What Witches Do

By Stewart Farrar

An eyewitness account of a modern coven and an overview of Wiccan history in a book that “sweep[s] clean the ‘old image of witchcraft’” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
What do witches really do? What is it like to be a witch? Experience the process through the eyes of Stewart Farrar, author, journalist, and witch, as he describes in detail the activities and practices of modern-day witches. When Stewart first started writing What Witches Do, he was “an interested agnostic” writing from an objective viewpoint. But by the time the book was finished, he had been initiated into the mysteries of Wicca and was destined to become internationally known as one of the world’s leading writers on the subject.
 
What Witches Do is part of The Paranormal, a series that resurrects rare titles, classic publications, and out-of-print texts, as well as publishes new supernatural and otherworldly ebooks for the digital age. The series includes a range of paranormal subjects from angels, fairies, and UFOs to near-death experiences, vampires, ghosts, and witchcraft.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781446358122

Book preview

Stewart Farrar

What Witches Do

A MODERN COVEN REVEALED

For

Alex, Maxine and Maya

Blessed be

‘The experience of the archetype is frequently guarded as the closest personal secret, because it is felt to strike into the very core of one’s being…. [These experiences] demand to be individually shaped in and by each man’s life and work. They are images sprung from the life, the joys and sorrows, of our ancestors; and to life they seek to return, not in experience only, but in deed. Because of their opposition to the conscious mind they cannot be translated straight into our world; hence a way must be found that can mediate between conscious and unconscious reality.’

Carl G. Jung,

The Personal and Collective Unconscious

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Initiation

CHAPTER 2 The Roots of Modern Wicca

CHAPTER 3 What Witches Believe

CHAPTER 4 Training of a Witch

CHAPTER 5 The Coven at Work

CHAPTER 6 The Great Rite

CHAPTER 7 The Seasonal Festivals

CHAPTER 8 Clairvoyance

CHAPTER 9 The Tarot and the Tree

CHAPTER 10 Magic

CHAPTER 11 Healing

CHAPTER 12 Worlds of the Elements

CHAPTER 13 Astral Projection

CHAPTER 14 The Rite of Queen Hagiel

CHAPTER 15 A Witch Wedding

CHAPTER 16 Endpiece

Appendices

APPENDIX 1 The Legend of the Descent of the Goddess into the Underworld

APPENDIX 2 The Charge

APPENDIX 3 Planetary Hours

APPENDIX 4 Wicca Transcriptions

APPENDIX 5 The Alex Sanders Interviews

APPENDIX 6 The Book of the Law

Bibliography

Glossary

Footnotes

Introduction

Late in 1969, my Editor sent me to the press preview of a film called Legend of the Witches. Our paper does not review films, but ‘King of the Witches’ Alex Sanders and his wife Maxine—who had given technical advice on the film and also appeared in it—were to be present. Alex was just beginning to get into the news, and the Editor felt ‘there might be a story’.

After the screening, free Scotch in hand, I maneuvered my way through the crowd around the Sanders. Alex was a slim, balding man in his early forties, wearing dark glasses, answering questions in a soft Northern voice and giving a quick, genuinely humorous smile every now and then. Maxine, taller than Alex and twenty years younger, a striking figure with long blonde hair and a diaphanous white gown, looked a very believable witch. I awaited my moment and asked if Reveille could have an interview some time in the next week or two. Alex agreed courteously, said a few kind things about the paper, and gave me his address in Notting Hill Gate.

Before the interview I did my homework by reading Alex’s biography, King of the Witches by June Johns, which had been published the month before. I found it an absorbing account of an extraordinary man. He had been initiated as a witch by his grandmother when he was seven years old, after he had accidently interrupted one of her solitary rituals. Neither Alex nor the family had any idea she was a witch, and it could have been a traumatic experience for the boy, bursting through the door to find the old lady stark naked among her strange weapons and paraphernalia; but she gave him no time to brood. She had the clothes off him, initiated him on the spot, and told him that he was now a witch too and that various dreadful things would happen if he betrayed the secret.

Fortunately for his mental health, Alex not only loved his grandmother but was himself a psychic ‘natural’, so he took to her training like a duck to water. For long after her death, he tried vainly to contact other witches while he continued his study of all the material he could lay his hands on. Then there was a long, materially profitable, but spiritually disastrous period of devotion to Black Magic, from which he finally extricated himself with a drastic process of self-purification.

Renewed and revitalized, he started building up his contacts, this time with more success. He met, initiated, and married Maxine Morris, another ‘natural’. (By the grades through which his grandmother had taken him, he was fully entitled to initiate others according to the rules of Wicca—the witches’ name for their Craft—but strictly speaking, only women; for initiation must be man-to-woman or woman-to-man.) Together, Alex and Maxine created what came to be called the Alexandrian movement: they initiated witches who in due course ‘hived off to found their own covens, from which others hived off in turn, till today Alex has no idea how many Alexandrians there are, but they are certainly the fastest-growing section of the Craft.

Homework done, I visited the Sanders (three of them now, with two-year-old Maya) at their basement flat in Clanricarde Gardens, London W.2.

I found Alex infinitely more impressive without his dark glasses. (I and others have tried to persuade him to stop wearing the things for public appearances, and I am glad to say he seems to have taken our advice.) He has an unmistakable air of authority and knowledge, and his eyes are compelling, some would say disturbing. But this aura does not cross the border into melodrama; it is saved by his puckish sense of humour, which breaks through at the most unlikely moments.

We talked for two or three hours, and he proved to be not merely visually impressive, but also extremely well-read, with a coherent and articulate philosophy.

He gave me early evidence of his powers. After he had been talking about clairvoyance and precognition, I asked him to tell me something about myself. He told me several things which could have been merely shrewd, and then said: ‘In the next month or two you’re going to make about £500 or £600 from a freelance assignment—something to do with law or the police.’

I could think of nothing likely at the time; but a few weeks later, out of the blue, I was asked to write an episode for the Thames Television series Special Branch. The fee was £550.

To my delight he invited me to watch an initiation the following Saturday. I realized later that he did so only because he had satisfied himself that I intended to write an impartial and not a ‘knocking’ piece.

The initiation struck me as dignified and moving, and the coven members as a naturally varied group who were anything but cranks. I wrote a two-part feature in Reveille, which seemed to go down well,both with our readers and with Alex and his friends. For weeks afterwards I was getting letters asking for Alex’s address. (The Editor cast a careful eye over them to make sure that none were from schoolgirls. He need not have worried; Alex is equally careful, and will not initiate anyone under eighteen.)

After the articles had appeared, Alex told me that the publishers of King of the Witches, Peter Davies, would like a second book as a complement to it; not a biography this time, but one dealing with the present situation—what modern witches do and beleive, and why. Would I be interested in writing it?

I would—and here it is.

I set to work, at first merely as a sympathetic observer, talking with Alex, attending his Tuesday and Thursday training classes, grilling the coven members in the local pub, and building up a library of books on witchcraft, magic, and the occult movement generally (the astonishing range and intellectual respectability of which I had, in my ignorance, not suspected until I started reading).

I soon realized that if my own book was to have any value, all this was not enough. I had to be inside.

This was a difficult decision. I had been brought up a Christian, had rebelled via Marxism and atheism, and for many years past I had settled down into what I defined as ‘interested agnosticism’. Now, after a few weeks of study, I had to admit that Wicca appealed to me; that it seemed to meet my individual spiritual needs, while not presenting the stumbling blocks that had prevented my return to the Church. Above all, it seemed to offer a technique for tapping those areas of the human psyche of whose existence I was perfectly well aware, but which I had thought to be inaccessible except to a psychically lucky few.

On the other hand, if I asked to be initiated, would I merely be rationalizing a writer’s ingrained curiosity?

I took the problem to Alex, with the intuitive sense that he would know (and the certainty that he would tell me) if my motives were self-deceptive.

Enough to say that Maxine initiated me into the coven on 21 February 1970—which happened, satisfactorily, to be the night of the full moon; and that I have not regretted it since.

So I would like it to be clear that I write as a witch; but that I am, I hope, close enough to the days when I had no contact with Wicca to be able to appreciate the doubts, misapprehensions, and baulking-points of those other ‘interested agnostics’ to whom the book is principally addressed.

I would also like to emphasize that I write with malice towards none; for unfortunately Wicca is divided, sometimes bitterly, into more than one school of thought.

Ignoring black covens, which all of them condemn, there are four sects: Hereditary, Traditional, Gardnerian, and Alexandrian.

The Hereditary witches are those, of course, who have kept the Craft alive in a direct family line. The theory is that these lines descend unbroken from the Old Religion itself; how true this is only the families know, if indeed they do know. Alex himself is hereditary in the sense that the grandmother who initiated him was a witch before he was born, but how many generations before her followed the Craft she never told him. Alex knows of five ‘hereditary witch families scattered about the country, but they have no dealings with him.

Quite what it is that the Traditionais do (except that apparently they wear robes for their rites) I cannot say. They keep themselves to themselves, and I have never to my knowledge met one; and since nothing goes into this book that I have not experienced, or been told at first hand, or read from a source that seems to me reliable, I must regretfully leave the Traditionais at that. If one of them reads this and cares to enlighten me, I shall be delighted.

The Gardnerians stem from Dr. Gerald B. Gardner, who was initiated by a hereditary witch called Daffo in the New Forest, led a revival movement in the 1940’s and 1950’s, wrote several books on the subject, founded a witchcraft museum in the Isle of Man which still flourishes, and died in 1961. Gardner was attacked by the ‘old’ witches for the same offence as that with which Gardnerians now charge Alex—courting publicity, which the ‘old’ witches shunned like the plague.

The Alexandrians are those whose initiation was received, either directly or at first, second or nth remove, from Alex or Maxine Sanders.

This question of publicity is a tricky one. Alex’s view is that it clears away the fog of misunderstanding, and that at least the tip of the iceberg should be plainly and accurately visible to all and sundry if they want to see it. ‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear’ is his motto; he claims that in any case only those who are ready to understand will understand. ‘You could tell it all and still give nothing away,’ he once said to me—a deliberate exaggeration, because there are many things Alex would not reveal except to an initiate of the appropriate grade, but I knew what he meant. The bald facts are largely available in print to those with diligence and the appropriate library ticket; but much more can only be directly experienced and taught face-to-face. That is the meaning of initiation; not that it is the traditional way, or the most secret way, but that in the end it is the only way.

Three brief quotes might help here, the first from The Tarot of the Bohemians by the nineteenth-century French occult writer Papus:

But those who think that occult science should not be revealed must not be too angry with us … It is one characteristic of the study of true occult science that it may be freely explained to all men. Like the parables, so dear to the ancients, it appears to many as only the expression of the flight of a bold imagination: we need, therefore, never be afraid of speaking too openly; the Word will only reach those who should be touched thereby.

The second from a book by a more recent writer, Mervyn Llewellyn’s Initiation and Magic:

That real knowledge in the hands of brash and ignorant man, to be used by his personal self, is dangerous, is one of the reasons why it has ever been guarded by being cloaked in the garments of symbology, allegory, parable and mythology. However at the present day, with the unconscious powers [ by which Llewellyn means the unawakened majority] having more means of propaganda to aid them … more knowledge is being disseminated than before, in order that those who are capable may be able to take advantage of it and speed their evolution.

The third quotation is a very revealing one from Gerald Gardner himself, in his book Witchcraft Today:

I think we must say goodbye to the witch. The cult is doomed, I am afraid, partly because of modern conditions, housing shortage, the smallness of modern families, and chiefly by education. The modern child is not interested. He knows witches are all bunk—and there is the great fear. I have heard it said: ‘I’d simply love to bring Diana in, she would adore it and she has the powers, I know; but suppose in some unguarded moment she let it out at school that I was a witch? They would bully and badger her, and the County Council or somebody would come round and take her away from me and send her to an approved school. They do such awful things by these new laws nowadays …’ Diana will grow up and have love affairs, is not interested, or is interested but gets married and her husband is not interested, and so the coven dies out or consists of old and dying people. The other reason is that science has displaced her; good weather reports, good health services, outdoor games, bathing, nudism, the cinema and television have largely replaced what the witch had to give. Free thought or spiritualism, according to your inclinations, have taken away the fear of Hell that she prevented, though nothing yet has replaced her greatest gifts: peace, joy and content.

Gardnerians and Alexandrians alike would insist that Gardner’s fears have proved groundless; Wicca is growing as never before. But his words, on the one hand, prove the need for healthy publicity (if only for ‘Diana’s’ sake), and, on the other, support Alex’s main criticism of certain of Gardner’s followers that they have allowed themselves to become ‘cozy’ and middle-aged, and are unwilling or unable to encourage and train young people. ‘Diana’ would be perfectly at home in an Alexandrian coven (and doubtless, to be fair, in many Gardnerian covens too).

At first I thought it was the publicity question, aggravated by Alex’s sense of humour and undoubted gift for showmanship, that was the main bone of contention between Alex and his Wiccan critics. That and his title ‘King of the Witches’—which is easily dealt with, because the title was given to him unasked by a gathering of sixteen of his own covens, and he never claims to be king of anything but his own witches.

But gradually I came to realize that his critics’ real objection was deeper: namely, that Alex does not put witchcraft in a watertight compartment, but sees it as part of the occult movement as a whole. ‘Sanders isn’t a witch, he’s a magician,’ I have been told; in fact he is a witch and a magician. For him, the first three of the traditional ten degrees of occult initiation are (or can be, among several equally legitimate paths) those of witchcraft. Even his critics allow that he is a very powerful magician; but he remains a witch too, and a very knowledgeable and effective one.

Personally—and with due diffidence, being comparatively new to Wicca—I cannot understand this objection. Learning from Alex and Maxine, with their broader horizons than some witches would approve, I have found that this broader background puts purely Wiccan lore into perspective, making it easier to understand and appreciate its real worth. I do not see how the spectrum can be chopped up.

However, let each choose his own horizons. It is distressing to a newcomer to see witches attacking each other over their differences instead of honouring each other for the Craft they share. One wonders sometimes if certain witches have learned anything from the Christians who burned their predecessors and one another with equal fervour, and who, even as I write, are murdering each other in Northern Ireland.

1.

Initiation

In the living-room of a London flat, a man stands naked¹ and blindfolded. His wrists are bound together behind his back with red cord, which is looped round his neck and holds his arms up to form a triangle. A white cord is tied round his right ankle.

He bought the cord himself this morning—three yards each of white, red and blue rayon upholstery cord—sellotaped the ends against fraying (‘No knots yet,’ he was warned). The only other things he was told to bring with him were a bottle of red wine and a black-handled knife. He had some difficulty in finding a knife which satisfied him; he knew that it must sit comfortably in his own hand, and that in due course he would have to engrave symbols on the hilt. With the idea of choosing an appropriate antique, he spent an hour in the Portobello Road market, only to discover that knifes with smooth black engraveable handles were surprisingly rare (except for Nazi daggers, which he refused to consider). He settled finally on a shapely bowie-knife from an ordinary cutler’s shop. It had a brown hardwood handle, so he sprayed it with black gloss enamel.

It is just as well today is a Saturday, because the coven gave him little warning. One thing he has learned already about these people: there is an element of spontaneity, not to say capricious-ness, in their arrangements. They admit to it, saying that some elasticity is needed to take best advantage of ‘the power’.

So if this book offends any witch, I ask his pardon. And if he takes exception to any detail in it, I ask him to consider whether that detail is really as important as the whole picture.

When in doubt, I have accepted Alex’s guidance on what should be revealed and what should be left unsaid, but since I too have taken the Oath of Initiation, I cannot shelve my own responsibility if anyone feels I have overstepped the mark. I have tried to set up signposts for those who want to understand Wicca, and I have tried to do so wisely.

Speaking of responsibility, I have written this book and must answer for its shortcomings. But ‘if there be any virture, if there be any praise’, I should point out that without Alex’s help, information, and instruction, and many hours of his undivided time, it would not have been possible at all. From that point of view, it is as much his book (not to mention Maxine’s) as mine.

Finally, a warning to non-witches who may be tempted to try out the procedures described in this book: if you are interested in anything more than the simple concentration excercises given in Chapter 1 (which are safe and even beneficial for anyone) you would be well advised to seek out a coven, or a responsible occult teacher, and work under guidance. Otherwise you may get dangerously out of your depth, and I assure you I am not over-dramatizing. And do not imagine that by getting a few friends together and trying to act out the rituals, you will have made yourselves into witches. Only a witch can make a witch—not because Wicca is a closed shop, but because, like mountaineering, it can only be safely learned from someone who knows a good deal more about it than you do, and who was trained himself in the same way. So if you want to be a witch, find yourself an existing coven, of whatever sect, because even the most rigid sectarians would agree that any coven, providing it is not black, is better than do-it-yourself.

Explanations over—let us light the candles and cast the Circle.

He has talked at length with the High Priest and High Priestess; as a guest (self-conscious and clothed, on a chair outside the Circle) he has watched an initiation; he has waited over a month since he asked to be initiated himself. Yesterday the High Priestess rang him up and told him to be here tonight with his knife, his cords, and his wine.

He wonders if would-be initiates in the old days, too, were kept waiting and then summoned abruptly. He suspects that they were.

The thought of the ‘old days’ brings another: that, naked and blind, hearing nothing but the tread of bare feet and the clink of ritual objects being arranged, smelling nothing but incense and the sweat of his own tension—he might be in the old days. He is fully conscious, but every stimulus reaching him is undated. This could be a sixteenth-century room full of sixteenth-century witches preparing to make him one of themselves. For some reason the fancy disturbs him, and he reaches for factual reassurance, persuading himself, for instance, that he can feel his blindfold to be twentieth-century Terylene …

Momentarily, although he does not move, he panics. What does he really know of these people, before whom he has allowed himself to be made helpless? What are they really going to do? Perhaps that other initiation he watched was a blind; perhaps they have something nameless in store for him; perhaps … He takes a grip of himself, knowing this fancy to be as groundless as the first one. It passes, but leaves in its wake a heightened sense of the meaning of the ritual. The ‘ordeals’ he is about to face are symbolic but not empty; they stand for an inner process, like the conquest of that unforeseen tremor of atavistic unreason.

To give his mind a specific task, he attempts to recreate what he cannot see, from his memory of that other man’s initiation.

He is standing at the north-east edge of a nine-foot circle (Fig. 3). At each of the cardinal points, a candle burns in a brass candlestick on the floor. On a small altar (Pl. 1) at the north of the Circle are a number of objects, which he tries to list in his mind. A white-handled knife. A wand. A scourge made with very unsadistic embroidery silk. A ‘pentacle’ or metal disc inscribed with various symbols. A censer of burning incense. Salt. A small bowl of water with a sprinkler. A metal chalice into which his red wine has been poured. White, red and blue cords like the ones he bought himself. A reel of red cotton. Most important of all from his point of view, his own black-handled knife, which from tonight will be his ‘athame’, his principal tool and the symbol of his membership of the Craft.

On the floor before the altar, he remembers a sword with a flat cruciform brass hilt, and a well-worn manuscript book of rituals—the hereditary Book of Shadows, which he will have to copy out for himself in the days to come …

He finds himself calmed by the exercise of remembering. The coven themselves: except for the High Priest and High Priestess, they are waiting outside the Circle, as naked as he—but for the ankhs (those strange crosses with the looped upper arm) worn on silver chains by some of them, and the amber and jet necklaces of one or two of the women. When he was present before, as a guest outside the Circle, a few of the women had been robed. Although ‘ye shall be naked in your rites’ is a rule of the Goddess, he understands that its application to particular occasions is regarded as a matter of personal choice, if only out of consideration of the monthly female rhythm. Whether it was because of that, or because then he was a stranger and now he is a postulant, he does not know; but the entire coven is naked tonight. Except for the High Priest, who wears the red robe of his office.

Sudden silence jerks him away from his private Kim’s Game. The movements, the murmuring, the occassional suppressed laugh, have ceased. He tenses himself, knowing that something is about to happen. The measured tread of one pair of feet tells him that the Circle is being ritually cast, the High Priestess is prescribing it with the point of the sword, leaving a ‘gateway’ in the north-east through which the postulant will be led.

The High Priestess speaks: ‘O thou Circle, be thou a meeting place of love, and joy, and truth; a shield against all wickedness and evil; a rampart of protections that shall preserve and contain the power which we shall raise within thee. Wherefore do I bless thee and consecrate thee, in the name of Karnayna and Aradia.’

Now that the words are being spoken, the blindfolded postulate feels less blind, and his tension eases a little.

He hears the sword being laid down, and the footsteps starting again. A spray of cold water down his front makes him jump; he should have remembered that the sprinkling of the Circle came next.

His nose tells him that the censer is being carried around the Circle, and he gropes in his memory for the next step. A whiff of a different smoke reminds him; a burning candle is going round it its turn. Blade, water, incense, fire; the Circle is ready.

Now, one by one, the coven brush past him, through the gateway’ into the Circle; each man being kissed by the High Priestess, and each woman by the High Priest, on the threshold. Man-to-woman, woman-to-man; the law of every ritual of the Craft.

Just to his left, the High Priestess’s voice again; ‘Ye Lords of the Watchtowers of the East, I do summon, stir, and call you up, to witness the rites and to guard the Circle.’ Feet and voice move, repeating the invocation to south, west, and north (see PI. 4).

Now the High Priest murmuring; he cannot catch the words, and his memory fails him. Straining his ears, he makes out the phrase ‘that shall kneel at the sacred altar’, and realizes that the High Priest is giving the High Priestess the Fivefold Kiss, which she in turn will be giving to the postulant himself later on. The spirit of the Moon Goddess is being called down into the body of the High Priestess, who will personify her for the rest of the ceremony (see PI. 3).

He hears the whole coven start to move, stepping clockwise hand-in-hand (man-to-woman, woman-to-man again) as they chant the Witches’ Rune:

Darksome night and shining moon,

East, then south, then west, then north,

Hearken to the witches’ rune;

Here I come to call thee forth.

Earth and water, air and fire,

Wand and pentacle and sword,

Work ye unto my desire,

Hearken ye unto my word.

Cords and censer, scourge and knife,

Powers of the witch’s blade–Waken

all ye unto life,

Come ye as the charm is made.

Queen of heaven,

Queen of hell,

Horned hunter of the night.

Lend your power unto my spell

And work my will by magic rite.

By all the power of land and sea,

By all the might of moon and sun,

As I do will, so mote it be;

Chant the spell, and be it done.

Eko, Eko, Azarak,

Eko, Eko, Zamilak,

Eko, Eko, Karnayna,

Eko, Eko, Aradia.

Three times the ‘Eko, Eko’ chorus is repeated, diminuendo and accelerando. Then the High Priest addresses him directly for the first time: ‘Listen to the words of the Great Mother, who was of old also called among men Artemis, Astarte, Athene, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Dana, Arianrhod, Isis, Bride, and by many other names …’

The High Priestess takes up the Charge: ‘Whenever ye have need of anything, once in the month, and better it be when the moon is full, then shall ye assemble in some secret place and adore the spirit of me, who am Queen of all witches …’

She has a musical voice, young and mature at the same time, and he does not find it hard to identify her with the many-named Goddess for whom she stands. He finds himself listening to the music rather than the sense—and yet the sense seems to reach him: ‘I am the

Reviews for What Witches Do

[Ryan Gary Edmonds · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a classical record of a real working witches' concern by one of the grandfather's of the Craft. The focus is on the Alexandrian tradition of Craft, and is to be read by any seeker of initiation

[buffy9tinkes · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Found the ideas very old and not at all a beginner type of book.