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

such as May Day celebrations, the bringing of an evergreen tree into the house at Yule, the making of Bride’s bed by Scottish Highland cottagers at Imbolc, customs for corn harvest, well-dressing and others meant that Paganism was embedded in the life of the land.

      Paganism was also embedded in the life of the mind. The ancient Greek scholar Euhemerus, whose book was one of the first to be translated from Greek to Latin, had argued that originally the ancient Pagan Gods were worthy men and women who had been made Gods by their grateful communities. Euhemerism, as it came to be known, enjoyed a revival in the Christian period. Isis was accredited with teaching the ancient Egyptians the letters of the alphabet, Minerva, the Roman Goddess of wisdom, with inventing the art of working in wool, and Mercury was seen as the first musician.¹⁰ Euhemerism provided a cover under which mythology could be preserved. Rather than demonizing the Gods as earlier Christians had wished, their qualities were venerated and set up as models for human behaviour.

      The influence of Paganism became more active from the fifteenth century on. In the fifteenth century a Renaissance began, a rebirth of knowledge and scholarship that had been suppressed by Christianity. Developments in intellectual thought made people question Christian dogmas, a process hastened by the corruption into which the Church had fallen. For some of the disaffected, the solution was to adopt one of the new brands of Christianity. For others who were looking for something which orthodox Christianity could not offer, there were other avenues to explore.

      In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, adventurous European nobles had ridden to the Popes’ summons to the Crusades. Ostensibly worthy enterprises to defend Christian shrines in the Near East from the onslaught of Islam, the Crusades proved to be a rallying call for hundreds of thousands of European nobles and not-so-noble. Those whose forefathers had leapt from longboats shouting the name of Odin were now happy to don the Crusader’s cross and perform rape, pillage and plunder in the name of Christ.

      The Crusaders’ armies marched eastwards and met their match. Their attempts to stop Islam were a failure. Instead, they brought back to Europe plunder, disease, heretical ideas and, most precious of all, ancient Pagan manuscripts which had been forgotten or destroyed in the West. The next 300 years saw a Renaissance in Pagan thought.

      One of the most influential of the rediscovered books was the Corpus Hermeticum¹¹ or Works of Hermes. The Corpus Hermeticum was mistakenly believed to be of very ancient origin, the work of a mythical magician Hermes Trismegistus, thrice-greatest Hermes. However, in reality the writings dated from the first to third centuries CE and were primarily Neoplatonist in outlook. One of the most well-known of the works is the Emerald Tablet which contains the words familiar to many Witches and Pagans:

       That which is above is like that which is below, and that which is below is like that which is above, to achieve the wonders of the one thing.¹²

      In other words, the microcosm is a reflection of the macrocosm. This is the basis of all astrology and divination: the patterning of the heavens, the runes, the tarot, is a reflection of what is or will come to be.

      In 1450, the Italian nobleman Cosimo de’ Medici purchased the Corpus Hermeticum, installed the priest and philosopher Marsilio Ficino in the Villa Carregi in Florence and commissioned him to begin the work of translation. The translation overthrew Ficino’s Catholic ideas and he found himself more and more convinced of the truth of the Pagan religious vision. The universe was a visible manifestation of the Divine and the same Divine force lay behind all religions. Each religion was but a manifestation of a higher truth. Marsilio Ficino had the natal chart of a dedicated occultist: Sun and Mercury in Scorpio, with Aquarius rising and a practical streak of Moon in Capricorn. He was interested in practice as well as theory and did not stop at translation, but started to experiment with magic. Ficino was interested in magic as theurgy or spiritual development. His magic involved the use of chanting and music in order to achieve higher states of consciousness. Ficino was careful to try and keep on the right side of the Church by emphasising that his magic was natural magic dealing with the powers of the planetary spheres upon earthly things, rather than more dubious dealings with angels and demons.

      Marsilio Ficino’s religious and magical ideas were taken up by others, many of whom were less cautious in their approach. A notable successor was Pico della Mirandola. Where Ficino had gone no farther than trying to use natural (i.e. non-Divine and non-angelic) forces, Pico della Mirandola favoured the use of magical ceremonies to contact aspects of Deity or angelic forces. Pico della Mirandola also had the advantage of knowing Hebrew and he was able to introduce concepts from the Jewish mystical and magical system known as the Qabalah into the framework of the Corpus Hermeticum. The Church reacted: anyone found reading Pico della Mirandola’s works would be excommunicated.

      Magical ideas continued to evolve throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1531, Cornelius Agrippa, a native of Cologne in Germany, published his De Occulta Philosophia, On Occult Philosophy, which contained more lists of magical correspondences between the planets, earthly activities and objects such as precious stones. Agrippa’s ideas about magic are near to those of modern Witches. Agrippa maintained that magic depended not on dealing with demons, but on natural psychic gifts. Agrippa led an adventurous life travelling around Europe in frequent conflict with the Church. One of the highlights of his career was in Metz in Germany when he successfully defended a woman accused of Witchcraft and got her acquitted. Later in life, he was banned from his native Cologne and eventually from all of Germany. He had a number of spells in prison when his writings were judged as heretical and offensive.

      The study of the Corpus Hermeticum and of the Qabalah, with its ten emanations of the Divine to which all Deities could be related, encouraged a new line of thought amongst some of Europe’s intellectuals: belief that behind the cloak of different religious traditions lay common truths. Thus by the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the German humanist Conrad Ruth¹³ could declare that:

       There is but one God and one Goddess,

       but many are their powers and names:

       Jupiter, Sol, Apollo, Moses, Christus,

       Luna, Ceres, Proserpina, Tellus, Maria.

       But have a care in speaking these things.

       They should be hidden in silence

       as are the Eleusinian Mysteries;

       sacred things must needs be wrapped in fable and enigma.¹⁴

      The Church was fighting a losing battle in trying to hold back those developments in human thought which led on the one hand to that empirical study of the world around us which is modern science and on the other to the empirical study of the human mind and spirit which gave rise first to the study of magic and later to the development of the science of psychology. Scientific revolutions are both caused by and in their turn precipitate breakthroughs in thought. One of the most radical discoveries or rediscoveries of the sixteenth century was that the Sun did not revolve around the Earth; something which was known by the ancient Greeks. The Earth and human beings were not the centre of the universe. In fact, the Earth revolved around the Sun. This discovery was made by the Polish physician and astronomer Copernicus. It is hard for us today to understand the impact it made. The whole world-view of Christian Europe – that we lived in a static unevolving universe created by an anthropomorphic male God in seven days – was totally undermined. Once the nature of the cosmos was questioned, the floodgates were opened. A new vision of the universe began to come into being, a vision which was Pagan and pantheistic.

      Although few magicians were burned at the stake and there was no systematic persecution, some, such as Giordano Bruno, did die for their faith. As a child, he had mystical experiences and saw spirits on the hills beneath the beech and laurel trees of his native Italy. He found himself agreeing with the Pagan view: the Divine was to be found in Nature. Bruno became a Dominican but his ideas did not find favour with his superiors. He fled his monastery, hiding a heretical book he had been reading down the lavatory. The book was discovered and the Inquisition ordered his arrest. Bruno fled to Switzerland, France and finally to England where he lectured at Oxford University and was received by Queen Elizabeth I. He also visited