians became the PPPA representative for New Zealand.
A year after the PPPA was launched, the Church of All Worlds (Australia) in Canberra was officially recognized as a pagan church by the state government. As well as Wicca, it also incorporated other neopagan traditions, including Celtic and Norse, voodoo, and shamanism. In 1997, the Pagan Awareness Network (PAN) was founded as a nonprofit-making educational organization by Australian members of the US-based Witches League for Public Awareness in Salem. Pagan Awareness Network was heavily involved in lobbying for a change in the existing laws against the practice of witchcraft, and defended the rights of Wiccans under the Religious Discrimination Act. They also ran a campaign to enlighten the public about Wicca, and correct misinformation in the media and disinformation spread by Christian churches.
One of the most prominent media witches in Australia with a high and controversial public profile was Fiona Horne (b. 1966). She was a self-initiate who came out of the broom closet in an article she wrote for the US music magazine Rolling Stone. Before her revelation she had been the co-founder and lead singer of the Australian rock group DEF FX. After it disbanded, Horne worked for the women’s magazine Marie Claire, as a music journalist on radio and television, and presented her own show on the Nine Network. In 1998, she caused a stir in Wiccan circles by posing nude for the centerfold of Playboy with snakes coiled around her body. Displaying her feminist credentials, she has also starred in The Vagina Monologues on the stage.
One of the practical problems facing Wiccan practitioners in Australia is the fact the country is in the Southern Hemisphere, so the seasonal calendar is opposite the Northern Hemisphere. In practice, this means that if the British (Irish) date sequence of Sabbats is followed, Samhain is in the spring, the winter solstice is at midsummer, Imbolc is a summer festival, Beltane is in the autumn, and Lughnasadh is a winter celebration. When Wicca first arrived in Australia in the 1970s, the British dates were followed slavishly, just as the Christian calendar is by non-Wiccans who celebrate Christmas in June with barbecues on the beach. It is only comparatively recently that Australian Wiccans have started to celebrate the Sabbats at the correct season, which means the summer solstice is on December 21.
Australian Wiccans also encounter problems when it comes to casting a magical circle, if they follow the Western tradition practiced in the Northern Hemisphere and based on the position in the sky of the rising and setting sun. In the Northern Hemisphere, the sun appears to move clockwise across the sky, but in Australia it appears to move anti-clockwise. When she visited Australia, the English High Priestess Vivianne Crowley said: “… I found it impossible to cast a clockwise circle in Australia and to me the flow of power seemed to be definitely anticlockwise, the Australian direction of the sun” (Crowley 2003: 39).
In Europe, Gardnerian Wicca was imported into the Netherlands in the 1970s through an English-Dutch couple known as Morgana and Merlin. They were initiated into a coven in England and began the Silver Circle Coven and the magazine Wiccan Rede in 1979. In 1999 they went public by starting the first “witches’ café” in the country. Morgana, who was born in Wales and brought up near the historical witchcraft center of Pendle Hill in Lancashire, became the Dutch representative for Pagan Federation International. Today Wicca is well established in the country, and in 2008 Isaac Bonewits from the United States, the “village witch” Marian Green (editor of the UK esoteric magazine Quest ), and Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone (no relation to Ray Bone) from Ireland attended Dutch conferences as guest speakers or led workshops and taught courses in the country.
The Zenit Daily Despatch issued by the Zenit International Press Agency reported in November 2005 that “witchcraft had moved into the mainstream,” when a Dutch court ruled that the costs of lessons in Wicca could be tax-deductible. The Leeuwarden District Court confirmed the legal right to claim the costs of witchcraft courses and lessons against tax bills owed to the national government. Margaville Rougan, of the Witches Homestead organization, said her workshops cost $200 for a weekend of training in the Craft and $2,600 for the full course of lessons. She claimed to have trained 150 students since 1995, and was pleased that future applicants could now claim their expenses against their taxes.
An example of how Wicca has developed in the Netherlands in recent years was provided by a report on the Pagan Federation Netherlands Conference held in 2008. The proceedings commenced with a Zoroastrian-Mithraic ritual that included an Arabic dervish dance. Workshops and talks followed on a range of subjects, such as using the tarot, the craft of the village wise woman, and using healing plants. The conference ended with a closing ceremony performed by the Temple of Starlight based on the resurrection of the ancient Egyptian god Osiris. The eclectic nature of this event not only reflects how Dutch Wicca has developed, but also how the modern neopagan movement has influenced Wicca in general.
Gardnerian Wicca spread to Germany through the founding of a coven there by Monique Wilson in the 1970s, by the influence of American troops stationed in the country during the Cold War who had been initiated into the Craft in the USA, and through individual contacts with covens in England run by well-known Wiccan writers and media witches. In the 1980s, Alexandrian Wicca became established in Germany through a series of lectures given by Alex Sanders. When Starhawk’s book The Spiral Dance was published in a German translation in 1983, it led to many feminist Wiccan groups being founded based on her Reclaiming tradition.
In France, which has a long history of occultism, in the 1980s there used to be a group known as “Français Wicca.” Contacts were established between them and several British Wiccans, including a senior member of the Brickett Wood Coven, Frederick Lamond, initiated in 1957. He was shocked to find out the French Wiccans worshipped the witch god and goddess as Lucifer and Lilith. His surprise is rather odd, considering that when he was initiated the goddess name used in Gardnerian Wicca was Aradia. This name came from Charles Godfrey Leland’s book on the nineteenth-century Tuscany witches that had greatly influenced Gerald Gardner. Aradia, of course, was the daughter of the sun god Lucifer and the moon goddess Diana. Unfortunately the High Priestess of the French coven committed suicide and the group disbanded. This confirmed Fred Lamond’s worst fears about them and their apparently foolish dabbling with Luciferianism.
Not all senior Gardnerian Wiccans agreed with Fred Lamond’s rather narrow and prejudiced view. For instance, shortly before her death Doreen Valiente told me she had been receiving psychic communications following a magical experiment to contact “the Lucifer current” [sic] and achieved “helpful and encouraging results.” These indicated to her that Lucifer was “the true name of the god of the Old Religion” (letters dated August 26, 1998, and September 11, 1998, in the MOW archive). This experiment by Valiente was inspired by reading a new translation of Leland’s book published in the United States. Twenty years earlier, Doreen had told me she “had no problem [with Lucifer] as a name for the old [witch] god” (letter dated September 6, 1977, in MOW archive).
Although the country has always had its own traditional witchcraft and folk magic dating back to pagan times, Wicca arrived late in Italy. Interest in the subject was first sparked around 1999 when translations of American books by Scott Cunningham and Phyliss Curott were first published. Curott’s fictional book Book of Shadows: A Modern Woman’s Journey into the Wisdom of Magic, describing her initiation into the Craft, and her Magic of the Goddess were especially influential in introducing Italians to Wicca. She visited the country in 2001 and did a series of workshops and talks that are regarded as jump-starting the neopagan movement in Italy. However, it was not until 2007 that the first book on Wicca was actually produced by an Italian writer. This was Wicca—Le Nouva Era della Vecchia Rel
igione or, in English, Wicca—The New Era of an Old Religion, by Cronos (aka Davide Marre).
In the early 2000s other popular American books by Starhawk and Silver RavenWolf began to be translated into Italian. To date, none of the well-known British authors such as the Farrars or Vivianne Crowley have been translated, although Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone have given talks in the country. Recently magazines have been published, groups founded, and conferences and workshops organized. Many of those attracted to Wicca in Italy are feminists or are involved in the green movement. Most are in the twenty-five to thirty-five age group and are well educated and middle class in social status. At least 60–80 percent of those involved or interested are women, and most are attracted to the type of Wiccan group represented by Starhawk’s Reclaiming tradition (Howell 2008).
Wicca has also spread from Europe and the United States to South American countries such as Brazil. The Wiccans in that country are mainly concentrated in the cities and the urban areas. They base their beliefs and practices on the available books by Gardner, Valiente, the Farrars, Laurie Cabot, Z. Budapest, Scott Cunningham, and Starhawk that have been translated into Portuguese in the last twenty years. There is even a Wiccan commune or witches’ village called the Temple da Deusa, or the Temple of the Goddess. This features a training school for Wiccan High Priests and Priestesses, and covers an area of fifty acres in the countryside. Members of this community are expected to carry out domestic duties such as cooking, child minding, washing the laundry, gardening, and driving transport. They grow about 20 percent of their own food, and membership in the commune is open to heterosexuals, homosexuals, lesbians, and transgenders.
In 1996, the Pagan Federation of South Africa was founded as a result of a change in the laws that granted freedom of religious expression after generations of white-only rule. Almost all the South African neopagans identify themselves as Wiccans, and other pagan traditions are marginalized (Wallace 2008). Despite the new legislation, it has been difficult for Wiccans in South Africa to get recognition by the new national government as followers of a legitimate religion, although some advances have been made in that direction. Even after the end of exclusive white rule, Christianity in the country has remained largely conservative. This is illustrated by the African Church’s attitude toward contentious moral issues such as homosexuality. These hard-line attitudes are also reflected in the approach to witchcraft—it is categorized by South African Christians as a satanic belief and practice.
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