about magic are near to those of modern Witches. Agrippa maintained that magic depended not on dealing with demons, but on natural psychic gifts. Agrippa led an adventurous life travelling around Europe in frequent conflict with the Church. One of the highlights of his career was in Metz in Germany when he successfully defended a woman accused of Witchcraft and got her acquitted. Later in life, he was banned from his native Cologne and eventually from all of Germany. He had a number of spells in prison when his writings were judged as heretical and offensive.
The study of the Corpus Hermeticum and of the Qabalah, with its ten emanations of the Divine to which all Deities could be related, encouraged a new line of thought amongst some of Europe’s intellectuals: belief that behind the cloak of different religious traditions lay common truths. Thus by the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the German humanist Conrad Ruth13 could declare that:
There is but one God and one Goddess,
but many are their powers and names:
Jupiter, Sol, Apollo, Moses, Christus,
Luna, Ceres, Proserpina, Tellus, Maria.
But have a care in speaking these things.
They should be hidden in silence
as are the Eleusinian Mysteries;
sacred things must needs be wrapped in fable and enigma.14
The Church was fighting a losing battle in trying to hold back those developments in human thought which led on the one hand to that empirical study of the world around us which is modern science and on the other to the empirical study of the human mind and spirit which gave rise first to the study of magic and later to the development of the science of psychology. Scientific revolutions are both caused by and in their turn precipitate breakthroughs in thought. One of the most radical discoveries or rediscoveries of the sixteenth century was that the Sun did not revolve around the Earth; something which was known by the ancient Greeks. The Earth and human beings were not the centre of the universe. In fact, the Earth revolved around the Sun. This discovery was made by the Polish physician and astronomer Copernicus. It is hard for us today to understand the impact it made. The whole world-view of Christian Europe – that we lived in a static unevolving universe created by an anthropomorphic male God in seven days – was totally undermined. Once the nature of the cosmos was questioned, the floodgates were opened. A new vision of the universe began to come into being, a vision which was Pagan and pantheistic.
Although few magicians were burned at the stake and there was no systematic persecution, some, such as Giordano Bruno, did die for their faith. As a child, he had mystical experiences and saw spirits on the hills beneath the beech and laurel trees of his native Italy. He found himself agreeing with the Pagan view: the Divine was to be found in Nature. Bruno became a Dominican but his ideas did not find favour with his superiors. He fled his monastery, hiding a heretical book he had been reading down the lavatory. The book was discovered and the Inquisition ordered his arrest. Bruno fled to Switzerland, France and finally to England where he lectured at Oxford University and was received by Queen Elizabeth I. He also visited the great English magician Dr John Dee, who shared his religious ideas. Bruno was an adventurous or a foolhardy man, depending on one’s perspective. He was not content to pay lip service to Christianity and believed that a new religion should be formed which would overthrow the corruption into which Christianity had fallen. His excursions into magic led him to develop a religious and magical system based on the religion of ancient Egypt. With a naiveté verging on lunacy, he attempted to convince the Pope of the merits of his new ideas. On February 17 1600, he paid the price for his impetuosity and was burned at the stake, having declared to his judges:
Perhaps you who bring this sentence against me are more afraid than I who receive it.15
Solo magicians and Pagan thinkers were many, but the more liberal and open intellectual climate of the eighteenth century saw a new phenomenon: magicians banding together in magical societies, such as the Martinists, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons. Their members were some of the most advanced thinkers of their age and it is rumoured that American statesman Benjamin Franklin was a member of the Illuminati. The formation of the magical societies marked a new openness. While the practices of the societies were secret, their existence was not. For the first time in many centuries the magical arts were being taught in an organized fashion. An important magical book which appeared at turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was The Magus by Francis Barrett. This consisted of a magical compendium of correspondences, talismans, various aspects of natural magic, astrology, alchemy and Qabalah, but its most unusual aspect was what was in effect a coven advertisement.
The Author of this work respectfully informs those who are curious … that, having been indefatigable in his researches into those sublime Sciences, of which he has treated at large in this Book, that he gives private instructions and lectures upon any of the above-mentioned Sciences … Those who become Students will be initiated into the choicest operations of Natural Philosophy, Natural Magic, the Cabala, Chemistry, the Talismanic Art, Hermetic operations of Natural Philosophy, Astrology, Physiognomy, & co, & co. Likewise they will acquire the knowledge of the Rites, Mysteries, Ceremonies, and Principles of the ancient Philosophers, Magi, Cabalists, Adepts, & co. – The purpose of this school (which will consist of no greater number than Twelve Students) [i.e. thirteen including Barrett] being to investigate the discovery of whatever may conduce to the perfection of Man; to bring the Mind to a contemplation of the Eternal Wisdom; to promote the discovery of both in respect of ourselves and others; the study of religion here, in order to secure to ourselves felicity hereafter; and finally, the promulgation of whatever may conduce to the general happiness and welfare of mankind.16
These were worthy aims indeed and, although couched in language of an earlier age, they are not dissimilar to those of us who teach the Mysteries today. The tide was turning.
History speaks
Until the eighteenth century, the Paganism which had excited the imaginations of those seeking a return to the Elder Faiths was the Paganism familiar to people educated in the Classics – the Gods of Greece and Rome. From the eighteenth century onwards, western and northern Europeans began to look not only to the Mediterranean for their Pagan revival, but to their own roots – to the Celtic and Norse-German Gods of their ancestors.
In Britain, Stonehenge and other Neolithic monuments were thought to be the work of the Druids and much speculation began in England about Celtic practices. Many of the ideas were romantic and historically doubtful. Just as Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century had decided that Britons were descended from the Trojans, so people began to speculate that they were descended from lost Atlantis. However, what these visions represented was a yearning for a genuine Pagan spirituality. A positive outcome of people’s interest in their native Paganism was a growing interest in folklore and folk custom.
The folklore revival also awakened a new interest in the Witch persecutions of a few hundred years earlier. There were three major stances: the Christian religious approach – Witches existed and were in league with the Devil; the psychological – there were no Witches and the whole thing was a crazed fantasy dreamed up by churchmen with psychopathological tendencies; and the sociological – the persecutions were a way of consolidating the Church’s power and oppressing the peasants. However, from the nineteenth century onwards a number of European researchers challenged these views. Another theory was put forward: that Witchcraft was a religion, the remnants of the Old Religion of Europe, the indigenous Paganism
