A Thought Experiment

Two of the modern Craft's Grand Old Men, Gerald Gardner and Victor Anderson, claimed initiation into preexisting covens: Gerald into the New Forest coven in southern England, Victor into the Harpy coven in the northwestern US. Were their claims true?

Well, there's true and there's true. After decades of historical research, mostly by true-believers, the evidence—to my mind, at least—remains tenuous, at best. But, speaking as a storyteller who has told a few in his time, let me tell you that it's nearly always more convincing to embroider what actually was, than to make up something out of whole cloth.

So let me tell you what I suspect.

Did the New Forest and Harpy covens actually exist? Personally, I suspect that there were indeed two small groups of like-minded people—would-be occultists, maybe—who together studied their way into magic, and maybe even eventually into the Craft. My guess would be that we see here, in both instances, small groups of people who got together to experiment with magical practice, that eventually came to think of themselves (or, at least, to be thought of—by VA and GBG, if by no one else) as covens, but only retrospectively.

I've said for years that Harpy coven sounds to me like a Max Freedom Long study group that eventually branched out into magical practice. (Max Freedom Long was the Carlos Castaneda of the 30s and 40s: essentially, a fraud who clothed his own ideas in exotic dress; in Long's case, Hawaiian.)

Same with Gardner's Rosicrucian friends. Here, though, their magic came from Ceremonial Magic grimoires.

Anyone at the time who was interested in magic would have known Margaret Murray's ground-breaking 1921 Witch-Cult in Western Europe. It's not difficult to believe that the romance and excitement of creating a modern Witch-cult wouldn't have struck at least some of its readers.

But Murray's account is long on theory, short on practice. Needing to get their “how to” from somewhere else, my guess would be that Gardner's friends looked to Ceremonial Magic, and Anderson's to Long's “Huna.”

If this reading of the past bears any resemblance at all to what actually happened, these were just the first instances of a story which has since repeated itself again and again. I see it here in the Midwest pagan community.

The Big-Name Wiccan traditions were, at first, largely coastal phenomena, and took a long time to get to Flyover country here in the American Midwest. So what did we do?

We studied, and we experimented. In short, we did exactly what Gardner's and Anderson's friends did: we taught ourselves. And, as anyone versed in heuristics can tell, you learn best what you teach yourself.

So, did the New Forest and Harpy covens actually exist? Though I can't prove it, it seems likely to me that, in one sense or another, they probably did, and that would-be witches have followed in their tracks, studying and experimenting our way into actual coven-dom, ever since.

And, baby, that's good enough for me.