Understanding the Roots of Modern Paganism in the Long Quest for Human Liberation
This is the Text of a paper presented by Embreis23 at the Mystic South Conference 2025.
By Embreis23 (James Grimes)
“And ye shall be freed from slavery,
And ye shall be free in everything;
And as the sign that ye are truly free,
Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men
And women also; this shall last until
The last of your oppressors shall be dead …”
from Aradia: Gospel of the Witches, Charles G. Leland (1899), but attributed by Leland to the Tuscan Strega Maddalena
I first read those words when I was 13 years old, more than 50 years ago, and they captured my imagination. It did not immediately lead me to declare myself a witch – that took another 14 years, and I have written about it elsewhere.(1)
But to me, Witchcraft, or the Modern Pagan Movement, as I now more often describe it, was always subversive, always political, in the broadest sense of that word, as much as it was religious or “spiritual.” It took me a while to get there, but in witchcraft, in seeing the world through Pagan eyes, I found a path that led neither to the vicious authoritarianism of my childhood Protestantism nor the dull thud of disenchanted materialism.
The roots of the Modern Pagan Movement – comprising an array of the Witches, and Pagans, and Heathens, and Wiccans, and occult fellow travelers– are tangled, but one important root that fed it runs to the radical politics of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries (if not earlier).
Freemasons, Illuminati and other conspirators
Canadian Anthropologist Erica Lagalisse, in her study Occult Features of Anarchism, has documented the many ways in which occult practices and secret societies dedicated to those practices influenced and supported the social movements that developed into socialism, communitism, organized labor, communism, and anarchism.
In telling that story, Lagalisse distinguishes between the Conspiracy of the Peoples, those who sought to improve and liberate the poor from oppression, and the Conspiracy of Kings, those who sought to maintain the power of established hierarchies.
Lagalisse, who comes from a working class background and experience as an anarchist activist, is concerned with the fracture in leftist and anti-authoritarian movements between Western intellectuals, who disdain religious motivations, folk beliefs, and the occult, and revolutionary organizers from indigenous and “third-world” populations(3), whose experience and motivations are often suffused with religion and magical belief.
Her main purpose is to show that Western leftist history is rooted in Hermetic and magical practices of the early modern era and “… the ‘disenchantment’ we often hear about in relation to the European Enlightenment is but a tale.”
“In the hands of power, Hermetic doctrines served to inspire new confidence and justification to assert worldly dominion over all levels of being, yet the same constellation of ideas was also mobilized ‘from below’ to influence the emergent social levelling projects of the modern left,” she writes. “When it became both religious and dignified for ‘the Miracle Spirit of Man’ to operate on the world, the assertion of existential powers by men with subversive intent was also subjectively validated and socially legitimized.”
Lagalisse goes on to document the role of Freemasonry, various Rosicrucian brotherhoods, and other revolutionary groups “who were not necessarily Masons [but] made use of the lodges’ existing infrastructure and social networks to further their cause.”
One such revolutionary brotherhood was the real and documented Order of Illuminati, founded by Adam Weishaupt, himself a Freemason, in the significant year 1776: “His revolutionary agenda involved the complete dismantling of the state, the church, and the institution of private property, all justified by a revamped Christian millennialism affected by reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Eleusinian mysteries and organizationally inspired by the secret associations of the Pythagoreans.”
Although there were also politically conservative Masonic Lodges, there is no real doubt that others who were deeply involved in the revolutions of the late 18th and 19th centuries were Masons. This included many of the men who led the American Revolution of 1776 and who were Masons, as were the leaders of the French Revolution of 1789.
Later figures such as anarchist leaders Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikael Bakunin were initiated into the Memphite Masonic orders in Paris.
The revolutionary brotherhoods and radical lodges were opposed by the old guard, of course. The monarchs and aristocrats of the old order fought back against the tide of popular revolution in what Lagalisse characterizes as the Conspiracy of the Kings.
In 1846, a letter from the Fraternal Democrats, a London-based brotherhood then led by no less a personage than Karl Marx, to a similar organization, the Belgian Democrats, stated the case succinctly: “The conspiracy of kings must be met with the conspiracy of the peoples.”
But, under the influence of Marx and, to some extent, Bakunin, the popular revolutionary movements mostly discarded, or at least papered over, the occult or metaphysical theories espoused by earlier rebels, in favor supposedly scientific theories of economics and history.
Not all of the radicals were on board with these developments. They began to seek a different path, rejecting the dubiously scientific materialism of Marx and doubting the continued value of mass uprisings. This was the third conspiracy, the conspiracy of the Magicians.
The Revolutions of 1848 and what came after
A series of revolutions leading up to 1848 proved that ordinary people with sufficient determination could stand up to the power of the kings and aristocrats. Although many of these revolutions succeeded, the overall results were never quite as bright as the idealists’ dream. The longer-term aftermath of these revolutions generally created the conditions for further authoritarianism, though it might take a different form from the target of the original revolt. The revolutions, rather than bringing lasting change, became merely the starting point for a cycle of despair, revolution, euphoria, and despair.
This cycle of revolutions can be said to have begun with the revolt of Britain’s North American colonies in 1776. The American colonists threw off the British Empire and established a Bill of Rights that went beyond anything known before in recognizing individual rights, but for the most part, the New United States was a government for and by white men who owned property, and that property included slaves.
In 1789, the French Revolution brought down a king, asserting “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” This changed the world in many ways, but it also brought brutal repressions. These led to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who became Emperor but was finally defeated. As a result, the Bourbon monarchy had been restored by 1817.
The cycle of revolutions rolled on. In 1830, the French ousted the last Bourbon king but went on to install the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Phillipe, the “bourgeois king.”
In 1848, more revolutionary waves washed over much of Europe, beginning in Italy and spreading throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the states that would become Germany. By June, the French dutifully rose up again and ousted Louis-Phillipe, beginning the Second Republic.
But in France, at least, the Revolution is probably most notable for its almost immediate failure. If the problem of authoritarianism was clear, the problems of democracy became equally clear. The euphoria of the Revolution of 1848 and the flight of King Louis-Phillipe wore off quickly. In the first elections, the supporters of the old Monarchy carried the day, electing as its first president Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew and official successor of the late emperor and conqueror. By the end of 1851, Louis Napoleon had mounted a military coup to make himself dictator. The next year, The French electorate supported a plebiscite declaring Bonaparte Emperor Napoleon III. The 2nd French Republic was dead almost before it began, leaving the dreams of the radicals in the dust.
Among those disappointed radicals were three men who would go on to influence the development of Modern Paganism. Jules Michelet, one of the most admired French historians of the day, was chief propagandist for the Republican uprising. Among the Parisians who were fighting in the street were the failed seminarian Alphonse Constant, who would soon take the name “Eliphas Levi”, and a wandering American and aspiring journalist named Charles Godfrey Leland.
Michelet was already famous as a historian in France. From the beginning of his career, he was an ardent campaigner for Republicanism and human rights, and against the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. His works were notable for focusing more on the influence of ordinary people living ordinary lives, rather than telling history through the stories of kings and warriors and “great men.” He was also known for focusing on the role of women.
In 1838, when Michelet had already published the early volumes of his 19-volume Histoire de France, he began a series of polemical lectures against the monarchy that are considered one of the direct influences on the revolution of 1848.
The collapse of the Republic had the most direct effect on Michelet. He was already a famous historian, but had supported himself for nearly 20 years by working in the government records office. In 1852, he lost that job because he refused to swear fealty to Napoleon III.
He had also remarried, in 1849 to the much-younger Athénaïs Mialaret, who was herself a formidable intellect and who later produced important works on “natural history” in her own right. Athénaïs, by Michelet’s own account, became his close collaborator and co-author, although she was never credited on his books. Under her influence, he began to move toward a different philosophical outlook, one often described as “pantheistic” and one which resembles some flavors of modern Paganism and “New Age” thought.
More importantly, in 1862, he published La Sorciere, in which he presented the witch of the middle ages as a figure of rebellion against the general oppression of the poor by the church and the nobility, but also as women rebelling against their oppression by men.
He writes in his introduction: “ Witches they are by nature. It is a gift peculiar to woman and her temperament. By birth a fay, by the regular recurrence of her ecstasy she becomes a sibyl. By her love she grows into an enchantress. By her subtlety, often whimsical and beneficent, she becomes a Witch; she works her spells; does at any rate lull our pains to rest and beguile them.”
La Sorciere Is a tough read for a modern reader because Michelet’s style is passionate and highly colored. Ronald Hutton, who (unsurprisingly) did not approve, described Michelet as writing with “passion and color unusual, even for the time,“
But by my reading, Michelet was a visionary who had the ability to see through the simple dry accounts of things, and look into the oral traditions of fairy tale and country law, and see what lay hidden in them. It seems to me that the passion and color reveal that Michele had bigger things in mind.
However, if you can get past his intensity, the image of a witch sounds very much like the kind of witch that many modern Pagans aspire to be. He says:
Unlike the Cassandra of old, who awaited mournfully the future she foresaw so well, [the witch] herself creates the future. Even more than Circe, than Medea, does she bear in her hand the rod of natural miracle, with Nature herself as sister and helpmate. Already she wears the features of a modern Prometheus. With her industry begins, especially that queen-like industry which heals and restores mankind. … Well does the priest discern the danger, the bane, the alarming rivalry, involved in this priestess of nature whom he makes a show of despising. From the gods of yore she has conceived other gods. Close to the Satan of the Past we see dawning within her a Satan of the Future.
Michelet, one must understand, remained Christian in his basic outlook, despite his disgust and anger at the hierarchy of the church. As such, he does regard his witches as worshipping Satan, but at the same time, this Satan is understood to be the great spirit of nature, combining the features of the Greek Pan, Proserpina (his preferred name for the deity Persephone) and other deities of the Classical past.
Your Dante, when he drew my likeness, forgot my attributes. When he gave me that useless tail, he did not see that I held the shepherd’s staff of Osiris; that from Mercury I had inherited his caduceus. In vain have they thought to build up an insurmountable wall between the two worlds; I have wings to my heels, I have flown over. By a kindly rebellion of that slandered Spirit, of that ruthless monster, succour has been given to those who mourned; mothers, lovers, have found comfort. He has taken pity on them in defiance of their new god.
These are the words of the witches’ Satan as given by Michelet.
Like modern Pagans and other writers including Lagalisse and Barbara Ehrenreich, he stresses the role of the medieval witch as a healer posessing knowledge of medicine that was not available to the conventional doctors of the era, stressing their expertise with herbal medicine: “What we know for surest with regard to their medicinal practice is, that for ends the most different, alike to stimulate and to soothe, they made use of one large family of doubtful and very dangerous plants, called, by reason of the services they rendered, The Comforters, or Solaneæ.”
This is the beginning of the belief in witchcraft for political resistance, at least in European theory.
Charles Godfrey Leland and the Witches of Tuscany
I had read Aradia: Gospel of the Witches and therefore knew the name Charles Godfrey Leland and that he had earlier published volumes of folklore, but I learned in researching this paper that he was a much more remarkable person than I had thought. As I noted, he was a student at the University of Paris, then aged 23, when the revolution of 1848 broke out and he took to the streets with the rebels. But that was neither the beginning nor the end of his adventures.
He returned to the United States and became a crusader against slavery and then fought for the union during the Civil War. After the Civil War, he became one of the first people to advocate for education in the industrial arts as a natural part of a broad education and helped found the first School for the Industrial Arts..
He lived for a time with the Algonquin tribe and also with the Romani (or Gypsies, as he was most likely to put it) in England. In first paragraph of his Memoirs, he mentions attending a dinner party with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. most importantly from our point of view, he refers to “the long and very strangely adventurous discoveries, continued for five years, among witches in Italy, which resulted in the discovery that all the names of the old Etruscan gods are still remembered by the peasantry of the Toscana Romagna, and that ceremonies and invocations are still addressed to them. All this, however, is still too near to be written about.”
Leland made his living publishing books about the folklore that he gleaned from his encounters with “black hoodoos and red Indians”, the terms that he used, typical of his generation. And his experiences with the witches of Tuscany, he was reluctant to publish. Besides the quotation from his Memoirs, published in 1894, 5 years before Aradia in 1899. I had earlier been under the impression this was Leland’s magnum opus, but actually he was 75 Years old and essentially retired when he finally published Aradia gospel of the witches, from which the quotation that heads this paper came.
Leland does not pretend to have written Aradia himself. The book consists mostly of an Italian text that Leland says was provided to him by the Tuscan Strega he calls Maddalena, along with his translation into English. The version that Modern Pagans know well, naturally, is Leland’s English translation. As in Michelet, the witches of Aradia “both men and women also” are country people who seek from Witchcraft the power to resist the oppression of wealthy lords and churchmen. Unlike Michelet, who took it for granted that Witchcraft was exterminated during the Early Modern persecutions, Leland presents Italian Witchcraft as a living practice in the 1880s.
I don’t know if it’s necessary to point out the importance of the Aradia, and especially of the opening invocation of Diana, to Modern Paganism, but consider The Charge of the Goddess, perhaps the most widely known piece of “scripture“ in modern Witchcraft. Most of its opening invocation is a thin paraphrase of Diana’s opening speech in Aradia.
Conventional historians such as Ronald Hutton tend to dismiss Leland as a teller of folk tales rather than a serious scholar, because they discount purely oral accounts. But the conventional historian’s bias against stories handed down orally works only to ensure that history is mainly a record of things the elites considered important. Leland lived among his sources and got to know them and thus was able to present a vision of Witchcraft not seen by the literate West before. Arguably, it doesn’t matter when assessing the importance of Aradia to Modern Pagans, how historically accurate Maddalena’s account was. But Leland was not the only source to record the continued reverence for Diana in Italy in the 19th Century, as Leland notes in the Introduction. Furthermore, there is plenty of documentation in the confessions of rites to a Goddess, sometimes under the name of Diana or Herodias and sometimes by other names. Accused witches who confessed this way were often tortured until they changed their testimony and admitted that it was “really” the Devil.(4)
Eliphas Levi: “the path of personal, successive, gradual emancipation”
Alphonse Louis Constant, before he assumed the name Eliphas Levi, had a troubled and tumultuous life. Twice he entered Catholic seminaries, with the intent of becoming a priest, and twice he left or was expelled (it isn’t clear) because he couldn’t abide by the disciplines. A.E. Waite says of his early difficulties with the Church:
He seems, however, to have conceived strange views on doctrinal subjects, though no particulars are forthcoming, and, being deficient in gifts of silence, the displeasure of authority was marked by various checks, ending finally in his expulsion from the Seminary. Such is one story at least, but an alternative says more simply that he relinquished the sacerdotal career in consequence of doubts and scruples.
He took a formal vow of celibacy, but then eloped with 16-year-old Marie-Noemi Cadiot. (5)
Both before and after his two attempts at seminary, he supported himself by tutoring and writing pamphlets. Around 1838, he fell under the influence of the “prophet” Simon Ganneau (an early advocate of non-binary or androgynous gender identity) and the Socialist writer Flora Tristan, among others, and began producing pamphlets advocating for socialism and republicanism, such La Bible de Liberte (1841) (the Bible of Liberty) and La Voix de Famine (the Voice of Hunger) (1846). Both of these got him thrown into prison by Louis-Phillipe’s regime for “seeking to break the Peace by exciting hatred between different classes in society and exciting hatred toward one class of people.”
This passage from La Bible gives some idea of his line of thought:
The man to whom egotistical and murderous society refuses the bread which will nourish him as others are nourished, repulsed in all his attempts to be seated at God’s great banquet, is outraged in his heart, and says to those who reject him: You are assassins! But, he says, I have as much right as you to live, and if I can defend myself against you, I will not die! You assault me with hunger: I will take up less cowardly and less cruel arms, and I will save my life with a dagger!
It should be noted, though, that, as with Michelet, Constant’s radicalism was still embedded in his idiosyncratic and anti-clerical vision of Christianity:
Martyrs are men of intelligence and love who protest, unto death, against the brutal tyranny of ordinary men. They are the sublime protestors who disobey men in order to obey God. … It was Christ who preached a new law and perished for sedition and blasphemy.
That last passage, in which “men of intelligence and love” are shown as at enmity with “the brutal tyranny of ordinary men,” shows an important development in Constant’s thought that will become more important later: contrary to the levelling instincts of the earlier radicals and the lionization of the working class by the nascent communists and anarchists, Constant was unconvinced of the ability of “ordinary men” for self government.
This became more apparent after the Revolution of 1848. Constant cheered the fall of Louis-Phillipe but became almost immediately disillusioned and disgusted by the behavior of the new republican government. He then became a supporter of Louis-Napoleon’s Bonapartiste Party, and applauded the elevation of emperor by plebiscite. By 1855, though, he had become equally repulsed by the political repression of the new empire and was jailed again for writing a poem criticizing Napoleon.
In that same year, his wife left him for the man who owned the magazine that was the primary market for his political writing. By the end of the year, He gave up on conventional politics and turned wholly to Magic, taking up the name Eliphas Levi Zahed,and devoting himself entirely to the study of Magic.
He had already been studying Kabala (his preferred spelling) and Tarot and had already published the first volume of Le Dogme et Rituel of Haute Magie in 1854. The second volume appeared in 1856, and, in 1862, the Histoire de Magie.
It is hard to overstress the influence that Levi had on the Western occultists who followed him: the integration of Kabala with the Tarot, the image of Baphomet, the symbolism of the Pentacle as it is now generally understood, all come from Levi. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, despite other claims, seems derived from Levi’s synthesis of Cabala and the Tarot.
Perhaps the most important to our purpose here is his conception of Will and the imagination, acting on what he calls “astral Light,” as the key to the great work of magic.
The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full entire conquest of his faculties and his future: it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will along assuring him universal domination over Azoth and the domain of Magnesia; in other words, full power over the universal magical agent. This agent, disguised by the ancient philosophers under the name First Matter, determines the forms of substance and we can really arrive by means of it at all metallic transmutation of the universal medicine. This is not a hypothesis. It is a scientific fact.
Levi did not originate the doctrine of the will, and he himself credited it to Paracelsus among others, but it’s his doctrine of the world that informed the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as taught by the Isis-Urania Temple in London. From there, it was transmitted down to Aleister Crowley, who, as we will see, was not only Levi’s intellectual heir, but believed himself to be Levi’s reincarnation.
In the final section of the Histoire, Levi states this political and social conclusion on the role of Magic:
The common people are initiated by toil and by faith into the right of property and knowledge. There will be always such a people, as there will be children always; but when the aristocracy, endowed with wisdom, shall become a mother to the people, the path of personal, successive, gradual emancipation will be open to all, and he that is called will thereby be enabled through his own efforts to attain the rank of the elect. This is that mystery of the future which antique initiation concealed in its dark recesses. The miracles of Nature made subject to the will of man are reserved for the elect to come.
Now, reading this carelessly one night included this just another assertion of the importance of hierarchical authority like many others before But it seems to me that this is where the difference is, especially in light of the phrase “gradual emancipation will be open to all come and he that is called will thereby be enabled through his own efforts to attain the rank of the elect.” This is the radical idea, the point which Levi diverges is both from the rising left, and the older regime of the right, that the future will be created to those who by their own efforts in the practice of magic achieve a state of mind that allows them to control themselves and thus the world. This is the idea that would pass through a few more transformations and motivate the beginnings of the Modern Pagan Movement.
Digression: the stories I have not told
I have focused on the development of a different vision of emancipation and liberation of humanity among some of the disappointed idealists of the middle 19th century, specifically the work of three figures, Michelet, Leland, and Levi, and their response to the failure of the Revolution 1848, because they all three have been clear and original influences on the Modern Pagan Movement, and because I think they are critical links in a chain of political/social ideas that are inherent to that movement. However, in so doing I recognize that I am leaving out the contributions of many others: I wish I had more time to talk about Paschal Beverly Randolph, who first openly taught sex magic in Western culture, among his many other accomplishments. Randolph was a free Black man who managed to operate in the middle of the 19th century by claiming to be the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman.
I wish I had space to talk about the founders of Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn, and also Hargrave Jennings, who was instrumental in organizing the Rosicrucian Society in Albion, a key predecessor of the Isis-Urania Temple, or Kenneth R.H. MacKenzie, the Scottish-Austrian polymath who may have created the “cypher letters,” that inspired the the Golden Dawn. And there are many others.
I particularly regret that the role of women is not better recognized here, because women were a huge part of this story. But in the middle of the 19th century, they rarely got to put their names on books. I have mentioned Michelet’s second wife, Athénaïs Mialaret, whom Michelet privately acknowledged as a co-author of his late works including La Sorciere. Similarly, S.L. MacGregor Mathers was one of the founders of the Isis-Urania Temple and his name is on many of the documents and translations, but his wife, Moina, formerly Mina Bergson and sister of the Swiss-French philosopher Henri Bergson, was by his side through all of that, even serving as his “prime minister” in later years, according to some accounts. And just considering the Isis-Urania Temple, we should mention Florence Farr, a famous model and actress in her day, who was also in charge of the education of 1st degree initiates and probably presided at Crowley’s first initiation, and Pamela Colman Smith, who created the images for the most famous and common of all Tarot decks.
One woman whose name was definitely on her books and whom I’ve unfairly neglected is Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, author of Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, and founder of the Theosophist movement. I must admit that I formed a poor opinion of Theosophy years ago and have neglected this important influence on all modern occultism. It has become apparent to me in researching this paper that Blavatsky was synthesizing Levi’s magical teachings with Egyptian symbolism and Asian religious thought decades before Crowley did something similar. But it was through Crowley that the main ideas we are discussing found their way to Gerald Gardner, and hence to the foundations of the Modern Pagan Movement.
The transformations of Aleister Crowley
Grant Morrison once called Crowley “the Picasso of 20th Century Occultists,” and that seems appropriate: both were brilliant innovators in their fields, unwilling to compromise, but constantly changing. And both, when you examine their lives and personal attitudes, are hard to like.
As a recent author, Chaewon Koo, put it “Crowley was not a woke person. But let’s not throw out the slippery baby with the grungy bathwater.”
Crowley was, to say the least, complex, and I am not going to attempt to relitigate the facts of his life, except to add that throughout his career, he was focused on Magic (or Magick, as he preferred) as a means to personal liberation, as way that humans could achieve enlightenment, or liberation, or emancipation, whichever you choose.
In the words of The Book of the Law, T“Every man and every woman is a star.” Frater IAO131 in his online essay “The Politics of Thelema,” says “There is a general idea in Thelema that each star has a particular orbit or course. Thelema implies the freedom to do one’s Will but also the severe restriction of only doing one’s Will; ‘It is the apotheosis of Freedom; but it is also the strictest possible bond’ (‘Liber II: The Message of the Master Therion’), for ‘Thou hast no right but to do thy will’ (Liber AL vel Legis I:42).”
I would submit that this a development from Levi’s idea that the “the path of personal, successive, gradual emancipation will be open to all.” That Crowley looked to Levi for inspiration is not controversial. His method of correlating Kabala, Tarot, and Astrology is derived from Levi’s work as implemented by the Isis-Urania Temple. Beyond that, Crowley stated clearly in Magick in Theory and Practice that he believed himself to be Levi’s reincarnation.
But Crowley went beyond Levi in many ways. Most obviously, he discards the remnants of Levi’s Christian framework. Crowley also synthesized Levi’s Magic with oriental influences, including Hatha Yoga and Taoist philosophy gleaned from his reading of The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tse. Another influence was undoubtedly Friedrich Nietsche. Crowley often praised Nietsche, and probably in “Every man and every woman is a star,” one must hear an echo of “One must have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star” from Thus spake Zarathustra. Crowley was also undoubtedly influenced by Nietsche’s concept of the aristocrat, particularly as described in the last chapter of Beyond Good and Evil. Crowley generally accepts Nietsche’s view of self-actualization through self-discipline and will, and he conflates Levi’s concept of Will in the pursuit of Magic with Nietsche’s concept of the Will to Power, but with this important difference: To Crowley, and I think he accurately finds this implied in Levi’s concept of Will as acting on the “astral light, Will is not just a matter of the individual’s self assertion, but a quality that is innate: to do one Will is to do that which one is naturally suited to do if one were not crippled by social conditioning and unwarranted guilt. This is the meaning of “Every man and every woman is a star”: that as stars have their natural paths through space, so every man and every woman has a natural path through life, one that they can travel with ease and grace. The problem is that humans are diverted from the natural path of their Will by social forces and other circumstances. In Crowley’s system, it is possible to overcome those forces and achieve the grace of true will by the practice of Magic.
Although Crowley’s rhetoric always spoke of the universality of this process, following Levi’s idea of the gradual admission of more and more people into the circle of the emancipated, his early efforts reeked of elitism. His system was opaque and secretive and organizations such as the A:A: and the Ordo Templi Orientis were expensive and difficult to join. Furthermore, he was a poor leader and organizer and his massive ego and tendency to self-indulgence drove away many of his closest admirers.
By the time he wrote the Introduction to Magick in Theory and Practice, he had realized all of this:
My former work has been misunderstood, and its scope limited, by my use of technical terms. It has attracted only too many dilettanti and eccentrics, weaklings seeking in ‘Magic’ an escape from reality. I myself was first consciously drawn to the subject in this way [emphasis added]. And It has repelled only too many scientific and practical minds, such as I most designed to influence.
But MAGICK is for ALL. I have written this book to help the Banker, the Pugilist, the Biologist, the Poet, the Navvy, the Grocer, the Factory Girl, the Mathematician, the Stenographer, the Golfer, the Wife, the Consul—and all the rest—to fulfil themselves perfectly, each in his or her own proper function. [I have simplified the dramatic typography of the original.]
But Crowley was temperamentally unable to bend from his Nietschean perfectionism and arrogance to reach out to a broader audience. There he needed help, and, near the end of his life, he found what he needed in a retired civil servant named Gerald B. Gardner.
Gerald Gardner and the Beginning of the Modern Pagan Movement
Almost as much has been written, good and bad, about Gerald Gardner as about Aleister Crowley. Whether or not you subscribe the tenets of the form of Pagan witchcraft now known as “Wicca” (although Gardner never called it that), whatever opinion you may have of the historicity or authenticity of his claims to have simply revealed the existence of an existing secret tradition of religious witchcraft, I hope it can be agreed that the the Modern Pagan Movement as an historical phenomenon and as a publicly acknowledged religious movement began with the publication of Gardner’s book, Witchcraft Today, in 1954. That book was the book that inspired many practitioners of many systems of magic and witchcraft to come out of hiding, and others to synthesize new systems incorporating some, not necessarily all, of Gardner’s ideas. Victor Anderson read it; Alexander Sanders read it, Timothy Zell read it, and all of these went on to lead their own systems of witchcraft or Modern Paganism.
As Gardner told the story, he was introduced to a surviving “witch cult” in 1938, when a woman he called Dafo introduced him to a group of elderly people practicing the Craft in the basement of a house in the New Forest area of England. In Gardner’s telling, the practices of the New Forest coven, recorded in the “Book of Shadows,” which on reading, he realized “that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived.”
Gardner emphasized the age and apparent fragility of the New Forest coveners – he himself had turned 50 years old at that point – and his fear that their knowledge would be lost when they all died. He reported that, after some years of practicing with the New Forest Coven, he was able to persuade his elders to relax his vows of secrecy to an extent and reveal the existence of the surviving witch cult to the world. He wrote in Witchcraft Today :
Anyhow, I soon found myself in the circle and took the usual oaths of secrecy which bound me not to reveal any secrets of the cult. But, as it is a dying cult, I thought it was a pity that all the knowledge should be lost, so in the end I was permitted to write, as fiction, something of what a witch believes in the novel High Magic’s Aid. This present volume has the same purpose, but deals with the subject in a factual way.
Gardner always stressed that the rituals he learned from the coven were fragmentary and that he had to supplement them from other sources. It is not difficult to notice that may elements of Wiccan practice – the three levels of initiation, the invocations of the powers of the classical elements at the four cardinal directions, the use of the phrase “so mote to be” – are recognizably drawn ether from Masonic practice or from the rituals of the Golden Dawn.
What Gardner never publicly acknowledged was the influence of Crowley or, for that matter, of Leland and Aradia. But those influences are easily spotted, particularly in the document known as “The Charge of the Goddess.” Even in the first, truncated version published by Gardner in Witchcraft Today it contains a paraphrase from Diana’s speech from Aradia: “Once in the month, and better it be when the moon is full, meet in some secret place and adore me, who am queen of all the magics ….” and the second paragraph is made up almost entirely of phrases taken verbatim from Crowley’s 1917 essay “The Law of Liberty.”
The longer, more familiar version of the Charge, as edited by Doreen Valiente, incorporates still more lines from Aradia, and retains 4 key phrases taken from “The Law of Liberty,” or as quotations from the Book of the Law used in “The Law of Liberty,” those being:
- “… for Mine is the ecstasy of the spirit and Mine also is joy on earth”
- “… and beyond death I give peace and freedom and reunion with those that have gone before”
- “Nor do I demand aught of sacrifice”; and
- “… for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.”
Aside from the textual evidence, Gardner visited Crowley on a number of occasions in the years before Crowley’s death in December of 1947. At one point, Crowley designated Gardner as his successor as outer head of the OTO in England and there is apparently a document in Crowley’s handwriting, authorizing Gardner to create an OTO “camp.”
It is most often reported that Gardner met Crowley for the first time when they were introduced by Arnold Crowther(7) in 1946, but there is some evidence that they knew each other as early as 1938. One would certainly suppose that Gardner, with his broad interest in occult, would have been aware of Crowley.
But the known timeline is important: in 1947, shortly before his death, Crowley named Gardner as one of his successors and issues a charter to him to create in OTO camp; in 1949, Gardner first describes the practices that would become Wicca in fictional form in High Magic’s Aid; in 1951, Gardner begins openly initiating people into the Bricket Wood Coven; and, in 1954, published Witchcraft Today. It is true that correlation does not equal causation, but the sequence of events certainly strongly suggests that, whatever other motives Gardner had, his communications with Crowley in 1947 was a driver of the decisions he made leading to the beginning of the Modern Pagan Movement.
The use of language from Aradia and “The Law of Liberty” gives away the game: both are documents that argue for the value of Magic and Witchcraft as tools to resist oppression and promote liberty, both in a social and political sense, and also in the sense of self-liberation from shame and social conditioning. Understanding that, we understand that Modern Witchcraft and Paganisms, were always meant to be political in the broadest sense, it was always meant to be subversive of the old order.
The Freemasons and the revolutionary brotherhoods found a justification for greater human freedom in Hermetic philosophy and magical practice; Michelet showed us how witchcraft could function as resistance to persecution and injustice; Leland gave us hope that the subversive witchcraft perceived by Michelet had survived; Levi synthesized Hermetic Magic with Kabala and imagined that people could overcome the oppressions of both the Left and the Right through the practice of Magic; Crowley further synthesized Levi’s vision with Taoist mysticism and existentialist philosophy into a method for achieving that kind of emancipation, but did not have.
A Magical Revolution
What would a Magical Revolution look like? Imagine a world of people who knew their own power, who felt in control of their own lives. Imagine a world without victims. What if everyone saw themselves as part of the web of consciousness, and not as a small part, linked to stars and worms equally. What if everyone loved lift, but no one feared death?
How would there be emperors or dictators or oligarchs where no one is afraid? How can dragons exist and maintain their dragon hoards
What if people:
- All understood themselves to have the power to change the world?
- Had no fear of death?
- Were not ashamed of their bodies or their desires?
- Were never sentimental, but never willfully cruel?
- Had no shame in enjoying the good things that they acquire, but no desire to cling to them or hoard them either?
If they were to, as Hakim Bey put it:
… shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history … shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.
How could such people be controlled? If they all could live with each other, what kind of world would they live in?
I would suggest that the end point of all Magical practice, the real Great Work of the mystics, is to become that person. And that is the Great Work to which we as Modern Pagans ought to aspire.
The Magical Revolution will not be about bringing down governments systems just to replace them with new governments or systems; it will about learning to be, and teaching others to be, so compete in our emancipated will that we become ungovernable.
Notes
- https://athensareapagans.org/blog/2024/07/27/pantheon-part-i/
- I dislike the term “neo-Pagan,” although I understand why it appeals to some. None of the ancients conceived of themselves as Pagans, or as having a common set of beliefs. Modern Pagans are the first to consciously adopt Paganism as a path.
- This is not a term Lagallise uses or would use, but I will for brevity’s sake.
- See, e.g. Ginzburg, Carlo, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Tr. John and Ann Tedeschi (1992 Baltimore; John Hopkins University Press)
- Who would leave him and go on to significant careers as a sculptor and writer. See A.E. Waite’s introduction to his translation of Levi’s HIstoire de Magie.
- Crowley discusses his understanding of Levi’s late religious thought in the introduction to his translation of La Clef des Grand Mysteres (the Key of the Mysteries).
- Crowther would go on to lead, along with his wife Patriica, one of the most important Gardnerian covens in the U.K.
Bibliography
Adler, Margot, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess Worshippers and Other Pagans in America Today (1979; revised edition 1996, Beacon Press)
Bey, Hakim T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (1985), posted by https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism
Bracelin, Jack, Gerald Gardner, Witch (1960 Octagon Press)
Carlton, H. (2018). “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”: ‘Egyptian’ Masonry and the History of the First International. Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 40(4), 317–330. https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2018.1484607
Constant, Alphonse Louis (see also Levi, Eliphas) La Bible de la Liberte (Paris, 1841 ). English Translation in P. E. Corcoran (ed.), Before Marx: Socialism and Communism in France, 1830–48 © Paul E. Corcoran 1983 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-17146-0_22
Crowley, Aleister, The Book of the Law (Liber Al vel Legis) (1904; 1938 edition, reprinted 1976, York Beach, ME, Samuel Weiser Inc.)
___ “Liber DCCCXXXVII: The Law of Liberty”. In The Equinox: The Review of Scientific Illuminism. (1919)
_____ Magick in Theory and Practice: Book 4 (Liber ABA), Part III (1928), Digital edition (2004, Leeds, UK; Celephais Press)
___ Magick Without Tears (first edition 1954; reprinted 1982; Falcon press, edited by Israel Regardie).
Fossen, Thomas “Nietsche’s Aristocratism Revisited” https://philarchive.org/archive/FOSNAR
Frater IAO131 “The Politics of Thelema” https://iao131.com/2010/12/02/the-politics-of-thelema/
Fraternitas Rosae Crucis, “Biography of Paschal Beverly Randolph” soul.org
Gardner, Gerald B. (as “Scire”), High Magic’s Aid (first edition 1949; reprinted 1996, Godolphin House, New Bern, NC)
__ The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), reprinted with an introduction by Dr. Leo Martello (1991: Magical Childe; New York)
__ Witchcraft Today (1954, London; Rider & sons), with introduction by Margaret Murray.
Ginzburg, Carlo, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Tr. John and Ann Tedischi (1992 Baltimore; John Hopkins University Press)
Greenfield, Allen, A True History of Witchcraft (2019; independently published)
Harrison, David, “Freemasonry and the French Revolution” https://dr-david-harrison.com/papers-articles-and-essays/freemasonry-and-the-french-revolution/
Horowitz, Mitch, “The Man Who Revived the Occult,” https://mitch-horowitz-nyc.medium.com/the-man-who-revived-the-occult-6e8656391ca7
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Koo, Chaewon, Spell Bound: a New Witch’s Guide to Crafting the Future (2022; Smith Street Books)
Lagalisse, Erica Occult Features of Anarchism (2019, PM Press)
Leland, Charles Godfrey, Aradia: Gospel of the Witches (1899; David Butt, London). I have relied a facsimile edition published by The Lost Library, Glastonbury, UK
____ Memoirs, (1894: London, William Heinemann) Project Gutenberg E-Book
Levi, Eliphas, La Histoire de Magie (1860), translated with a preface and Notes by Arthur Edward Waite as History of Magic, (second edition) (1922 London; Rider & Sons) digitized by the Internet Archive,
____La Clef des Grand Mysteres (1861) Tr. with an introduction by Aleister Crowley as The Key of the Mysteries This translation appears to have been first published in 1959. A new edition was published by Martino Fine Books, Connecticut USA in 2019.
__ Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854, 1856), translated by Arthur Edward Waite (1896 London; Rider & Co.) digitized by the Internet Archive,
Michelet, Jules La Sorciere, (1862), tr. L.J. Trotter, as The Witch of the Middle Ages, from the French of J. Michelet (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1867) Project Gutenberg Ebook. This translation is openly bowdlerized. Trotter, the translator, writes in his preface “In one point only is he [i.e. Trotter] aware of having been less true to his original than in theory he was bound to be. He has slurred or slightly altered a few of those passages which French readers take as a thing of course, but English ones, because of their different training, are supposed to eschew. A Frenchman, in short, writes for men, an Englishman rather for drawing-room ladies, who tolerate grossness only in the theatres and the columns of the newspapers.” I am not sure whether this supposed to be an apology, a brag, or dig at the publishers.
Some more commonly available English translations give the title as Satanism and Witchcraft, which sees unnecessarily sensational.
Mount Vernon Digital Encyclopedia, “George Washington and Freemasonry,” https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/freemasonry
Nielsen, Nick “Jules Michelet and the Promise of Emanciptory History” https://jnnielsen.medium.com/jules-michelet-and-the-promise-of-emancipatory-history-8e09281eaf7c
Nietsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), Tr. Helen Zimmern. Project Gutenberg Ebook
__ Thus Spake Zarathustra: a Book for All and None (1883), Tr. Thomas Common, Project Gutenberg Ebook
Sarasota Lodge 147 https://www.sarasota147.org/founding-fathers/