An Outline of the Original Witchcraft

By Joe Pelaez

An Outline of the Original Witchcraft introduces the writings of various writers rejecting their contention that
it evolved from a fertility cult. Instead, it contends it emerged from the Goddess religion of ancient times
It shows how the Roman authorities closed the temples, forcing the craft to continue its practices in hiding.
It also presents the view that the three degrees correlate with the three sections of the Tree of Life

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496940780

Joe Pelaez

I was born on August 17 , 1940 in new York City, where I grew up. I graduated from elementary school in 1954 from Downtown Community School. In 1958 I graduated from Walden High School. I then went to Ohio University, where I majored in English . After that , there was in interruption . I was drafted by the US Army and assigned to the Finance Corps , and sent to Ger many , where I spent 18 months . I graduated from Ohio U in 1970 . After that I took courses in Theatre and Cinema at Hunter College Graduate School. Since I liked to write, after my college days I continued in that pursuit . Before the Outline of the Original Witchcraft, I wrote a book , three screenplays, and a teleplay . I left New York in 1976. After living in Denver and Los Angeles , I finally settled in Las Vegas, where I reside now .

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© 2014 Joe Pelaez. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 09/30/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4079-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4078-0 (e)

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Chapter 1 Minions Of The Moon

Chapter 2 An Essential Definition

Chapter 3 Matriarchal Period

Chapter 4 Book Of Shadows

Chapter 5 Nudity

Chapter 6 Nox

Chapter 7 The Purport of the Seasonal Festivals

Chapter 8 Color

Chapter 9 Scent

Chapter 10 Sound, Touch, Taste

Chapter 11 The Feminine Tree

Chapter 12 Hecate

Chapter 13 Alim

Chapter 14 The Witchcraft Degrees

Chapter 15 Tyro

Chapter 16 First Degree

Chapter 17 Second Degree

Chapter 18 Third Degree

Chapter 19 Endword

Bibliography

1

Minions Of The Moon

¹

The scant supply of public information describing Witchcraft that has trickled down to the modern world from the Church Witchcraft trial proceedings of the Middle Ages constitutes insufficient evidence with which to assess the true nature of this important system. Quite on the contrary, the few sparse facts which are currently circulating in mainstream circles have been ever so cleverly selected as to prevent any real understanding of its basic tenets² and, as a result, has left obscured the entire intent and aim of its practices.

So successful has been this determined misrepresentation³ that many later writers, when commenting about the subject, have assumed these biased and misleading facts to be the only pertinent information existing about the Craft, and an entire body of incorrect and scurrilous literature has been compiled and set forth for public consumption with the result they’ve obstructed any learning about its true nature, as they unwittingly aid the agenda of the original falsifiers. It seems only high time, then, that steps be taken to expose this calculated inaccuracy and counteract the resulting detrimental effects on the entire contingent of duped writers who unreservedly digest and regurgitate this false and maligned information.

Fortunately, this disgraceful strategy has not met with total success. History has gone on to prove what a former U.S. President famously and aptly stated,⁴ that it is only SOME of the people that you can fool all of the time. And there have already been a few writers that have made efforts to correct this malicious denegration.

The first, or at least the first that has come to light, of an infrequent series of more perceptive writers with any real understanding of the matter, was Reginald Scot,⁵ who in 1584 has, fortunately, given posterity a somewhat more accurate and detailed disclosure of the true nature of these insidious and despicable activities.

He was, first of all, appalled that the prosecutors of the Inquisition, one of the first spreading the misinformation, were attributing a power to the devil, and consequently to the witches through their supposed pact with him, that was, in his estimation, possessed by God alone.

He decried the fact, as he was observing, that the charges were being made by the most base of individuals against only unlucky or solitary people.⁶ The victims were being brought to trial through other unfortunates who were cajoled into giving fictitious accusations. He was also astounded by the absurdity of the charges. Tamptests and other natural phenomena were being credited to the devil.

In addition, victims could not find out or confront their accusers. The accused were brought in by the Inquisitors, who got a spoil of their goods, and wrung by torture, got them to confess to absurdities or impossibilities that they never did.

But apart from establishing, correctly, that the victims were poor, powerless, and innocent people, Scot never fathoms that the accused witches might have belonged to an organization, and that there might have been a real Goddess based religion in existence.

It is interesting, too, to note that, after Scot died, the King, James, whom Scot had implored to stop the madness, had all the books of his that he could get his hands on, collected and burnt.⁷

The three individuals which follow Reginald Scot are writers which Stewart Farrar cites as being of paramount significance in the reconstruction of the Craft and its Twentieth Century revival.⁸ These are, of course, Charles Godfrey Leland, Margaret Murry, and Gerald Gardner.

GODFREY LELAND’s book Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches,⁹ published in 1899, is a collection of portions on cosmology, incantations, and stories. Its value is that it presents Witchcraft through the viewpoint of its own material and not through the derogatory accounts offered by its many detractors. To him, though, all the information, mainly collected for him by a witch named Maddalena, was, as he states on page 141 of Aradia, exists only in the memories of a few old sorcerers who are daily disappearing. His view was that these materials were being kept alive by a few surviving remnants of the old practitioners of the Goddess based religion that was carried on in ancient times. He, therefore, makes no mention of any structure or organization, or any method of instruction, for that matter, nor any system of initiation used for entering and advancing in the Craft.

The next person, listed by Farrar, to tackle the subject and make a contribution to the reconstruction of the Witch religion was MARGARET MURRY. She advances the perception one step further. Whereas Reginald Scot had merely striven to show that the accused were guilty of no crime, and Godfrey Leland gives glimpses of the Craft’s practices, Margaret Murry, for the first time, establishes the actual existence of the Witch Cult.¹⁰

Until that time, some eighty years ago, it is revealed that most historians thought that Western Witchcraft was the invention of the Inquisition, but now from her efforts, this fallacy is no longer thought to be so.¹¹

But the main drawback to her presentation is that she accepts and relies upon, as Stewart Farrar¹² and Justine Glass,¹³ among others, have noted, exclusively on the bogus accounts of the Church Inquisition, and records them as the basis for her summation, uncritically accepting them at face value and using them to compile her account. So, although she does uncover the existence of the Witch Cult, her findings, accept and present a view of the system that stems from the highly biased and sometimes completely conjured and entirely preposterous version of the Craft, which the Church incorrectly and maliciously declared was an organization out to do evil, and which slander the Church also supplied for public consumption and, too, for the advantages it derived from having this total misconception being accepted by the public as true fact, helping it achieve its goal of discrediting a rival. Also, on top of this fault, she evaluates everything in terms of just customs, beliefs, and practices, without it ever occurring to her that there might be to the outward event some practical and useful purpose or goal, or some deeper meaning behind these activities.

So, the true aims and purposes, and the intents of its procedures and instructions of the Craft, as a consequence, do not emerge from Murry’s writings, and they ultimately illustrate the pitfalls of having an anthropologist investigate esoteric matters.

The third crucial writer mentioned by Stewart Farrar is GERALD B. GARDNER.¹⁴ He is the first person to begin presenting the true essence of the Craft. He reveals the many encounters he’s had with actual present day witches, establishing the fact that witches had, in some form, survived the prosecution, and then he takes the account one step further, as it’s only with him that it is finally shown that the Witch Cult is not an outfit out to do the work of the devil, but is an organization with a constructive agenda, that it was Goddess oriented and that it followed the feminine method for obtaining illumination. With him is finally established the structure of the Craft, public at least, that we are familiar with today. But the information he provided was not complete, and it has been the striving of the Craft writers that came after him to uncover the rest of the missing elements of the system and to work out the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in some parts of the information that is thus far known.

Also, while although free of the concocted and distorted information that had been thrust on the Craft and with which Murry had been misled and was subject, Gardner, monetheless, was gripped by other misconceptions of his own. Particularly, he was led astray by the seemingly apparent and assumed signs of the origins of the Craft, namely that it was partly the outgrowth and remains of a simplistic primitive, rural, stoneage approach to the unknown and unfathomable aspects of the workings of this world. This is a most curious conclusion both on the part of Gardner and also of Murry before him.

Stewart Farrar’s own book itself is a further addition to the information that is available concerning the practices of Witchcraft.¹⁵ He adds much useful information in areas not covered by any of the previous writers, and thus advances the account of the witches even still further. He reveals that he too has had many encounters with present day witches, thereby confirming the facts gleaned by Gardner that the witch organization is in some form still in existence today. He also indentifies the Sabbats and the dates on which they fall and also gives information on Esbats. He also provides the outline of the proper ritual for each of these. He also describes the marriage ceremony, called Handfasting, and details the Craft’s three degree structure and also shows the symbols for each of these degrees. He then gives a summery of the initiation for each of the grades. But most important of all, he notes that the aim of the system is the development of the individual. The one outstanding drawback of his account is the fact that he too accepted the currently