Extract from Seán Manchester's autobiographical works:
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In the autumn of 1985, I was invited to a performance of Byron in Hell at the Offstage theatre in London’s Chalk Farm. It was a far cry from my own one man show, An Evening with Lord Byron, some years prior, but the actor, Ian Frost, a personal friend of a mutual acquaintance ― my London secretary, Diana Brewester ― wanted to meet me. After the show on December 11th, Frost, still in costume, bowed deeply as he shook my hand.
Four days later, I gave a piano recital at a soirée in Highgate hosted by an American socialite to honour the publication of my full account of the Highgate investigation. I regarded this as closure on that part of my life, plus it was time to move on in other ways. Mary Sweet-Escort, a dear friend, who had enjoyed my recitals and poetry readings, took me to dinner where we exchanged conversation and reflected on the state of both our relationships. Hers appeared to be in the doldrums, and I had been seeing Kate Dwyer, the niece of a Roman Catholic archbishop of that name. That, too, was going nowhere. Kate later left our shores for California.
Kate during our time together.
On 19 April 1986, in the following year, the 162nd anniversary of Lord Byron’s death, Diana Brewester and I joined the Byron Society on their thirteenth annual pilgrimage to Newstead Abbey and Hucknall Torkard in Nottinghamshire, the county of my birth. None of the excitement of earlier pilgrimages was evident on this occasion ― only the sense of a vanishing world of chivalry, dignity and honour, which, at least, was still apparent among members of the Byron Society. The day was enjoyable enough, but the decade of the 1980s witnessed the advent of creeping mediocrity, now laced with the unattractive condiment of cynicism.
In July 1985, I had left Hampstead Garden Suburb to live in a modest cottage in South Hertfordshire, which would become both retreat and safe house. Contracts were exchanged on my birthday. Kate was gone. My personal life was on hold. Originally named “Grouse Cottage,” owing to the grouse that were to be found in a neighbouring field, I renamed the Victorian dwelling “Grail Cottage” ― and set about making it suitable for my work and studies. Visitors were quick to remark on the many crucifixes adorning the walls.
Travelling to Islington to visit my parents, friends and colleagues, I sometimes stopped off at the junction where Holloway Road and Seven Sisters Road, not a stone’s throw from my old photographic studio. It was on such a detour, talking to a friend next to a newspaper vendor on the corner, around midday on Monday, 6 October 1986, that something occurred to reawaken dormant feelings held within one's heart and soul.
The girl I met in October 1986 .
Pale and thin, dressed in a flimsy top, she walked along the pavement in a northerly direction as the autumn sunshine danced on the heads of passers-by. Yet something drew me to her. We spoke, not as strangers, more as friends who had known each other for ever. This encounter was quite brief. Had I not asked for her telephone number, and shown an interest in the symbol she was wearing around her neck, I doubt she would have provided it. All I really knew about her was her name ― Sarah.
When we next met, however, I would discover a great deal more, including the presence of the silver pentagram. A drama and dance graduate, Sarah had arrived in London in May 1984, only to become enmeshed in witchcraft like so many others. When I encountered her at the crossroads in Holloway, she was a member of a coven who were outwardly wiccan and inwardly satanic. This was not unusual. In my experience, groups on the Left-hand Path operate exactly in this way. Yet Sarah seemed to be such an open and honest person from the very start that her fascination with the dark occult belied everything I saw. Clearly she had been duped by those in the coven whose members I would soon meet.
Gerald Gardner ~ UK witch.
The story of modern witchcraft definitively began with Gerald Gardner who was born on 13 June 1884 at Great Crosby, near Blundell Sands in Lancashire, England. Gardner definitely accumulated an extensive occult background. His formative years were spent in South East Asia where he became a Mason (in Ceylon) and also a nudist. In 1939 Gardner returned to England an avid occultist. He immediately became a member of the Rosicrucians and through such associations met a certain Dorothy Clutterbuck, known as “Old Dorothy,” who allegedly initiated Gardner into the New Forest Coven in September of that year. However, research suggests that Gardner did not discover a pre-existing witchcraft group. A paper by Gardner disclosed that he took the magical resources he acquired in Asia and a selection of Western magical texts and created a new religion centred upon the worship of the Mother Goddess which is precisely what has become the focus of modern witches. There is no evidence that witchcraft existed in ancient pagan cultures that predate the Bible. While it is true that ancient pagans practiced various rituals, it is not possible to substantiate, for example, Margaret Murray’s thesis in lieu of the scattered history of pre-industrial societies. It is just too difficult to piece together so many eclectic fragments of various beliefs and practices endemic to cultures wholly unrelated to each other. Moreover, a single organised matriarchal religion cannot be traced.
Ten years after his self-proclaimed initiation, Gardner published a fictional account of witches called High Magick’s Aid. Then, following the repeal of the witchcraft laws in Britain in 1951, he followed this with a non-fiction book, titled Witchcraft Today, published in 1954. His high point must have come when he was invited to a reception at Buckingham Palace in 1960. Gerald Gardner, the founder of modern witchcraft, died on 13 February 1964 while returning from abroad on the SS Scottish Prince.
In addition to Margaret Murray, the influence of Aleister Crowley, Theosophy, Freemasonry, ritual sex magic etc all blended eclectically in the writings of Gerald Gardner. Out of the cauldron of his mind emerged modern witchcraft, or as it is commonly called, wicca. Robin Skelton, himself a witch, confirms in his book The Practice of Witchcraft Today that “Gardner’s work influenced the Old Religion deeply. His rituals owed much to the occult and kabbalistic tradition. His admiration for the occultist Aleister Crowley led him to include some of Crowley’s words and rituals … the sexual rituals and practices of Hindu Tantrism crept into occultism in the late nineteenth century and deeply influenced Aleister Crowley who, in turn, influenced Gerald Gardner and therefore Gardnerian witchcraft.” Gardner’s connection with Crowley has a deeper shared philosophical root. One of the founders of Ordo Templi Orientis was the Freemason Franz Hartmann, a companion of the theosophist Helena Blavatsky. Prior to Gardner’s discovery of witchcraft, he was a member of a Rosicrucian fraternity, the Fellowship of Crotona. This was an offshoot of the Temple of the Rosy Cross, which was founded by Annie Besant, the British leader of a second theosophical society that sprang up after the death of Madame Blavatsky. An OTO writer in Pagan News (August 1989) maintains that “Crowley wrote the Gnostic Mass as the public ritual of the OTO … it should be remembered that sections have been incorporated into the Great Rite, the third and highest wiccan initiation.” Some hold that Gardner actually paid Crowley to write the rituals that have become fundamental to modern witchcraft. As far back as 1915 Crowley had advised: “The time is just ripe for a natural religion … be the founder of a new and greater Pagan cult.”
The principal instructions and rituals mingled Crowley’s magic with Masonic symbolism and ingredients from the East. And from this a new generation of advocates for a new feminist spirituality has emerged. Among these are Alexander Sanders, Sybil Leek, Raymond and Rosemary Buckland, Margot Adler, Jim Alan, Jessie Wicker Bell, Gavin and Yvonne Frost, Doreen Valiente, Zsuzanna Budapest, Donna Cole, Ed Fitch, Janet and Stewart Farrar (replaced after his death by Gavin Bone), and numerous others, including many rogues and charlatans. Alex Sanders had the greatest impact in England during the 1960s at the time of the counter-culture, occult explosion, satanic revival, and the fast growing mass media. I confronted the self-styled “King of the Witches” on Radio London in January 1971 at a time when Sanders was threatening to raise a demon before an audience on the stage of the Hendon Classic cinema in north London. The event went terribly wrong. Sanders blamed it on the fact that someone sitting in the audience near the stage was wearing a silver Christian cross. It was not me, as some thought, but I did oppose what he did.
Alex Sanders ~ “King of the Witches.”
Sanders’ early life is mysterious and various published accounts are undoubtedly fictional for the most part. He was born Orrell Alexander Carter in Birkenhead on 6 June 1926, the son of a Harold, a musician, and Hannah Carter. His Welsh grandmother, Mrs Bibby, was apparently a cunning woman and medium who gave him an early interest in the occult. His mother was also a medium, as was Alex and all his brothers. The young Alex Sanders (he later changed his surname to Sanders by deed poll) became quite well known as a trance medium where he lived. The claim by him that he was initiated into witchcraft by his grandmother when he was seven years old, after he interrupted one of her solitary rituals, is largely dismissed even by other witches. Mrs Bibby was a cunning woman from the foothills of Snowdonia, but not quite a witch. The initiation story is probably an elaboration of Mrs Bibby’s influence on him that (along with his mother) introduced him to spiritualism and the occult. An almost identical story was later claimed by phoney witch David Farrant concerning his being “initiated” at a young age by his mother, who, according to him, was also a medium and a spiritualist. The Sanders’disciple Stewart Farrar revealed: “Neither Alex nor the family had any idea [Mrs Bibby] was a witch, but she gave him no time to brood. She had the clothes off him, initiated him on the spot, and told him that he was now a witch too and that various dreadful things would happen if he betrayed the secret.” Bearing in mind that Sanders was a seven-year-old child at the time, the claim is more redolent of child abuse than wicca as promoted by today’s practitioners. His assertion that his “Book of Shadows” was given him by his grandmother is, therefore, almost certainly false. The Sanders’ “Book of Shadows” is fundamentally a Gardnerian one with some differences and some of the prose sections missing.
Sanders gave a very vivid account of his early manhood in King of the Witches by June Johns with tales of his falling into the ways of the Left-hand Path when he was adopted by a wealthy, childless couple. He supposedly immersed himself into a life of hedonistic orgies dedicated to the dark powers, describing this as his “black magic phase.” According to the same work, Sanders rescued himself by undergoing the long exhaustive ritual of purification in the magical system of Abramelin in order to purge himself of his excesses. He nevertheless died in abject poverty with lung cancer in a hospice on the East Sussex coast of England, close to where Aleister Crowley had also died four decades earlier, and where “high priest of British witches” Kevin Carlyon resides in a nearby small seaside resort. The date of Alex Sanders’ death at the age of sixty-one is 30 April 1988, celebrated as Beltane on the witchcraft calendar.
The sheer number of modern-day witches suggests a wide variety of beliefs and practices. However, despite the pluralism and diversity, distinct principles derived from Gardnerian wicca are common to most modern witches. First and foremost is the belief in the Great Mother Goddess. Historically she has manifested in numerous forms: Artemis, Astarte, Aphrodite, Diana, Kore, Hecate etc. The consort Pan (the Horned God) is the male principle of wicca. He, too, possesses a varied nomenclature, including such names as Adonis, Apollo, Baphomet, Cernunnos, Dionysius, Lucifer, Osiris, Thor etc. The Mother Goddess is represented by the moon and the Horned God is represented by the sun. Each year, Pan dies and is brought back to life in a ceremony called “Drawing down the Sun.” The ceremony associated with the Mother Goddess is called “Drawing down the Moon.” Each coven varies in the ceremonial details. Wiccans, or witches, nonetheless have a calendar that is common to all groups. High festive days pinpoint key phases in the seasonal progress of mother earth. There are eight seasonal festivals, known as Sabbats, identified as follows: Imbolg (February 2); Spring Equinox (March 21); Beltane (April 30); Midsummer Solstice (June22); Lugnasad (July 31); Autumn Equinox (September 21); Samhain, also known as Hallowe’en (October 31); Winter Solstice (December 22). Imbolg, Beltane, Lugnasad and Samhain are known as the Greater Sabbats, while the four equinoxes are the Lesser Sabbats. Additional meeting times for covens are Esbats.
Witches practice clairvoyance, divination, astral projection, spells, curses, and herbal healing. They are supposed to follow a principle of ethics known as the wiccan rede where the effects of magic are believed to return threefold upon the person working it for good or ill. Not all adhere to this voluntary code. Their very belief in gods and goddesses, whether symbolic or not, identifies witchcraft groups as embracing a polytheistic conceptualisation of the universe. Modern witches, however, do not necessarily believe in a pantheon of male and female deities, but that reality itself is understood in many different ways. Truth is not a matter of correspondence between language, the world, or any one conceptual model. Put differently, there is no singular expression of truth. Truths that are contradictory are held to simultaneously. Symbols that accompany wiccan lore include the amulet, the talisman, the ankh, the pentagram (as worn by Sarah when I noticed her walking along Holloway Road, London, on 6 October 1986), the athame (ritual dagger), the cup, the pentacle, the rune, the sigil, the wand, the tarot, the cauldron, the altar, the fith-fath (effigy) etc.
Wicca is sharply at odds with Christianity because divination, spiritism, magic, sorcery, witchcraft, and all the dark arts in general are condemned in the Bible. The polytheism in witchcraft is also a blatant contradiction to the strict monotheism of Christianity. Like most other non-Christian religions and religious cults of the world, witchcraft obliterates the distinction between Creator and creation. Wiccans deify nature in such a way that both God and nature are identified as synonymous. Furthermore, since divinity lies in nature and in the cosmos, it also resides within each person. Here it can be observed that wiccan thought closely parallels Hinduism and other Eastern paradigms. Traditional Christian thought holds that witchcraft has its source in Satan, the “god of this age” (2 Corinthians 4: 4). Some wiccan groups, but not all, are an introduction to overt diabolism and Devil worship, and this was undoubtedly what Sarah had become embroiled in prior to our meeting in late 1986.
Sarah’s story is told comprehensively in From Satan To Christ, where I remark: “Within a couple of years of becoming a witch Sarah had drastically lost weight and was constantly run-down with the result of regular illness. Her skin, hair and eyes had become dull and suffered from acute tiredness. … The young woman I met on that bleak October day in 1986 was a mere shadow of her former self. Three years earlier she had been a stunning beauty with an abundance of health and energy. The pitiful, anaemic creature with dark circles beneath her eyes that I beheld was now a Satanist. Yet, against all odds, her heart shone through that sad exterior.” (From Satan To Christ, Holy Grail, 1988, page 57).
I felt obliged to embark on one last undercover mission where I risked detection in order to rescue this young person from the fate that awaited her as a traveller on the Left-hand Path. The outcome was my incurring the anger and wrath of the cult leaders at the end of a successful operation where not only Sarah, but eventually everyone else in the coven, especially after the publication of From Satan To Christ, recognised the truth and turned against the coven leaders. Some of them, Sarah included, contributed to television programmes and film documentaries exposing the dangers they had faced.
I recognised straight away that Sarah was special. The coven leaders also thought so, because, unlike the other female members, Sarah had been kept apart from their more squalid and disgusting lifestyle choices, and was not forced to attend their ritual animal sacrifices. She was apparently being kept pure for what the leaders described as the “Mars rituals.”
These initiations began during the time I came to know her, and consisted of acts of humiliation, discomfort, and a gruelling survival course. It became apparent that they would end in Sarah either becoming “filled with the essence of Mars” and giving birth to a demon possessed child with possibly her own death in the attempt to do so. It was essential to break the stranglehold the coven had on her, and this was only possible through engaging in yet another covert operation.
But Sarah now had my love, protection and sanctuary.
“No longer could she remain at her flat in Islington ― not if I was to attempt to rescue her. I watched her cry herself to sleep and when she woke the next evening I took her home where she would remain for as long as she needed. … No harm would befall her within the walls of her new-found sanctuary. Her safety would, for the time being, depend on her remaining under my protection. … The days and nights ahead would be crucial as the Light and the forces of darkness fought for a girl whose soul was still intact and heart was largely innocent.” (From Satan To Christ, Holy Grail, 1988, pages 67-68).
Wiccan thought offers a variety of views concerning the existence of evil and very few would deny its existence. However, the most common view among witches is to understand evil, not as a separate reality apart from good, as do Manichæans, Satanists, and other groups, but rather as a necessary aspect of good. Yet is the evil that human beings encounter in the world and in history an acceptable and healthy aspect of a reality that, according to wiccan thought, has no flaws to begin with? How can such a view of evil be reconciled to the wiccan rede: “That ye harm none, do what ye will”? Is not evil harmful? To the victims and families of a murderer it certainly is. If there is no one absolute standard or set of truths exclusive of all falsities, how can even the wiccan rede be regarded as true? To grant that it is, is to grant that there is at least one absolute truth. Many witches are willing to live with this blatant contradiction because of either naïveté, intellectual dishonesty, or just convenience.
For Christianity, God is the source of all truth, and the Bible is God’s revelation of such truth, deemed necessary for the world.
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