#james frazer

This is an older post, but it's gonna be relevant to later ones, so I'm sharing it here. Buckle up, because there's a story here.

I discovered Wicca about twelve years ago, and got super into it. It was my obsession at the time. I had learned that magic was real, so by god, I was going to learn it! At the time, I didn’t know to distinguish between witchcraft as a practice, neopaganism as modern polytheism, and Wicca as a specific religion under both umbrellas. The sources I looked at lumped them all together as though they were interchangeable. So, I thought I had to invoke Hecate on full and dark moons in order to be a witch. I thought that was just what witches did. I don’t regret having done those early “drawing down” rituals — I really felt something when I did them, and I learned that I have a natural gift for interacting with gods. But that lack of context and conflation of multiple disparate things would become a much bigger problem.

I don’t think I ever bought the “Old Religion” narrative, because I was lucky enough to find a documentary about Wicca’s origins early on. Some people still repeated it in 2014, but I was aware that Wicca was a modern religion that wasn’t even a hundred years old. That didn’t bother me. What mattered to me was that Wicca had a veneer of universality.

At the time, I was also really into the Jungian or Theosophical idea that all religions had some kind of universal underlying concept. I thought that all religions worshipped the same gods under different names, and enjoyed grouping gods under the banner of archetypes, essentially claiming that all the gods in each box were the same entities under culturally-specific names. Wicca encouraged this notion, because it interpreted all gods and goddesses as aspects of the Lord and Lady. For a few years in there, I really thought that Mithras, Attis, Horus, and Dionysus were all born on Dec. 25th. I wrote posts about how Christmas trees were obviously pagan, and most other Christmas traditions were pagan, claims that often showed up in Wiccan spaces and even in published books. It didn’t occur to me to try to find primary sources for these claims, because I didn’t know how to do that kind of research, or even what that kind of research looked like. It almost goes without saying that I was also super into Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the “Monomyth.”

Wicca’s apparent universality was why it appealed to me. I thought that Wicca had somehow dug through to the marrow of religion itself and constructed an ultimate religion, a universal religion that appealed to ancient and archetypal forces. Wicca felt primeval. I took for granted that every religion must worship the God and Goddess, and honor the cycle of their sacred marraige, death, and resurrection (except Christianity, which had unwisely done away with the Goddess). I didn’t question it when Wiccans said that Yule, the Winter Solstice, celebrated the return of the Light in the darkest days of winter, because it made intuitive sense. It was like Wicca had taken religion and stripped away all the superfluous bits to reveal the heretofore hidden ideas that all religions centered around. I thought I was tapping into a hidden, magical heritage that I didn’t know I had. That felt powerful, meaningful, magical.

Then the cracks started showing. Here’s a simple but specific example: Early on in my studies into Wicca, I became absolutely ecstatic to learn that the festival of Lammas was on Harry Potter’s birthday, July 31st. That was a coincidence, of course, because JKR had given Harry her own birthday. But Harry Potter’s patronus was a stag, and stags are symbols of the god Cernunnos. They shed and regrow their antlers each year, which represents rebirth and the Tree of Life. And Harry Potter’s wand wood is his birthwood, holly, which represents the Holly King (an aspect of Cernunnos) who dies on Lammas. Just like Harry Potter dying and being resurrected in Book Seven!

So, let’s break this down:

Lammas or “loaf-mass” is an Anglo-Saxon harvest festival at the midpoint between the Summer Solstice and Autumn Equinox, that may or may not have had pagan origins. It happens at the same time as the Irish festival of Lughnasadh, which involved games and feasting in honor of the god Lugh. The Wiccan celebration of Lammas or Lughnasadh at which the Holly King dies, as detailed in the Farrars’ A Witches’ Bible, has nothing to do with any of this.

Cernunnos does have antlers, but we know almost nothing else about him. His associations, mythology, and mystical significance are almost all a modern invention. We certainly can’t say whether he was a “dying-and-rising” god or not, and the entire concept of a “dying-and-rising god” was pretty much invented by James Frazer in The Golden Bough. (The Farrars cite Frazer a lot.)

The emphasis placed on death and resurrection is, in part, a result of the cultural dominance of Christianity, which places an enormous amount of emphasis on that concept. Though it exists in paganism, it isn’t always that important and is often interpreted differently, but you wouldn’t know that from The Golden Bough.

The notion of “birthwoods” was invented wholesale by Robert Graves in The White Goddess, based on a very weird interpretation of the Ogham alphabet. There never was any “Celtic Tree Calendar,” but no one questions this because “Druids = Trees” in our minds.

We can also thank Robert Graves for the entire concept of the Oak and Holly King. He selectively interpreted various myths in the context of a battle between winter and summer, even though there’s no evidence that any of those myths were originally interpreted that way. The notion of a battle between winter and summer itself comes from Frazer again. Graves also introduced the concept of this battle happening specifically for the sake of the Goddess.

So, that amazing revelation I had about Harry Potter turned out to be based on nothing authentic. (Also, it's so cringe it's actually hard to write, but I'm trying to be kind to my 14-year-old self. We were all cringe at 14.)

That’s a small and kind of silly example, but there were a lot of moments like that. They added up. I realized, steadily, that almost all of the ideas underlying Wicca had their origins in poor scholarship from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and some of them were just plain made up. The Sabbat cycle wasn’t nearly as balanced as it appeared to be at first glance, because it had been cobbled together from different traditions. That’s why the story of the God and Goddess didn’t fit together properly (Hey, isn’t the death of the Holly King supposed to happen at the Winter Solstice, when Oak takes over again? Why does he die during the Farrars’ Lammas ritual? How many bloomin’ times must the God die?!). The God and Goddess concept is also painfully heteronormative and gender-essentialist. There never were any prehistoric European matriarchies, that idea was made up by men in the nineteenth century like Eduard Gerhard and J. J. Bachofen. There’s a popular claim that the “Night of Hecate” is on Nov. 16th (or Nov. 30th), but there’s no historical source for that. (Pro tip: If an alleged Roman holiday doesn’t have a fancy Latin name, it’s not real.) Don’t even get me started on the stupid Jesus was really [insert pagan god here] memes or all of the claims about Yule and Christmas. It was like watching a house of cards collapse in slow motion.

Wicca isn’t responsible for all of this misinformation, and I don’t mean to suggest that it is. But part of the reason I absorbed so much misinformation is because of the lack of historical context in Wiccan or Wicca-adjacent material. Wiccan material was especially likely to propagate ideas that were misleading or just plain wrong, usually because the author was just as misled as I was. Other pagan traditions aren’t immune to this sort of misinformation, but they’re not at the center of the web of it; I discovered that once I separated out all of the different things that were lumped together under Wicca, I could do more targeted in-depth research into each one. I learned that ancient pagans had very different mindsets from modern ones, that they thought about gods differently, that the assumptions under which they engaged with the divine were different. I learned that “witchcraft” is a particularly divisive term for several different varieties of folk magic, and that folk magic is often Christian. I learned about the differences and similarities between folk and ceremonial magic. I learned which traditions of both Wicca was pulling from. I learned that all this stuff I thought was part of one unified and universal system was actually a complex amalgam of influences, most of them modern.

 Why did it matter? Wicca is still a valid spiritual path. In fact, it's more than valid: It's a genuinely effective system! Regardless of its origins, it works, and if I personally find meaning in it, that’s enough of a reason to practice it. Also, complete historical accuracy is pretty much impossible for any neopagan religion. So why do I care?

I care because that illusion of universality is what I liked about Wicca in the first place. Once I learned that it was all based on bullshit, the spell was broken, and I became too disillusioned to continue with it. Not just disillusioned, but angry. I felt betrayed. It’s never really felt the same since. If I’d learned the authentic history of it in the first place, I might not have felt that way. But I was only a kid, and had to learn the hard way how to find good sources and trace ideas to their origin. In a way, that trial by fire is what gave me my excellent research skills. This is also why I’m so aggressive about attacking those misconceptions and informing newbies of them early, even if it’s harsh or disappointing. I want to make sure they know what they’re getting themselves into, before they have the rug pulled out from under them like I did.

But, after all of that, I’m sort of coming back around to Wicca. Learning the truth about it was sort of like finding out that Santa isn’t real; some of the magic is gone, but I still leave out milk and cookies for Santa, and there are still things that I can appreciate about Wicca. Something about it resonated, and that’s hardly worthless. What if there were a way for me to rediscover its magic?

I’ve gotten a lot of practice at separating out my scholarly brain that looks for hard evidence from my mystical brain that makes a bunch of amazing connections, and letting them both operate in tandem instead of undercutting each other. Too much scholarship, and there’s no room for connections that give you the amazing feeling of everything suddenly making sense. Too much mysticism, and you end up with insane conspiracy theories with no historical grounding. It’s a difficult balance to maintain, but an important one.

I’ve also gotten this experience of feeling betrayed by something that once felt meaningful several more times, and have had to find ways to deal with it without becoming entirely disillusioned. (Lookin at you, Harry Potter.) More recently, I discovered that “spiritual alchemy” is also a modern construct with limited historical grounding that was codified by people in the nineteenth century. And this was after writing my grad school admissions essay on it! I said that “real alchemists knew it wasn’t about making gold” in an academic paper, and I am so embarrassed! But I didn’t feel angry or betrayed when I learned that was wrong. Instead, I revised my historical claims to be more accurate, but still kept the psycho-spiritual interpretation for myself because I thought it was meaningful. This year, I basically admitted defeat regarding Christmas. And I still love Jung; significant parts of my practice are based on his ideas.

Someone on Reddit astutely pointed out that Wicca was based on the scholarship of the time, just as reconstructionist pagan religions are now. The scholarship of the time just happened to be really shitty, and that’s not Wicca’s fault. I rant about Frazer and Graves and Margaret Murray as if the Farrars and other Wiccan writers should have known that their work was bunk, but why should they have known? Frazer was a leading authority on anthropology for so long. Murray was published by Oxford! Even if the experts in those fields knew better, it usually takes a while for hot new scholarship to reach the general public (longer, pre-internet). It might not have made it that far in 2014.

One week before Good Friday, the prelates of progressive religion have chosen England’s greatest living philosopher Sir Roger Scruton as a scapegoat to make atonement for the nation’s sins of Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and racism. All Scruton had described Islamophobia as a propaganda word “invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue,” he noted there was a George Soros empire in Hungary and he damned the Chinese government for turning its people into robots. Progressive puritans pronounced Scruton’s statements blasphemous for using the “language of white supremacists.”

Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola

Okay so I found my Old Enemy in a bookstore and…

fuckin’ GASTER was behind The Golden Bough the whole time!!!