Diana and Lucifer of the above-mentioned witch legend are but figurative forms of these Mighty

Ones. Although the legend is overlaid with later gnostic overtones such as the latinized names

"Diana" and "Lucifer," these are not inappropriate, and indeed they preserve many of the seeds of

truth. "Gnostic" itself in its etymological derivation means much the same as "witch": "One who

knows," "one who concerns himself or herself with the hidden wisdom." It is the tattered remnants of

the wisdom of the Watchers, or gods, which constitutes the lore of the witch.

The wisdom was said to have been borne away from the Lost Lands prior to the cataclysm by certain

survivors, who knew the minds of the Watchers, and fled the oncoming doom. The knowledge is said

to have been preserved until such a time as bit by bit in devious manners it could be secretly

reintroduced to humanity once more.

Babylonian legends of Uta-Napishtim and the Biblical Noah or his Greek parallel, Deucalion, all

contain echoes of this belief. Witch lore, moreover, tells of settlers from the Lost Lands coming in

their wanderings to the land which is now Britain and Northern Europe, or Middle Earth as it was

called in Old English, and mingling with the neolithic cultures then in existence. It was the people

produced by this intermingling that the iron-bearing Celts discovered on their sweep westwards across

Northern Europe and into Britain around 500 B.C.

The indigenous Britons, or Prytani as they then were called, were a strange people, who buried their

dead in great burial mounds, or barrows, used bronze as their only metal, and relied for weapons

chiefly upon slender arrows with delicate elder-leaf-shaped flint tips. Their religion, which was

connected in some way with the moon and stars, was conducted amidst stone circles, surrounded by a

bank and ditch (the original witch circle, in fact). The Prytani appear to have kept very much to

themselves, isolating themselves within raths, or large circular encampments, the only contact

between the two races being made by the Celtic shamans, or Druids, a word probably signifying wise

ones, or wizards. Much or all of the Druidic lore would appear to have been drawn from contact with

the Prytani. Indeed many druids were probably born of Prytanic fathers to Celtic mothers. The

legendary Merlin was maybe one such as this, born of "mortal" mother and fathered by a "devil" or

"elf." In fact elves were but the Teutonic names bestowed upon the remaining Prytani five centuries

later by the Germanic invaders of Britain.

Arthurian legend has it that King Arthur's half-sister Morgan la Fay (like Merlin) was also of elven

descent, accounting for her magical prowess, Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, and Vivian, Merlin's

enchantress, were of course completely elven in their ancestry. To this day there remain certain

Scottish families which claim elven descent, for by the time of the Roman invasion of Britain within

the first century A.D., the Prytani had almost all retreated to the northernmost tip of the country, and

were occupying the lands north of what is now Perth and Argyll in Scotland.

This may also account for the old witch belief of the north as being the holy direction. The northern

abodes of the rulers of the Picts, as the Prytani were known by the Romans, were often mysterious

vitrified forts, towers whose outer stones had been fused together by great fires, making them

practically impregnable to all attack. This is probably the origin of the witch's Glass Castle, which you

will encounter later on. We know for a fact that glass castles such as these existed at Craig Phadrick at

Inverness, Dun Fionn, Achterawe, and Dundbhairdghal.

By the eleventh century A.D., subsequent to successive invasions of Britain, as it was now called, by

Teutonic Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and lastly Normans, Prytanic lore had been completely

overlaid by a conglomeration of Celtic, Roman, Saxon, and finally Christian beliefs, gnostic and

otherwise. The Prytani themselves, now referred to by either their Saxon epithet, Elvenfolk, or simply

as People of the Heath or heathens, were rapidly dwindling into legend. The elven king and queen in

their enchanted hill which opened up on the ancient holy festivals of Halloween and Beltane were fast

passing out of public memory, recalled only by the wise, or as they were known in the old English

tongue, the Wicce and Wicca, Wizards and Witches. The legend of the Elvenfolk's ancestry still

survived, however, in heavily Christianized form. They were the remaining offspring of the fallen

angels. Neither devils, like Satan and his cohorts, nor angels, but somewhere between the two. Neither

good nor bad, merely indifferent.

It is at this point that organized Christianity began to take a hand, and bore down heavily on all those

suspected of either having consorted with or actually being elves or "faery folk."

The heresy trials of the Waldenses, Albigenses, and Knights Templar had spanned the twelfth,

thirteen, and fourteenth centuries, as Mother Church consolidated herself and waged war against the

forces of dissolution and darkness manifesting as rival doctrinal factions within her bosom. It was not

till the fifteenth century that the actual cult of witchcraft became established as an entity in the mind

of the Church's "instrument of justice," the Inquisition. This cult was in fact based upon traditional

witch beliefs, but strung together in a way reminiscent of the accounts of the religious rites that the

Church had chosen to believe were celebrated by the recently defunct heresies of the past two

centuries.

Joan of Arc was burned a witch and consorter with the faeries in 1431, and in 1484 Pope Innocent

VIII formally declared war on all "witches" in a Papal Bull. This was closely followed by the

Inquisitors Kramer and Sprenger producing their infamous handbook on witch finding, the Mallens

Maleficarum, or Witches Hammer, in 1486, a book incidentally used by Protestant and Catholic witch

hunters alike.

The sixteenth century saw a great revitalization of interest in the past in the form of the Renaissance.

Scholars began to study the antiquities of the classical world, and with them many of the old magical

practices, always, however, relating it to a Christian framework, for safety's sake if nothing else. In

Italy, Pico della Mirandola, Ficino and Giordano Bruno began experimenting with the old art of the

employment of magical archetypal images, while in northern Europe Abbot Trithemius and his pupils

Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, and Wierus turned their attentions circumspectly to the Black Arts. In

England, Dr. John Dee, preoccupied with the Lost Lands of Logres and the Star Temple at

Glastonbury, began his Scrying Experiments using a "great chrystalline globe," or seeing stone. It was

during the course of these experiments that certain parts of the pre-flood language are said to have

been rediscovered, a so-called Enochian tongue, the original language of the Nephelim.

By the seventeenth century, the persecution of witches, by Protestants now as well as Catholics, seems

to have fairly well decimated most of the centres of witch lore, save those preserved under heavy

disguise of Cabalistic or alchemical learning. Even these by now had also become suspect, and

apparently owing to this, secret brotherhoods such as the Rosicrucians and Freemasons were

organized, for the very purpose of keeping the flame of the old wisdom burning.

By the eighteenth century Masonic and Hermetic lodges had become widespread and the power of the

Church had been considerably reduced, indeed was waning fast, never to recover its old position of

strength. Within the lodges, many old witch secrets were being rediscovered. Swedenborg

reintroduced the concept of that principle which is known as clairvoyance, or ESP, and Mesmer began

his researches on what he called animal magnetism, but that witches nowadays refer to simply as

witch power. The powers of the deep mind were being rediscovered.

The nineteenth century, with its bias toward materialist science, saw a greater concentration on

aspects of magical power under one name or another. In 1801 the English magus Francis Barratt had

gathered together a school of twelve students of arcane lore with himself as leader, a traditional coven,

in fact. It is probably to this magical society that the great French occultist Eliphas Levi, alias Abbe

Constant, and Lord Bulwer Lytton had belonged, both of whom widely publicized the marvels of the

newly rediscovered witch power, under the name of the Astral Light in Levi's case, Vril in Lytton's.

Baron Reichenbach was also trying to put this same mysterious energy, which such mediums as D. D.

Home, Eusapia Palladino, and the Fox sisters were flaunting before the public, on a firmer scientific

footing in his experiments with what he designated "odylic force" or "od." The task was taken up in

earnest by the English Society for Psychical Research when it was formed in 1882.

However, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth that the

occult world lost its somewhat strained "scientific" outlook of the previous hundred years, and turned

its attention once more, after all the centuries, to the old gods.

In 1851 Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had met the aforementioned Rosicrucian magus Bulwer Lytton,

and impressed by the encounter, had organized the Theosophical Society in 1875, the object of which

was to establish a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity. The purpose of this nucleus was

to study the supreme source of all the world religions, the central "Wisdom Religion" as vouchsafed to

various peoples of the earth in such a manner as best suited to time and geographical circumstance,

and which was said to have been in existence from time immemorial; the old wisdom of the Watchers,

in fact. In Madame Blavatsky's society it was the Oriental branch of this Wisdom, comprising the

teachings of Vedanta and Esoteric Buddhism, which was the main inspiration.

Closely paralleling this movement, however, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was formed in

England a few years later, similar in ideal but pursuing a Western, Rosicrucian path bound up with a

system of ceremonial magic comprising invocation of ancient Egyptian gods, Cabalistic formulae, and

Dr. John Dee's sixteenth-century Enochian research. This erudite institution attracted many fertile

minds including the poet W. B. Yeats, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood, all on the fringe or

involved with the "celtic twilight," and all greatly preoccupied with the rediscovery of the old gods, as

will be readily discerned if one acquaints oneself with their writings. A later, Christianized

development of the original Order of the Golden Dawn was the "Stella Matutina." This offshoot

attracted such minds as A. E. Waite, Evelyn Underhill, and Charles Williams to its ranks.

However, in magical circles, it is chiefly the names of Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune that are

best remembered as members of these mysterious schools, both, like Yeats before them, deeply

involved with the reconstruction of the old mysteries, and the return to the elder gods. The researches

of Freud, but especially Jung, had provided part of a link with the past via the image-magic of

Trithemius and Bruno. The rest of the link was supplied by the magical dictum publicly propounded

by Dion Fortune herself, that in essence all gods are one god, and all goddesses but one goddess; that

the varying pantheons and hierarchies are but racial and regional permutations of the same ancient

archetypes.

In 1951 the last English witchcraft act was repealed, removing the final official stigma upon the study

and practice of the craft, in that country at least.

Three years later, an anthropologist, Gerald Gardner, published a work, Witchcraft Today, admitting,

for the first time in history, to the existence of a definite witch cult similar to the one suspected by

Margaret Murray in the twenties, a tenuous but widely spread body of magical practitioners who did

not cloak their occult operations under scientific, Christian, or Cabalistic guise, but preferred simply

to practise their arts in the old manner that they had inherited from the past, under the banner of the

old gods

Most of the witch processes that remain to us now are simple and unsophisticated in

comparison with the starry wisdom of the lost lore of the Watchers, fragments of which are daily in

the process of being rediscovered through "legitimate" scientific research.

In fact our present-day witch magic is decadent. A patchwork quilt of historical odds and ends,

religious flotsam and jetsam, but containing in the midst of that welter of confusing symbolism

enough of the old secrets to make the processes work if properly pursued. The methods nowadays

may seem to some childish, hit and miss compared with the original starry wisdom, but modern

witches believe that despite the accretions and maybe distortions of the past sixty centuries, there still

remains at the centre of the cinder a spark of that mysterious dark angelic fire which first breathed life

into the clay of this world.

It is to this remnant of the old wisdom in its most practical aspect that you shall be introduced in the

following pages. This is what witchcraft is all about. Theory and scholarship I shall leave to other

books. The interested reader, should he wish to pursue magical theory in greater detail, or follow the

historical thread of the witch trials back into the labyrinth of time, will find a list of some of the more

useful works at the end of this book in the bibliography.