The Book of Shadows: The Making of Wicca

Some time in the late 1940s, a retired British customs officer named Gerald Gardner began filling a leather-bound notebook with rituals, charms and invocations, written in mock-archaic spelling: Ye Bok of ye Art Magical. Gardner said he had been initiated in 1939 into a coven of hereditary witches in the New Forest, the survivors of an ancient pagan religion. His notebook, renamed the Book of Shadows, became the ritual book of the religion he launched, Wicca. Every new initiate was expected to copy it out by hand.

The book

• A working ritual manual: the casting of the circle, the calling of the quarters, initiation rites for three degrees, seasonal festivals, and the Charge of the Goddess.
• It changed constantly. Gardner revised it through the 1950s, and his students adapted it; there was never one fixed text.
• It is oath-bound: in traditional (Gardnerian and Alexandrian) covens, its contents are kept secret. Versions have been published, and they differ.

Doreen Valiente

In 1953 Doreen Valiente was initiated into Gardner's coven. She saw that much of the book came from the writings of Aleister Crowley (see V73) and from ceremonial magic, and she feared this would discredit the Craft. Gardner invited her to rewrite. Her poetic version of the Charge of the Goddess, in which the Goddess speaks to her worshippers, is now one of the best-known texts of modern Paganism. In 1964 she gave the first known public form of the Wiccan Rede: "Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfil: an it harm none, do what ye will."

Where did it come from?

Gardner presented the rites as ancient. Historians, above all Ronald Hutton in The Triumph of the Moon (1999), have traced them to sources of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Crowley, the Golden Dawn, Charles Leland's Aradia (1899), Freemasonry, folklore, and Margaret Murray's theory of a surviving witch cult, which historians of the witch trials reject (see The Witch Trials, ch32). Whether Gardner met any real group of practising witches before he wrote is uncertain; some researchers have argued for a New Forest group of some kind, but no evidence shows it continued an ancient religion.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The circle and the pentacle. The rites centre on the magic circle, cast to make a sacred space, and the pentacle, a disc marked with a five-pointed star and other signs, taken from ceremonial magic.

A copied book. The instruction to copy the book by hand made each initiate's copy a record of their own lineage, and handwriting itself part of the tradition.

The Goddess and the God. The book gave form to Wicca's pair of deities, the Goddess and the Horned God (see the Pantheon).

Connections

Wicca & Modern Paganism (ch38), with The Witch Trials (ch32) for the history Gardner claimed. Compare the Book of the Law (V73), from which some of its words came.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/book-of-shadows.html