A Quick History of Magick, Wizards, Witches, and Christian Mothers Alliance with Scientists.
A Rambling Summery of Things I Half Understand
Before we begin I would like to say this should not be taken with any degree of “authority,” I can’t offer complete citations or anything looking like scholarly certainty that what I am saying is 1000% accurate, rather this is an exercise in distillation, an attempt to create a clearer picture in my own mind as to the narrative of magic as I have learned it over the course of a few years of enjoyable study. I will add at the bottom of this a reading list of books I have found most useful. But overall, I invite you to see this as a relaxed conversation in a living room, rather than anything worth academic scrutiny.
We will start with England, which is the area whose magic history I understand the best and, in my opinion, the most interesting. I say it is interesting because England is religiously a thing unto itself. Most of Europe falls under either the Greco-Roman Pantheon or the Norse Pantheon. It’s either Zeus or Odin. England’s paganism was of a different sort, still polytheistic her gods had a texture unto themselves. Not Odin, but Woden. We would call the Anglo folk religion something like Witchcraft today, at least that is what we would recognize it as, though that would not be what they would have called their beliefs at the time. Witchcraft is a wide and broad thing, that contains many things from the medical to spiritual to social, but for the reasons of making a clear narrative, I am going to simplify it to the point of risking disrespect. (So if you are a witch reading this, I apologize and hope you can tolerate my broken use of language and find the point I hope to make.)
A Witch for our purposes is a pagan engaged with prayer. If I, as a Christian, said “Please God, bless my day” I am engaging in spell making, in the same way a Witch is when they say “In the name of (spirit), bring me a fortune.” The only meaningful difference between spell work and prayer is who the request is directed to, and that is a massive difference. This at least is how scholars explained it at the time and it should be noted that most work on the subject is written by Christian scholars (I would very much welcome alternative sources if this interpretation is flawed). I have made an attempt to separate my readings between honest attempts to study the pagan practices of pre-Christian England from the crackpottery that so often found itself used in Witch trials (Sticking Needs in worts and that sort of thing) but that isn’t always possible. Bias, as is its way, seeps in.
This leads us into the second category of Magicks, which we will call Wizardry (again, not what would have been useful in the era and not strictly correct in a modern context, but as will all esoterica which despises specific definitions and clarity, we must apply words that work for our limited contexts). The Wizards primarily fell into a type of Druid class, but that isn’t totally accurate. Druids may as well be translated as “Inteligencia,” they were lawgivers and keepers of myth and culture, as such they were just as pagan (and therefore Witches) and anyone else in their society. BUT, like anyone who occupies the learned classes, they valued words. Words to the Druid were reality, for some of them this was literal. They saw when they spoke, either the Law, or Poetry, or Story, that it had a literal and palpable effect on people. Words from the mouth to the ear, ear to the mind, mind to the whole body. Legend told us that the best of the Druids could speak with such rhetorical power, that they could have a similar effect on plants and trees as they did with human beings. Some could even compel the stones and inanimate objects.
Assuming this was possible, how? What is the metaphysical justification for language to have power over the inanimate? One theory, that held so much sway it became basically a religion unto itself, was that the rocks were on the most basic level made of language. Something described the rock and, by adding a verb to the noun, it changes the state of the rock.
It is worth noting that between the witches and the wizards, the wizards won out, mostly with the help of invading Christians, bringing their religion and their swords to conquer. Basically, the Christians declared “In the beginning, there was the Word. The Word was God, and the Word was with God, and God spoke and made all creation” and the Wizards, who already suspected reality was vocabulary, saw Christianity as the answer to their own question. Thus this class of native Englander joined the Christian kings. The Christians and the Wizards found each other, while odd, completely compatible. Wizardy was slotted into Christianity and it was from this group we gained the legendary figure Merlin, who was undoubtedly a synthesized version of many historical figures, just like his master King Arthur. The Wizards found comfortable life as the druids of the new order. Courts of all status had men of magic in their ranks, while the Witches were transitioned to the underground. Wizardry was arguably underground as well, not in hovels made of candy just outside the village, but rather in occupying offices and other official duties, and being magical was a hobby. You may be the court medicine man, and occasionally use a spell or two on top of the herbs. You may be an advisor and sometimes attempt to see the future. But you were not “The Wizard Bob” you were “Bob the Doctor,” or “Bob the Librarian.” Combined with the fact Wizardry was secretive and esoteric by nature, magic was never mainstream or well discussed in the view of the public, but it wasn’t hunted down, provided you were a vocabulary magician and not a prayer magician.
The Wizard view of the world has had significant staying power, especially in modern fiction about magic. J.K. Rolling deserves credit as a student of English history for incorporating into her magic system a firm understanding of the English magic tradition, thought with significant catholic interpretive additions. The spell “Leviosa” is a type of broken Latin, the closest translation available would be something like “it flotes,” or “it rises.” Even the addition of the wand is incorporated. If we can assume most of their spells translate along the lines of “it flotes,” “it dies,” “it inflates” the wand serves to clarify the noun attached to it. If I walked into a room and said “you come with me,” with my arms firmly at my side, no one would move. A bad spell. But if I used my finger to point at one person the noun “you” is focused, and thus they will move. We are told that wands are used to “focus the magic,” not like a laser is focused, but rather to takes the noun “it” from something impossible to tell what “it” is referring to and focuses that noun into one specific object.
The question that has occupied neurotic Christian mothers, and magic philosophers starting in the 17th century, is “who is the listener,” for whose benefit is the wand clarifying instructions. It’s not God, as God is all-knowing and has no need of clarification. The debate falls between two things: Sprits, or the thing themselves.
Neurodic Christian Mothers came down hard on the view that it must be spirits, or demons more specifically, and that Harry was instructing demons to do his bidding. This, interestingly enough, was the view of 17th-century scientists when they made massive efforts to remove Wizards from the Royal Acadamy of Science, believing that rather than doing legitimate work in metaphysics, Wizards were simply beseeching the help of the devil, and not working under their own power. The fact that they didn’t say “In the Name of [insert demon or pagan god]” didn’t nessesarally mean they were not talking to them.
What Wizard and JK would argue is that the listener is the object itself, responding to the reorganization of its vocabulary, as if it were a sentence written in a book. If I wrote “There was a rock,” it would describe the rock, but I could write “there is a rock and it flotes” and change the nature of it. Reality is thus words on a page.
The vocabulary of the Christian mothers used to object to Harry Potter was originally developed by 17th-century scientists. This was all against the backdrop of a massive change in the world precipitated by the printing press. Wizards wrote in code, they used flowery language, used metaphor, and believed the metaphors to be literally true. Messy, unscientific writing. The Scientific community was just taking their first baby steps into the “plain language movement” which itself was a baby step in the “free information movement.” If you were dedicated to learning something new about the world, you ought to state your findings plainly for all to understand, and you should share that knowledge with all (or at least the institutions of knowledge). This went against the texture of magick, the texture of the druidic tradition, and was just as much a power play as it was a legitimate argument over the theory of human information sharing.
The Scientists won and we have lived under their regime ever sense. There is a legitimate category of knowledge on the one hand. A scientific, stated plainly, freely tested knowledge. And there is demonic and ungodly knowledge if you are spiritual, or else superstitious and harmful knowledge if you are secular. This assumption has gone on that way for hundreds of years.
The cracks have always been there particularly in the world of fantasy writers. Especially in the writings of the two great modern fantasy founding fathers, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein. This makes sense, both are men who lived in the poetry and stories of pre-Christian England and the British Isle more generally, the domain of the old Druids. They seemed (C.S. Lewis at least and Tolkein most likely) to actually believed in Black and White magic. That there was a magic that was good and pleasing to God in contrast to the magic and was good and pleasing to the Devil. They in their own way, though doubtful magic users themselves, were inheritors of the British wizardry tradition. At least as keepers of lore and language, the minor magic of rhetorical power that the Druids of old undoubtedly had over their communities.
The Witches have their modern dependence as well. They also seemed to break back into the open around the same time Tolkein and Lewis’ ideas began to gain cultural relevance. Finding a niche in the counter culture movements. The most apparent inheritors of the Witch tradition is of course the popular semi-modern folk religion of Wicca.
Wicca is premised on the “witch-cult hypothesis” which basically believes that the men and women killed under which trials were in fact witches, and survivors of the old pagan beliefs. It was around the early 20th century that there was an interest in reviving the old pagan rituals. The populizer of this movement Gerald Brosseau Gardner or Scire if you prefer his “craft name”. The relationship to witchcraft as I have described it is complicated by the fact that many Wicca practitioners are skeptical of the spiritual world, but I will slide these folks into the same category as “cultural Catholics” and not let them taint our view of the actual “text” of their practices. And, frankly, if I wrote a letter to the North Pole inviting Santa over for dinner, even if I didn’t believe in him, I would have no one to blame but myself if he actually showed up. So it is with the spirits at play in Wicca.
Arguably, the Wicca go even further back than the time of the Druids. Rather than Woden, they worship the Horned God and the Mother Goddess, as well as many other miner beings. In terms of magic, they point most often to people like Aleister Crowley and other ceremonial magicians. Crowley said that magic is “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will.”
We shall leave my friend Aleister for a moment, but we will come back to him.
Even in Wicca, there is a differentiation between “your energy” and “other” energy. You should use your energy all you like but be cautious when performing spells that request assistance. However, for those advanced in the craft, it’s considered acceptable to invite the assistance of those “good” forces beyond yourself.
This magickal description is light, because, as someone who is not a Wicca practitioner it would be considered bad practice for anyone to teach me advanced spells that could invite powerful spirits beyond myself, even if I never had the intention of performing such acts. It would be a kind of magical HIPPA violation in their view, which I respect.
So to demonstrate my point we return to Alastair Crowley who, while not Wicca, is defiantly a Witch, well regarded in the community of those who do practice such magic, and has much more accessible information. It is here that I must remind the reader of my bias. I am a Christan, and I count myself a spiritual warrior, thus I have a side in this fight. With that in mind, I will confess further that I consider Crowley the finest villain in the realm of spiritual warfare ever to grace the stage. A true enemy of God. My weapons are prayer and words, so I don’t hate him in the same fashion I hate a Hitler. If I ever met Crowly, I would more than likely have a good cup of coffee with him, share some laughs, and count him a good companion.
But. Bear in mind that what I say about this man, I say as a sworn enemy to his way of thinking, and the spiritual empire he has built during his life and death.
Aleister was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (the organization and his place in its history are far too complicated and fascinating to get into here, but he was a member and that’s all that’s really relevant) and eventually founded a type of offshoot A∴A∴ (DON’T GET BOGGED DOWN IN THE DETAILS HERE WE ARE JUST PASSING THROUGH), and their magical system is very available for anyone to know and understand. It claimed heritage from Jewish magic but more prominently Egyptian magic. The theology is basically that there is an order in the afterlife of “Secret Cheifs,” great men and women of history who were magic users and that through training you can access them and beseech their assistance.
The very first spell in this tradition is called the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, which I will describe in detail.
First, you form the Qabalistic Cross apon your body, a five-point cross on your head, chest, groin, and then extending your left and right hands, while uttering magic words which are the Hebrew words “Thine Kingdom Come.” You then proceed to draw a pentagram in the air, preferably with a dagger, but two pointed fingers will do, in each cardinal direction, and utter the letters of various names for God. You then declare “Before me Raphael. Behind me Gabriel. To my Right Hand Michael. To my Left Hand Uriel. For about me flames the pentagram and within me shines the six-rayed star.” The Qabalistic Cross has formed again.
This is quite literally the recommended first spell for new members of the Order. You will remember from the beginning of this post that I told you there is no difference mechanically between a prayer and a spell from a Witch tradition except to who it is you are praying. It would be easy to mistake what you just read as Christian prayer. Notice the first uttered intention: “Thine Kingdom Come.” Not “Thy.” You are not praying for God’s Kingdom you are praying for your kingdom. Magic, according to Crowley, is the execution of your will.
The differences don’t end there. This spell is the first level, after months and months of practicing this spell, perhaps every day, learning new spells, and learning magical theology, you progress a level or two. At higher levels, you are taught one of the core theological tenants of this magic system.
Angels and Demons are the same.
That is Every Angel, is a Demon wearing different clothes. It is revealed, as a prank, that your protection spell has been explicitly, intentionally inviting demons through the gate.
Now in fairness, A∴A∴ probably isn’t trying to trick you or cause you harm, but rather teach a lesson about dualism and the nature of will and power. It is more than a little deceptive though.
This type of magick, and Aleister Crowley’s interpretation of magick generally, is essential. The bulk of Crowley’s influence was built from 1900 to 1914. Wicca was not founded in its current form until 1936, as a matter of fact, it is pretty clear that Crowley-ism was used as a type of gap filler where good English Witchcraft wasn’t as well developed. Not only was Gerald Brosseau Gardner trained by Crowley, but the Horned God has significantly more traceability to Egyptian culture than British!
The discussion of modern Witchery, and even much or Wizardry, as I have defined it, has been intertwined almost absolutely with Crowley. His influence is comparable in magick to Paul in Christianity. The job of discovering if a form of Christain Wizardry can be reclaimed, in a form that it used to be, is, therefore, an exercise in detangling current magic theory from Crowley, which is nearly impossible.
This brings us to the current state of things. Witches on Tik Tok, Wizards settling back into the authority of story and poetry, and nervous Christian mothers still working overtime to decipher it all to help their children navigate the world as they find it.
I know for myself it’s an area I will continue to explore and developed an understanding in as a layperson. I find myself firmly on the side of the Wizards, of course, and believe that it is worthy energy to try and sus out the metaphysical world as it is. I invite any thoughts you might have on my Twitter, and if you feel I misunderstand anything or have given anyone a bad wrap let me know.
In the meantime thank you for coming by to chat, now get out of my house.
PS
Almost forgot that I promised some reading materials for the interested:
By far the biggest influence and one of the best books on the Subject:
https://www.cuapress.org/9780813215785/rhetoric-science-and-magic-in-seventeenth-century-england/
Book by the Father of Witchcraft himself, hugely helpful in understanding the extremely obtuse and diverse religion:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08H17NW4K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Book on the Golden Dawn:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01APSXKNA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
And a Youtuber who is a very passionate advocate of A∴A∴ and an excellent explainer of Magick and its Theory and Practice:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnRyoC6Oww6FrYVc-BxKyDg/videos