Everybody sucks: a theological review of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon

Jewish date:  22 Kislev 5776 (Parashath Wayeshev).

Today’s holidays:  Feast Day of John Damascene (Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Mechagodzilla (Church of the Subgenius), Bona Dea (ancient Roman religion).

Everybody sucks:  a theological review of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon

by Aaron Solomon Adelman

One of the most persistent stories in the English-speaking world is the legend of King Arthur.  The most famous telling is Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (published in 1485).  Since then the legend and select parts of it have been retold many times, including:  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Idylls of the King, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (itself made into movies), Mr. Merlin, Merlin (the miniseries), Merlin (the TV series), Prince Valiant, The Once and Future King, and The Sword in the Stone.  (This list is nowhere near complete.  The lists on Wikipedia are huge.)

An aspect of the legend of King Arthur which is often not explicitly stated—and yet is relevant to this blog—is that it is a Christian story.  Arthur is a Christian king supported by Christian knights.  One thread of the story is the quest to find the Holy Grail (the cup which Jesus drank from in at the Last Supper), humorously depicted in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Even if someone interprets the legend in such a way to downplay the religious aspect—and many interpreters do that—the Christian nature of Arthur and his court remains as a subtext.

Every interpretation the legend gives it a new spin, and eventually a Neopagan interpretation was produced in the form of The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley, a rewriting according to Neopagan matriarchal pseudo-history.  The spin was novel enough that the book was on The New York Times bestseller list, and a miniseries was made based on the book.  All the well-known elements of the story (and even some lesser-known elements) remain intact, just reworked to fit a different set of assumptions.  Rather than putting Arthur in some idealized British past age, the story is set in Britain not long after the Romans have left.  At the start of the story, the island is a patchwork of small kingdoms and tribes.  There is no overall unity, and there is constant threat of invasion and war.  Avalon is recast as a pagan religious site, populated mostly by priestesses and their acolytes studying to be priestesses.  The Lady of the Lake becomes the high priestess, and the Merlin the high priest.  (The definite article is not a typo.  Two Merlins, Taliesin and his successor, Kevin, appear in the story.)  The whole plot deals with the struggle between paganism and Christianity in Britain.  Christianity has already become the favored religion in many courts, and it continues to spread.  As paganism is abandoned, Avalon slowly slips into the mists and away from the rest of the world; it may only be reached deliberately by magic.  In this religiously divided world, all the major characters belong to one religion or another, a few being pagans pretending to be Christians or religiously confused.  (Other religions are somehow absent.)

Morgaine (as in Morgaine le Fey) is promoted to central character and becomes a pagan priestess of Avalon, eventually becoming the high priestess.  Arthur becomes king by “sacred marriage”; he sleeps with his half-sister Morgaine as a proxy for the Goddess and marries the land.  (That business about him marrying the land is not a typo.)  Arthur has the problem of trying to satisfy both a Christian aristocracy and pagan peasants.  (Or so we are told.  Much is written about the aristocracy, but peasants receive little screen time.)  When Arthur gets too Christian under the influence of his wife Gwenhwyfar and thus fails to live up to the pagan priestesses’ hopes, Morgaine plots his downfall according the cycle that sacred kings are supposed to undergo:  they reign for a time under the consent of the real, female ruler, and when they falter, they are ritually killed and replaced.  (See The Golden Bough.)

The writer displays a consistent hatred for Christianity.  The pagans repeatedly claim that all gods are the same god—a typical Neopagan claim—but this claim runs afoul of the fact that Christians for the most part do not believe this, both in the book and real life.  It should go without saying that the Neopagan claim of the existence of a goddess who is all goddesses has even less Christian acceptance.  There is a little lip service towards ecumenicism (e.g., Taliesin claims to have attended mass and taken communion), but Christians get depicted badly, and the more dedicated they are to Christianity, the worse they are depicted.  Thus Christian priests and nuns are depicted as mean, rigid, life-hating, patriarchal people.  Christians are intolerant, obsessed with sin, and hypocritical, especially about sex.  One cannot even finish reading a sentence about one of these people without feeling revulsion.  Only by embracing Neopagan ideals can a Christian gain favor in the eyes of the author.  Very prominently, Gwenhwyfar is so seriously Christian that she pushes Arthur to Christianize himself, his court, and by extension Britain—and she is treated for the most part as the enemy.  However, when she slips up and commits adultery or at least emotional intimacy with Lancelet—behavior which is acceptable to Neopagans but not Christians—and maybe feels a bit ecumenical is she treated sympathetically.  Symmetrically, Kevin starts off as a good (though secret) pagan, completely approved by the author, but then he decides that the way to deal with the Christianization of Britain is to use pagan religious articles in Christian ceremonies—which is treated as unconscionably evil.

Bradley also goes out of her way to make Christians look like a bunch of idiots.  Morgaine steps in when Kevin tries to use pagan religious articles in a Christian ceremony and turns the experience into a full-blown ecstatic pagan ceremony.  The Christians are unable to comprehend what has really happened, so they interpret it as a Christian revelatory experience involving the Holy Grail.  Many of the knights then set out on a fruitless quest to find the Grail.  If this makes no sense to you, do not be surprised.  It makes no sense in context either.

If this negative treatment of Christians sounds familiar, I have written reviews of books betraying such attitudes before.  Philip Pullman created his own deliberately perverse version of Christianity for His Dark Materials, and Ayn Rand depicted everyone who is not selfish as contemptible.  The technique is simple:  portray the hated group in a negative light at all times, thus making the favored group look good.  The technique is purely rhetorical, not rational or logical.  A fictional story is not constrained to be realistic.  There are some Christians who are jerks in real life, but when Christians are consistently jerks without a good reason for all the Christians in the setting to be jerks, the story comes off as biased.

To be fair, Bradley is under no delusion that being a pagan automatically makes someone good and pure.  (Contrast Pullman and Rand, who are that delusional.)  But Bradley goes overboard in depicting pagans as something other than idealized saints.  The central pagan character, Morgaine, wavers a good deal in her devotion to the Goddess and spends a number of years completely derelict in her duties.  She sleeps regularly with Kevin without the benefit of marriage, and then later has an affair with her stepson Accolon; the latter is rationalized by him being a pagan and them claiming to do so for religious reasons.  She sends Accolon to kill Arthur for abandoning paganism, but Arthur wins the battle and kills Accolon.  For Kevin’s treason, Morgaine orders the young priestess Nimue to seduce Kevin to return him to Avalon for execution.  While Nimue is successful, she falls in love with Kevin in the process; overcome by guilt, she commits suicide.  (What?  Was sending an assassin with a sword too hard?)  As a heroine, Morgaine leaves a lot to be desired—and she is arguably the best portrayed pagan in the entire book.  The others are no better morally.  (Do not get me started on Morgause, who abandons all principle and practices blatantly black magic.)

Even bizarre jumps of logic are not limited to Christians.  Morgaine has her own episode at the end of the story in which she looks upon the Christians around her and finally sees something positive.  Her beloved Lancelet, at the end of his life, has retired to a monastery and was ordained as a priest shortly before his death.  And Morgaine herself sees enough of paganism among nuns—the only time nuns are portrayed positively—with their communal living and their veneration of Mary and Bridget.  Why this suffices her is never stated; anyone with a basic knowledge of Christianity knows that even Mary, despite her high status, is not considered a goddess, while God is most certainly considered a god.  Thus it takes great intellectual dishonesty to see pagan duotheism in Roman Catholicism. 

Perhaps the most bizarre jump of logic is the one that isn’t made.  The way to keep a religion going is to encourage people to believe in it and practice it.  But Morgaine and her fellow priestesses barely do so.  Morgaine on a number of occasions warns Arthur to keep his pagan coronation oaths, and when he fails to do so, Morgaine plays politics and seeks his downfall—as if killing Arthur would show that paganism is the truth.  Never do the pagan priestesses even discuss trying to spread paganism.  There are no pagan missionaries trying to show the people that paganism is the truth in any way, shape or form.   Since the Christians, unlike the pagans, evangelize, it is little wonder that they win out in the end.

Where The Mists of Avalon fails miserably as a polemic is that it never shows what is so great about paganism or how it is better than Christianity.  The focus on paganism in this book is whether or not it is going to survive.  Why it should survive is not really dealt with.  Demonstrating the truth of paganism is not considered at all.  Even as a moral system, no attempt is ever made to show that paganism is better (according to any criteria) than Christianity.  Hence, as accordance with the title of this review, everybody sucks.

Overall classification:  Pretentious, dreary fantasy novel.

Theological rating:  D.

Star Trek Into Darkness, The Key of Solomon the King, and Save Me

Jewish date:  24 ’Av 5773 (Parashath Re’eh).

Today’s holidays:  Feast Day of Ignatius of Loyola (Roman Catholicism), Lughnasadh Eve in Northern Hemisphere/Imbolc Eve in Southern Hemisphere (Neopaganism), Feast Day of St. Bill Gates (Church of the SubGenius).

Greetings.

I know posting on this blog has gotten irregular. Sorry about this.  Life is busy.

I would like to comment on a number of different things relevant to this blog:

1) Star Trek Into Darkness:  Preemptively, your humble blogger would like to note that he eventually wants to write a great grand review of religion in Star Trek, all series and movies, but as he saw it recently, he would like to jot down some thoughts on it now so they do not get forgotten.

Much ink (or rather the electronic equivalent thereof) has already been spilled on what is right and wrong with this film.  Considering the focus of this blog, I will note that what Harrison did with the photon torpedoes is such an obviously bad idea that he should never even considered it (duh!) and proceed to discussing religion.  This is not an especially religious film, but like Star Trek in general, it touches on it.  The movie starts out on the planet Nibiru, which is inhabited by humanoids who have not yet developed warp technology and thus, according to the Federation’s Prime Directive, must not be contacted at any cost.  Spock gets quickly trapped in an active volcano with a device meant to freeze the molten lava so the volcano does not erupt and kill the natives.  Due to the Enterprise being hidden under water—something which everyone says makes no sense—Kirk faces the dilemma of whether he uphold the Prime Directive, in which case Spock dies, or get the Enterprise out of hiding and where the transporter will work properly to save Spock, in which case the natives will probably see the ship—a clear violation of the Prime Directive.  Kirk being Kirk, the natives see the Enterprise rising out of the ocean.  The natives’ behavior soon afterwards suggests they believe they have seen a divine being or have had a prophetic vision.  To say the least, Admiral Pike is not happy.  

Religious misinterpretation of Federation activity actually has been done at least once before in the Star Trek universe.  The Star Trek:  The Next Generation episode “Who Watches the Watchers” revolves around someone on a technologically primitive planet inhabited by Vulcanoids mistaking Captain Jean-Luc Picard for a god known as the Overseer.  That episode deals with the consequences of such a mistake and how to deal with it—not to mention religious epistemology—in far greater length and detail than Star Trek Into Darkness, which says nothing about what, if anything, Starfleet does to clean up the mess on Nibiru.

Your humble blogger is not aware of anything quite like either of these fictional incidents happening in reality, though cargo cults approximate them to some degree.

Also noted is a little peek into the Vulcan belief system.  Whether Vulcans believe in the supernatural or not has never been discussed, albeit Mr. Spock once claimed to specifically not believe in angels.  However, the Vulcan belief system includes things like monasticism and mysticism which would normally be religious on Earth.  There is some arguing in this film over whether the needs of the many really do outweigh the needs of the one (reflecting Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III:  The Search for Spock).  Also, Spock claims that war is “by definition” immoral, which sounds like an all-too-human attempt to skirt the problem that morality is intrinsically a matter of opinion.  Certain properties, such as weight and temperature, are matters of objective fact.  But whether an action is good or bad cannot be objective in the same way; no matter how hard one looks, one will never find goodness particles or evilness waves.  Spock seems to be trying to make morality objective by defining what is and is not moral.  One can argue about whether some action objectively fits this definition.  (And your humble blogger assumes that Spock, being no mental slouch, has a definition for war and every other relevant term.)  However, since the definition is not rooted in objective reality, it remains an opinion.  Klingons just as easily can claim that war is by definition moral (and act on this presumed morality, too).  Defining what is moral or immoral does not make it objectively so.

Also:  Considering that Vulcans have been depicted at times waging war, the Vulcan belief system appears to have a priority system.  Vulcans may consider war immoral, but they may well consider other things, such as being murdered by enemy soldiers, to be worse, thus making war the lesser of two evils.  Real humans tend to agree on this issue, though there are a few true pacifists.

2) The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis) translated by S. Liddell MacGregor Mathers:  This is a grimoire repeatedly mentioned as source material in your humble blogger’s previous reading on Neopaganism.  It certainly looks like the source for Gerald Gardner’s High Magic’s Aid, the procedures for working magic being largely the same.  Unlike High Magic’s Aid, The Key of Solomon deals with working magic in a Jewish (or pseudo-Jewish) context.  There is none of the Neopagan business of duotheism, polarity of the sexes, or ritual nudity.  Magic instead is presented as an exercise in manipulating spirits for one’s purposes.  Much emphasis is put on the necessity of piety to work magic.  Consistent with this is the lack of any procedure for divination; after all, the Torah explicitly forbids several kinds of divination.

And, no, there is no convincing reason to believe that King Shelomoh (Solomon) actually wrote this book.  There is nothing in the Hebrew Bible to suggest he practiced any form of magic.

3) Save Me:  This gem of a show showed up recently on Hulu.  It is story of a woman with poor moral habits (such as drunkenness, petty theft, and embarrassing behavior) named Beth who accidentally chokes.  She survives, though feeling like she died in the process.  Reborn, she finds herself religiously moved and believes that God communicates with her.

One major issue that this show deals with is how would someone who experiences a sudden conversion would behave.  (This sort of thing does happen in real life at times.  See The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James.)  Given the profundity of Beth’s conversion, she tends to go to extremes—absurd ones, as this is a comedy.  Having no previous religious experience, Beth frequently has no idea how a religious person is supposed to behave and makes some very strange mistakes.  For example, in one episode she prays constantly.  She also embraces love for her fellow humans and other creatures to the point of loving her husband’s ex-mistress Carlise and a spider.  At one point, she decides to read the (Christian) Bible, but finding the King James Version too hard, she turns to The Children’s Bible and proceeds to misinterpret the parable of the Good Samaritan.  (Come to think of it, she never seems to get very far in either version.)  In another, she “honors” her parents by calling them excessively.  Trying to “honor” her daughter Emily into honoring her back proves socially embarrassing for the latter.  Despite everything being played for laughs, religious behavior Beth undertakes on her own really is no stranger than what a lot of converts do.

(And to be fair to Beth, none of the other main characters displays much knowledge of Christianity or religion in general, which is sadly normal for Americans these days.  (See Religious Literacy by Stephen Prothero.)  Emily even hollows out a Bible to hide marijuana in.)

The other major issue is the nature of prophecy.  For Beth, this is something in the way of a comedic version of the sorts of things one would expect in Ezekiel and Jonah (or Evan Almighty):  She is told to do all sorts of strange actions in a gender-neutral voice, and she is not allowed to shirk her duty.  Refusing to do what God demands only results in pain for Beth, and compliance is quick.  Beth is assumed to be some sort of crackpot for claiming prophecy, though with the lack of theological sophistication of the characters, none of them ever thinks about empirically testing whether she can consistently make correct predictions.  This is despite that around Beth periodically occur unusually well-timed events (lightning striking Carlise, Beth’s car hitting a squirrel, various injuries to Beth, rain falling, the power in various houses going out, etc.) which serve to progress the plot, tie up loose ends, and bring Beth together with her family and friends.  Beth’s husband Todd is unusually generous in interpreting what happens to Beth and chalks her prophecies up to intuition.  Untraditionally, Beth prophetically has access to knowledge about people which she should not have.  Semi-traditionally, she actually has two visions of God, once in the form of Betty White(!) and the other as a black man.  (For comparison, YHWH or some suitable representative has a form which looks like it is practically on fire in Ezekiel.)  Less traditional is God claiming to have taken corporeal form when Beth was a child and played friend with her; while Christians generally regard Jesus as God somehow become corporeal, your humble blogger is not aware of them promoting the idea that He has made a habit of pretending to be human.  Then again, God in this series never claims to be the god of Christianity or any other religion, so some flexibility is warranted.

All in all, an enjoyable effort in theological fiction.  I am saddened that its run seems limited to just seven episodes.  I hope NBC changes its collective mind and continues the series.

’Aharon/Aaron

There are no atheists in twisters (or: The gods of Oz must be crazy): a theological review of Oz the Great and Powerful

Jewish date:  30 Nisan 5733 (night) (Parashath Thazria‘-Meṣora‘).

Today’s holidays:  Ro’sh Hodhesh (Judaism), Tuesday of the Second Week of Easter (Roman Catholicism), Feast for the Three Days of the Writing of the Book of the Law and Feast Day of Rabelais and Feast Day of Francis Bacon Lord Verulam (Thelema), Feast Day of St. Tommy Geogiarides (Church of the SubGenius), Day of Jarl Hakon (Norse Neopaganism).

---

There are no atheists in twisters (or:  The gods of Oz must be crazy):  a theological review of Oz the Great and Powerful

WARNING:  THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS, STARTING IN THE SECOND PARAGRAPH.

Much ink has been spilled (so to speak) recently by Ozophiles reviewing Oz the Great and Powerful, and a lot of is very accurate.  This includes a review allegedly by the Witch of the West on this blog’s sister blog, Weird thing of the day.  The graphic effects are indeed excellent and completely worthy of Oz.  The writing, while not as good as the effects, is good enough to be entertaining.  But while there is much that is good and many nods towards the literary Oz canon and the famous 1939 MGM movie, one needs to keep one thing in mind when discussing this movie:  it was produced by Disney.  Disney has a reputation for being driven by profits more than by the quest to produce true art—an attitude which produces botched works.

Oz the Great and Powerful is botched in an artistic aspect, because it was the wrong film to produce in the first place.  Oz the Great and Powerful has Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs, also known as “Oz” and “the Wizard” as the protagonist, and Oz is absolutely the wrong character to center any prequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz around.  Oz the Great and Powerful starts off and ends with it being very clear that Oz is human and a fraud.  This completely removes the major revelation that the Wizard is a fraud for anyone watching the movies in order—a serious artistic offense.  The writers should have learned this from Star Wars, Episode III:  Revenge of the Sith but did not.  Nothing can truly compensate for this error.

Even ignoring this blunder, centering the film around Oz is a clear violation of the norms set down by L. Frank Baum, the creator of Oz.  As noted in my previous post on this blog about Oz, Baum incorporated ideas of matriarchy and feminism—ideas derived from sources that also influenced Neopaganism—into his works.  He created many strong female characters, and he favored using girls as his protagonists.  Making Oz the protagonist makes it harder to write Baumian feminism; the easy way to write such a story, given that he is the hero, is to give him the lion’s share of successes in moving the plot towards a happy ending.  Thus any other character on the side of good—regardless of sex—is going to look second-class by comparison.  Thus Glinda, the most powerful mortal character in Oz, is noticeably less powerful than how Baum describes her; otherwise she would have no use for Oz at all except maybe as a figurehead—a position any man sufficiently skilled in lying could fill.  As the villains, Evanora and Theodora, can be as powerful as the writers want, so long as Oz can beat them, are both women, it is very easy to interpret this film as having the message that it is wrong for a woman to be too powerful, whether or not that was actually intended.

“The Witch of the West” does a nice job of detailing how the writers further screwed up on its portrayal of women.  Suffice it to say that the result is a textbook example of regression to the mean and fitting the ideals of neither Baum nor his proto-Neopagan sources.  Given that (and how) people routinely poke fun at the portrayals in Disney movies of women, such is (disappointingly) to be expected.  (For examples of poking fun of Disney’s portrayals of women, see “ Advice For Young Girls From Belle”, “Advice For Young Girls From Snow White”, and “Advice For Young Girls From The Little Mermaid”.)

Bucking Baumian proto-Neopagan matriarchy is not the only religious aspect of Oz the Great and Powerful.  The plot can be understood as a religious journey for Oz.  Oz starts off as a flawed man, albeit not a hopeless one.  Part of this is that he is a professional charlatan, practicing stage magic.  Lest anyone think this is necessarily harmless, his audiences—unlike modern audiences—believe his powers are real.  This gets him into trouble when he is asked to heal a crippled girl and he cannot comply.  He also is a serial womanizer, habitually releasing his charms on whatever beautiful adult human female is available without foresight—which creates problems, as he is somehow extremely attractive to women.  He rather guiltily has to turn down one Annie, who is struggling to decide whether to marry John Gale or continue a sporadic relationship with Oz.  He also has to flee to avoid getting killed by a strongman who does not appreciate him having charmed his wife.

Oz escapes the strongman in a balloon, which turns out to be a bad idea, as it quickly gets caught in a tornado.  Vividly animated flying objects with the potential to kill Oz evoke a religious response:  he prays.  Oz’s prayer is a prayer of the saying “There are no atheists in foxholes”:  unfocused and desperate.  He does not specify to Whom he is praying, not even a generic “God”, and he promises little more than to improve and accomplish something.  At this point, he is ready to do anything any god demands, just so long as he lives.  And his prayer is apparently accepted by a god Who expects Oz to make good on his prayer.

The previous king of the Land of Oz, father of the witches Evanora, Glinda, and Theodora, prophesied about the coming of the Wizard.  The Wizard would be named “Oz” and save the people.  Disappointingly, nothing is said of the critical details of prophecy, such as the name of the god in Whose name it was said or how anyone knows that the king had actual prophetic powers and was not delusional—a large theological plot-hole.  (Would it have killed the writers to add in “Thus says the Supreme Maker” or “In the name of Lurline”?)  Whatever the real details are, the prophecy is generally believed, and the arrival of Oz, quite logically, only serves to reinforce the belief.

Not all the characters unambiguously believe the prophecy.  Oz, who was not raised on the belief, is more confused about it than anything else.  While never claiming disbelief, he repeatedly quietly denies he is the foreseen Wizard.  Evanora and Theodora (post-slide into evil) seek to prevent the prophecy from coming true by killing Oz; technically this not require belief in the truth in the prophecy, but removing Oz also removes the possibility that a rebel movement of believers will coalesce around him.  Glinda also is ambiguous about her belief about the prophecy.  She is aware from the moment she meets Oz what sort of man he is (probably by magic or Sherlock Holmes-like perception), and from that moment she charms him into fitting the role well enough to launch and execute a revolution against Evanora.  Whether the prophecy is real or not seems of little import to her.  That her subjects believe the prophecy makes it a lot easier for her and Oz to get them to prepare for battle and fight.  The result, of course, is in accordance with the prophecy:  the revolution, led by Oz as the Wizard, is successful, Evanora and Theodora are defeated and have to flee, and Oz becomes the undisputed ruler of the Emerald City.  

The fulfillment of the prophecy opens a whole theological can of worms.  Is the prophecy genuine, or did Glinda just engineer the fulfillment of a false prophecy?  If the prophecy is genuine, did whatever gods exist have a hand in its fulfillment, or did they just foresee what would happen? 

Along the way to fulfilling the prophecy, Oz does undergo some moral improvement.  At the start of the movie, the only relationship he has which is not exploitative is with Annie.  At first in Oz, he follows his usual pattern—most egregiously by taking advantage of Theodora and then abandoning her without so much as an “It’s not you; it’s me”.  But he also exercises real sympathy, helping Finley the Flying Monkey and the China Girl (despite no hope or desire of a romantic fling with either) and eventually Glinda’s subjects.  Oz also manages to form a relationship with Glinda without exploiting her.  (To be sure, despite her maltreatment by the writers, even in this film taking advantage of Glinda would be hard.  Instead, she is arguably exploiting him.)  Oz even issues a public apology to Theodora and offers her a place in the Emerald City if she finds her “inner goodness”.

On the other hand, Oz’s moral improvement leaves a lot to be desired.  At the end of the day, he is still a charlatan.  He uses large-scale humbuggery to win the war, and he remains a humbug in his capacity as the Wizard even after his victory.  Also, his apology to Theodora is too little, too late; she dismisses it without a thought.  And there is something disappointing in knowing that this “hero” down the line is going to send Dorothy and company to kill Theodora.  This is a horrible thing to do to Dorothy and company, given that if they are crazy enough to attempt it, they will probably get killed, injured, or enslaved.  And it is a horrible thing to do to Theodora, given how badly he has treated her already.

This incomplete repentance makes for some serious question for the unnamed gods of Oz.  If the revolution is really their doing, why did they put a fraud in power?  Why do they let him get so out of hand as to risk people’s lives?  What sort of morals do they hold by if they do such things?  These are not insoluble questions.  E.g., the gods of the Land of Oz may be trickster gods, or they may consider Oz as the Wizard as their best available solution to the Land of Oz’s problems, not an ideal one.  But no attempt is made to answer such questions.

Theological rating:  C-.  (Your humble blogger doubts the planned sequel is going to clean up the mess the writers left.  Note Disney’s Tron Legacy, which does little to answer the unsolved theological questions of Tron.)

Appendix (because your humble blogger cannot resist commenting on things beyond theology and morality):  

1) The way to write a prequel to Baum’s Oz books covering the arrival of the Wizard correctly is to not write it with the Wizard as the central character.  Such a prequel should be about someone young, preferably a girl, living in or visiting Oz at the time of the arrival of the Wizard.  The Wizard might well appear as a character, but never, ever in his true form, only disguised and scaring the heebeejeebees out of everyone in that time of political turmoil, thus avoiding spoiling a major revelation.

2) I would like to note one continuity nod which I have not noticed anyone else mentioning.  As noted above, in the film, one Annie tells Oz that John Gale has asked her to marry her, the implication being that Annie and John will become Dorothy’s parents.   Alexander Melentyevich Volkov created a loose adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in Russian and a series based on it which went off in a different direction from Baum’s books.  The equivalent of Dorothy in that series is named Ellie, and the names of her parents are… John and Anna.  This may not be a continuity nod to literary or MGM Oz, but it does indicate that someone who made this film really was an Ozophile.

3) “Oz” is conventionally translated into Hebrew as ‘Uṣ, apparently repurposing the name of the place ’Iyyov (Job) lived.  But “Oz” is translated into Hebrew in this film as ’Oz.  The name of this film in Hebrew is ’Ereṣ ’Oz (“The Land of Oz”)—corresponding to the conventional shortened title of the second canonical Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz.  Your humble blogger suspects these discrepancies may be due to less familiarity with Oz here in Israel than in the United States.

4) For those who are interested in seeing films which do a better job on certain themes in Oz the Great and Terrible, your humble blogger recommends The Adventures of Captain Zoom in Outer Space and Galaxy Quest.  Both films deal with the theme of people forced by their circumstances to impersonate people who do not actually exist and coming to accept the roles, albeit in science-fiction settings rather than a fantasy setting.  Captain Zoom also deals with religious issues, including having some uniquely dramatic evidence that a prophecy is real.  Both are very entertaining and worthwhile watching just for the fun of it.

Proto-Neopaganism in Oz

Jewish date:  27 Shevaṭ 5773 (evening) (Parashath Mishpaṭim).

Today’s holidays:  Feast Day of Paul Miki and companions (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Tlaloc (Church of the SubGenius).

Greetings.

I have decided to put off writing about The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know?  These movies/books are eminently worthy of criticism, and the way the magic espoused in them is supposed to work does resemble that of Neopaganism and LaVeyan Satanism.  However, The Secret properly belongs to the New Thought movement, and What the Bleep Do We Know? is a product of Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment.  As such, discussing either properly requires a sizable amount of research which would be a major tangent away from Neopaganism.  The Secret also requires (or would prompt) digressions into the worlds of Chicken Soup for the Soul and Conversations with God, the authors of which appear in the movie.  As such, I deem them worthy of review at a later date.

Current reading more directly related to Neopaganism is going slowly, so please be patient.  I have read a little from The Key of Solomon, a classic grimoire which is cited as one of the sources for Wiccan ritual.  (And it certainly reads so far like something Gerald Gardner was cribbing from in writing High Magic’s Aid.)  I am also reading The Book of the SubGenius, a sacred text of the Church of the SubGenius, a parody religion connected with the Neopagan denomination of Discordianism.  (It’s also sufficiently disturbing that I want to get it over with.)

In the meantime, I would like to note Finding Oz:  How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story by Evan I. Schwartz.  This is not a book about religion per se, but rather a book about how L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  This includes not just his personal history and the state of society in the United States at the time in general, but also religious influences.  One of these was Theosophy, a religion which was having its heyday in Baum’s day.  (Those who have read Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West will remember that the Wizard in that story was a Theosophist on a mission from Madame Blavatsky.)  Another was Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk who spoke at the Parliament of the World’s Religions at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and became popular for a time.  I hope to discuss Theosophy and Hinduism in the future, and thus I will not discuss them now, especially since I still have a lot to read of even basic Hindu literature (which is extremely extensive) and everything to read of Theosophical basic literature.

So what is there left to discuss from Finding Oz now?  Consider that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900, and society in the United States back then was noticeably different than it is today.  Today it is generally assumed in the United States that women are equals of men and have the same rights (despite problems in implementation), thus leading to Republican politicians making themselves look really bad whenever they dare to suggest anything appearing otherwise.  This assumption of equality was not a foregone conclusion back in Baum’s day, which was decades before the era of women’s liberation.  Baum happened to live at the time of the suffragette movement of Susan B. Anthony and company, which sought to obtain the right to vote for women.  And his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, was a leading suffragette.  Gage did not just break with common expectations for women at the time; she also broke with Christianity.  Not only did she embrace Theosophy as an alternative, but she also embraced... the pseudo-history of matriarchy, the idea of witches as “wise women” and Christian persecution of witches.  Please note that The Sorceress, Aradia, and the first edition of The Golden Bough had already been published, so these ideas were available already to be embraced.

These ideas rubbed off on Baum to the extent that they showed up in the Oz books.  This is not limited to Baum having a thing for strong female characters (Dorothy, Glinda, Ozma, Betsy, Trot, Scraps, etc.).  While Baum generally kept religious references in his books to a minimum, everyone is aware that Oz has witches.  (Gratefully, he avoids the cliché that witches are all evil or its inverse that they are all good.)  Dorothy Gale is told when she first visits Oz that Oz has witches, because it is an uncivilized country, the implication being that in civilized countries—such as the United States—witches are persecuted.  Both Glinda and the Witch of the North are definitely “wise women”, providing sage advice and help, especially the former throughout the series.  All four countries in Oz are ruled by women (specifically witches) when Dorothy first visits, and while there are male rulers after that, in The Marvelous Land of Oz a girl, Ozma, becomes ruler of all of Oz, a position she retains even in the works of succeeding authors.  Also note that Baum avoided the psychologically unrealistic equation of making all female rulers automatically good and all male rulers automatically bad, e.g., the Wicked Witch of the West is a terrifying dictator, and her replacement, Nick Chopper the Tin Woodman, is much beloved by his subjects.  (Baum still has plenty of fans today, and with good reason.)  Granted, the proto-Neopagan ideas were never taken to the extent of Aradia or The Golden Bough (e.g., Glinda never goes dancing naked in the woods, worshipping the Fairy Queen Lurline and doing something inappropriate with a warlock, and she most definitely does not murder a Quadling consort every year), but some of the basic ideas which later inspired Neopaganism are really in there.

(Now all I need to do is figure out how to tie Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan into religious fallacies and misinformation...)

Peace.

’Aharon/Aaron

Review of ten Neopagan books

Jewish date:  7 Shevaṭ 5733 (Parashath Bo’).

Today’s holidays:  Friday of the First Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Martin Luther (Church of the SubGenius).

Greetings.

I am finally getting around to posting something on a whole slew of Neopagan (mostly Wiccan) books, finishing up what I have for Wicca in print.  These are not ideal reviews, but this post has been put off too long so far.  After this I get to worry about pre-Neopagan magic, such modern magic as The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know?, Discordianism, the Church of the SubGenius, and various other surprises.

The reviews follow below

Peace and Shabbath shalom.

’Aharon/Aaron

---

The Sorceress (La Sorcière) by Jules Michelet (Michelet):

This pseudo-historical book, originally published in French in 1862. draws upon accounts of witch trials.  All the clichés found in the work of Margaret Murray, Charles Leland, and Gerald Gardner are present in abundance and luridly to the extent that any movie made of this book would have to have at least an “R” rating.  The Christian clergy and nobility are presented as being irredeemably corrupt.  This is emphasized for the priesthood, dwelling extensively on sexual abuse of nuns.  The peasants are downtrodden to the point where they are totally miserable, are rarely able to get married, and frequently resort to abusive incest.  The peasants, in their desperation, also resort to Satanic witchcraft, likewise depicted scandalously.  This book is useful as an example for how witchcraft was depicted back around the time Gardner was putting together his Book of Shadows.  As a representation of what actually happened, it comes off as if Michelet committed the logical fallacy of cherry-picking:  choosing the material which suited him—in this case, anything and everything smacking of sexual impropriety—and ignoring everything else.  Since all the characters are evil, desperate, or crazy, the book comes off as unbelievable.

Drawing Down the Moon:  Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers and Other Pagans in America Today by Margot Adler (Adler):

Anyone who wants to know about Neopaganism needs to read this book.  This is a genuine academic work, looking at what Neopagans actually believe.  Ms. Adler not only took a survey of the views of Neopagans, she did it twice.  Your humble blogger has the revised and expanded edition.  And what she turns up in the interviews, over and over again, is the real key to understanding Neopaganism.

Abrahamic religions put an emphasis on truth.  For example, Christianity hinges on the question of whether Jesus is the Messiah.  Thus the New Testament, especially the Gospels, spend a good deal of verbiage arguing that Jesus is the Messiah.  If he is not, then there is no point in being a Christian.  

Neopaganism, to the best of your humble blogger’s knowledge, never works like this.  There has been a good deal of arguing over whether there is any truth in the historical claims of Robert Graves, James Frazer, Margaret Alice Murray, and Charles Leland, but one will look in vain in the Neopagan works your humble blogger has read for any rational reason to believe in the Triple Goddess and the Horned God.  What one finds in abundance throughout Adler’s book, on the other hand, are emotional reasons.  People who convert to Neopaganism do so because it resonates with them.  They have had deep emotional experiences in response to paganism and have decided to adopt it as a lifestyle.  Some come to paganism through study.  Others have visions of various gods and goddesses.  And almost incredibly, some people play-act paganism for one reason or another and have such a powerful emotional experience that they become pagans.

How participants feel affects every aspect of Neopaganism.  They believe what resonates with them, even if the “belief” is what they act as if is true rather than what they actually think is true.  If polytheism resonates with them, then they are polytheists.  If duotheism, they are duotheists.  If belief in just a single goddess resonates with them, then they believe in just a single goddess.  Likewise, they do what resonates with them for rituals and magic.  If they enjoy Gardnerian rituals, then they perform Gardnerian rituals.  If they prefer rituals practiced by historical pagans, they do that.  And if they prefer to make up their own rituals, they do that, since whatever gives them a spiritual high is important.  The religious stories (“myths”) they tell are what resonate with them, be it genuine historical pagan religious stories, the pseudo-histories already discussed in this series, or brand-new stories which fit their tastes, or science-fiction.  Their moral/ethical behavior is also what resonates with them, which can be liberal or conservative, egalitarian, female supremacist, focusing on men, ecologically oriented, politically active, politically neutral, or just about anything else one can imagine.  So they end up creating such unusual-sounding groups and ideologies as the Church of All Worlds, the Reformed Druids of North America, Feraferia, Ásatrú, and Discordianism, and they go off in all sorts of unforeseen directions.  And since how one feels is all they consider important, many Neopagans indulge in whatever misconceptions they like without critical thinking, even if outside of religion they are fairly rational people.

Also in this book are some ideological discussions, a disdain for Christianity, rationalization that polytheism is somehow inherently more moral or otherwise better than monotheism, some talk of the predominant Neopagan theology of pantheism (belief that everything that exists is divine), and trying to subsume all Neopaganism (and sometimes even more) into a single, unified ideological framework.

The Witch’s Bible by Gavin and Yvonne Frost (Frost and Frost The Witch’s Bible), The Prophet’s Bible by Gavin and Yvonne Frost (Frost and Frost The Prophet’s Bible) and The Magic Power of White Witchcraft by Gavin and Yvonne Frost (Frost and Frost The Magic Power of White Witchcraft:  Revised for the Millennium):

The Witch’s Bible happens to have been briefly reviewed by your humble blogger before this blog was founded (Adelman).  Unfortunately, his evaluation of it has not improved.

The Frosts are the founders of the Church and School of Wicca.  The School of Wicca runs a correspondence course, and thus naturally much of the material in these books instructs the reader how to practice magic and this version of Wicca.

The Church of Wicca is theologically unusual, to the point where some wish that it would not be labeled as Wicca at all.  Its doctrine is that there really is only one god, but in its rituals participants pretend there are two.  There is also a lot of theological emphasis on “the Other Side”, which is inhabited by the dead, who are progressing in their spiritual development and occasionally contact the living.

While Neopagans commonly practice ritual magic—which does get its fair share of discussion—these books push magical and irrational thinking to unusual levels and in a new direction; they are largely about how one can develop one’s psychic powers, and they are full of pseudoscience.  These books also deal extensively with magic as a form of self-improvement; one can read in them about how to use magic to increase one’s income, get what one wants, and rearrange one’s life for the better.  Intermixed with this is more traditional financial and career-development advice.  As such, these books come off as less spiritual or religious than many other Neopagan materials discussed in this series.

While Neopagans seem to be in general more sexually permissive than traditional Christians, the Church of Wicca actually mandates sex magic and regular swapping marriage partners.

Like Neopagans in general, the Frosts seem rather annoyed by Christianity and continue the tradition of botching Hebrew and Qabbalah.

A Witches Bible Compleat (Eight Sabbats for Witches and The Witches Way) by Janet and Stewart Farrar (Farrar and Farrar):

This is an extremely serious ritual manual and series of essays on Wiccan magic and theology.  The Farrars practice Alexandrian Wicca, one of the early offshoots of Gardnerian Wicca, and they worked with Doreen Valiente, one of Gardner’s high priestesses, to research the textual history of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows.  (Valiente actually wrote parts of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows.)  This is thus a useful book for anyone wanting to know about the origins of the Book of Shadows; it was not handed down intact, but rather was compiled from a number of different sources, and parts were written from scratch.  

The Farrars are not even vaguely rational people.  Their “rationale” for Wicca is philosophical, without the least bit of evidence to back it up.  They mix together anything from older religions which suits their tastes, factual or fictional, whether or not the combination actually makes sense.  They are also no more accurate in general than the Neopagan authors whose works are reviewed in this series.  They buy into Gardner’s doubtful pseudo-history of witchcraft and matriarchy, and like Gardener they love bashing Christianity over (real or imagined) crimes.  Like Gardner and the Frosts, the Farrars buy into pseudoscience constantly, unable to distinguish that which is supported by evidence from flimflam.  What separates them from the Frosts is the lack of financial and self-help advice, and a tone that many will find downright creepy.

This book should prove very useful for anyone wishing to study the practice of Wicca.  It may also prove useful for those looking for a peek into the minds of serious Wiccans.

A Wiccan Bible:  Exploring the Mysteries of the Craft from Birth to Summerland by A.J. Drew (Drew):

Mr. Drew does not appear to be a major figure in Wicca.  You humble blogger acquired his book only because he is aware of a large number of “Bibles” other than the Jewish and Christian ones, and he is collecting them for the Divine Misconceptions project.  Mr. Drew presents his own system of theology and ritual for Wicca, and much of what he writes can be found in other sources.  However, he goes into depth presenting a creation story, unlike other writers, and he takes a truly unique approach.

When trying to write a religious text, writers tend to take one of two paths:  either they present their text as something handed down to them, or they present their text as a work of scholarship.  The Wiccan works reviewed for this series tend to take one or some mixture of both these paths.  Mr. Drew takes a third path:  he blatantly claims he made up his own creation story.  While many people try to pass off something fabricated as something meant to be taken seriously, Mr. Drew is honest that he is simply making up his own story.  While this approach can work well when writing parables, Mr. Drew transparently cobbles together his story from the stories of previous religions and genuine history, actually having paragraphs giving the purported original stories.  The effect is to make for tedious reading and no aura of respectability that a (real or purported) transmitted text or a (real or purported) scholarly text might have.  The effect is even worse when one is familiar with any of the sources he draws upon and can recognize that he is fudging.  Since Mr. Drew is blatantly making things up, there is no point in him bringing sources, especially when he cannot be bothered to get them right.

This tedious “cobbled” approach is carried over to discussions of theology and ritual, as if any older religion’s tenets were evidence of Wicca (Mr. Drew’s version or otherwise).  Actually, it gets worse, with long lists of the gods (and purported gods) and holidays of numerous older religions.  How accurate any of this is unclear; for example, Mr. Drew is intent on finding polytheism in Judaism and Islam, in complete disregard of the fundamentals of Judaism and Islam.  Your humble blogger has no trust that Mr. Drew got anyone else’s religion right.

This book is for the Wiccan literature completist and the scholar of Wicca.  Almost everyone else can skip it.

The Wicca Bible by Ann-Marie Gallagher (Gallagher The Wicca Bible:  The Definitive Guide to Magic and the Craft) and The Spells Bible by Ann-Marie Gallagher (Gallagher The Spells Bible):

Like Mr. Drew, Ms. Gallagher does not appear to be a major figure in Wicca either, with her books also acquired for your humble blogger’s “Bible” collection.  While Ms. Gallagher seems to have some sort of academic credentials, they do not show in her books, which read like she is on a spiritual high due to Wicca, untempered by critical or analytical thought.  Practically everything in these books can be found elsewhere, only packaged with a plethora of color photographs and careful typography.  The main reason to read these books is the photographs.  Otherwise they can be safely ignored.

Witches’ Craft:  A Multidenominational Wicca Bible by Bruce K. Wilborn (Wilborn):

There is a bit of the history and theology of Wicca in this book, with the author buying into historically questionable claims of a secret witch cult persecuted by Christians.  There is also a section on how to perform divination and work magic with herbs.  However, the most interesting thing about this book is that it details the rituals of many distinct denominations of Wicca.  As noted above, Neopagans change their rituals in order to get the desired emotional experience, and Wiccans are no exception.  This book lists the variants of each ritual, one after the other, allowing easy comparisons.  This book is probably more useful for scholars of Wicca and Neopaganism than other people.

Bibliography:

Adelman, Aaron Solomon. “Beware of the Surprise Narrator.”  (2009).  [http://weirdthingoftheday.blogspot.co.il/2009/08/beware-of-surprise-narrator.html].

Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon:  Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today. 1979. Revised and expanded ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Print.

Drew, A.J. A Wiccan Bible:  Exploring the Mysteries of the Craft from Birth to Summerland. Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2003. Print.

Farrar, Janet, and Stewart Farrar. A Witches Bible Compleat. New York: Magickal Childe Publishing, Inc., 1984. Print.

Frost, Gavin, and Yvonne Frost. The Magic Power of White Witchcraft:  Revised for the Millennium. Paramus, NJ: Reward Books/Prentice Hall, 1999. Print.

---. The Prophet’s Bible. York Beach, ME: S. Weiser, 1991. Print.

---. The Witch’s Bible. Los Angeles:  Nash Publishing Corporation, 1972. Berkley Medallion ed. New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1975. Print.

Gallagher, Ann-Marie. The Spells Bible:  The Definitive Guide to Charms and Enchantments. Hampshire, UK:  Godsfield Press Ltd., 2003. Cincinnati, OH: Walking Stick Press, 2003. Print.

---. The Wicca Bible:  The Definitive Guide to Magic and the Craft. London: Godsfield Press, 2005. Print.

Michelet, Jules. The Sorceress (La Sorcière). 1939.  [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/sor/index.htm].

Wilborn, Bruce K. Witches’ Craft:  A Multidenominational Wicca Bible. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2005. Print.

A leap into the abyss of unreason: a review of the work of Gerald Gardner

Jewish date:  18 Tishri 5733.

Today’s holidays:  Ḥol hamMo‘edh Sukkoth (Judaism), Feast Day of Francis of Assisi (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Buster Keaton (Church of the SubGenius), Ieiunium Cereris (Roman religion).

A leap into the abyss of unreason:  a review of the work of Gerald Gardner

Consider the items reviewed so far in this series on Neopaganism:

1) Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches by Charles Leland (Leland; Adelman “Review of Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches”):  A purported text of an Italian pagan witch religion opposed to Christianity.

2) The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and The God of the Witches by Margaret Alice Murray (Murray “The Witch-Cult in Western Europe:  A Study in Anthropology”; Murray The God of the Witches; Adelman “Review of the Witch-Cult in Western Europe and the God of the Witches”):  Works by an historian claiming the persistence of a pagan religion in Europe and its persecution by Christianity.

3) The Golden Bough by James Frazer (Frazer; Adelman “Review of the Golden Bough”):  A multivolume work by an anthropologist on the workings of magic and religion, with an emphasis on the sacred king story.

4) The White Goddess by Robert Graves (Graves; Adelman “I Spit on Robert Graves: A Review of Robert Graves’s the White Goddess”) (OK, so the review as written two years ago, but it is totally relevant):  Work by a poet waxing poetic on the “poetic theme” of the sacred king.

The scholarship in all these works is problematic at best, and anyone who is sufficiently rational will feel wary about making use of any of them.  A rational person is going to think about the provenance of his/her materials, whether there is any paper trail for them, whether the claims in them make any sense historically, whether the internal logic is solid.  And when considering adopting a new religion, he/she is going to seriously consider the basis for a possible new belief system.  He/she is going to consider what the evidence is for the reality of the religion.  What evidence is that its gods exist?  What evidence is there that its claimed history is correct?  Does it make testable, nontrivial predictions?

But not all of us are even vaguely rational.  Gerald Gardner, the subject of this review, never had any formal education.  Though curious and interested in anthropology and archaeology, he never seems to have learned critical thinking skills.  He lived in a number of different places in his life, and he was exposed to a good deal of magic (ritual and ceremonial, not the tongue-in-cheek kind), such as the Ordo Templi Orientis, Spiritualism, and various local magic traditions—and he most sincerely believed that magic really works.  And thus Gardner uncritically synthesizes Leland, Murray, Frazer, and Graves and mixes in whatever else suits him, making the leap from a hypothetical witchcraft religion to a real one which later became known as Wicca—and never really considering that he is being irrational.  Like pseudoscientists in general, he seems to think there is scientific support for his views.  Gardner claims to have been initiated into a secret pagan witchcraft group, but whether or not this actually happened, he certainly is under a lot of other influence.

High Magic’s Aid:  the prequel to Wicca:  Strange as it may sound, witchcraft was illegal in Britain well into the 20th century, and anyone daring to practice it who did not wish to be arrested had to do so in secret.  Before the government collectively changed its mind and permitted witchcraft, Gardner published an historical (or pseudo-historical) novel, High Magic’s Aid (Gardner High Magic’s Aid), which prefigures much of what Gardner later taught and practiced openly:

1. This book is blatantly anti-Christian with a special anti-clerical emphasis, viewing Christianity as corrupt and a money-making scheme.  The hatred of Christianity is so uncompromising that anyone who is seriously Christian has no redeeming features.  Emphasized is the worship of saints, and downplayed is the idea that a Christian might ever pray directly to God.  Christian clergy are depicted practically as magicians; they are the only people with knowledge of magic, even though they are not supposed to practice it.  Christianity is depicted as completely against pleasure, sex, and even cleanliness.  Christianity is depicted as anti-intellectual—despite having an educational system—and really only concerned with death.  Scripture is blamed for Christian barbarities (thus showing a gross ignorance thereof).  There is also some rather painful lecturing in the book.  Readers should expect to find things prefiguring Atlas Shrugged (Adelman “Faking Reality: A Moral Review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged”; Rand) and His Dark Materials (Pullman The Amber Spyglass; Pullman The Golden Compass; Pullman The Subtle Knife)—and no form of Christianity ever practiced by real humans.
2. Cribbed from Murray, witches in this story are a pagan cult quietly surviving, known about by the Church, yet never mentioned openly.  These witches are polytheists, worshipping the “Old Gods”, such as Artemis and her daughter “Ardrea”.  (Your humble blogger does not remember an Ardrea in the stories of the ancient Greek religion, and doing a quick search on-line turned up nothing on her.)
3. Witchcraft is depicted as pro-pleasure.  The Church thus purportedly opposed witchcraft out of fear the people might turn to it instead.  (The idea that Christians might believe that Christianity is the truth and thus worthy of being believed and practiced somehow never comes up.)
4. Various practices which are standard in Gardnerian Wicca are depicted:  Scourging (not enough to draw blood or cause much pain).  Herbalism.  The ritual of Drawing Down the Moon, in which a High Priestess can reportedly become inhabited by the Goddess.  Sabats (regular meetings of witches).  A woman on the altar at the great sabat.  Fertility cult practices.  Ritual nudity.  Astrology.  Not bringing animal sacrifices or using blood in rituals.  The ritual sanctification of magical tools, not to mention the standard set of tools themselves.  A witch priesthood.  Ritual groping (which is something your humble blogger cannot make up).  And much of the liturgy.

There is one big difference between the magic of High Magic’s Aid and that of Gardnerian Wicca that anyone should notice:  despite the paganism of these fictional witches, the magic is transparently Christian trying to rip off Judaism and the Qabbalah.  Gardner’s characters constantly make use of Jewish/Hebrew names and attributes of YHWH in their magic, not to mention verses from the Hebrew Bible, often with no real idea what the terms they use mean.  This is not merely religiously insensitive; it is completely illogical.  If Judaism or Christianity is correct, the Deity cannot be expected to give aid to anyone acting in ways He finds offensive (e.g., writing verses from His scripture on the floor and calling out His names while naked), especially those who do not believe in Him (e.g, pagans).  If this fictional witchcraft is correct, the magicians, who are all either pagan or who convert to paganism, are still effectively calling on the god of their enemies, which is still theologically a very bad idea if they want to get help.  By the time witchcraft became legal in England and Gardner went public, even the irrational Gardner seems to have figured out this makes no sense and changed his rituals accordingly.

The founding documents:  Once witchcraft became legal, Gardner produced a number of works without any pretense that he was writing fiction.  The most famous of these is The Book of Shadows, which is primarily a liturgical manual.  Purportedly it was handed down to him from the group that initiated him, but one of his high priestesses, Doreen Valiente, admitted that she and Gardner had written parts of it, and other parts are known to have been copied from preexisting sources, such as Aradia, Freemasonry rituals, the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, The Key of Solomon (Mathers), and the writings of the occultist Aleister Crowley.  The Book of Shadows was supposed to be secret, but it was leaked and has been published in various venues, including The Gardnerian Book of Shadows (Gardner The Gardnerian Book of Shadows), A Witches Bible Compleat (Farrar and Farrar), and Witchcraft:  A Multidenominational Wicca Bible (Wilborn).  Besides rituals (discussed below), The Book of Shadows contains instructions on how to remain hidden and what to do when captured by Christian witch-hunters.

Published publicly were Witchcraft Today (Gardner Witchcraft Today) in 1954 and The Meaning of Witchcraft (Gardner The Meaning of Witchcraft) in 1959.  The emphases in these are more historical and theological.

History (or rather pseudo-history):  There is an aura of validity and prestige in age.  Many new religious movements try to add to their own validity and prestige by misrepresenting themselves as an older religion.  Gardner pulls the mother of all age misrepresentations by claiming the continuous worship of a horned god back to the Paleolithic based on figurines.  (As if anyone could be completely sure of what anyone living before there was writing was thinking.)  This Gardner plugs into Murray’s claims of crypto-paganism and Christian persecution of witches, totally failing to deal credibly with the plausibility problems; everything which fits the hypothesis he considers correct, and everything which does not fit he blames on Christian misunderstanding.  Never does it occur to him that one would expect at least a few authors of witch trial accounts would figure out that that there is a difference between Satanism and paganism.  Gardner also buys totally into Graves’s matriarchal pseudo-history and his business of a White Goddess and sacred kings.  He also tries rolling various ancient European paganisms into his “Old Religion”, despite blatant contradictions.  (E.g., Gardner’s Witchcraft is against animal and human sacrifice, unlike historical paganisms.)

Side note:  Gardner also buys into Murray’s belief in fairies, only he identifies them as Greek pagans.

Theology:  Mixing Graves, Murray, and Frazier, Gardner is a polytheist.  Besides accepting that there are local gods (as would be expected from historical paganisms) and having some idea of the non-exclusivity of religions, he believes in the Horned God Cernunnos and the Triple Goddess Aradia.  These deities are not all-powerful gods like YHWH, the Trinity, or ’Allāh, but rather lesser beings.  The Triple Goddess and the Horned God are defied aspects of nature.  They are also flagrantly sexual to an extent that mainstream Abrahamic believers consider totally alien.  Unlike most Abrahamic deities, the Triple Goddess and the Horned God are not all-powerful, and they actually need human help.  This is where ritual comes in.

Ritual and magic:  In mainstream Abrahamic religions, rituals, such as prayer and sacrifice, are (normally) pure communication; the worshipper hopes that his/her god will look favorably upon him/her, and only the naïve or foolish would think that their prayers could actually force their god to do something.  Gardnerian ritual, on the other hand, is magical in nature and meant to accomplish something beyond communication.  Part of the ritual is simply trying to work magic towards practical ends, such as healing and helping people.  The group rituals are thus geared for creating the emotional states in a whole coven at once that magicians believe are necessary to work magic effectively and thus magnify the effects.

Another large part of Gardnerian ritual may be described as a mystery cult.

SPOILER ALERT:  DO NOT READ THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW THE GREAT MYSTERY OF WICCAN RITUAL.

The mystery of Wiccan ritual is the passing of the seasons and the lifecycle of crops.

END SPOILER.  IF YOU THINK THIS SOUNDS ABSURDLY BANAL FOR A MYSTERY, YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

This mystery is symbolized by the divine version of the sacred king story, which, as you will remember, is a love story gone horribly wrong:  god meets goddess, god and goddess fall in love, goddess lames god, goddess has god killed by his other self, goddess gives birth to the same god, thus bringing the story back to the start.  (And, no, that is not a typo.  Like the cycle of the seasons, the sacred king cycle is a closed loop.)  Gardnerian ritual takes celebrants through the entire sacred king story—including the whole business of ritual murder—over the course of the year.  Members of a Gardnerian coven play out the parts of Aradia and Cernunnos’s various aspects ceremonially.

The Horned God and the Triple Goddess are not merely male and female, but lovers (or rather a god in love with a goddess with serious relationship issues).  This theology is reflected in practice.  Part of this is symbolic, with all the ritual tools being either “male” or “female”.  But much of it is quite literal.  Whenever possible, Gardnerians prefer to have all religious interactions, both ritual and pedagogical, be between a male and a female.  Group rituals are led by a high priest and a high priestess, and there is a strong preference for covens to consist of equal numbers of men and women.  (Actually priests and priestesses; the priesthood is universal for the initiated.)  More extreme—and extremely alien to Abrahamic believers—is ritual sex (the “sacred marriage” or “great rite”) performed by celebrants representing the Horned God and Triple Goddess.  This also fits in with the witch-trial accounts of witches mating with the Devil, subsequently retconned as a representative of Cernunnos.  This may be performed symbolically by inserting an athame (ritual knife) into a goblet—or it may be performed quite literally.  Consistent with this sexuality and borrowing straight from Aradia and the witch-trial accounts, Gardnerian ritual is supposed to be performed naked.  (And, yes, outdoor ceremonies in England during the winter are at best difficult.)

Also:  High Magic’s Aid borrows from the Black Mass of the paranoid Christian fantasy of Satanism by depicting a woman on the altar at the great sabat.  In the third-degree initiation as performed, it is proclaimed that woman was the original altar (Wilborn 184; Farrar and Farrar, vol. 2, p. 36).  To someone from an Abrahamic religion, this is utterly incomprehensible, as for such people an altar is an inanimate object on which offerings are burned.  This is, however, likely the origin of a LaVeyan Satanist claim that altars were originally flesh and only later stone (LaVey 135).

Hebrew, Judaism, and the Qabbalah:  Though Gardner stops being quite as blatantly obtuse as he was in High Magic’s Aid about Hebrew, Judaism, and the Qabbalah, he continues to botch anything Judaic and pretend it somehow supports his beliefs.  Standard Jewish theology (and frequently heretical Jewish theologies as well) accepts the existence of one and only one god, YHWH, also known as ’Elohim.  Prefiguring The Hebrew Goddess (Patai), Gardner completely botches this most basic fact of Jewish theology and tries to rationalize in a goddess as well.  He misunderstands the divine name ’Elohim as being a feminine plural noun, claiming it to be a plural of the divine name ’Eloahh, which he misinterprets as being a feminine noun.

Tangent:  Hebrew grammar lesson which may fly above the heads of those who have never studied Hebrew:  The feminine form of ’el (“power”, “god”) is ’elah.  The he’ on the end of ’Eloahh is part of the root, notated by the mappiq in the he’.  ’Eloahh, not having a feminine ending or being one of those few feminine nouns without a feminine ending, is thus a masculine noun.  ’Elohim is not a true plural but an honorific, and it is normally treated as a masculine singular noun.

Gardner is unfazed by the simple fact that there is zero support in the Hebrew Bible for duotheism.  He actually takes Graves’s delusional rewriting of the Hebrew Bible seriously.  He claims that the duotheism was symbolized by Yakhin and Bo‘az, two columns at the door of the First Temple and that “wicked priests” perverted the concept of “Gods of Love” into “a solitary God of hate and vengeance” and falsified the Hebrew Bible.  (He thus blindly accepts an old anti-Semitic misunderstanding of the Hebrew Bible and is unaware of any verses dealing with love and forgiveness.)  Gardner also makes the ludicrous charge that Jewish monotheists were opposed to paganism due considering beauty evil.  (Hint:  beauty is never identified as evil in the Hebrew Bible.)

Gardner in particular tries to find support for Witchcraft in the Qabbalah, of which he shows no more understanding.  He claims that the Qabbalists adore ‘Ashtoreth—an ancient Semitic pagan goddess.  Gardner also attributes the alleged falsification of the Hebrew Bible to Ḥizqiyyahu (Hezekiah) and claims the Qabbalists believe this and worship the Goddess.  These claims are completely unlike anything your humble blogger has ever read in Qabbalistic source material or books about the Qabbalah by people who know what they are talking about; if Gardner did not fabricate these claims himself, he probably copied them from someone who was lying or delusional.  Gardner is also completely unaware that the Qabbalah is rooted in and is dedicated to justifying Judaism; as such, trying to rip its constructs out of context and pretend they support another ideology is grossly dishonest.  (For information on the Qabbalah and why its theology does not realistically qualify as duotheistic, as well as why duotheism is hopelessly incompatible with Judaism in general, see “The goddess who never existed: a review of Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess” (Adelman “The Goddess Who Never Existed: A Review of Raphael Patai’s the Hebrew Goddess”).)

Despite trying to reduce the amount of Judaic material in his rituals, Gardner does not eliminate it altogether.  In a first-degree initiation (1949 version), a priest closes a doorway saying, “Agla, Azoth, Adonai”, and anyone who knows anything about Judaism will recognize ’Adhonay as one of the names of YHWH.  In another version of the first-degree initiation, the initiator is supposed to make the sign of the “Cabalistic Cross”, which is groping the new recruit’s forehead, breast, right shoulder, left shoulder, and breast again while saying “Ateh Malkhuth ve-Geburah ve-Gedulah le-olam”, intending to mean “Thou art the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory forever” (Farrar and Farrar, vol. 2, p. 16; Wilborn 160).  This is bad Hebrew and bad Qabbalah.  If the Hebrew was correct, it would be “’Attah Malkhuth uGhevurah uGhedhullah le‘olam”.  The Qabbalah is wrong on two counts.  The first is that the symbolism of the Sefiroth is wrong.  The ten Sefiroth correspond to different parts of the human body, or more specifically the bodies of a man and his wife.  Ḥesedh/Gedhullah corresponds to the man’s right arm, Gevurah corresponds to the man’s left arm, and Malkhuth corresponds to his wife.  The second count is that the Sefiroth are organs of YHWH, not humans, so the identification is implausible.  In the rite for the summer solstice, Michael (= Mikka’el) is invoked as “the Power of the Sun” (Farrar and Farrar, vol. 1, p. 101), even though he is actually an angel.

Gardner thinks grimoires attributed to Shelomoh (Solomon) are genuine, no matter how out of character with Judaism they are.

Gardner also claims the witches have a tradition that their ancestors gave Jews shelter during persecutions and learned the Qabbalah from them.  He also claims the existence in the old days of crypto-Jewish “wizards”.  Your humble blogger is unaware of any corresponding Jewish traditions of contact with crypto-pagans or crypto-Jewish magicians.

Syncretism:  Gardner tries to reach back to a pan-European paganism, and in doing so he rolls together a number of different historical paganisms together to achieve something close to duotheism (belief in two gods).  In The Book of Shadows, as part of the Charge of the Goddess, Aradia is said to have been worshipped  as “Artemis, Astarte, Dione, Melusine, Aphrodite, Cerridwen, Diana, Arianrhod, Bride, and by many other names” (Farrar and Farrar, vol. 1, p. 42; Wilborn 121), as if all these goddesses were really all the same.  (Your humble blogger kids you not, even though Artemis is an eternally virgin huntress and Aphrodite a polyandrist.)

A consequence of trying to roll together a number of different historical European paganisms into a single religion is that who Aradia and Cernunnos are is a bit hazy.  Aradia is supposed to be the Earth, but at the same time she is the Moon and the “Star Goddess”.  Cernunnos is an underworld deity, but at the same time he is the Sun.

Morality:  Gardner lays out very little in the way of a moral code.  Even the famous Wiccan Rede (“An it harm none, do what ye will”) does not go back to Gardner.  Gardner thinks of witches as good and benevolent, not interested in hurting others—the sort of people that one might argue need regulation the least.   The rules that Gardner does lay down in the Old Laws deal with the regulation of covens, keeping Witchcraft secret, and magical professional ethics, not how witches should lead their lives when magic and the coven are not impacted.  In the second-degree initiation, the initiate is told that whatever he/she does will return to him/her threefold—but it does not mean that any action is strictly prohibited, only that one must face the consequences of what one does.  Drawing on Murray and Leland, Gardner embraces what is arguably an anti-Christian approach to morality, or rather an approach to morality opposed to a version of Christianity which probably never existed.  Gardner sees Christianity as anti-pleasure, anti-sex, anti-beauty, and anti-life,  and correspondingly he sees Witchcraft as being pro-pleasure, pro-sex, pro-beauty, and pro-life.  Someone who is opposed to a Christianity he thinks is overly controlling and restrictive (despite Paul’s antinomianism) is not the sort of person to lay down inviolable rules.  What Aradia wants from her worshippers, as noted in the Charge of the Goddess, is for her followers to enjoy themselves.  What does not affect that seems of little consequence to her.

Theological rating:  F.

Peace.

’Aharon/Aaron

Bibliography: 

Adelman, Aaron Solomon. “Faking Reality: A Moral Review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.”  (2012).  [http://divinemisconceptions.blogspot.com/2012/02/faking-reality-moral-review-of-ayn.html].

---. “The Goddess Who Never Existed: A Review of Raphael Patai’s the Hebrew Goddess.”  (2010).  [http://divinemisconceptions.blogspot.com/2010/08/goddess-who-never-existed-review-of.html].

---. “I Spit on Robert Graves: A Review of Robert Graves’s the White Goddess.”  (2010).  [http://divinemisconceptions.blogspot.com/2010/10/i-spit-on-robert-graves-review-of.html].

---. “Review of Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches.”  (2012).  [http://divinemisconceptions.blogspot.com/2012/06/review-of-aradia-or-gospel-of-witches.html].

---. “Review of the Golden Bough.”  (2012).  [http://divinemisconceptions.blogspot.com/2012/07/review-of-golden-bough.html].

---. “Review of the Witch-Cult in Western Europe and the God of the Witches.”  (2012).  [http://divinemisconceptions.blogspot.com/2012/06/review-of-witch-cult-in-western-europe.html].

Farrar, Janet, and Stewart Farrar. A Witches Bible Compleat. New York: Magickal Childe Publishing, Inc., 1984. Print.

Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough. 1922.  [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/frazer/index.htm].

Gardner, Gerald B. The Gardnerian Book of Shadows. 1949-1961. [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/gbos/index.htm.].

---. High Magic’s Aid. 1996.  [http://homepage.ntlworld.com/wisewoman/HighMagicsAid.doc].

---. The Meaning of Witchcraft. 1959. [http://homepage.ntlworld.com/wisewoman/TheMeaningofWitchcraft.doc].

---. Witchcraft Today. 1954.  [http://homepage.ntlworld.com/wisewoman/WiccaWitchcraftToday.pdf].

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess:  A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. Amended and enlarged ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948. Print.

LaVey, Anton Szandor. The Satanic Bible. New York: Avon Books, 1969. Print.

Leland, Charles Godfrey. Aradia, or, the Gospel of the Witches. 1899. [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/aradia/index.htm].

Mathers, S. Liddell MacGregor. The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis).  1888.  [http://www.sacred-texts.com/grim/kos/index.htm].

Murray, Margaret Alice. The God of the Witches. 2001.  [http://www.thewica.co.uk/godwitch.pdf].

---. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe:  A Study in Anthropology.  1921. [http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/wcwe/index.htm].

Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. Jewish Folklore and Anthropology. 3rd enlarged ed. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Print.

Pullman, Philip. The Amber Spyglass. His Dark Materials, Book 3. New York: Ballantine Books, 2000. Print.

---. The Golden Compass. Scholastic Children’s Books, 1995. His Dark Materials, Book 1. First Ballantine Books ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997. Print.

---. The Subtle Knife. Scholastic Children’s Books, 1997. His Dark Materials, Book 2. New York: Ballantine Books, 1997. Print.

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York:  Random House, 1957. New York: Signet, 1957. Print.

Wilborn, Bruce K. Witches’ Craft:  A Multidenominational Wicca Bible. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2005. Print.