Wicca: A comprehensive guide to the Old Religion in the modern world. Vivianne Crowley

involving invocations to the Gods. The Neoplatonists had great respect for all the ancient Pagan traditions. Care was taken to reconcile their more sophisticated religious thinking with traditional practices. Like the followers of Isis, many Neoplatonists were vegetarians, but they did not condemn those who continued to perform the traditional animal sacrifices.

      While the Neoplatonists saw the Divine as being outside the created world or transcendent, the Stoics believed that the universe was itself Divine and that human beings were part of this Divinity. In other words, the Divine was immanent or indwelling in the universe. The Stoics had high moral principles and believed that:

       For mortal to aid mortal – this is God,

       and this is the road to eternal glory.⁴

      The Stoics’ view that the universe is Divine and that the Gods are in-dwelling in Nature is very important within Wicca.

       Paganism and Witchcraft

      The stately world of the priests and priestesses of Isis and the thoughts of Greek philosophers poring over the mysteries of the Universe seem far removed from the traditional image of Witchcraft – the Witch with her cauldron and broomstick. What is the connection between the Goddess worshippers of the New Stone Age, the priesthood of Isis in their beautiful temples by the banks of the Nile, and the wizened crone of a Witch stirring her cauldron in the rural villages of Medieval England?

      Long before Christianity, there was a division in the most urban part of Europe, Greece and Rome, between the Paganism of the temples and the Paganism of the woods and groves. Indoor temple Paganism took an Apollonian approach; the Greek God Apollo being a God of music and intellectual pursuits. This was a Paganism of stately ceremonies in clean white robes. It was religion which focused on the conscious rational mind and symbols of Light and Sun; of this Neoplatonism was a part. The Dionysian approach, named after the Greek God of wine Dionysus, was a Paganism of ecstatic vision, of trance, of the loss of individual consciousness and its merging into Nature. The rites of Dionysus were the rites of drumming and darkness, the rites of the Moon. They celebrated individual freedom rather than control by the state and a return to Nature, rather than seeking to evolve beyond it.

      In Roman times, many of the practices of earlier Dionysian Paganism were thrust out of the mainstream of religion and became associated with Witchcraft. Witches were described as drawing down the Moon, or in other words Moon worship, and as going out in the darkness to collect herbs with bare feet, loose hair, their robes pulled up around their waists and armed with bronze sickles. On the dates of the larger festivals they went out on the hills to dance and chant and to tear apart a sacrificial victim, a black lamb. On the feast of Lupercalia on February 15, young men also took part, covering their bodies with goat skins and their faces with masks. Goats were sacrificed and people whipped with straps made from their hides to raise magical power. These practices were not favoured by the state, but were incorporated into Mystery Traditions such as that of Bacchus, God of Wine.

      The devotees of Bacchus soon fell foul of the law. They were accused of plotting against the state in much the same way as medieval Witches were later seen as plotting the downfall of James I of England. In Rome decrees were made against the Bacchanalia and the God’s adherents were imprisoned or executed.

      The stately and controlled approach to religion favoured by the urban cultures of Greece and Rome was a necessary stage in the development of our human intellect. However, while this type of religion appeals to the conscious mind, it does not satisfy the larger part of the human psyche that is not intellectual. For some the gap between the solar and lunar oriented aspects of religion was bridged by the Mysteries of Isis and of Eleusis. These rites, like those of Dionysus, took place by night, but their aim was not to lose the sense of individuality and to enter ecstasies, but to awaken higher consciousness. The Mysteries were a middle way which combined the best of Apollonian and Dionysian Paganism; for we must have both Sun and Moon, light and dark, conscious and unconscious, if we are to find our spiritual destiny. The Mysteries were very beneficial, but in many cases they were not available to the majority of people. Only those rich enough to pay the fees and buy the necessary ritual clothing, and well-educated enough to understand the complex rites, could take part. The Mediterranean world was in a spiritual void and the time was ripe for the new religion of Christianity to step in to fill the gap.

       The rise of Christianity

      Initially, the growth of Christianity was slow. By the beginning of the third century CE, it was so torn by schisms that it seemed unlikely to survive as one religious entity. All this changed with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine. In 324 CE, he declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Empire. Paganism was not immediately suppressed but now that Christianity had harnessed the powerful political force of the Roman Empire behind it, Paganism’s days were numbered.

      Unlike the religious tolerance which had marked the Pagan religions around the Mediterranean, Christianity was true to its Judaic parent. It was an intolerant masculine monotheism. There could be no question of co-existence alongside the older religions. Christianity took the uncompromising view that it was right and all other interpretations of the Divine were wrong. Satan was the ruler of all those who had not espoused the Christian religion. Other Gods were not Gods, but demons and servants of the arch-demon, Satan. The fate of some Gods and Goddesses was kinder than others. In the Mediterranean, the local deities tended to become absorbed into Christianity as saints. However, many Gods, including the Goddess Diana and, in most areas, the Horned God, were relegated to the status of demons. Christianity succeeded, for a time, in making the Gods of the old religion the Devil of the new.

      The European Pagan religions already condemned the practice of magic for evil social intent; but beneficial magic was widely accepted. Christianity condemned all magic – spells, incantations, herbalism, divination, weather lore – the whole gamut of activities by which human beings sought to control their environment. The Christian attitude was that these activities were not the prerogative of ordinary men and women, but the prerogative of the Church with its monopoly on the line to God.

      Christianity was a missionary religion and over a period of a thousand years it became the dominant religion of Europe. Far to the north-east in the Baltic States, Paganism remained the predominant religion, but various political manoeuvres meant that by the fifteenth century, the last Pagan country in Europe, Lithuania, had succumbed to Christianity. The conversion of kings and nobles to the new faith did not, however, mean an instant conversion of their peoples. Enforcement of Christianity was difficult and frequently followed the pattern of its younger brother in masculine monotheism, Islam, of conversion by the sword. The Scandinavian king St Olaf made his subjects choose between baptism or death. Such forced allegiance can have been nothing but nominal. In Germany, the Emperor Charlemagne conducted mass baptisms of Saxons by driving them at sword point through rivers blessed further upstream by his bishops. Others such as Redwald, King of the East Saxons, whilst adhering to Christianity, had not quite grasped the principles of monotheism. Redwald kept two altars, one for the new God and one for the Gods of his fathers. Many felt that in such tricky matters as Gods, it was best to play safe.

      What the Church later lumped together as Witchcraft had two elements – Pagan worship and magic. Pagan worship included man-worshipping (i.e. invoking the Gods into a priest or priestess) and the worship of the Divine in Nature, especially in evocative objects such as wells, trees and standing stones. Magic involved spell-making, divination, and healing. The concept of there being two types of religion: intellectual, solar-oriented, Apollonian religion which appeals to the conscious mind, and lunar, intuitive, ecstatic Dionysian religion which appeals to the unconscious, is important for understanding why Paganism continued to appeal. While Christianity could accommodate the Apollonian side of religion, a religion which emphasized the control of the unconscious by the conscious mind and the suppression of sexuality could not accommodate the joy to be gained through the celebration of Dionysian-type rites.

      In Britain, the old Pagan ways died hard. Following the conversion of the Saxon kings, bishops produced a steady flow of books of penances condemning those who practised Paganism. In the middle of the eighth century, Archbishop Ecgbert of York⁵ wrote condemning making offerings to devils,