Miracles of Our Own Making

A History of Paganism

Liz Williams

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789142600
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A bewitching and authoritative historical overview of magic in the British Isles, from the ancient peoples of Britain to the rich and cosmopolitan landscape of contemporary paganism."An absolute must for anyone interested in the development of paganism in the modern world. I cannot recommend this book enough."—Janet Farrar, coauthor of  A Witches' Bible "At last, we have a history of British Paganism written from the inside, by somebody who not only has a good knowledge of the sources, but explicitly understands how Pagans and magicians think."—Ronald Hutton, author of The Triumph of the Moon and The Witch What do we mean by "paganism"—druids, witches, and occult rituals? Healing charms and forbidden knowledge? Miracles of Our Own Making is a historical overview of pagan magic in the British Isles, from the ancient peoples of Britain to the rich and cosmopolitan landscape of contemporary paganism. Exploring the beliefs of the druids, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings, as well as Elizabethan Court alchemy and witch trials, we encounter grimoires, ceremonial magic, and the Romantic revival of arcane deities. The influential and well-known—the Golden Dawn, Wicca, and figures such as Aleister Crowley—are considered alongside the everyday "cunning folk" who formed the magical fabric of previous centuries. Ranging widely across literature, art, science, and beyond, Liz Williams debunks many of the prevailing myths surrounding magical practice, past and present, while offering a rigorously researched and highly accessible account of what it means to be a pagan today.

SEVEN

Modern Magic

The twentieth century is an exciting time for the student of paganism. Esoteric practitioners such as Dion Fortune dip their toes into the literary world; thriller writers such as Dennis Wheatley and Marion Zimmer Bradley return the compliment, with novels that have inspired generations of occultists and pagans. By the turn of the century, modern Druids have become a familiar sight at Stonehenge solstices; at its end, Wicca is close to being a household name thanks to TV shows such as Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This century sees paganism going mainstream in the UK for the first time in a thousand years and, now the genie is out of the bottle, it is unlikely that it will be put back in it any time soon.

Conversely, the twentieth century sees much magical practice continue to decline in the UK, although it does not wholly disappear. I am referring here to folk magic. Ceremonial, Hermetically influenced magic has already been swept up into the big orders such as the Golden Dawn and remains under their wing as the twentieth century progresses, along with many individual practitioners. But the traditional content of cunning practice – healing, finding lost objects and cursing – is subsumed into non-magical organizations, such as the NHS, the police force and the legal system. If you have a problem with your marriage, you are more likely to make an appointment with a lawyer and seek a divorce than curse your spouse (although you might be tempted). If you have a wart, your first thought is probably to go to the doctor. The odd man out is divination, since we still do not have a reliable method of foretelling the future, and Tarot reading, crystal-ball gazing and palmistry continue to be popular throughout the century, given a little extra help by the repeal of the 1735 Witchcraft Act in 1951.

The last person to be imprisoned for witchcraft in Britain was Helen Duncan, who was sent to jail in 1944. Duncan was a fraudulent medium, but where she fell foul of the law was in holding a séance in 1941 in which it was revealed that the British warship HMS Barham had been sunk. This was true, but the news had not yet been broken to the public and there were fears that Duncan had leaked classified information (in fact, letters of condolence had already been sent to the families of the dead seamen, and it is estimated that some 9,000 people were aware of the fact that the ship had gone down. Duncan may have picked up this fact from a naval family member). She was made an example of by being imprisoned for nine months, although many people felt this was excessive, and Winston Churchill complained to the then Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, that the charge was obsolete. After this, no further person was prosecuted and the Act was repealed.

That cunning craft was still practised to some degree throughout the twentieth century is evidenced by many anecdotal accounts of people visiting fortune-tellers, who often had booths at the seaside, and references in popular culture (for example, in Dorothy L. Sayers’s novel Strong Poison (1930), Peter Wimsey asks a manicurist to obtain a suspect’s nail clippings to demonstrate that the man has been accustoming himself to taking arsenic, but the girl immediately asks him if he is going to use them for a spell and says that she wants no truck with anything ‘occult’).

I have said that folk practice tends to go onto the back-burner in the early decades of the twentieth century. However, we might argue the case for its return in a somewhat different form at the end of the century, when healing practices such as Reiki and energy work become increasingly popular. Because of constraints of space, we will not be devoting a great deal of time to the New Age, which has become particularly popular in parts of the United States – California, for example – but aspects of the New Age are also the inheritors of magic. Writers like Doreen Virtue, who started their careers in teaching about angels, are in essence harking back to older forms of magic, and so are the authors of works such as The Secret, which relate to the manifestation of wealth and other desired outcomes through the focus of the will.

In this chapter, as well as some important literary influences, we are going to look at the main trends within paganism in the UK over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, which we first encountered in our Introduction. The history of British paganism and magic as we move from the nineteenth century into the twentieth becomes a series of intertwined strands that by now will be familiar to us from the late Georgian and Victorian periods: a combination of literary fiction, cultural organizations, and magical and religious societies, plus the remnants of grass-roots folk practice and superstition. The twentieth century brings a novel element to the mix in the form of new media: film, television and the work of the tabloid press.

In the previous chapter we considered a number of popular nineteenth-century works that are not well known today, but which have nonetheless influenced contemporary paganism. Ainsworth and Leland were not, however, the only Victorian writers to explore ideas that subsequently became part of twentieth-century movements. H. Rider Haggard, author of the novel She (1886), stated, ‘I have a respect for Thor and Odin. I venerate Isis and always feel inclined to bow before the moon.’¹ He evinced an interest in magic – as Ronald Hutton writes: ‘This rich and idiosyncratic cocktail of beliefs is implicit in the plots of many of his novels, and contributes to their allure.’² In the same book, Hutton considers the work of Rudyard Kipling and Kenneth Grahame, whose novel The Wind in the Willows (1908) contains the chapter ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, which alludes to the re-emergence of the god Pan – an eerie and evocative passage:

and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, [Mole] looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.³

In Grahame’s novel, the animals live above the ruins of a great city, something which it is easy to miss on a quick read. Maybe it is Roman – or perhaps London, fallen at last? It is significant, though, suggesting a longing for a purer world, an Arcadia without human interference. We have met this type of idyll before, in the longings of the later Druids.

Pan was a popular god among the late Victorians and Edwardians, and his ancient influence pops up later in the twentieth century, too, in some surprising places. W. Somerset Maugham, Saki, D. H. Lawrence, Arthur Machen, E. M. Forster, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Louis Stevenson – all of these authors and more have a Pan moment somewhere along the line. A character in Saki’s story ‘The Music on the Hill’ (1911) informs his wife calmly that

the worship of Pan never has died out . . . he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. I’ve been a fool in most things . . . but I’m not such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I’m down here . . . if you’re wise you won’t disbelieve in him too boastfully while you’re in his country.⁴

His arrogant wife does not believe this and removes a bunch of grapes on the altar of a small temple that she finds on the estate, containing a statue of Pan. When she tells this to her husband, he replies: ‘I don’t think you were wise to do that . . . I’ve heard it said that the Wood Gods are rather horrible to those who molest them.’⁵ He’s quite right: shortly after this, his wife is gored to death by a stag.

In E. M. Forster’s ‘The Story of a Panic’ (1904), a group of English tourists encounter that sinister sense of a terrifying presence in the Italian countryside, and it affects one of their party, a young boy, to a remarkable degree:

Eustace Robinson, aged fourteen, was standing in his nightshirt, saluting, praising, and blessing, the great forces and manifestations of Nature. He spoke first of night and the stars and planets above his head, of the swarms of fire-flies below him . . . of the great rocks covered with anemones and shells that were slumbering in the sea. He spoke of rivers and waterfalls, of the ripening bunches of grapes, of the smoking cone of Vesuvius and of the hidden fire-channels which made the smoke, of the myriads of lizards who were lying curled up in the crannies of the sultry earth, of the showers of white rose-leaves that were tangled in his hair. And then he spoke about the rain and the wind by which all things are changed, of the air through which all things live, and of the woods in which all things can be hidden.⁶

Pan is not perhaps so strange a god for the British to adopt when one considers the repressive elements of Victorian society, both social and sexual. There was perhaps an emergent feeling that in the recent industrialization and urbanization of the nation, some connection with the wild natural world had been lost – a feeling that continues to draw many people to paganism today. After the First World War, too, there may have been a reflection on the darkness of human nature. And the developing discipline of psychology was beginning to investigate the powers of the subconscious mind. Dion Fortune’s occult hero Doctor Taverner is a psychologist as well as an occultist, for instance, and Fortune studied psychology herself. As Richard Stromer says in his thesis on Pan:

Considering all of these factors, it hardly seems surprising then that a deity such as Pan – a rambunctious, instinctual, libidinous god of all things and places wild – should have become a cultural icon presaging cataclysmic social and cultural changes lurking just over the historical horizon.⁷

Helen Law, in her work on Greek references in English poetry, notes 106 citations of Pan, one-third of them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁸ Sometimes Pan is the kind guardian of the woods, protector of straying otter babies, and sometimes he is a sinister force, the generator of panic out in the wild world.

Pan is not the only deity to have been adopted by the Edwardians, and the classical world is not the only influence. We have seen Egyptian themes in the work of late Victorian occultists, but many esoteric writers and practitioners had already been looking closer to home, to the works generated by the Celtic revival. Anthropologist James Frazer had produced an influential work, The Golden Bough, in 1890 and this was reprinted in the early 1900s. Frazer himself was emerging from a background of a growing British interest in folklore (an interest that was influenced in turn by German Romanticism and the work of Wilhelm Mannhardt). He drew on myths and beliefs to put forward the idea that ancient religions were primarily fertility cults, based around the sacrifice of a ‘sacred king’ (Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz and even Christ being examples). The Golden Bough scandalized Victorian society when it came out, owing to Frazer’s comments about Christ, but the book’s impact on anthropology was shown over time to be less marked than its literary heritage and, through this, its substantial effect on paganism. Frazer’s work influenced Yeats, Fortune and, later, the poet Robert Graves. Crowley referred to Frazer as ‘the only man worthy of note’ in the field of religion and believed that The Golden Bough was invaluable.⁹ The work also influenced Wicca: Gerald Gardner took on many of Frazer’s ideas, and Gardner was another who described Diana as ‘queen of the witches’.

This is ironic. As Hutton and others have pointed out, Frazer was an atheist from a radical Free Church of Scotland heritage whose aim was to discredit Christianity by including it within a range of ancient superstitions. Frazer did not do this explicitly, but there is a general consensus among historians that this was his intention. Mary Beard suggests that Frazer sought to compare the folk rituals of the British countryside with those of a savage antiquity, and thus discredit all of them, along with Christianity itself. But Frazer’s presentation of Christ as one in a long line of nature gods achieved an effect contrary to the one he originally intended, by drawing people’s attention to the old pagan religions in a new and stimulating light. Hutton states: ‘Frazer arguably did succeed in doing further damage to the status of Christianity, but fostered not so much an enhanced respect for rationalism and progress as a delight in the primitive and unreasonable.’¹⁰ Thus, if you are to trace modern paganism back, the majority of its most significant paths can be shown to have deep roots in The Golden Bough.

The Inklings and Dennis Wheatley

Fantasy fiction as a genre has been around for some time, arguably ever since Homer composed the Odyssey and the Iliad in the late eighth century BC. In Britain, fantasy fiction’s first proponent is Mary Shelley, the teenage author of Frankenstein (1823). But it is in the twentieth century that fantasy literature really starts to make its mark, along with genre films and television. One of the greatest works of British fantasy is surely J.R.R. Tolkien’s saga The Lord of the Rings (1954), based on Saxon and Norse lore. Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis’s novels about the imaginary land of Narnia have also inspired generations of children to look more closely into magic and the pagan world.

Both Tolkien and Lewis were members of the Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. This discussion group met throughout the 1930s and ’40s. All members were Christian, and yet their novels cont...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• ONE Ancient Origins
• TWO Saxons and Vikings
• THREE Magic of the Middle Ages and the Witches Who Weren’t
• FOUR High Magic and the Seventeenth Century
• FIVE The Georgians
• SIX The Victorians
• SEVEN Modern Magic
• Conclusion
• APPENDIX I: A Short Guide to Magical Tools and Ritual
• APPENDIX II: Addressing Some Issues within Paganism
• REFERENCES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX