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THE ROOTS and REALITY of MAGIC and WITCHCRAFT
By Andrew Collins
Revised for lecture 12 November 2000
The topics Covered:
- LEGACY OF THE NEANDERTHAL
- RULE OF THE WATCHERS
- HECATE AND THE WITCHES' SABBAT
- WITCHCRAFT IN THE MIDDLE AGES
- THE NATURE OF THE WITCHES' SABBAT
- RITUAL MAGIC
- WITCH PERSECUTIONS
- THE NEO-PAGAN REVIVAL
- PAINSWICK'S PAGAN PAST
- THE WITCHCULT IN WESTERN EUROPE
1. LEGACY OF THE NEANDERTHAL
We begin with the Shanidar cave in Upper Iraq, occupied continually for perhaps 100,000 years. Here was found a 60,000-year-old Neanderthal burial on which flowers had been strewn. Ritual action of this kind is our first real indication of a belief in the human spirit. Caves in Switzerland 75,000 years old have been found to contain a Neanderthal shrine in which seven bears skulls had been placed - one group of three and another of four. Stan Gooch in his remarkable work CITIES OF DREAM identifies the sevenfold symbolism as relating to the constellation of the Great Bear, suggesting that the star cluster was identified with this animal at such an extraordinarily early age. The shrine also indicates a reverence to the collective spirit of the bear as an individualised higher intelligence, like a god or spirit. It might well have been invoked in order that the clan could achieve what they wanted in life and death. The clan aligned themselves specifically to the bear, adopting it as its guiding force and spiritual guardian. It would have become the chosen symbol of the clan, perhaps indicating its strength in relationship to rival tribes or clans. They would dream they were at one with the collective spirit of the bear, the original basis no doubt for the elitism known as shamanism.
Shamans are, of course, priest-magicians, described as walkers between worlds and the earthly representatives of the higher realms which disincarnate spirits enter after death. To interface this realm themselves the shamans would induce near death experiences brought on by fear, sensory depravation and drug inducement.
The shaman, or priest-magician, exacted the power of heaven which was considered supernatural in origin, even to other members of the community who lived mostly in superstition and fear. Yet the natural order of things allowed for the development from the Neanderthal era onwards of a veneration of the generative powers of nature through the woman as a personification of the Divine Mother. From later knowledge of the cult of the Divine Mother derived from the megalithic cultures of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean women chosen for this role were usually depicted seated upon a throne from which creation could be effected in the outside world. The goddess was the woman herself, not an etheric counterpart that lived in the sky. This cult continued in connection with megalithic monuments until the advent of the Bronze Age around 2500 BC. In India the cult of the Divine Mother is still practised, with women being chosen to personify this divinity on earth.
2. RULE OF THE WATCHERS
A shamanic elite from the Nile Valley entered Near East c. 9500-8500 BC following cataclysms which accompanied the end of the last Ice Age. Fire from heaven forced many people to seek shelter in mountain caves while unparalleled flooding reinforced the necessity to reach higher ground. On the Upper Euphrates in what is today Syria, southeast Turkey and Upper Iraq (modern Kurdistan) the shamanic elite came upon primitive peoples ripe for more settled lifestyles. From their earlier experience of the agricultural lifestyle in the Nile Valley the shamans founded new settlements and introduced the inhabitants to animal domestication, cultivated crops, metallurgy, baked pottery, weaponry and the magical arts. From these early foundations derived the earliest Neolithic city of Catal Huyuk in southern Turkey, as well as the civilisations in the Fertile Crescent of Lower Iraq.
In Judeo-Christian tradition the shamanic elite would appear to have been remembered as the Watchers of Eden, the prototypes of the angelic race, more particularly the fallen angels, who inhabited the land of Eden (modern Kurdistan) and provided mankind with the forbidden arts and sciences of Heaven. These arts included the use of sorcery, magic, herbs and conjurations – in other words the methods of exacting effect on the physical world through supernatural intervention.
This was carried into the first civilisations, founded by the descendents of the Watchers and the gods of Eden, known as the Nephilim and the Anakim. They established kingship, in which kings, instead of Earth Mothers, were set up on thrones in order to create a centralised rule.
In early civilisations magic became the mainstay of all ritual performed by the priestly elite, and by the masses as a whole. It became concerned with such matters as the transmigration of the soul, entry into the afterlife and the influencing of others through supernatural means – i.e. magic, spells and conjurations. It was present not only in Sumer and Babylon, but in every civilisation worldwide. It existed too in a counter form in that superstition led people to believe that what went wrong in life could be attributed to occult powers used by practitioners of the magical arts – those known as sorcerers, witches and necromancers. They were thought to be able to invoke supernatural forces to control the world about them, including fellow human beings. Spirits and deities were seen to have been utilised for such purposes, casting them in the role as denizens of darkness. Moreover, they became associated with animalistic forms cast as evil and sinister. These included the serpent, a symbol of knowledge and wisdom, the vulture and other carrion birds such as the raven and crow, all symbols previously linked with the Watchers and their descendants.
3. HECATE AND THE WITCHES’ SABBAT
From the point of view of witchcraft its primary influence in classical times was the notoriety of rites conducted by the worshippers of Hecate, the Queen of the Night. She was depicted in a triple form back-to-back with each of the six arms holding either a knife, a torch or a spear (very similar to the six-armed form of the goddess Kali). It was also believed that she had a fourth form which was shrouded in darkness and faced away from the light. In this way she became the goddess of the crossroads, facing towards each of its four directions. It was thus at crossroads, the archetypal place of fate and destiny, that she was placated by her devotees. An offering of a sheep or dog would be made to her. Prayers would also be said and then honey poured on the ground. Afterwards, the supplicant would walk away without looking behind. If they had suitably placated her, they would be granted either a vision of the goddess or the object of their desires.
The Hecate worshippers of Thessaly practised frenzied, orgiastic rites of a type that compare favourably with those associated with the Witches’ Sabbat of the Middle Ages. Yet such rites were not restricted to the veneration of the goddess Hecate. They were bound up integrally with festivals held in honour of Bacchus, or Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstacy. Like those rites dedicated to Hecate they were condemned by the Roman authorities, forcing them to be conducted in secrecy at night. Initiations were performed and, of course, copius amounts of merriment took place. Dionysus was integrally associated with the male goat – later the form taken by the Master, or Magister, in the Witches’ Sabbat.
4. WITCHCRAFT IN THE MIDDLE AGES
After the fall of the Roman Empire such cults were brutally suppressed by the Christian church. St Paul identified the pagan gods of Rome and Greece with Satan and the devil, while the satyrs, fawns and nymphs became demons and imps.
Yet what might now be termed witchcraft continued through into the Middle Ages across Europe. Those now described as witches who practised sorcery were said to be able to fly through the air. Yet they flew not on broomsticks, but were seen to be able to transform themselves into crows, ravens or screech owls – all birds related to the cult of the dead in previous ages. Witches were thought to alight on male victims and suck them dry of blood and vitality through sexual intercourse; an act in which they were said to have been ‘owl blasted’. They could also turn milk poisonous and cast spells and curses which could only be broken by those skilled in such matters.
Another area that contributed much to medieval witchlore was the wild hunt, said in Germanic and Norse tradition to pass through the night sky at certain times of the year. The nightriders, as they were known, flew alongside packs of red-eyed demons and witches who were said to terrorise the living. It was traditionally led by Wotan, or Woden, but in some traditions it was Holda, a Germanic form of Diana, the huntress, who was said to lead the nightriders. In Christian terms she was identified as Herodias, the wife of Herod, who was responsible for the death of John the Baptist. Witches were summoned into her service after dark to fly through the air as nightriders.
5. THE NATURE OF THE WITCHES’ SABBAT
We can only derive morsels of knowledge from the understanding of witches left to us from medieval treatises written in order to aid their inquisition. They state that the Witches’ Sabbat was presided over by a master or magister who would take the form of a goat, interpreted generally as the devil himself. Sexually based rites would take place in which the naked female participants would copulate with this person. Red wine would be consumed, and there is enough evidence to show that the participants would go naked. In more recent times this nakedness has been termed ‘skyclad’, with the idea that it allows those involved to be more able to exert and influence magical forces free of day-to-day bonds. It was further believed that witches would attend the Witches’ Sabbat by anointing themselves in some kind of magical unguent or oil. They were seen to be able to fly out of houses on their broomsticks via the chimney to the place of the meet. They danced ‘widdershins’, i.e. against the sun, the opposite to deosil, i.e. with the sun. They were practitioners of ‘love magic’ in which philters would be used to ensnare would-be partners, an age-old practice that dates back many thousands of years and is found in ancient Egypt. Witches also had so-called familiars – animals such as cats, dogs, mice or toads – which were seen as personifications of their own magical powers.
Tradition asserts that the witches of the Middle Ages came together four times of the year -on 2 February (Candlemass, Celtic Imbolc), May Eve (Beltane or Walpurgisnacht), 1 August (Lammastide, Celtic Lugnasadh) and 31 October (Halloween). These dates correspond with the four cross-quarter days, the midway points between the equinoxes and solstices. Some traditions also suggest there were two additional dates, the solstices themselves, defined as St John’s Eve, 23 June, and St Thomas’ day, 21 December (Norse Yule or midwinter’s day).
At such times it was considered that the veil between this world and the next was thin and that denizens of the dead, spirits and demons were abroad. Moreover, that it was the best time to conduct magical rites. Sabats were supplemented by weekly esbats, which reflected the different phases of the lunar cycle.
Yet these are distorted views of witches and their sabbats written by those who extracted confessions from their victims. To get a better idea of the role of witches we look to fiction. In Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ Lady Macbeth encounters three witches who predict her undoing. The bard has them invoking Hecate in a wild setting by an ancient tree. They are hags, or crones, who are in fact mortal forms of the three fates, known in Germanic and Norse mythology as the Wyrd Sisters, or the Norns. They weave fate and destiny through sewing the web and by stirring the magical cauldron in which is placed an assortment of uncouth ingredients. Their image is stereotypical of witches as hags, reflected in the fact that the name witch simply means ‘old woman’.
Although there is ample evidence to suggest that the roots of witchcraft stemmed originally from the rites of Dionysus, Bacchus, Hecate and Diana, there are also clear signs that they derive from the belief in the realm of elves and fairies, the denizens of a magical kingdom that exist beyond our own.
6. RITUAL MAGIC
From the time of the Crusades onwards there was a steady interest across Europe in Jewish and Arab mysticism. This spawned a number of books that purported to show the methods by which communication could be gained with supernatural entities that included angels, demons and spirits of the dead. The aims were either to find hidden treasure, enter higher realms of existence or the attainment of wealth and worldly goods. Such books were known as grimoires, and each was claimed to have been written by biblical characters, the most famous of them being Abraham, Moses and Solomon. Indeed, by far the most famous of these books was the Clavicles of Solomon, or ‘Keys of Solomon’, which has survived in various forms to this day.
Practitioners of grimoire magic were the occultists, those who held to occult, or ‘hidden’, knowledge of the universe which was withheld from the profane. They were also magicians, after the Magi, the priestly elite of the Iranian religion of Zoroastrianism.
By far the most well-known and important magician of the Elizabethan age was Dr John Dee, the confidant of Elizabeth I. He was not only the queen’s personal astrologer but also a brilliant mathematician, writer and expert on maritime navigation and exploration. Yet instead of simply following in the steps of his mentors and practising grimoire magic with the help of his seer or sidekick Edward Kelly, he devised a new magical system based on a knowledge of the communication of angels as recorded by the biblical patriarch Enoch in the book which bore his name. Dee and Kelly created a complex method of entering the realms of angels using a previously unknown Enochian language and writing system, as well as a strange world made up of 30 realms of existence known as ‘aethyrs’.
The few fragments of the Book of Enoch which existed in Dee’s day contained an account of the fall of the Watchers of Eden, and so it is clear that what Dee and Kelly were attempting to achieve was communication with those who had provided human kind with the forbidden arts and sciences of heaven. Enochian magic is thus like a computer programme which enables the practitioner to access the realm of the Watchers.
Although the world of John Dee and Edward Kelley might seem a million miles away from the dark world of witches it is important to point out that the collective memory of the Watchers role in corrupting mankind is remembered in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It is a serpent who tempts Eve, in the same way that the Watchers were said to have come unto the ‘daughters of men’ who subsequently begat giant offspring called Nephilim. The serpent is a metaphor for the actions of the Watchers during the time of the Fall, since their faces were said to have resembled those of serpents. Indeed, the Book of Enoch even names the Watcher who came unto Eve. However, there is no reason to attribute this sin to one Watcher alone, for the story of the temptation of Eve is a collective memory of the Watchers’ intervention in the genesis of civilisation.
To Christian scholars of the Middle Ages the Serpent of Eve was viewed as Satan in disguise, while the devil was seen as the leader of the fallen angels in the Book of Revelation. We can conclude therefore that it was this same deity that was worshipped by the witches. Moreover, his form as a goat derives not simply from the connection between Dionysus and the Witches’ Sabbat, but because one of the other main animal forms of the Watchers is the goat. One of their two leaders, Azazel, takes his name from the Akkadian az, or uz, meaning ‘goat’. Moreover, in Jewish mysticism the name Azazel was given to the scapegoat on which the sins of the Israelites was heaped before being pushed over a precipice to its death. Early cylinder seals from 3500 BC and found at the site of the ancient city of Elam on the southern slopes of the Zagros mountains, show goat men holding ritual instruments and controlling diving vultures. This seems to demonstrate the importance of the mountain goat in shamanic practices connected with the Neolithic cult of the dead, and later absorbed into Jewish mysticism.
7. WITCH PERSECUTIONS
Throughout the Middle Ages the ecclesiastical authorities made it their express goal to stamp out what it saw as witchcraft and sorcery. It is estimated that around 40,000 individuals perished as a result of being accused of practising the forbidden arts. All were tortured into giving lurid confessions of Witches’ Sabbats, which were said to involve debauched acts, worshipping and cavorting with demons and initiations in which the obscene kiss was conducted. This was defined as kissing the backside of the devil.
Details of the confessions of witches were given in a number of books which purport to be a true account of their activities and meetings. The most notorious was the Malleus Maleficarum, Latin for ‘hammer of the witches’, written by Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer and first published in 1486. It is these books which form the basis for our understanding of witchcraft in Europe from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. How much of what they say is based on truth and reality is impossible to say. However, they at least provide a basis on which to assess the nature of the witch cult and its origins.
We shall spare the gruesome nature of the torture inflicted on the claimed witches and sorcerers. Suffice to say that religious intolerance, ignorance and fear created a holocaust unprecedented until our present age. Interestingly, witchcraft was never a capital offence in Britain. Nor were its witches, contrary to belief, burnt at the stack. The death penalty for witchcraft in England was confined to those who were found guilty of murder by sorcery. Even then, the penalty was hanging, and not the stake. Lesser crimes were punishable by pillory and imprisonment alone (the witchcraft act was repealed only in 1951).
In Essex the number of individuals hanged for alleged witchcraft was enhanced considerably by the actions of one Matthew Hopkins, the self-appointed ‘Witch Finder General’. He conducted a systematic rooting of accused witches from Essex between 1644 and 1646. In Manningtree alone he managed to condemn to death no less than 29 victims, all through alleged murder by witchcraft. Over a period of two years he was responsible for the deaths of 200 individuals. Most of his victims were known to have been anti-Puritan. Yet in 1646, a minister named John Gaule published a pamphlet in which Hopkins was himself accused of witchcraft. He was brought to trail and, mercifully, he too was condemned to death. In May 1647 Hopkins was hanged for the very offence that had sent so many others to their deaths.
In 1692 came the most bizarre ever debacle over the accusation of witchcraft, and this time it took place not in Europe but in America. We speak here of the famous Salem witch trials in New England. Bizarre paranoia and accusations flying everywhere resulted in the deaths of 20 individuals and the arrest of 200 others, including the President of Harvard University and the wife of the Governor of Massachusetts. Their was a public outcry against the sheer absurdity of the trails, and as Europe passed slowly into an age of reason - ruled not by God by science and philosophy - superstition and fear could never again be allowed to condemn to death innocent people on such a wide scale.
8. THE NEO-PAGAN REVIVAL
In line with the gradual curtailment of witch trials both in Europe and North America during the eighteenth century, the organised Witches’ Sabbat seems to have vanished from history. No more the Dionysian or Bacchalian orgiastic rites so familiar to the written discourses on witchcraft. It was seen to have all but died out, or to have been incorporated into colloquial folk festivals held among rural communities on feast dates previously revered by witches.
Yet the eighteenth century was also the beginning of the classical revival, where aristocratic intellectuals seized upon archaic folk customs and rituals, citing them as survivals of pagan ceremonies practised in Greece and Rome during ancient times. Moreover, it was assumed that the goat of the Witches’ Sabbat was really a memory of Pan, the goat-foot god of herds and pastures in Greek mythology. He was elevated to the role of the creative spirit of nature, whose hooves were to be heard in any dell or pasture beaming with life, colour and vitality like that of his mythical realm of Arcadia. Nature, on the other hand, became personified through lunar goddesses such as Selene, Persephone or Diana.
All across Europe wealthy landowners began erecting mock temples, or follies, on their estates. Scenes from classical works involving the appropriate gods and goddesses would be acted out with individuals taking a specific role.
9. PAINSWICK’S PAGAN PAST
One prime example of the connection between the landed gentry and the neo-pagan revival is the extraordinary case of Painswick, until the end of the eighteenth century a thriving Gloucestershire wool town. In 1739 a family named Hyett took up residence here and built Buenos Aires (today Painswick House), a Palladian mansion with rococo gardens located north-west of the town. The head of the family, one Benjamin Hyett, commissioned the erection of a series of temples and towers in the gardens, as well as an outlying structure called Pan’s Lodge, located on the other side of the Painswick Valley. In the mansion’s rococo gardens he erected a six-feet high statue of Pan in lead made by the Dutch sculptor Jan van Nost. More peculiarly, around this same time a statue of Pan was erected on the south wall of Painswick church.
The Hyett’s apparent obsession with Pan did not end here. A painting of Pan’s Lodge done in 1757 by its architect Thomas Robins shows Pan leading a merry dance of fawns, satyrs and nymphs. Another painting by Robins, done in the same year and showing the view from the lodge across the valley to Painswick, spelt here ‘Panswyck’, again shows Pan. He plays his pipes as ladies and gentlemen listen on. Moreover, a preliminary drawing of Pan’s Lodge, also by Robins, bears the inscription ‘Pan Deus Arcadiae’ – a quotation from Virgil’s Tenth Eclogue – confirming the town’s association with the realm of the goat-food god. Lastly, among stucco plastering in Beacon House, built around 1769 in the Palladian style by local cloth drawer and church warden John Gardner and situated adjacent to Painswick churchyard, we find the head of Pan depicted in high relief with his reed pipes.
The profusion of Pan imagery in Painswick was not simply down to the local gentry’s taste for neo-paganism. Even before the Hyetts took up residency in the town, each spring the people of Painswick held a ‘Feast Sunday’. According to one account made by the Revd John Wiltshire in 1760 the yearly ‘Pan procession’ went from the churchyard to woods close to the Hyetts’ residence. This would indicate that by this date the ‘Feast Sunday’ had become an established event. In 1787 a further account of the festivities was given by Robert Raikes, the Gloucester founder of the Sunday School movement. He relates how it took place in September, and not in spring. Furthermore, he states that it ‘would have disgraced the most heathen nations. Drunkenness and every species of clamour, riot and disorder formerly filled the town on this occasion.’ It is said that his revulsion as what he saw actually inspired his creation of the Sunday School movement.
Somehow the Painswick Feast Sunday was linked with a local delicacy called puppy-dog pie. Different versions exist as to how this tradition came into being. The most well known tells of how one day visitors to the town went to eat at The Falcon Inn, Painswick, having heard that its pies were the best in the area. Finding that the pub did not have any meat in the pantry, the landlord ordered that a puppy dog be served to the strangers. They ate the pie unaware of its contents until afterwards when this was made known to them. Not unnaturally, they were reviled and promptly left Painswick, cursing the peculiar sense of humour of its town’s people. It is said that since that time Painswickians have been known as Bow Wows, a tag by which they are still known today. Interestingly, there is a puppy dog among the stucco plastering of Beacon House, showing that John Gardner’s interest in Pan was linked to the revelry attached to Painswick’s annual folk ceremony.
During the Feast Sunday puppy-dog pie is said to have been served in local hostelries, yet by the 1800s puppy dogs had been replaced by china dogs. Knowledge of the association between puppy dogs and Painswick’s Feast Sunday would seem to have convinced the local gentry that the festival was a survival of the Roman festival of Lupercalia. This honoured the wolf which suckled the twins Romulus and Remus, who grew up to be the founders of Rome. During the festival, which took place annually on 15 February, dogs would be sacrificed and naked men would rush through the streets lashing out at any women that crossed their path. Apparently, this act was supposed to confer fertility on the victim. Somehow Lupercalia had become associated with Pan, who in Greek mythology protected the flocks against attacks by wolves and other wild animals.
This was the knowledge available to the Hyetts and their friends when they first came across Painswick’s Sunday feast in the 1740s. Exactly what might have been going on in this Gloucestershire town prior to the neo-pagan revival is difficult now to determine. Yet as Timothy Mowl wrote with respect to the Painswick Sunday Feast in an article for COUNTRY LIFE in 1996:
…could 18th-century local gentry such as Benjamin Hyett and John Gardner, who may well have been familiar with these details of the Roman ceremony, have been able to persuade the entire population of a prosperous Cotswold wool town to start baking dog pies in pious memory of what of what pagan Romans had done almost 2,000 years ago? It seems unlikely.(Mowl, Timothy, ‘In the Realm of the Great God Pan’, COUNTRY LIFE, 17 October 1996, p. 58)
What we do know is that during the Feast Sunday villagers would march in procession from the churchyard north towards Painswick Hill, the site of an ancient beacon, coming to a halt in a wood just east of Painswick House. Here they would indulge in merriment and debauchery, just like the Witches’ Sabbat of the Middle Ages or the Dionysian or Bacchalian rites of classical times.
A possible clue to the pagan roots behind Painswicks’ Sunday Feast is the curious legend attached to the churchyard, where the statue of Pan statue could be found. Local tradition asserts that there have always been 99 yews in the churchyard (there are in fact around 120 today), and that any attempt to plant a 100th tree would always be thwarted. Can we see 99 as an odd, or incomplete, number which only gains completion when another is added to make 100? Is it possible that the 100th tree has some kind of symbolic value? The fact that the legend is connected with the location of the Sunday Feast indicates that the 100th tree might well be a metaphor for something else. On the outside wall of the church’s north aisle is an ithyphallic figure of fifteenth century origin carved in high relief. It faces due east and thus greets the morning sun, a deliberate placing perhaps as a good omen for the Feast Sunday which was originally held in the spring. Did his phallus represent the 100th tree?
Lastly, we have certain pre-eighteenth century place-names in and around Painswick which could well shed some light on the town’s pagan past. There is a farm called Bacchus two miles north-west of the town and mentioned in connection with a local skirmish during the Civil War. There is Jack’s Green on the other side of the Painswick Valley - Jack-in-the-Green being a character that led the merry dance and chased young girls in May Day festivals throughout England. Then there is Paganhill at the southern end of the Painswick Valley. Today it is a suburb of Stroud. Close by is Puckshole. Puck, of course, was the mischievous imp-like character of folklore, the English equivalent of Pan.
So what became of Painswick’s Feast Sunday? Interest had waned considerably by the 1830s. However, it was enthusiastically revived during the 1880s by Painswick’s new incumbent the Revd. W. H. Seddon, a believer in all things colloquial and high church. It thus continued through into the twentieth century. However, in 1950 the vicar, one Revd Jackson, plotted to curtail the revelry surrounding Feast Sunday. He ordered a team of churchgoers to enter the churchyard at night and tear down the Pan statue, which had remained in position for perhaps 200 years. They buried it in an unmarked grave, and those involved were sworn to secrecy over its whereabouts. Today only one or two individuals preserve this precious knowledge.
In the wake of this act of desperation on the part of the Church, the activities of Feast Sunday were scaled down dramatically. Some of the older members of the community can recall the annual procession towards Painswick Hill, although this ceased some years ago. All that remains today of the original festival is the so-called Clipping of the Church ceremony in which local youngsters (originally members of the Sunday School) link hands around the ‘mother church’ and sing a ‘hymn’. Since there is never enough children to make an entire ring around the building, locals and visitors are encouraged to complete the circle. This event takes place on the first Sunday after the 19th September, if, that is, the 19th is not itself a Sunday. Regardless of what day it falls, it is on this day each year that the yews in the churchyard are clipped in advance of the all-important church clipping ceremony.
The term ‘clipping’, as in linking hands and not trimming the yew trees, is derived from the Old English ‘yclypt’, which means ‘to embrace’. Yet in church clipping there is no sense of embracing the ‘mother church’, rather one of containment. It is known, for instance, that church clipping occurred in at least three counties other than Gloucestershire in the recent past. Is it possible therefore that, since Christian edifices were so often constructed on pre-existing sacred sites, church clipping was the survival of a pagan festival in which the fertility of the community was guaranteed through offerings made to local gods, goddesses and the resident genius loci. Is this the origin of Painswick’s Sunday Feast and its association with the great god Pan?
As for Pan’s influence in the town: Pan’s Lodge, once located in woods behind Greenhouse Court (in front of which the Hyett’s erected a castellated stables known locally as the Spite Wall, or the Red Stables), is marked today by a wooden bench. Then there is the plight of Van Nost’s statue of Pan, once located in Painswick House’s rococo gardens.
In the summer of 1999 Richard Dickinson, the 2nd Baron Painswick, who inherited the estate some 40 years beforehand, sold the house and created a trust to provide funds for the restoration of the gardens, to which he put himself in charge. It is his intention to move into converted stables located within the grounds, and in its conservatory he has placed Van Nost’s statue of Pan, proclaiming that it would be vulnerable to theft if left in the gardens. Yet this was done without permission from the correct authorities. Since the Pan statue is a Grade II listed monument Lord Dickinson committed an offence when he removed it from its original position. As a consequence Stroud District Council took him to court and won their case. As Chris Bladon, the council’s Chief Conservation Officer pointed out to THE TIMES newspaper on 1 August 2000: ‘He has moved it to an inappropriate place without first consulting the appropriate people. It is a statue of historical importance which can now only be enjoyed by Lord Dickinson and his family and friends.’
As one Pan statue is set to return to its original position, perhaps now is the time to begin a campaign to find and retrieve the other one buried in the churchyard. Even if it cannot be returned to its original position, it should be placed on display either in Stroud Museum or in one of the local buildings, such as The Falcon Inn, home of the puppy dog pie. Once more the influence of the great god Pan would be felt, heard and seen in Painswick.
The true origins of Painswick’s pagan past might never be known. Assuming that its Feast Sunday does go back beyond the eighteenth century then it is perhaps an echo of fertility rites thousands of years old. Entering the Painswick Valley magical landscape is like entering Pan’s Arcadia, where satyrs, nymphs and fawns eternally dance in a bright realm of flowers, meadows and lush pastures This is what Benjamin Hyett, Thomas Robins and John Gardner would seem to have recognised and perpetuated during their own lifetimes.
Sceptics of Painswick’s pagan heritage suggest that its connections with Pan derive from the Hyett’s fanciful love of neo-paganism and their liberal interpretation of the town place-name as ‘Panswyck’, which falsely honoured Pan. It is pointed out that Painswick takes its name from a Norman lord of the manor named Payne Fitz John. This is so. However, it was not until 100 years after his death in 1137 that the town gained the name ‘Wyke Pagani’, i.e. Payne’s Wick, (Hyett, F. A. Glimpse of the History of Painswick with a bibliography of its Literature, John Bellows, Gloucester, 1928, p. 9) (prior to this time it had simply been known as Wick, Wyck or Wykeham). Even if the town did gain its name from a Norman landowner, there is irony in the fact that the personal name Payne, or Pain, derives from the word Latin paganus, meaning ‘the pagan’. The suffix ‘wick’, from the Old English wic, meaning a ‘land with special usage’, implying that the true translation of the name Painswick, is the ‘pagan land’, a description that anyone would admit befits it very well indeed.
10. THE WITCHCULT IN WESTERN EUROPE
Pan, as a masculine symbol of nature, is rooted firmly in the neo-pagan revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He appeared in fictional works such as Arthur Machen’s THE GREAT GOD PAN (1894), Maurice Hewlett’s PAN AND THE YOUNG SHEPHARD (1899), Kenneth Graham’s THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS (1908) and Dion Fortune’s THE GOAT-FOOT GOD (1936).
Finding the roots of revivalist witchcraft is as difficult as trying to find the true nature of the Witches’ Sabbat of the middle ages. Despite claims that it is derived from existing traditions which stretch back into antiquity research conducted into the subject by Ronald Hutton, who holds the chair of history at Bristol University, shows this to be highly unlikely (see his excellent work THE TRIUMPH OF THE MOON, OUP, 1999).
Yet the bridge between the ancient and more modern traditions was unquestionably three books – THE GOLDEN BOUGH by folklorist Sir James Frazer (1890), THE WITCH CULT IN WESTERN EUROPE by respected Egyptologist Margaret Murray (1921) and THE WHITE GODDESS by Robert Graves (1948). Each one justified the belief that folk customs preserved across Europe were the direct survival of a pagan past that stretched back thousands of years. In Murray’s case she attempted to prove, as with the case of Painswick, that these customs were the remnants of a fertility cult focused on the horned god as the generative power of nature and personified at the Witches’ Sabbat by a human being dressed as a goat. She believed in the former existence of witches covens involving 13 people controlled by a master, or magister, who presided over several such covens. Those who participated were either born into the service of the coven or initiated when they reached adulthood. She promoted the view that they met four times a year at sabbats and weekly at esbats.
Margaret Murray’s thesis was expounded in a scholarly way, and yet she received severe criticism from historians and folklorists alike who saw many of the folk customs she cited as creations of the neo-pagan and later folklore revival of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her ideas were expounded in a sequel published in 1933 entitled GOD OF THE WITCHES and although this too was met with great scepticism there is no question that her views heavily influenced the rekindling of interest in witchcraft in the ensuing decades.
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