Traditional Witchcraft and the Pagan Revival: A Magical Anthropology by Melusine Draco

Author:Melusine Draco [Draco, Melusine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Body; Mind & Spirit, Magick Studies, Non-Fiction, Paganism, Religion, Witchcraft
ISBN: 9781782791553
Google: cczgAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Moon Books
Published: 2013-08-29T23:00:00+00:00

Needless to say, the clergy were often nervous of such ‘custom of folk’ since it was believed that witches were ‘capable of diverting such sacraments to nefarious ends’: by dropping wax from a holy candle into the footprints of someone they hated, causing the victim’s feet to rot off! It has also been suggested that so powerful was the lure of the female pagan elements, that in England during the mid 1300s, special prominence was given to the Virgin Mary, who became more and more important in the popular devotions of the late Middle Ages, as is demonstrated by the art of the time. Was this a conscious move by the Church to elevate Mary to rival the ‘goddess’ in the minds of the people? Nearly all the important pagan festivals had been incorporated into the Church calendar, so why should the clergy be above exchanging the Earth Mother for Mary, the Mother of God? How many old churches contain a simple lady chapel to the side of the main altar? Mary was not divine and hardly warrants a separate altar, unless it was to offer an alternative Christian female image – and Mary was the only suitable female they had to hand to neutralise pagan influences.

The arrival of the Black Death, however, brought about irrevocable changes in the social structure of Europe as a whole, and was arguably a serious blow to the Catholic Church, resulting in widespread persecution of minorities (Sex, Dissidence and Damnation, Jeffrey Richards) including those suspected of witchcraft. The ‘softly, softly chatchee monkey’ technique of the early missionaries was replaced with a ‘big boots and boxing gloves’ approach that held anyone demonstrating any kind of difference from their neighbours could be held responsible for God’s wrath. From now on there would be no compromise, and religious austerity became the order of the day as represented by the grim memento mori that dominate later medieval art, literature and architecture, ‘which became saturated in images of pain and death’.

As Philip Ziegler points out in The Black Death, paradoxically, the decades that followed the plague years saw not only a decline in the prestige and spiritual authority of the Church, but also a growth in religious fervour. Since the plague recurred in cycles every five to ten years throughout the Middle Ages, Jeffrey Richards claims that the established Church, having already suffered a growing loss of prestige during the plague years: ‘failed to meet the challenge … under the circumstances the people looked to themselves for spiritual deliverance’.

All over Europe, what Ziegler calls ‘co-fraternities’ grew out of the ashes – drawing strength from the discontent and disillusionment of the people at large. If people were turning to the new religious fanaticism of the break-away Christian orders, it may possibly have been the ideal opportunity for the formation of the early ‘covens’ catering for those families who had kept one foot in the pagan camp and who couldn’t cope with the new Christian austerity measures. The old witch-families may now have opened their doors to like-minded souls who had nowhere else to turn.

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