PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

Claude Tholosan's 1445 (?) treatise So That the Errors of Magicians and Witches has some pretty profound things to say about the Horned.

Admittedly, he does call him Diabolus, the Devil.

But lay that by for now.

He shows himself to each according to their desire...nor is he seen except by whom he wishes.

“He shows himself to each according to their desire.”

He's skin-strong, this one, a changer of shapes, and how you see him depends on you and your expectations. He shapes himself to you.

Relationship. It's all about relationship: his with you, yours with him.

What a god.

He shows himself to some as a man, to some as a woman, or some beast. Me, I saw a beautiful naked man with branching antlers.

To some he shows himself as Cernunnos, to some as Pan.

To Herb Sloane, founder of Our Lady of Endor Coven and the Ophitic Gnostic Cultus of Sathanas (ca. 1965)—as perhaps to M. Tholosan—he showed himself as the Devil.

One might even suppose, then—surely it is not beyond his capability—that to some he shows himself as Christ.

I say again: what a god.

“...Nor is he seen expect by whom he wishes.”

When, on the morning after

the witches' sabbat, the Horned

leads us up out of the woods and,

to the singing of meadowlarks,

mounts the horizon and,

lambent with white flame,

disappears over the edge,

I've always wondered whether

he sinks down into Earth

or walks off into the Sky,

or maybe both;

but now I know.

I, Steven of Prodea,

Steven son of Russell,

with my own eyes have seen

the Gates of Heaven swing

wide to admit him, and lo!

to the sounding of horns

and trumpets he entered in,

and lo! the gates were shut.

This with my own lips I tell you,

and what I tell is true.

Myth meets myth.

Male-Male Transgression in 17th-Century Basque Witchcraft

In 1608, King Henri IV appointed witch-hunter Pierre de Lancre* to investigate a troubling outbreak of witchcraft in the French Basque country. According to de Lancre's report, this outbreak was fueled by the expression of forbidden sexuality.

When having sex with young men or women, the Devil, he reported, “took as much pleasure in sodomy as in the most ordered and natural voluptuousness.”

Men that he interrogated confessed to “performing sodomy” with one another, frequently with relatives, in order to “please the devil.”

One male witch confessed both to having frequently bottomed for the Devil, and topped other warlocks.

In the end, the judges decided that the Basque witches did not really believe in the Devil; rather, their witchery amounted to a mere smokescreen for the sex.

“And so they gathered,” they wrote, “and the naughtiest one among them pretended to be Satan.”

So, at least, claims Benjamin Ivry—without, I might add, providing any documentary evidence—in his 2000 biography of composer Maurice Ravel (8).

(What, you might ask, has any of this to do with Maurice Ravel? Item: Ravel's mother was Basque. Item: Ravel was born in the French Basque country. Item: Ravel was gay. Item: Ravel had a lifelong fascination with witchcraft and the occult. Item: As reflected in his music, Ravel had a lifelong devotion to the god Pan. Item: For the ancient Greeks, the phrase “to honor Pan” meant male-male sexual activity [16].)

While I have yet to confirm all of Ivry's historical claims concerning Basque witchcraft, my own research has turned up enough similar evidence to tentatively accept what he says as historical.

Certainly—as evidenced by the furor over “homosexuality” in contemporary conservative Christianity—in a hetero-normative Christian society, transgressive behaviors like witchery and same-sex sexuality quite naturally go hand-in-hand.

The cow is sick.

The baby is sick.

Your man has run off with another woman.

If the stories tell true, these are the times when the Devil would come and say: Come with me, join us.

And you would join.

There's no time when it's good to be poor, but early modern Europe was as bad as any. In a time without social safety nets, lacking kin, in times of need there was only the cold charity of the priests, and, later, the kirk. Under such circumstances, the death of a cow could spell ruin.

So let us say that the “Devil” was indeed (as they say) the local “cult leader,” the Man-in-Black, him that wore the Horns on the old fire-days.

Let us say that what he was offering you, in your time of need, was membership in a society of mutual aid beyond the kin-group.

“Our Mother, who art in Heaven....”

(Our Mother in Heaven: that would be the Moon, right?)

Och, gods help me: if I never see another pagan rewrite of the Our Father again, it will still be way too soon.

I understand, I understand. We're pagans; so much of our lore has been lost down the centuries that we're hungry, hungry. Cooking up something from scratch is hard; it's easier if you have a recipe to tweak.

Well, I have no problems with “reclaiming” material per se: certainly I've done my share of it down the years. (Most wassailing songs, for instance, reclaim very nicely, thank you very much.) It does seem to me that there's a certain etiquette involved in the process, though. (These things must be done delicately, or you hurt the spell.) You have no right to borrow something unless you can rightfully claim to have improved it.

So much for Mater Nostra.

What Protestants call the “Lord's Prayer” has its own integrity. For one thing, it sticks to basics, unlike virtually all of the bad pagan rewrites that I've seen. In America, where most of us take the basics for granted—and shame be upon us for it—we're left with nothing to pray for but intangibles like enlightenment and spiritual advancement.

As my grandmother used to say: Feh.

The last Our Mother that came my way (I think it began: “Our Mother and Father...”) was sent around—this was back in the days of on-line lists—by the moderator of the list. I'm not sure whether he intended it as a serious attempt at creating pagan liturgy (“Blessed be: welcome to the Pagan Irony-Free Zone”), or if he was just trying to stir up controversy. Either way, the results did not impress.

Besides, I'm a votary of the Horned. Witches don't need a new version of the Our Father; we've already got our own.

"Anything they say about us becomes ours, to do with as we please."

(C. F. Moore)

If (like me) you're one of those who has read pretty much everything that there is to read on the subject of witches, let me ask you: what do you think of J. R. Hanslet's 1933 All of Them Witches?

Isn't it a classic? Beautiful writing, good research, and—best of all—all that hot, hot information on what the Craft looked and felt like back BW (Before Wicca).

If you've got a copy (that beautifully-crafted J. Waghorn edition, with the real gold lettering and the black goatskin binding), hold onto it. It's never been reprinted, and (if you can find one), it will go for more than $1300.

Ha! Gotcha! If you think that you've read Hanslet's magnum opus, apparently you're one of those witches (gods know there are plenty of us out there) who can't admit that there's anything Craft-related that she doesn't know. Call it the Granny Weatherwax Syndrome.

In fact, you can't have read J. R. Hanslet's All of Them Witches because there is no such book. It's straight out of Ira Levin's brilliant 1967 witchsploitation novel Rosemary's Baby. Remember? It's the book that Hutch leaves to Rosemary that enables her to figure out that her neighbors (the ones who brought over the black candles during the big power outage) are actually witches and are planning to sacrifice her baby to Satan.

Or so she thinks.

“It's a religion,” she tells her husband (but it turns out he's a witch too). “It's an early religion that got—pushed into the corner” (177).

Personally, I think Rosemary's Baby is required reading for every modern witch: a little black gem of a novel, beautifully structured, with lots of twists and a delicious hermeneutic of suspicion. Don't trust anyone: they're all of them witches.

And, I mean. When, in the closing scene, Roman Castevet (né Steven Marcato) cries out: “He shall overthrow the mighty and lay waste their temples! He shall redeem the despised and wreak vengeance in the name of the burned and the tortured!” (236). Well, really, how can you help but chime in with a Hail Satan! or two, regardless of whether you actually believe in him or not?

Whenever I'm drawing up a bibliography on the Craft that lists enough books to make it inconspicuous, I almost always slip J. R. Hanslet's All of Them Witches in amongst the others. For those in the know, it'll read as a joke. For those that aren't, well...let 'em wonder. The god of witches—Old Wagtail Himself—is a notorious Trickster, and we, his children, are like him.

Because, best of all, Rosemary's Baby is a true story. That bit about the Horned siring children on mortal women: it's all true. In fact, my dear brother or sister in the Craft, he sired you.

So, you want to be a witch, do you?

Well, here's what you do.

Friday night, go up to the old Indian graveyard up top the ridge.

Take off every stitch of clothing and dance, dance for the Devil.

Then get dressed and go back home.

The next Friday, do the same, and the one after that. Nine weeks running, you do this.