Wicca and the Christian Heritage

Ritual, Sex and Magic

Joanne Pearson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415254144
• eBook ISBN: 9781134524266
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is Wicca? Is it witchcraft, Paganism, occultism, esotericism, magic, spirituality, mysticism, nature religion, secrecy, gnosis, the exotic or 'other'? Wicca has been defined by and explored within all these contexts over the past thirty years by anthropologists, sociologists and historians, but there has been a tendency to sublimate and negate the role of Christianity in Wicca's historical and contemporary contexts.

Joanne Pearson 'prowls the borderlands of Christianity' to uncover the untold history of Wicca. Exploring the problematic nature of the Wiccan claim of marginality, it contains a groundbreaking analysis of themes in Christian traditions that are inherent in the development of contemporary Wicca. These focus on the accusations which have been levelled against Catholisicm, heterodoxy and witchcraft throughout history: ritual, deviant sexuality and magic.

1
ENGLAND’S ‘OLD RELIGIONS’

Wicca is commonly called the ‘old religion’ by its practitioners, a designation that is intended to claim historical ancestry to validate some of its practices. However, this chapter argues that this term does more than retrace or reread a past (religare) and claim to maintain rituals of an ancient Wiccan ancestry (its traditio). ‘Old’ and ‘new’ religion are value-laden terms that have links with a political history dating from the time of the Tudor reformations in England, for the term had earlier served both the Church of England and the Catholic traditions of Christianity in the period between the reformations and the nineteenth century. In continental Europe, the various forms of Protestantism that arose in the course of the sixteenth century were seen to offer new experiences of Christianity. Characterised as throwing off the shackles of popery, magic, superstition and monasticism, the reformed Protestant traditions relegated the tropes of Roman Catholicism to the ‘dark ages’ of Christianity and looked to the future. However, a deep concern of the new Church of England was to demonstrate that English Christianity was not dependent on the Catholic Mission of Augustine of Canterbury (597 CE) for its claims to be apostolic, and it therefore sought to retrace older apostolic origins and ‘Celtic’ infl uences.¹

There are, then, at least three ‘old religions’ to which England has laid claim. Two of these are constructs of the Christian church formulated during the period of the reformations, both Protestant and Catholic. During and after the establishment of the Protestant ‘new religion’, Roman Catholicism was referred to as the ‘old religion’, both affectionately by lay people who sought comfort from what they knew, and disparagingly by the reformers. Of course, Roman Catholicism cannot be regarded as one of England’s ‘old religions’, but with the revival of English Catholicism in the nineteenthcentury Oxford Movement and the development of Anglo-Catholicism, there emerged a more positive reclaiming of the ‘old religion’, with a concomitant critique of Protestantism as the ‘new religion’.² However, this ‘new religion’ in the form of the Church of England sought to provide itself with a line of continuity stretching back to the apostolic era in order to substantiate its claim to be an ‘old religion’. The third version of an ‘old religion’, constructed partly in response to institutionalised Christianity in the twentieth century, was of course Wicca. In order to explore the political valorising of ‘old’ and ‘new’ it is necessary to demonstrate the uses of these terms in the struggles over authenticity in Anglicanism, before returning to their uses in the development of Wicca.

The ‘new religion’ of ‘Protestant’ Christianity in England emerged and developed during the reigns of Henry VIII (1509–47), Edward VI (1547–53) and Elizabeth I (1558–1603), rather than springing fully-formed as a result of Henry’s ‘divorce question’ in 1530. It developed over a period of some seventy years, five of which saw a reversion to the Roman Catholic Church and Papal authority under Mary Tudor (1553–8). Indeed, the new Church of England was never fully Protestant. Henry had wanted a break with Roman authority, not with Catholic traditions of piety and ritual, to the despair of his more Protestant-minded reforming ministers, Thomas Cranmer³ (1489– 1556) Archbishop of Canterbury (1532) and Thomas Cromwell⁴ (c.1485– 1540). Later, Elizabeth continually sought to occupy a middle ground between the Protestant Puritans on the one side, and Roman Catholicism on the other. Only during the short reign of Edward were the Protestant reformers able to follow their own agenda, an agenda that was overthrown during the reign of Mary. By the seventeenth century, then, the Church of England had become ‘a fusion of Catholic and Protestant positions in which most Christians, apart from extreme Calvinists and Catholics, could find a home’ (Waite, 2003: 77). As will be seen later in this chapter and in Chapter 4, it was the inclusivity of this ‘broad church’ that allowed for the revival of Catholicism in an English form in the Oxford Movement of the 1830s, and its later Anglo-Catholic and Ritualist developments. The complexity of the religio-political manoeuverings under the Tudor monarchs is not, however, the subject of extensive discussion here; suffice it to say that the general population would not necessarily have been aware of each and every shift or the intricacies of debates and intrigues.⁵ However, some awareness of the Protestant colouring of Edward and Elizabeth, and the Catholicism of Mary, would have been enough to engender anxieties and expectations as each reign drew to a close, and events such as the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace and the dissolution of the local monastery would not have gone unnoticed. Indeed, the latter would have been as likely to be celebrated as mourned, given the often harsh treatment of local populations by their monastic landlords.⁶

If Protestantism emerged as the new people’s religion, full of hope for the future, it did so partly by casting Catholicism as the old-fashioned religion, full of superstition and administered by a priesthood that not only performed sacramental magic, but also practised angelic or demonic magic (Waite, 2003: 229). Indeed, to one anonymous reformer writing in 1556,

the sorcerers who conjure demons are more holy than you who are the whorish Church … you command Christ to enter into a piece of bread and believe that you could have him as often as you say the words, ‘this is my body’.

(cited in Waite, 2003: 102)

Anticipating theories of religion and magic that were formulated in the nineteenth century, magic was not simply un-Christian but a survival from the backward, primitive culture associated in the minds of the reformers with the Middle Ages. That there was a general tendency to refer to Roman Catholicism as ‘the old religion’ need not refer, then, to a nostalgic remembering of a recent past, nor can it necessarily be read as a yearning for an authentic Christianity, particularly in the 1530s and 1540s when the break with Rome was not strictly a break with Catholicism. A certain amount of time had to pass before it was possible for people to look back to ‘the good old days’, and certainly there is evidence of this after the passing of centuries. In Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736–1951, Owen Davies cites the example of a Yorkshire Anglican priest in 1825 who was asked to ‘lay’ a spirit which was troubling an old woman (i.e. she thought she was possessed). He said he couldn’t ‘lay spirits’ to which she responded: ‘if I had sent for a priest o’ t’ au’d church, he wad a dean it’ (1999: 23). Davies asserts that there was a popular memory of spirit-laying powers of the Catholic clergy by the eighteenth century in England, though ‘Catholic worshippers and priests were rather thin on the ground’ (ibid.). Closer to the period in question, in 1593 Thomas Bell could remark on ‘the sad fact that the “common people for the greater part”, insist on calling Protestantism “the new religion” ’.⁷ No study of instances of Catholicism being referred to as the ‘old religion’ and Protestantism as the ‘new religion’ has yet been conducted, and such an investigation would be out of place here. That there were instances of such labelling is, however, beyond doubt as shown by the examples given above.

Picking up on the anxiety that seems to have attended the labelling of Protestantism as the ‘new religion’, the emerging Church of England responded with a particular ambition for antiquity, an anxiety for ancestors. This takes us to the second of our examples, the Church of England’s desire to promote itself as an authentic expression of the earliest formulations of the Christian religion. As indicated above, the Reformation in England was not accomplished primarily via Henry VIII’s marital problems.⁸ Rather, it emerged and developed ⁹ with many twists and turns throughout the Tudor period and on into that of the Stuart monarchs. A continual theme, however, was the search for, and invention of a tradition of English Protestantism. With the ‘old religion’ continuing to assert itself through papal interference at one extreme and popular appeal at the other,¹⁰ the leaders of the ‘new religion’ found it necessary to remake a history for the English church that would legitimate the break with Rome and validate their own orders. In order to subvert the attempts of Catholic propagandists to undermine Protestantism by contrasting the antiquity of Roman Catholicism with Protestantism’s novelty, they needed to find a precedent: an older ‘old religion’.¹¹

Cromwell, as Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, began this process in his preambles to the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) and the Act of Supremacy (1534).¹² In the Act in Restraint of Appeals, England is declared ‘an empire’ according to ‘divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles’, and the English Church ‘hath been always thought, and is also at this hour, sufficient and meet of itself without the intermeddling of any exterior person or persons’.¹³ The Act was to conserve the imperial prerogatives of the imperial crown, both temporal and spiritual, ‘to keep it from the annoyance … of the see of Rome’.¹⁴ The purpose of these Reformation statutes was ‘to separate the English from Western Christendom and provide them with a new identity, derived from a new view of their past’ (Jones, 2003: 18). A new, official version of English history was constructed to meet the needs of the new church, the church which had delivered the English from the ‘slavery’ of papal authority asserted during the Middle Ages, restoring the nation ‘to its original imperial state in which the English king had reigned supreme over all aspects of national life’ (ibid.: 22). The underlying concept was that England was independent and had therefore developed an indigenous English culture, religion and institutions, untainted by outside infl uence, power and authority.

The characterisation of England as an imperial realm rests on the legend of the unhistorical King Lucius, portrayed as an English equivalent of Constantine. Cromwell made use of the claim that Christianity was brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea and disciples of St Philip. After the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea had supposedly become a missionary, working with the apostle Philip in France before being made leader of a mission to Britain. Arriving in Glastonbury, he was alleged to have built the first English Church, the vetusta ecclesia,¹⁵ c.64 CE, from wattle and daub.¹⁶ Once he and his companions had died, the church was unused until 166 CE when King Lucius wrote to Pope Eleutherius (174–189 CE) of his own volition, asking him to send Christian missionaries to convert him and all his people.¹⁷ These missionaries, St Phagan and St Deruvian, refounded a small community at the church and built a second of stone, which became a monastery under St Patrick who arrived from Ireland in the fifth century. English Christianity, it was claimed, thus came straight from the early apostles, straight from Jerusalem, not via Rome.

The story reflects the struggles of the monks of Glastonbury during the high Middle Ages.¹⁸ The association with the apostles had first appeared in William of Malmesbury’s De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae, c.1130, but although the passage on Joseph of Arimathea is an interpolation dating from at least a century later,¹⁹ the legend seems to have emerged from an already traditional belief in the apostolic conversion of Britain.²⁰ Such works as Malmesbury’s De Antiquitate and John of Glastonbury’s Cronica sive Antiquitates Glastoniensis Ecclesie (c.1400) were often commissioned for the purposes of increasing the prestige of monastic houses by demonstrating their claims to ancient historical foundation. But they also had another purpose, a political one. The date of a country’s conversion to Christianity determined its precedence in the general councils of Europe, apostolic conversion being the most prestigious. Thus, the legend of St Joseph at Glastonbury enabled claims to be made for the apostolic conversion of England, and it was ‘cited by the English party to back its claim to precedence at a series of general councils – at Pisa (1409), Constance (1417), Siena (1424) and Basle (1434)’ (Gransden, 1980: 362).

However, the impact of the Glastonbury legends continued to be felt well into Cromwell’s lifetime.²¹ In 1520, a life of Joseph of Arimathea in verse had been printed to reinforce his connection with Glastonbury,²² which the reigning abbot, Richard de Bere (1494–1525), wanted to promote.²³ The need to increase revenue from pilgrims in the fourteenth century,²⁴ and rivalries over claims to antiquity and precedence within the church in the fifteenth, had meant that the ‘status of Joseph at Glastonbury rose accordingly, and reached its apogee in the early sixteenth century’ (Hutton, 2003a: 69), just in time for Cromwell to make full use of it for the establishment of the new Anglican Church which was to see the dissolution of Glastonbury Abbey, along with all the other monastic establishments. Thus, though the abbey would be dissolved six years after the 1533 Act,²⁵ the story was both readily available and had a proven track record of success in promoting not just an independent English national church, but one which had successfully claimed precedence in the conciliar movement of fi fteenth century Europe.²⁶ That Joseph of Arimathea did not enter the Roman Martyrology until 1545 would simply have given further credence to the idea that English Christianity existed, and always had existed, independently from Rome.

From Cromwell’s time onwards, according to Jones (2003: 60), ‘the history of England was the story of the heroic struggle of its native kings and people, valiantly defending true Christianity against alien invaders who in various guises represented the forces of “Anti-Christ”’ (emphasis added). These invaders included not just the heathen Saxons from Germany, but also St Augustine of Canterbury – portrayed as a corrupting agent from Rome – and the arrival of monks and friars following the Norman Conquest. But this was nothing new. As mentioned above, the importance of the idea of an independent English national church, free from Rome, was already traditional before the twelfth century. What was new was that there now existed the institution of such a church, national and erastian in character, broken away from Rome, and backed by the power of the state propaganda machine: the Ecclesia Anglicana was no longer the Catholic Church in England, but the Church of England. The legend was reworked to give England a destiny: to defend the national church which ‘had been retained in spite of interference from abroad by the Papacy during the medieval period’ (ibid.: 77) – a period which was now to be ignored and dismissed as backward and decadent – and restored to its native state by the Henrician reformation. To aid this effort, those condemned as heretics by the old religion were transformed into native guardians of the true faith – figures such as John Wycliffe (c.1330–84) and the Lollards were now portrayed as suffering persecution in order to preserve the pure and untainted ‘English’ Christianity. Thus was born the idea of the proto-Protestant martyr.

Marian exiles such as John Bale (1495–1563) portrayed old heretics and heretical sects as new Protestant, or proto-Protestant, martyrs and heroes in an attempt to provide a continuous lineage leading up to the reformers of the sixteenth century. Bale’s vision of England’s history was one of a golden age of purity characterised by the acceptance of Christianity from a pure source, during Joseph of Arimathea’s visit to Britain in 63 CE. Coming from Jerusalem rather than Rome, ‘The Brytains toke the christen faithe at ye very spring or fyrst going forth of the Gospel, whan the church was moste perfit, and had moste strengthe of the holy ghost’.²⁷ This purity lasted until the division of Britain into dioceses under Diocletian (regarded as the first sign of institutional rigidity), at which point the second stage of decay and degeneration set in, particularly after the mission of St Augustine. This ‘minion of Antichrist’ introduced ‘candelstyckes, vestymentes, surplices, alter clothes, synyng bookes, rellyckes’.²⁸ Even worse, Augustine and, after him, Theodore of Tarsu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 ENGLAND’S ‘OLD RELIGIONS’
• 2 EPISCOPI VAGANTES AND HETERODOX CHRISTIANITY
• 3 CHURCHES GNOSTIC AND AGNOSTIC
• 4 REDISCOVERING RITUAL
• 5 SEX AND THE SACRED
• 6 THE MAGIC OF THE MARGINS
• AFTERWORD: THE CHRISTIAN HERITAGE?
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY