Gerald Gardner

The teaching

Taught from his own books, Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), with the rites of his covens.

The religion of the Wica

Gardner teaches that witchcraft is not the worship of the devil but the remnant of an old religion of Europe, older than Christianity, kept in secret by a few families through the centuries of persecution. Its people call themselves the Wica, the wise, and they worship a god and a goddess. He traced them in part to a small, dark people of the Stone Age, whom later legend remembered as the fairies, and held that the witch trials had all but destroyed them. That is his claim, and the plain fact stands beside it: no trace of such an unbroken religion has been found, and the rites he gave are of his own century.

The god and the goddess

The god of the witches, in his account, is the horned one, lord of the hunt, of death and of what lies beyond it, who keeps the gate through which the dead pass and opens it again for their return. The goddess is the great mother, the giver of fertility, love and rebirth. The god rules the dark half of the year and the goddess the bright. In the circle the high priestess stands for the goddess, so that a woman is first in the coven and the priest works at her side.

The power from the body

The witches' magic rests on a power that comes from the human body. The circle is cast to hold it in, as a vessel holds water, and they work in it naked, he says, because clothes hinder its flow. They raise it by dancing round, by chanting and by the other ways of their craft, until it can be sent out to its work as a cone. He told that in the summer of 1940 the witches of the New Forest raised their power to put into Hitler's mind the thought that he could not cross the sea, as their forebears had done against the Armada and against Napoleon. That is his story, and nothing can show it.

The eight ways and the five essentials

His book of rites names eight ways of making magic: meditation or concentration; trance and the projection of the astral body; rites, chants, spells, runes and charms; incense, drugs and wine, whatever is used to release the spirit; the dance; control of the blood with the cords, and control of the breath; the scourge; and the Great Rite, the union of priest and priestess. They are not all to be combined in one rite, it says, for some work against others, as meditation and dancing do.

Before any of them stand five essentials. The first is intention: the witch must know that they can and shall succeed. Then come preparation, a circle properly cast and purified, the purification of all who work in it, and tools properly consecrated.

The house teaches the ways as the book gives them and leaves several aside. The book itself warns that drugs are very dangerous and must be strictly limited; the house uses none. Binding with cords to slow the blood, holding the breath and the scourge all work by strain on the body, and the house leaves them out. The Great Rite belongs to consenting adults, and many covens work it only in token, with the cup and the blade.

The law of the threefold return

In his rites the scourge carries a law. In the rite of the second degree the one who has received the strokes gives back three times as many, and learns that in witchcraft whatever is received must ever be returned threefold. From that rule of the circle grew the teaching, now widespread among witches, that what a person sends out comes back to them three times over, for good or for ill.

The laws of the craft

In 1957 he gave his covens a set of laws, which he said were old. They bind the witch to keep secret the names and meeting places of the others; forbid the use of the art for money, for boasting or for harm; tell each witch to copy the book of rites in their own hand and to have it destroyed at their death; and set the high priestess at the head of the coven, with the counsel that she should retire gracefully in favour of a younger woman when the time comes. The circle, its tools, the festivals and the degrees as his covens worked them are taught on the protection art's branch Wicca and the modern craft.

Born again among one's own

The witches, he says, believe in rebirth, and their hope is not to escape the world but to be born again among the people they loved, to meet them, know them and love them again. The rites are meant to help them toward it, and the goddess grants it. That hope is, in his telling, the heart of the old religion: life is good, and the craft asks for more of it.