Gerald Gardner, Sallustius, and the Problem of Evil (Modern Paganism and the Ancient Mysteries, Part Two)

[Jeez Loueez, it's been over a month since I posted anything. I am actually working on several new posts, including at least two inspired by Lucien Febvre's "The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century" in which it is argued that Paganism was not merely non-existent, but veritably impossible, nay, unthinkable, during the Renaissance. This ludicrous hypothesis has, sadly, insinuated itself into modern Pagan thought by way of the influence of a certain "Pagan" "scholar" who also happens to be mentioned in the old post recycled below, originally published on February 6, 2011. Enjoy. Or don't. As you see fit.] 

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"From the outset, Gardner's witches faced the dilemma that if they were to multiply (or, as Gardner put it, to save the Old Religion from extinction), then they needed publicity; but that negative publicity might destroy them."
[Ronald Hutton, History of Pagan Witchcraft, in
Witchcraft and magic in Europe: The twentieth century
ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, p. 54]

1."Witchcraft doesn’t pay for broken windows."
Indeed, Gardner's witches did multiply, and soon Doreen Valiente had formed a new, sister Coven, in 1957. A number of factors contributed to this growth, among them being the publication in 1954 of Gardner's book Witchcraft Today, combined with Gardner's eagerness and talent for courting public attention.

However, a great deal of the resulting attention paid to Gardner and his Witches was decidedly negative. According to Hutton (continuing on in his essay on The History of Pagan Witchcraft already quoted above), starting in 1955 the popular press began to "run features attacking witchcraft as Satanism .... In 1957 and 1959 the original London coven was denounced sensationally and unscrupulously, putting a considerable strain on its members and fracturing relations between Valiente's group and Gerald Gardner." In response, Gardner came out with (in 1959) The Meaning of Witchcraft: "answering the press attacks and attempting to establish the historical credentials of his religion more firmly by relating it to a string of ancient religious texts and images, and later magical groups." [p. 55]

(It should be noted, at least parenthetically, that, Hutton's crude misdirection notwithstanding, the connections drawn by Gardner, in The Meaning of Witchcraft, between 20th century Wicca and "ancient religious texts and images, and later magical groups," constitutes a seamless continuation of the way Gardner had presented the history and roots of Wicca previously in Witchcraft Today. In fact, Gardner had included in the Foward of that earlier book a prominent reference to the Mystery cult of Isis and the writings of the Platonic philosopher Apuleius, who was an initiate in the cults of Isis, Asclepius, and Hermes, and possibly that of other deities as well. Gardner also devoted an entire chapter of Witchcraft Today to "The Witches and the Mysteries", as well as another chapter titled "Out of the Land of Egypt", which is also primarily focused on the Mystery Religions of the ancient world. And there are in addition significant references to the Mysteries in the chapters on "Witch Beliefs" and "Witch Practices" in Witchcraft Today.)

The following two passages from the first chapter of The Meaning of Witchcraft give some indication of the kind of hostility that Gardner and "his Witches" were up against:

"I am a member of the Society for Psychical Research, and on the Committee of the Folklore Society; so I wanted to tell of my discovery. But I was met with a determined refusal. 'The Age of Persecution is not over,' they told me; 'give anyone half a chance and the fires will blaze up again.' When I said to one of them, 'Why do you keep all these things so secret still? There’s no persecution nowadays!' I was told, 'Oh, isn’t there? If people knew what I was, every time a child in the village was ill, or somebody’s chickens died, I should get the blame for it. Witchcraft doesn’t pay for broken windows.'

"I can remember as a boy reading in the papers of a woman being burned alive in Southern Ireland as a witch; but I could not believe that there could be any persecution nowadays in England. So, against their better judgment, they agreed to let me write a little about the cult in the form of fictions, an historical novel where a witch says a little of what they believe and of how they were persecuted. This was published in 1949 under the title of High Magic’s Aid.

"In 1951 a very important event occurred. The Government of the day passed the Fraudulent Mediums Act, which repealed and replaced the last remaining Witchcraft Act, under which spiritualists used to be prosecuted in modern times. This Act is, I believe, unique in legally recognising the existence of genuine mediumship and psychic powers.

"I thought that at last common sense and religious freedom had prevailed; but even so, the passage of this Act was highly obnoxious to certain religious bodies which had been preaching against Spiritualism for years and trying to outlaw it as 'the work of Satan,' together with any other societies to which they objected, including Freemasonry and, of course, witchcraft.

"About a year previously, this Museum had been opened, and I had flattered myself that showing what witchcraft really is, an ancient religion, would arouse no hostility in any quarter. I was to find out in due course how wrong I was!

"Any attempt to show witchcraft in anything even remotely resembling a favourable light, or to challenge the old representation of it as something uniformly evil and devilish, or even to present it as a legitimate object of study, can still arouse the most surprising reactions. The virtues of humanism, which Charles Saltman defined as 'sensitivity, intelligence and erudition, together with integrity, curiosity and tolerance,' have still quite a long way to go in their struggle against the mentality which produced the Malleus Maleficarum."
[The Meaning of Witchcraft, pp. 11-12]

"The Old Horned God of the witches is not the Satan of Christianity, and no amount of theological argument will make him so. He is, in fact, the oldest deity known to man, and is depicted in the oldest representation of a divinity which has yet been found, namely the Stone Age painting in the innermost recess of the Caverne des Trois Freres at Ariege. He is the old phallic god of fertility who has come forth from the morning of the world, and who was already of immeasurable antiquity before Egypt and Babylon, let alone before the Christian era. Nor did he perish at the cry that Great Pan was dead. Secretly through the centuries, hidden deeper and deeper as time went on, his worship and that of the naked Moon Goddess, his bride, the Lady of Mystery and Magic and the forbidden joys, continued sometimes among the great ones of the land, sometimes in humble cottages, or on lonely heaths and in the depths of darkling woods, on summer nights when the moon rode high. It does so still.

"From time to time the public have been treated to various highly-coloured and highly unconvincing 'revelations' in the popular Press and elsewhere upon the subject of 'Black Magic', 'Satanism', and similar matters, and occasionally these have been linked with witchcraft. Let me state right away that I personally maintain an attitude of thorough-going scepticism towards these things, and that even if they do exist I do not consider them to have any relation to the survival of the witch cult. Alleged 'confessions', especially where witchcraft is mentioned, bear ample internal evidence of their own meretriciousness, in that they are obviously modelled upon sensational thrillers and reveal no knowledge whatever of genuine witch practices."
[The Meaning of Witchcraft, pp. 21-22]

2.
"That there is no positive evil."
Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique is an Oxford educated anthropologist who is chair of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at l'Université d'Etat d'Haïti. She is also a highly respected Priestess (Mambo) in the Haitian Vodou religion. In September of 2009 (fully 55 years after Gerald Gardner wrote Witchcraft Today), Beauvoir-Dominique was interviewed in conjunction with an exhibit on Vodou at the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden (too see the interview, go here).

The first question asked of Professor Beauvoir-Dominique was "what is Vodou?" A perfectly reasonable question, to which the Mambo gives a very informative answer. However, it does not take long for the other shoe to drop. The second question was "Are there any evil forces in Vodou?" To which Professor Beauvoir-Dominique again gives a very educational answer, part of which is:

"Vodou ... is part of Haitian culture, and in this culture we don't see that there is Evil. We think that the word Evil is constructed, it comes from other places, and is really not ours. The "good" and the "bad" are very Christian notions, very Manichean. We think more in terms of grays, of black becoming white, of white becoming black. Of Yin and Yang. As in the figure of Yin and Yang -- there is a perpetual movement of things. And for us there is no Evil. Things become evil when they are seen through evil eyes."

When Gerald Gardner chose to answer accusations against Wicca in his second exposition on the religion, The Meaning of Witchcraft, he took a very similar approach to the one we see in Mambo Beauvoir-Dominique's patient and thoughtful answer to the question about Vodou and "evil". In particular, when Gardner responded directly to the most infamous accusation, namely that Wicca amounts to "worship of the Evil Principle", in his chapter entitled "The Black Mass", Gardner, like Beauvoir-Dominique, explains that Wicca "positively denies the existence of a Power of Evil." [p. 171]

This chapter on "The Black Mass" is, in fact, the section of The Meaning of Witchcraft in which Gardner introduces Sallustius' Peri Theon kai Kosmou and pronounces it to be "a general statement" of the beliefs of Wiccans (as discussed in Part One of this series). The first portion of Sallustius' Pagan Manifesto that Gardner quotes is the entirety of Section XII: "The origin of evil things; and that there is no positive evil."

"The Gods being good and making all things, how do evils exist in the world? Or perhaps it is better first to state the fact that, the Gods being good and making all things, there is no positive evil, it only comes by absence of good; just as darkness itself does not exist, but only comes about by absence of light.

"If evil exists it must exist either in Gods or minds or souls or bodies. It does not exist in any God, for all god is good. If anyone speaks of a 'bad mind' he means a mind without mind. If of a bad soul, he will make the soul inferior to body, for no body in itself is evil. If he says that evil is made up of soul and body together, it is absurd that separately they should not be evil, but joined should create evil.

"Suppose it is said that there are evil spirits: - if they have their power from the Gods, they cannot be evil; if from elsewhere, the Gods do not make all things. If they do not make all things, then either they wish to or cannot, or they can and do not wish; neither of which is consistent with the idea of god. We may see, therefore, from these arguments, that there is no positive evil in the world.

"It is in the activities of men that the evils appear, and that not of all men nor always. And as to these, if men sinned for the sake of evil, nature itself would be evil. But if the adulterer thinks his adultery bad but his pleasure good, and the murderer thinks the murder bad but the money he gets by it good, and the man who does evil to an enemy thinks that to do evil is bad but to punish his enemy good, and if the soul commits all its sins in that way, then the evils are done for the sake of goodness. (In the same way, because in a given place light does not exist, there comes darkness, which has no positive existence.) The soul sins therefore because, while aiming at good, it makes mistakes about the good, because it is not primary essence. And we see many things done by the Gods to prevent it from making mistakes and to heal it when it has made them. Arts and sciences, curses and prayers, sacrifices and initiations, laws and constitutions, judgments and punishments, all came into existence for the sake of preventing souls from sinning; and when they are gone forth from the body, Gods and spirits of purification cleanse them of their sins."
[On the Gods and the Cosmsos, Sallustius, Section XII: "The origin of evil things; and that there is no positive evil."]

3.
"The inner meaning of religious rituals."
The section of Sallustius that Gardner turned to first requires little or no explanation. It is, in fact, one of the clearest explications of a Pagan answer to the so-called "Problem of Evil". Less clear, perhaps, are Gardner's reasons for his next selection from Sallustius, which deals with, as Gardner styles it, "the inner meaning of religious rituals."

"It is impious to suppose that the divine is affected for good or ill by human things. The Gods are always good and always do good and never harm, being always in the same state and like themselves. The truth simply is that, when we are good, we are joined to the Gods by our likeness; when bad, we are separated from them by our unlikeness. And when we live according to virture we cling to the Gods, and when we become evil we make the Gods our enemies -- not because they are angered against us, but because our sins prevent the light of the Gods from shining upon us, and put us in communion with spirits of punishment. And if by prayers and sacrifices we find forgiveness of sins, we do not appease or change the Gods, but by what we do and by our turning toward the Divine we heal our own badness and so enjoy again the goodness of the Gods. To say that the Gods turn away from evil is like saying that the sun hides himself from the blind.

"This solves the question about sacrifices and other rites performed to the Gods. The divine itself is without needs, and the worship is paid for our own benefit. The providence of the Gods reaches everywhere and needs only some congruity for its reception. All congruity comes about by representation and likeness; for which reason the temples are made in representation of heaven, the altar of earth, the images of life (that is why they are made like living things), the prayers of the element of though, the mystic letters of the unspeakable celestial forces, the herbs and stones of matter, and the sacrificial animals of the irrational life in us.

"From all these things the Gods gain nothing; what gain could there be to God? It is we who gain some communion with them."
[On the Gods and the Cosmsos, Sallustius, Section XIV (partial): "In what sense, though the Gods never change, they are said to be made angry and appeased." And also Section XV: "Why we give worship to the Gods when they need nothing."]

But what bearing does the subject of "the inner meaning of religious rituals" have on responding to accusations that Pagan religion is somehow involved with Evil?

The issue here is not merely the accusation that Pagans do evil things, but rather that we worship Evil Things. This accusation goes back to the earliest days of Christianity. Among its clearest expressions is that found in the writings of Augustine, and his City of God, Against the Pagans in particular. Somewhat ironically, Augustine wrote that work largely as a defense of Christianity against the accusation, from Pagans, that the Christian prohibitions against the worship of the old Gods had led to the downfall of Rome (some of the historical background to this is discussed in Reflections on Vergil and Augustine.)

In Book VIII of his Against the Pagans, Augustine asserts that the traditional Gods worshipped at Pagan festivals and in the urban Pagan temples are "rather malign demons than gods." Furthermore, Augustine employs a favorite Christian trope that is still popular today with Ronald Hutton and his fanbase, in which it is claimed that the religion of ancient philosophers is somehow different from and unrelated to that of the Pagan masses generally. (By this logic the "philosophy" of Augustine is equally unrelated the lowbrow Christianity of the ignorant, unwashed masses who make up the vast bulk of the Army of Christ, thus making Augustine no Christian at all. But any such appeal to consistency is lost on the likes of Hutton.)

And so Augustine now focuses not on "the fabulous, that is, the theatrical" theology of the plebs, nor on the more staid "civil, that is, the urban" theology of the aristocratic priests and priestesses serving the deities of the polis. Instead, Augustine explains that he wishes to address himself "not to ordinary men, but to philosophers ... concerning the theology which they call natural." In particular, Augustine, and here he shows that he knows what he is about, directly attacks the magical and erotic theology set forth by Socrates in Plato's dialogues.

In his famous speech in the Symposium, Socrates had revealed what the Witch (for surely she fits Gardner's profile for ancient Witches) Diotima had revealed to him as a young man concerning the nature of Eros. She had instructed Socrates that Eros is not really a God, per se, but rather a Daemon: "A great Daemon, Socrates; for the whole realm of the Daemons is intermediary between the Gods and mortals." At this point Socrates had inquired about the "powers" possessed by these Daemons. And here is Diotima's answer:

"Interpreting and conveying things from men to Gods, and things from Gods to men, prayers and sacrifices from one, commands and requitals in exchange for sacrifices from the other, since, being in between both, the Daemons fill the region between both so that the All is bound together with itself.

"Through this Daemonic realm moves all prophetic art and the art of priests having to do with sacrifices and rituals and spells, and all powers of prophecy and enchantment. The Gods do not mingle with mortals, but all intercourse and conversation of the Gods with humans, waking and sleeping, are through this intermediary realm. Those who are wise about such things are truly divine, but those who are wise about any other arts or crafts are mere technicians and mechanics. The Daemons, then, are many and manifold, and one of them is Eros."
[202d-203a, taken from R.E. Allen's translation, with some liberties]

The above is only one small part of Diotima's teachings on Eros and the Daemons, according to Socrates, according to Plato. Just a little later on, Diotima states that Eros is πόριμος (clever, contriving), a φιλόσοφος (a lover of wisdom, philosopher), a γόης (witch), a φαρμακεύς (one skilled in potions), and a σοφιστής (sophist).

Almost two thousand years later, Marsilio Ficino wondered why Diotima, in addition to describing the great Daemon Eros as clever, philosophical and a sophist, had also imputed magical powers to Eros:

"But why do we think that Eros is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in Eros. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature. But the parts of this world, like the parts of a single animal, all deriving from a single author, are joined to each other by the communion of a single nature. Therefore just as the brain, lungs, heart, liver and the rest of the parts draw something from each other, and help each other, and sympathize with any one of them when it suffers, so the parts of this great animal [the cosmos as a single living being], that is, the bodies of the world, similarly joined together, borrow and lend natures to and from each other. From this common relationship is born a common love; from love, a common attraction. And this is true magic .... [T]he works of magic are works of nature, but art is its handmaiden .... The ancients attributed this art to Daemons, because the Daemons understand what is the inter-relation of natural things, what is appropriate to each, and how the harmony of things, if lacking anywhere, can be restored .... They [the ancients, such as Socrates, Zoroaster, Apollonius of Tyana, and Porphyry] seem to have become magicians through friendship of the Daemons, just as the Daemons are magicians through understanding the friendship of things themselves. And all nature, because of mutual love, is called a magician."
[De Amore, Marsilio Ficino. This is specificaly from Speech VI, using the translation by Sears Jane, p. 127 of the 1985 Spring Publications edition]

But let us return now to Augustine, and to Book VIII of his Against the Pagans in particular. We have already seen how Augustine equated the traditional Gods with "malign demons". Later (Chapter 5 of Book VIII) he calls them "impure demons, under the name of gods." Most of the latter half of this Book (Chapters 14-26) is devoted to attacks on the Platonic conception of the role of Daemons in magic and religion. In addition to Plato himself, Augustine pays special attention to the Platonic philosopher Apuleius and to the figure of Hermes Trismegistus.

The take home message from Augustine's polemics against Plato, Apuleius, and Hermes is that the whole Daemonic realm is, in reality, Demonic in the sense of being purely Evil. In other words, what Plato portrayed as the liminal realm of the Cosmos, situated above the human realm, whose purpose is to connect us with the Gods, and which is responsible for the efficacy of both religious practices and magic arts; that this is in fact an infernal realm populated with demons that are "arrogant" and "deceiving" who prey on those who seek "divine refuge" by "feigning divinity". These demons are everywhere "lying in wait for the deception of man!"

The Christian view, then, is that (1) Pagan religiosity is generally evil, (2) more specifically, the spiritual Powers upon which Pagans call are evil beings, and (3) the whole spiritual realm (outside of the Holy Ghost and "angels") is filled with and characterized by malignant Evil. It is in order to counter these dark (and as perversely self-serving as they are self-revealing) Christian fantasies, which they sometimes try to hide behind the philosophical niceties of the so-called "Problem of Evil", that Gardner invokes the words of Sallustius on the subject of the "the inner meaning of religious ritual." In essence, Gardner wishes to categorically disprove any idea that the magical/religious practices of Wiccans amount to calling upon evil forces. However, Gardner chooses not to explicitly defend the liminal/Daemonic aspects of Platonic theology but to explicate Pagan rituals in such terms as (1) being "joined to the Gods", (2) having "the light of the Gods ... shining upon us", and (3) "by turning toward the Gods we heal our own badness and so enjoy again the goodness of the Gods." All this and more comes about because "The providence of the Gods reaches everywhere and needs only some congruity for its reception."

The fact is that Sallustius provides no opportunity to more directly defend the intermediary spiritual realm, for, true to the title of the work, he sticks to "the Gods" and "the Cosmos". And it is unlikely, anyway, that Gardner would have thought there could be anything to be gained by trying to convince the general public that Wicca relies on daemons, but not on demons. And then there was also Gardner's choice to (dishonestly, as is now generally accepted) deny the very real connections between his Wicca and Ceremonial Magic (where explicit references to Daemons are easy to find).

But (even though he avoids direct references to Daemons) it is quite clear that Gerald Gardner in 1959, just like practitioners of Vodou today, had to defend himself against the mindset that all spiritual powers outside Christianity are by definition infernal, evil and Satanic. And Gardner turns to the Platonic Paganism of Sallustius to assert both that (1) in terms of belief, "Wicca positively denies the existence of a Power of Evil" (using Gardner's words), and (2) in terms of practice, the Gods of Wicca "are always good and always do good and never harm" and "worship [of the Gods] is paid for our own benefit," with the end in mind that by such worship we might "live according to virture" and be "joined to the Gods by our likeness to them" (using Sallustius' words as cited by Gardner).

Modern Paganism and the Ancient Mysteries:

1. Part One: Sallustius, Gardner & Wicca: "A general statement of their creed."
2. Part Two: Gerald Gardner, Sallustius, and the Problem of Evil
3. Part Three: Gerald Gardner, Sallustius, and Reincarnation
4. Part Four: "Divested of their garments"

Behold: The Future of School Prayer in Post-Potter America?

[Lately my life hasn't left me much time for blogging. So, sometimes now when I go a whole week or more and I haven't had a chance to write anything at all, I just look through some of my more popular old posts and change the date, add a little prologue, and maybe edit it/add to it slightly. This post was originally prompted (well over three years ago) by a graphic that suddenly appeared in several of my Pagan friends' facebook feeds. I was so struck by the subversive brilliance of it, that I tried to find out who was behind it. I only ever got as far as finding the original photographer and model, both of whom are highly talented in their own rights. But to this day I have never discovered who the genius was that added the captioning to the image. If anyone happens to know, please leave a comment! And now without further ado, here is a little something I posted back on November 20, 2010.] 

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Some pictures really are worth a thousand words, but there are times when just the right caption can add something essential to the end result.

This "Motivational Poster" style commentary on school prayer has been making the rounds on teh interwebs. It started as part of a "Student Witch" series by photographer Marcus J. Ranum. You can see the whole series at Ranum's DeviantArt gallery here.

(Ranum's wikipedia entry tells us that he is a computer security expert of some note and that "his hobbies include photography and firearms.")

I would like to find out whose idea it was to add the eleven words to Ranum's already quite magnificent photo, thus taking it to the next level of brilliance!

The book she is holding is Aleister Crowley's "Magic in Theory and Practice", which you can make out if you look at the full size image of the original. The book on the ground is something by Anton LeVay.

Ranum, who is an atheist and a supporter of Richard Dawkin's "Out Campaign", has this to say about inclusion of the LeVay book as a prop in the original photograph:

Someone mentioned (rightly and courteously) that I might have given offense by mixing the word "witch" with LaVey's goofy satanic bible. It's just a prop. I was tempted to fix the title but then I realized that would be inconsistent. As an equal opportunity disrespector of all religion, it would be unfair of me to show wicca more respect than I show any of the other goofy superstitions of the world. So, with all due respect, if this image bothers you - "get over it."

As long as I'm trying to give credit where credit is due, I'm pretty sure the model is Laura Unbound. She also has her own DeviantArt page here (actually that's a direct link to the photo of her to the right by Scott Church, which is part of Laura's own online portfolio).

[Since first posting this I have received direct confirmation from Laura Unbound that it is her. She also left a comment below.]

Here's my other personal favorite from Ranum's "Student Witch" series (Student Witch - 5), as well as some other works featuring the lovely Laura (by photographer Rodney Mickle), just for the hell of it, and also possibly just to jack up my hit count in one of the most obvious and time tested ways:

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"Hail Satan" meets "Nailed It"

Gerald Gardner, Magna Carta, and the Right to Bear Arms

[This was first posted on August 10, 2012. I am reposting it now in honor of Gerald's 130th birthday.]

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"... my Luger and Donna's revolver ..."

In August of 1940 the Battle of Britain was just getting under way, and it very much remained to be seen who would prevail. If the Luftwaffe managed to establish control of the skies over Britain, then the Wehrmacht would soon be marching on British soil.

It was under these circumstances that one Gerald Gardner wrote a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph under the title "Resisting the Invader" and subtitled, "Delaying Actions by Civilians". (See Philip Heselton's wonderful book Witchfather: A Life of Gerald Gardner, Volume I, for the full text of the letter as well as more background information, sources, etc.)

The main thrust of Gardner's letter was that in the event of a successful invasion of Britain by the Nazis, any civilians who found themselves behind enemy lines should engage in armed resistance against the foreign occupiers. In order to prepare for such an eventuality Gardner specifically proposed that "Everyone willing should be given arms when they are available and taught how to use them."

Gerald Gardner was as good as his word. As a volunteer ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden, he had already begun distributing the few weapons he himself possessed (including pikes and coshes) to his fellow wardens. In addition, Gardner took an inventory of the privately held weapons among his neighbors, which he found lamentably inadequate for the task at hand: "We expected Hitler on the seashore any day. We had no weapons worth the name. In my three-mile beach sector there were six shotguns, my Luger and Donna's revolver, and a few other pistols, with about six rounds apiece for them. Then there were my pikes and swords."

When a small unit of regular army soldiers was dispatched to Gardner's area, he further complained about their lack of serious weaponry: "barring rifles and not much ammunition, they had nothing. No artillery, no automatic weapons. I tried to get an old Malay cannon going, with some blasting powder for explosives, but nothing came of this." Despite the lack of success with the Malay cannon, Gardner did manage to get his hands on some Sten guns for the local Home Guard, and he also showed his neighbors how to make Molotov cocktails.

Gardner, a proud Conservative, worked closely with the local Commander of the Home Guard, Major Fish, a Canadian socialist. Despite their significant political differences both men shared a common anti-authoritarian streak, and a fierce determination to "fight them on the beaches" when and if it came to that. Fish enrolled Gardner as an Armourer for his battalion despite the fact that ARP wardens were officially forbidden from taking up arms even in the event of an out and out invasion. But Fish and Gardner agreed that this prohibition was nonsensical, and, besides, Gardner "could be a warden during air raids and Home Guard during the All Clears".

One might be tempted to assume that Gardner's Churchillian sounding letter was nothing special, just an obvious and unproblematic statement of ordinary patriotic sentiments in the face of an imminent threat to British national sovereignty. But the role of civilians in warfare is a matter of perennial controversy. Wars should be fought by armies on the battlefield, and civilians should having nothing to do with it, or so one way of looking at things would have it. After all, in theory at least, the "rules of warfare" dictate that civilians should not be the targets of military attacks. But when civilians arm themselves and join the fray, as Gardner was proposing, what makes them any different from any other armed combatant? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that in the act of taking up arms, civilians thereby make themselves (and all nearby civilians) "fair game."

To Gardner's mind, however, there was nothing theoretical about any of this: "If each village and town had defended itself, France would never have fallen as she did, and Germany might well have been on the way to defeat now," he wrote in his letter. England must not repeat the mistake of the French: "Why should people who wish to defend themselves be prevented just to make it easy for Germany? By Magna Carta every free-born Englishman is entitled to have arms to defend himself and his household. Let us now claim our right."

The official Nazi press took notice of Gardner's "Magna Carta letter", as it became known, and responded by publicly lecturing Gardner about "advances" in "human ethics": "His suggestion is condemned as medieval and as an infringement of international law."

The Nazi position was not quite as ridiculous as one might think. All too recently Europe had witnessed first hand the mind-bending horrors of modern, mechanized warfare. The killing power of machine guns and poison gas, combined with other technological advances such as rail and air transportation and electronic communications, had all combined in the Great War to result in a truly staggering loss of life (2% of the British population, 4% of France, nearly 4% of Germany ....).

And when all out war raised its ugly head again in Europe in the 1939, it came in the form of Blitzkrieg, which made the weapons that had slaughtered so many millions in WWI look crude and primitive by comparison. What could civilians with pistols and swords and clubs hope to accomplish against Stuka dive-bombers and Panzer tank divisions? To many it just seemed ludicrous to think that ill-equipped and barely trained civilians could play any meaningful role in modern warfare, other than to provide a cruel pretext for savage collective retaliation against civilian populations.

Additionally there is the embarrassing (especially for Conservatives like Gardner and Churchill) fact that it was just a tad inconsistent for the British Empire to uncritically embrace the general principle that ordinary people have a right to take up arms against a foreign occupying force. For, you see, once that is conceded then one is already well on one's way down the slippery slope toward such things as "self-determination" and "national liberation". And if the point was lost on anyone in 1940, this ineluctable logic bomb exploded with full force in Africa and Asia less than a decade later, once the European "Great Powers" had settled their differences.

But desperate times have a way of focusing the mind. With Nazi aircraft directly overhead and only the English Channel separating them from Nazi jackboots on the ground, Britons knew that their choices were down to two: submit or fight. And they knew that to fight meant to fight by any and all means necessary, and this demanded that "Everyone willing should be given arms when they are available and taught how to use them."

"While the Anglo-Saxons were yet Pagans."

It should be emphasized just how fitting it was for one of the most important figures in the modern Pagan revival to invoke the Magna Carta. It is even more fitting to turn to a letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright in order to illustrate this point. (source)

In 1776, the year in which Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence at the behest of the Continental Congress, John Cartwright produced a work that was arguably even more radical. The title of Cartwright's book was Take Your Choice, and in it he argued for the radical reform of Parliament in order to make England truly democratic. Specifically, Cartwright argued for the principle that we now call "one man one vote" (a phrase that Cartwright used and may have coined), that is, universal male suffrage and strictly proportional representation.

Nearly fifty years later, in 1823, Cartwright's reforms had not been enacted in England. In the U.S., on the other hand, property restrictions on voting had been removed for white males, but other serious issues remained (as they do today, such as non-proportional representation in the Senate, the electoral college, and so forth). In that year Cartwright published another highly significant book on The English Constitution. In that book, Cartwright set himself the task of showing that the basic democratic principles that he had devoted his life to were based in Anglo-Saxon Common Law. This meant that the democratic reforms that appeared so radical to some were, in fact, simply a long-overdue reestablishment of ancient traditions.

As one might expect, Cartwright was generally well disposed toward the American Revolution and its leaders. The copy of his The English Constitution tha one finds online at archive.org (link) is signed and personally dedicated to John Adams. Cartwight also personally sent a copy of his book to Thomas Jefferson, who wrote to thank Cartwright, and to make a few specific observations.

One thing that Jefferson found especially worthwhile about Cartwright's book was the author's conclusion that the essential rights and liberties cherished by both the English and their American cousins were traceable back to the first arrival of the Anglo-Saxons on British soil. Jefferson was pleased not only because this afforded the founding principles of the United States such a long and estimable pedigree, but more specifically because it decisively undercut any claim by Christianity to a central place in the English or American political and legal systems, and, thereby, resoundingly validated that principle which Jefferson held especially dear and with which his name is so closely associated: the separation of church and state.

Here are Jefferson's own words to Cartwright:

"I was glad to find in your book a formal contradiction, at length, of the judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such the judges have usurped in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of the common law. The proof of the contrary, which you have adduced, is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet Pagans, at a time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character had ever existed."

The opinion that Jefferson expressed in his 1824 letter to John Cartwright, that the rights and liberties cherished by the English and the Americans were rooted in pre-Christian traditions, was one that Jefferson had long held. This is shown by another letter, written just one month after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

This letter concerns another project, in addition to the Declaration, on which Jefferson, Adams and Franklin were also working at the same time: a committee (the first of three, as it turned out) charged with designing an official "Great Seal of the confederated States." In a letter to his wife Abigail, John Adams described Jefferson's proposal that that Seal should portray "Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon Chiefs, from whom We claim the Honour of being descended and whose Political Principles and Form of Government We have assumed." (full text of letter, dated August 14, 1776, here.)

Roman Catholicism: The Birth of European Theocracy (A Very Brief History of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Seven)

A Western "Augustus" versus the "Empire of the Greeks"

[NB: I was making some minor edits to this old post from over four years ago, and somehow I managed to change the date on it so that it now shows up as a "new" post! I will let it sit here in the present for a while, for all to admire, or not, as the Dear Reader sees fit. And then when it seems appropriate, I will send it back to the past. The original post date was May 25, 2010.]

[Original Preamble: This post is the latest in a series on the history of monotheism. Links to other installments in this series can be found at the bottom of the post. See especially the two previous posts on Charlemagne linked to there. Those two posts are more thoroughly annotated than this one, which revisits much of the same material, but with a view to more explicitly connect the events of the 8th and 9th centuries to the subsequent development of Medieval Christendom. Look for future posts on a reassessment of the Viking raids as a defensive response to Frankish Jihadism, drawing heavily on Robert Ferguson's book The Vikings: A History, as well as at least one post on connections between Northern Heathenism and "non-European" spiritual influences, especially Siberian/Arctic Shamanism.]

Prior to Charlemagne, whoever sat on the throne in the city founded by and named for Constantine (modern day Istanbul) was the only emperor recognized by the Orthodox Christians of the world, including those living in the far-flung barbarian rump of Christendom, amidst the crumbling remnants of what had once been the western Roman Empire.

In fact:

Throughout the early Middle Ages the popes were the subjects of the East Roman emperors. Up to A.D. 800, every papal document sent to western bishops and to western rulers was dated by the regnal year of the emperor in Constaninople, the pope's true lord and master.
[Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, pp. 179-180]

Precisely what transpired in Saint Peter's Basilica, in the city of Rome, on Christmas Day, 800 AD, is very literally the stuff of legends. One thing is clear: this was the beginning of the end of the days when the Emperor in Constantinople was the "true lord and master" of the Pope in Rome.

What we do know is that both Pope Leo III and Charles, King of the Franks, were present together on that historical day in the Basilica. We also know that at some point the Pope placed a crown on the King's head and declared him Augustus: a title that had been used by all Roman Emperors after the Senate granted it to Octavian (aka Caesar Augustus) on January 16, 27 BC, until it was abandoned by Heraclius, who ruled from 610-641 AD. Heraclius and those who followed him preferred the Hellenic title Basileus, which had been used by Alexander the Great and his successors in Egypt, Asia and Macedon.

(Unresolved questions about the coronation of Charles by Leo include: whether this was planned ahead of time, whether Charles sought this or welcomed it when it came, why Leo did whatever it was he did, why Charles went along with it to whatever extent he did, and so forth.)

Even though the emperor of the Romans (who reigned from Constantinople, as Roman emperors had done since 324 AD) no longer (but only since 610) used the Latin title Augustus, nevertheless, bestowing that title on someone not seated on the throne in Constantinople was considered at the very least an affront by both the Greek speaking Church of the East and the Greek speaking Roman/Byzantine state.

It is important to remember that the empire commonly referred to today as "Byzantine" never called itself that, nor did anyone ever call it that until well after the Empire itself was finally snuffed out by the Ottomans. At the time of Charlemagne it was, and had always been, the Roman empire -- and in the Middle Ages it's people still called themselves Romans, although they now did so in Greek. If that seems a little odd to us, perhaps it is slightly less odd when we consider that according to the legends about the origins of the Roman people, the great hero Aeneas and his followers were refugees from the cataclysmic destruction of Troy at the hands of the Greeks, and when they finally arrived on the banks of the Tiber they abandoned whatever their native language had been in favor of Latin, and intermarried with the locals.

The coronation a new Augustus in the city of Rome openly posed a challenge to the "Roman-ness" of the "Empire of the Greeks" (Imperium Graecorum, as it was already being called by Latin speaking, and Greek-less westerners). As of December 25, 800 AD, there were now two Christian emperors, and who could possibly avoid wondering whether or not the world was big enough for two Christian Empires?

Christianity in the modern world is overwhelmingly dominated by the distinctly Western Christianity that was (only) now taking shape. And this new kind of Christianity was not only Western, it was a Christianity that was for the first time genuinely European. In modern terms, this new Western Christianity can be defined as Roman Catholicism and its offshoots (the various "Protestant" sectoids).

It must be emphasized that there was nothing European about early Christianity at all, even well past late antiquity and into the Dark Ages proper. The bulk of the population of the late Roman Empire lay in Asia and Africa, and that is also where the economic and cultural center of gravity of the Roman world was. Alexandria was arguably the cultural capital of the whole world up through the 4th and into the 5th century AD. As the port through which the great wealth of Egypt (grain in particular) passed out into the world at large (and through which the wealth of the world at large passed back into Egypt) it was also a world-class economic powerhouse. And it was also one of the most important centers of the Christian religion.

The Greek speaking East was both more populous in general, and more heavily (and more orthodoxly) Christian than the Latin speaking West. Through the 4th and into 5th century the city of Rome (still the city with the largest human population on earth) continued to be a bastion of Pagan resistance to Christianization. When Rome was sacked by the Christian Visigoths in 410, Pagan refugees flooded into North Africa. It was in part to counter the influence of these Pagan diehards, now emboldened by the Christian God's failure to protect Rome (even against other Christians!), that Augustine embarked on his great exercise in religious propaganda, his City of God: Against the Pagans.

The western and northern parts of the Empire, and the semi-barbarian frontier areas that were heavily Romanized, were not only less Christian, but the Christians there were less Orthodox. In particular, the Arian sect that proved one of the most resilient of the heresies, thrived especially among the various Germanic peoples. These Arian Goths came to control large parts of the West for significant periods of time, including all of Italy and Spain and much of Gaul (modern France). In fact the entire western half of the empire was ruled by Germanic peoples by the 6th century, and of these only the Franks were reliably Orthodox.

But by the 8th century, Christianity, and Orthodox Christianity in particular, appeared to be rallying in the West. And with Muslim invaders now advancing through Spain and with the  Heathen Continental Saxon Pagans menacing on the northern frontiers, it was now or never. This reinvigorated Western Christianity was ready to take on the Saxons and the Mohammedans, but at the same time it was no longer willing to take it's orders from the East. It would take another 254 years to become official, but in essence a new, distinctly European (that is, "white") form of Christianity was inaugurated when Pope Leo bestowed upon Charles the title Augustus.

Western Christians, that is, Catholics and Protestants, today make up close to 80% of the world's approximately 2 billion Christians (with Catholics alone comprising over half the world's Christians). Most of the remaining 20% are Eastern Orthodox.

The predominance of Western Christianity is even more striking in that essentially all of the growth of the Christian religion, as a percentage of the human population, over the last 1000 years has been due to the spread of Catholicism (and, later, Protestantism). That growth, in turn, has been as a direct result of the violent consolidation and expansion of Western Christendom in five distinct phases:

1. Military expansion of Catholicism, combined with forced conversions, throughout all of western and northern Europe from the 8th century through the 15th century (final defeat of the Lithuanian Pagans).

2. Continuous and large-scale persecution of all religious deviants (from relatively minor "heresy" to full scale apostasy and/or Crypto-Paganism) all the way up to the 18th century.

3. Military expansion of Catholicism and Protestantism, combined with forced conversion, throughout the Western Hemisphere from the 15th century through the end of the "Indian Wars" in the early 20th century. The Spanish conquest and forced conversion of the Philipines also occured during this same phase. (This accounts for about 300 million Christians who are the descendants of those who were simultaneously conquered and converted in the Americas and the Philipines.)

4. Enslavement and forced conversion of Africans "imported" to the Western Hemisphere from the 16th century through the 19th century. (This accounts for about 180 million Christians today who are the descendants of those who were enslaved.)

5. The "Scramble for Africa" by the European "Great Powers" from mid 19th century through the mid 20th century (this accounts for about 450 million Christians who are the descendants of those who were simultaneously colonized and converted.)

The early successes of the first phase listed above coincided with reigns of Charlemagne and his father, Pepin. The father accomplished the unification of the Franks under a single ruler, the son consolidated this unification (which had been accomplished before, but never sustained), but then built on this in two ways: (1) he launched a series of expansionist wars against non-Christians (and also against the Lombards who were supposedly Christian, but who were at the very least unreliable in their loyalty to the Pope, and may very well have harbored Pagans in their midsts); and (2) he forged a political-religious-military alliance between the King of the Franks and the Bishop of Rome which simultaneously created a new Christian Empire and a new form of Christianity.

Religio Christiana versus the Northmen

The iron grip of Christian theocracy on Europe was still far from complete when Charlemagne died in 814. Even the Pagan Saxons had still not been vanquished or even genuinely converted, as the Stellinga uprising of 841 demonstrated. But beyond the Saxons lay a vast expanse of Pagandom. Here is brief description of "The Northmen" from the final Chapter of Peter Brown's The Rise of Western Christendom:

In the 820s and 830s Dorestad was the greatest port in Western Europe. During the reign of Charlemagne's successor, Louis the Pious (1814-840), four and half million silver coins were struck at its mint. They showed a cross placed in the middle of the facade of a classical temple, and bore the inscription Religio Christiana. An ostentatiously Christian empire lay at the southern end of the trade routes which led across the North Sea. North of Dorestad and Frisia stretched non-Christian lands, characterized by fragile chiefdoms. In Denmark, along the fjords of Norway, and in the lowlands of southern Sweden, small kings rose and fell according to their ability to gain access to wealth, though plunder on the waters of North Atlantic and the Baltic. But they were also traders. In this period, Hedeby in Denmark and Birka (Bjorko) in southern Sweden became the Dorestads of the North. They were emporia, ringed by fortified ditches. It was there that the merchants of the Christian south purchased the products of the wild lands of the north -- all manner of sumptuous furs from the Baltic and precious walrus-tusk ivory from the Arctic seas. The Franks referred to the varied inhabitants of Scandinavia as "Northmen." (What is now called Normandy, on the coast of France, was the "land of the Northmen": it was the only permanent Scandinavian settlement in Continental Europe.

The Northmen were pagans. They had remained fiercely loyal to their gods. Only gods could impart to their worshipers the suprahuman vigor and good luck which gave to individuals and to groups a competitive edge over their many rivals. Thus, in around the year 800, two religious systems faced each other at either end of the North Sea. In true Carolingian style, the "Christian Religion" coinage of Dorestad conveyed a message of imperial solidity, protected by the power of Christ. Such confidence was met, in Scandinavia, by a very different set of beliefs . . . . [T]housands of golden amulets have been discovered in Denmark and southern Sweden. They were dedicated to shrines or worn on the persons of leaders so as to increase their numinous good fortune in war. In the fifth and sixth centuries, late Roman gold coins had reached as far as Denmark, where they were promptly transformed into images of victory-bringing gods.

In the ninth century, the Frankish kingdom was far closer to Scandinavia than Rome had ever been. Francia and the lands of the Northmen were close neighbors. Only a few hundred miles of the North Sea lay between them. Frankish goods poured into Denmark and southern Sweden. Not surprisingly, these goods included high-quality Frankish swords. Even the swords spoke of the power of a distant God. the hilt of a Frankish sword, found in Sweden, bears a verse from the Psalms: "Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight." [Psalm 144:1]

For Franks and Northmen alike, war was a matter of truly religious seriousness. Sacred words -- Latin Psalms or, in Scandinavia, arcane runes -- showed that the gods were close to hand, to enhance the efficacy of a warriors weapons. Christ was the Frankish god. It was possible that he might find acceptance in Scandinavia, provided that he lived up to the expectations of a society of brittle warriors and enterprising pirates and traders.

Scandinavia itself consisted of a band of coastal settlements, caught between a North Sea whose southern end was ringed by Christian kingdoms and a vast hinterland which stretched as far as the Arctic Circle. But Scandinavia did not only look south. To the east, along the Baltic, the "Northmen" were in contact with a world which reached, through modern Finland, as far as the Siberian forest zone. This was a world of hunters and pastoralists, of Lapps and Finns. Their shamanistic rites, performed in animal costumes, implied an open frontier between the human and animal and between the spirit and human world. Shamanistic practices were partly adopted by the Northmen. Performed in southern Sweden, they struck observers from the distant Christian south. In around 850 an abbot in northern Francia wrote to a missionary in Birka to ask about the manner in which the Northmen transformed themselves through wearing animal masks . . . . Was it really true, he asked the missionary, that a race of dog-headed men lived at the far edge of the earth.

As this letter shows, contact with Scandinavia had intensified by 850. It had been fed by Frankish imperial policy and by trading relations between the Northmen and Dorestad. But with this contact Continental Christians found themselves confronted by a far wider world than they had expected. With the pagan Northmen, it seemed as if they had truly reached the edge of the world, where humans merged with the beasts.
[pp. 463-465]

Next up in this series: Viking Raids Reconsidered: The Christian Jihad and the Heathen Backlash (A Very Brief History of Pagan Monotheism, Part Eight).

See also (links NOT automatically generated):
Charlemagne, Part Deux: "A substantialy new Church was allied with a new political system." (A Brief History of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Six)
Charlemagne (A Brief History of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Five)
Paganism is not a European Religion, Part Deux
Paganism is not a European ReligionMuhammad (A brief history of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Four)
Constantine (A brief history of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Three)
Moses (A Brief History of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part Two)
Akhenaten (A Brief History of Revolutionary Monotheism, Part One)
Monotheistic Robots of Doom, Part Deux
Monotheistic Robots of Doom
Lies, Damned Lies, and Pagan Monotheism
Hic Sunt Dracones

Three More From Bulgaria

Johannes Kepler's mother was suspected of Witchcraft because she was a healer

Katharina Kepler, mother of the the famous astronomer/astrologer, was an ill-tempered woman who was widely, and quite possibly deservedly disliked by those who knew her. So when one discovers that in 1615 she was denounced by her neighbors as a Witch, and that they specifically accused her of trying to poison them, and that these accusations were deemed serious enough to warrant formal charges of Witchcraft and a subsequent trial that would drag on for years, one might be tempted to conclude that this is a straightforward example of what certain modern scholars would like us to believe is the typical scenario for Witchcraft accusations during the Burning Times. Read on to see how this case might indeed by typical, but not in the sense that these scholar intend.

You see, certain scholars have, over the last three decades or so, attempted to rewrite history by systematically promulgating a completely false image of the victims of the Witch persecution that gripped Europe during the 15th - 18th centuries. According to this scholarly clique, the victims of the Witch-hunts were targeted only because they were genuinely believed to be malevolent practitioners of harmful magic. Even more specifically, those who were put on trial as Witches were most definitely not, according to this revisionist theory, practitioners of divination, healing and other forms of beneficial magic.

In the specific case of Katharina Kepler we are able to clearly see just how wrong-headed this conflation of Witchcraft with malefic magic really is. For the historical record tells us plainly that Katharina Kepler was a practitioner of magical healing. She was indeed, as her son Johannes himself freely admitted, a sharp-tongued, stubborn, and all around difficult person. But the fact is that far from shunning her, her neighbors sought her out for her cures, which involved herbal potions and magical incantations.

Viewed in light of Katharina Kepler's indisputable reputation as a magical healer, the charges against her constitute, at worst, an accusation of magical malpractice: either her cures did not work, or, worse yet, actually made the patients who took them worse off than they were before.  To be sure, whether Katharina Kepler's potions and incantations did anything at all or not, and if so, whether that was for the better or not, is impossible for us to ascertain now, over four centuries later. Systematically proving or disproving the efficacy of any purported treatment for any illness is a non-trivial process requiring double-blind studies, statistical analysis, and so forth.

However, the "magical malpractice" scenario is only one possible explanation for how a healer such as Kepler could find herself accused of Witchcraft. Another, and arguably more parsimonious, explanation is simply that Katharina Kepler was suspected of being a Witch precisely because of her reputation as a magical healer. Either way, though, there is no doubt that here we have yet another case of a magical healer who fell prey to the Witch-hunters, as was the case with Geillis Duncan and Agnes Sampson in Scotland in 1590-1 (as discussed in the previous post).

Fortunately, in this particular case the story has a happy ending. Katharina Kepler was eventually cleared of all charges. Her exoneration was due in large part to the energetic intervention of her son, the famous scientist and Pythagorean philosopher. But Katharina herself also deserves a significant amount of the credit. Thanks to her indomitable spirit, the Witch-hunters were never able to induce her to "confess" during years of interrogation (which did not include physical torture, but did include threats of torture up to and including being "shown the instruments").


Further reading on the case of Katharina Kepler:

• Kepler's Witch, James A. Connor, Harper Collins, 2005
• Kepler, Max Caspar, 1948
• Witch Hunts in Europe and America: An Encyclopedia, By William E. Burns, 2003 (link)
• Der Hexenprozeß gegen Katharina Kepler, Berthold Sutter, 1979
• Historical Trials, A Selection, Sir John MacDonnel, 1931 (link)

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