IN MEMORIAM. Jhonn Balance

Treadwells Lectures

(HOMO)SEXUALITIES IN MODERN WITCHCRAFT Christopher Penczak, Author and Practitioner 29 November (Monday) 7.15 for 7.30 pm - £5.00

Paganism emphasises sexual energy a sacred force to be at once celebrated and also harnessed for magical workings, so does the orientation of that force make a difference in how it moves and works? Tonight's speaker, a gay male witch visiting from the US, shares his perspective and opens up issues for a round table discussion. He considers: same-sex ritual workings, single-sex covens, and what happens when gay men and lesbians join mainstream initiatory covens. The talk is followed by round-table discussion, with all perspectives equally welcome. Wine soiree follows. Christopher is the author of Gay Witchcraft (Red Wheel/Weiser), and The Temple of Witchcraft series published by Llewellyn. His forthcoming book, Sons of the Goddess (Llewellyn), is out in April.

EARLY ENGLISH MAGIC - Worts and All Steve Pollington, Author 1 December (Wednesday) 7.15 for 7.30 pm - £5.00 This talk explores the broader way in which Anglo-Saxon herb magic actually worked, as best as modern historians can work it out. Looking at the surviving evidence, it is evident that there were three main influences: Judaeo-Christian, Greco-Roman and native Northern European. Steve Pollington recently published a new edition of the main early English herbal texts, and so is intimately familiar with their contents; his talk will be generously interspersed with examples. Short readings in Modern and Old English give a flavour of the originals. Steve Pollington works on Anglo-Saxon subjects; titles include The English Warrior, An Introduction to the Old English Language and its Literature, Rudiments of Runelore, and Wordcraft. Online Background: Lacnunga Anglo-Saxon Charms: http://www2.hawaii.edu/~kjolly/lacnunga.htm

MARGARET MURRAY - Wicked Stepmother of Wicca? Dr Juliette Wood, Univ of Cardiff 8 December (Wednesday) 7.15 for 7.30 pm - £5.00 The Witch-cult in Modern Europe is a history book written just after the First World War by a young Egyptologist named Margaret Murray. Miss Murray, an archaeologist at University College London, became convinced that early modern England was a semi-Christian one in which pre-Christian religion survived in a secret cult - 'witchcraft'. The witch-hunts were thus an attempt to eradicate a non-Christian survival religion. The 'Murray thesis', was quickly dismissed by historians but was fertile fodder for the imagination of nonspecialist readers. Among those inspired were the formulaters of modern Wicca in the 1940s and 1950s. Murray, in fact, wrote the introduction in to Gerald Gardner's 1954 book, Witchcraft Today - the two were friends. Murray's thesis became the 'creation myth' of modern paganism, a fact that has caused pagans no end of ridicule in educated society. Tonight's talk looks critically at the work and legacy of Margaret Murray on today's pagan spirituality - was the Murray Thesis a blessing or a curse? Dr Juliette Wood is a lecturer at the University of Cardiff and secretary of the Folklore Society. She co-wrote, with Caroline Oates, A Coven of Scholars: Margaret Murray and her Working Methods. The lecture will be followed by seminar discussion, then a wine reception on the shop floor.

LORE AND MAGIC AT THE WINTER SOLSTICE Treadwell's Staff 10 December (Monday) 7.15 for 7.30 - £5.00 A mini-workshop on old Yule folklore to bring alive the traditions of midwinter. The winter solstice is the longest night and the shortest day - the deepest point of darkness, after which the light commences to grow. Ancient customs and superstitions are recounted, along with tales and myths, to help people appreciate the symbolic correspondences of holly, ivy, decorated evergreens, and burning logs - to name just some of the more well-known items and activities. The staff of Treadwell's bring along herbs, flowers and boughs, and play a few relevant folksongs to complement the talk and slides.

‘WITCHA- A Book of Cunning’
by Nathaniel J. Harris

19.99 isbn 1869928776 310pp 13.99/$24.99

WITCHA presents many secrets of English witchcraft in plain language, giving details of widdershins and deosil circle casting, spell-craft, divination, spiritism, sabbats and esbats, sacrifice, entheogens, philosophy, history, and more. The focus is primarily upon those aspects commonly called ‘operative witchcraft’ of ‘results’ and ‘getting things done’, rather than the supposedly more ‘spiritual’ aspects that have been the subject of so many books of late. These are illustrated with photographs taken by my step-father, Adrian Bryn-Evans, detailing, with their kind permission and support, exhibits from the Museum of Witchcraft, Boscastle.

To the disappointment of those seeking a ‘tradition’ to fall back on when they doubt their own judgement, I have attempted instead to portray an attitude of spiritual freedom central to the Craft. Some might even call it the witchcraft of the left hand path. Nevertheless, members of our family continue to be of service to their community, as those witches were in generations before.

Forteana: The Tunguska Incident

Tunguska is a region which possesses the beginning of Lake Baikal, approximately five hundred miles long and two hundred miles wide, the greatest quantity of fresh water on the whole of the planet Earth. The incident which happened eight kilometres above Tunguska River, flattening 2,150 square kilometres of forest, affecting eighty million trees, and lighting up London in 1908....Russian scientists now believe pieces of a craft they have found at the locale of the devastation must have been an extra-terrestrial craft....very recently in the news media....

soooooo . . .

It was roundabout six in the evening, and Gully, the six foot two inch barman was preparing for the insane onslaught of Edinburgh nightlife which would beleagure him within three hours.

The barfly caught sight of sheets of paper I was carrying, and in particular a certain acronym typed there. "So you're into UFOs, are you?" he drawled out in a thick Scottish accent.
"It's one of the subjects I'm interested in."
He was about five feet seven inches, black-haired stocky, muscley. He was drinking a lager while Gully slid over an orange juice thing for me.
"I did get told a few things about that while I was in the military."
"Why did you leave?"
"Injury. And I'm not happy about what they gave me."
"What type of injury?"
"Not very easy to tell you. But bad enough to make me leave."
"What were you?"
"A top secret weapons technician. For eight years from 1984 to 1992." The point in time of this conversation was January 1993.

Readers can not know what went through my mind at that statement. John Grace is the secret real name of the American trainer in the use of American-developed electro-magnetic beam weapons which were sent over during the Autumn of 1979, and he trained British troops in their use from 1980 to 1984. That latter fact can cause a quite frightened look to come upon a soldier's face, as long as, of course, it is what he has been confidentially informed of. There's something really scary about that 1979 thing.....the diseases induceable by these 'directed energy weapons' range from polycaemia, a leukaemia variant, to Crohn's Disease, which warps the large intestine, but most especially dangerous is the raising of the temperature of the brain by two or three degrees.....so the date of the induction of this man into top secret weaponry was instantly intriguing.

He went on, "....but their attitude to what it did to me makes me feel like sayin' 'Fuck your secrecy, pal.' So I could tell you somethin', like...."
His heavy vibe made me feel I was in for a heavy bit of disclosure, and if you, dear reader, would like some idea of what is meant by 'a heavy vibe' (let's call him Sean and respect some need for confidentiality) the fellow tried to commit suicide two days after this conversation, and had shown Gully the scars on his wrist to convey how low he had felt.
Deducing he couldn't have been all that long out of the military, maybe even a matter of weeks, I urged him.
"O.K. Fire away. Not with one of your weapons of course."
"Aw right, I've got to - got to - be really careful about this - they might - you know - "

"Take you out, obviously." (Yes, I did ponder the corniness of Sean's actual utterance, but when something really happens, people just do sound like a Hollywood B-film....they don't come out with a spontaneous Hegellian pontification....the very first story I got told that set me off on all this invloved the witness having to apologise for claiming a bunch of Germans had exclaimed "It can't be!! It vood haff to be rrreading ourr minds!!") Sean also conveys what was on most people's minds at the time, the recent publication of Tony Collins' '25 Mysterious Deaths In The Defence Industry' in January 1990, detailing strange deaths of British scientists in Britain, often visiting the Clifton Suspension Bridge, for a more scenic fling of themselves over it, possibly....a Sunday Times journalist had discovered they all had been electro-magnetic wavelength spectrum analysts, whilst a musical backdrop jangled in my brainwaves provided by The Sundays, whose beautiful blonde lead singer would exercise before every performance...when asked why, she'd answered some NME interviewer by saying

"Because I'd worked in such a heavy area of the civil service, I needed to know such hellish state secrets I'm scared they're gonna come along and top me, so I like to think I'm gonna put up a fight if they do..." "Here's Where The Story Ends" is their most famous song, if you're having trouble placing them....

Sean spurted on - "It was, it was that...toon...toon...what's the name of it....it happened in 1908 in Russia....a fuckin' massive explosion."

"The Tunguska explosion in 1908."

"Aye! That was it. I had had to be told that that was an incoming extra-terrestrial craft. As part of my job they'd HAD to tell me. I'm not sure I can say any more than that. They'll go really crazy if I say any more."
"What's the reason for the secrecy?"
"It's difficult....I can't...."
"Is it to do with money....aliens are from money-free societies and the West doesn't want that morale boost to go to the Soviets?"
"Well, somthin' like that....listen, if you want to do somethin' big for your ufology, I'll tell you one more thing, and I'm not tellin' you anymore....do your ufo investigatin' around Rosyth, aroundabout that area there.....man, if you bastards knew what was happenin' there...it's massive.....just investigate around there, where I was based...."

I'll stop the anecdote there. I didn't investigate "aroundabout there", so totally convinced was I that an electro-magnetic beam weapon incident in Kent was the biggest story I'd come upon, and that kept me visiting Kent, partly psychologically unwilling to believe that near to me the biggest events were happening....to my eternal regret.

The biggest incident I've ever heard of was to happen on the 23rd of September 1996, when four witnesses out together claimed they'd seen hundreds of alien beings swarming around the fields just by the nothing-ever-happens-here village called Newton-of Falkland, centrally within the shire of Fife. Nevertheless, I feel I may have made up for that by finding out more about that incident than anyone else (For instance, one of the two women had stated "I'm not masturbating with the sheets off again. Not after all those funny wee men suddenly appearing round my bed.") and now possess quite a fund of fascinating details in relation to what these people said they experienced that have not yet been written down, by other than me.

And just one other thing.....a woman called Brenda Butler claims that in 1984 she accompanied an extra-terrestrial (reptilian) to the house of Lord Hill-Norton, Admiral of the Fleet, and watched the being beg for water to be gifted to his parched planet, partly water in far lesser proportion than ours, as if Lord Hill-Norton was the presumed interface for such requests....it had to be fresh water, not salt, which these reptoids are very much more afraid of than we are.....and so one's mind thinks back to Lake Baikal.....

Nuff said.

David Moncoeur, I've lectured a lot in England, and most gratifying was, a friend called Robert Hutton returning from visiting the paranormal crowds I'd lectured to, and telling my friend Sharron Coull "They were all going on about how Davey Moncoeur was their favourite speaker of all the speakers they've put on." Robert is a park ranger in Scotland, and he always goes to England for breaks because he gets so sick of seeing Scottish scenery.

I've also been flattered by a local Scottish TV company (Lanarkshire TV, which used to broadcast to Glasgow, not Edinburgh) who, in broadcasting me a third time, said I was the best thing they'd aired, and would I like to be a resident TV personality? I was just too shocked and embarrassed, and also found it too awkward to change careers just like that...another, internet, TV company stated I was the best thing they'd filmed (Pharo.com or something) and I am working with an independent film maker in Fife who is also very taken with me, called Sarah Macleod.

Just a couple of weeks ago I appeared on the front page of a local newspaper, the 'Musselborough News', in a colour photograph showing me beside a gravestone which had been claimed by a few people to have suddenly seemed to have Latin writing on it, which then changed back to English before their very eyes, and am developing my own personal slant on why these things happen. Yours truly, David Moncoeur

Triumph of the Moon

I've been rereading Ronald Hutton's Triumph of the Moon, a masterful history of pagan witchcraft, published in 1999. It's maybe inevitable that a book that covers such a huge spectrum of ideas is bound to suffer from the criticism of individual specialists. For example I would dispute the idea that after 1902, the poet Yeats' 'religious ideas reappear only in fragmentary form, embedded thereafter in his later poetry and plays' (Hutton 1999: 157). I would say that Yeats' greatest religious and magical revelation comes after his marriage to George Hyde Lees in 1918 with his vision for the phases of the moon. The influence of these ideas about the moon on the contemporary magical scene is something overlooked until quite recently.

But I refuse to fault-judge Professor Hutton's book given that the overall thrust is so provocative in the best possible sense. There were several themes that particularly stuck in my mind.

Firstly the positive effect of the transference of pagan witchcraft to USA from whence it returned politically refreshed. It's so easy for the little Englander view of witchcraft to overshadow the novel contributions of our American friends. Hutton shines the spotlight on the latent conservatism of the UK magical world (for an earlier expose see my own book Sexual Magick.) I too remember as a breath of fresh air the words coming from American witch poets such as Robin Morgan. In the 1980s I helped form a group inspired by Starhawk's groundbreaking Spiral dance. It was then by no means taken for granted that other pagans would share our anti the bomb agenda. The conversion of modern pagans and magicians to these causes was something that had to be worked for - via organisations such as Pagans Against Nukes, the Greenham Women and the Stonehenge free festival, all causes strangely absent from the lips of Professor Hutton's informants.

Many felt that Tanya Luhrmann's infamous study of the uk magical scene was itself flawed by its restriction to a very narrow and conservative bunch of magicos, as well as her outright refusal to meet with any representatives of occultism's new wave. Many linked this with 'her apparent dismissal of their practices as founded on delusion. Perhaps that's unfair but then as Ronald points out 'The feeling of the latter were to some extent enhanced by Luhrmann's own return to United States as soon as her project was complete, her entry into the academic profession assured and her subsequent lack of any obvious interest in Paganism or magic. (Hutton 1999: 376) It is a feature of the book that Hutton is as hard on fellow academics as he is sympathetic to the magical practitioner.

Professor Hutton levels some very telling criticism of the internecine strife that has been a feature pagan witchcraft since its very beginning. The often-termed 'bitchcraft' hardly waned, even when during the 1980s 'satanic child abuse panic' when the stakes were very high indeed. Whilst not a complete stranger to wiccan circles, I was at the time firmly within the magical fold. I remember feeling much got at by the intemperate outbursts from wiccans, 'great and good'. They seemed to be fuelling the press views witch hunt against 'black' practitioners. Ronald's book has at least helped me to get that in perspective. These attacks were not aimed at occultists but at other rival wiccan priests and priestesses! Whether the press saw it that way is another story. In Oxford a local Christian wannabee attempted to get our speaker meetings banned from council property and the 'oh so liberal' Bishop of Oxford (still in post), stopped our path working group using the local community centre.

Personally I wonder whether the abusive and bitchy nature of many covens is perhaps linked to the unhealthy influence of the fourth way philosophy of Gurdjieff or indeed the worst excesses of some of Aleister Crowley's training regimes?

There is a common misconception that Professor Hutton has somehow undermined the basis of pagan witchcraft. I didn't really get that impression, if anything he has cleared a space in which it can thrive. If anything his work reminds me of the kind of approach taken by the late Andrew Chumbley, whose credentials are anything but undermined by this book. I once asked Andrew about all these claims to a lineage older than the 1940s emergence of Wicca and he replied that although initiated by traditional witches with a long pedigree they didn't actually know very much. It was still down to him and his colleagues to reinvent or flesh out the tradition.

Likewise on the topic of the goddess, the learned professor's position is really a form of enlightened agnosticism -

'The effect [of the 'Murrayite' fall from grace] upon professional pre-historians was to make most return, quietly and without controversy to that careful agnosticism as to the nature of the ancient religion which most has preserved since the 1940s. There had been no disproof of the veneration of a Great Goddess, only a demonstration that the evidence concerned admitted of alternative explanations.' (Hutton: 1999: 282)

Which does not mean that goddesses were not worshipped in prehistoric times or that none of them achieved to greatness. For example Isis; who may not be a prehistoric goddess but is certainly the first to go global. Ronald Hutton's book is a reminder that a god or goddess wants you to encounter them as they truly are and not as a mere cipher with which to work out your frustration or bitterness about the way your life is going just now.

Crowley and the cult of Pan

Aleister Crowley and the Cult of Pan by Paul Newman (Greenwich Exchange £12.99)

Few more nightmarish figures stalk through the pages of English literature than Aleister Crowley (1875 - 1947), poet, magician, mountaineer, drug-taker and agent provocateur. Born at Leamington Spa, son of strict Plymouth Brethren, he attended Cambridge University where he acquired a reputation as a poet and dabbler in the occult. Leaving university, he joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, explored China and India, organised mountaineering expeditions, wove spells and scandals. When he died, he left behind a mass of poems, essays, lyrics, meditations and narratives that few scholars have ever bothered to assess. In this present study, Paul Newman dives into the occult mire of Crowley's works and fishes out gems and grotesqueries that are by turns ethereal, sublime, pornographic and horrifying in their bitterness and revulsion. Showing how Crowley, like Wilde before him, stood in 'symbolic relationship to his age', this groundbreaking study relates him to contemporaries like Rupert Brooke, G.K. Chesterton and the Portuguese modernist, Fernando Pessoa. It depicts him as an influential exponent of the cult of the Great God Pan, affecting both major European writers and English novelists like E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence and Arthur Machen.

Paul Newman lives in Cornwall. Editor of the literary magazine Abraxas, he has written over ten books. Recent titles include Lost Gods of Albion and A History of Terror: Fear and Dread Down the Ages. He was among the international scholars asked to contribute to Scribner's Dictionary of Ideas and recently his Arthurian novel 'Galahad' was awarded the Peninsula Prize.

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Groups

Bath Omphalos, a Moot for LHP magicos in Bath area. For more details contact omphalospaganmoot@.... Essentially a discussion group at the moment, open to all. The first speaker meeting is

Conferences

The Pagan Federation

Saturday 27th November 2004
Fairfield Halls Croydon.
10.00am till Midnight!!
The International line up of speakers include;
Christopher Penczak USA on 'queer witchcraft'
Dr Jenny Blain - north trad
and three thought provoking speakers especially if your're into the 'primitive' path
C4's Richard Rudgley
Andy Worthington on stonehenge and avebury
Jude Curriven on envisioning the neolithic -
plus cornish pellar workshop -
those are the speakers that interest me but there is a full day of events and entertainment - so got to be worth it - call by at the mandrake stall for enormous discounts on our books

0906 3020184 www.paganfed.org Tickets available on the door; PF Members £18.00 Non-members £23.00 Young person £12.00

Gnosis, a festival of light, life, love liberty