From The Wild Hunt
There’s a rather entertaining “top 10″ list of grimoires (both fictional and authentic) in a recent Guardian article that has been making the rounds on the Pagan web. What interested me was the entry (coming in at #10) for “Book of Shadows”.
“Last but not least there is the founding text of modern Wicca – a pagan religion founded in the 1940s by the retired civil servant, folklorist, freemason and occultist Gerald Gardner. He claimed to have received a copy of this “ancient” magical text from a secret coven of witches, one of the last of a line of worshippers of an ancient fertility religion, which he and his followers believed had survived centuries of persecution by Christian authorities. Through its mention in such popular occult television dramas as Charmed, it has achieved considerable cultural recognition.”
Now this was obviously a puff piece, not meant for serious scrutiny, but there are all sorts of small quibbles here. First, in this instance it should probably be called “Gerald Gardner’s Book of Shadows”, or the “Gardnerian Book of Shadows”, since all Witches are supposed to keep their own BOS and there are literally thousands of them around today. Secondly, Gardner’s BOS is Wicca’s “founding text” in only the loosest sense of the term (and try telling some other traditional Wiccan groups that Gardner wrote their “founding document”) since the religion is far more about practice (praxis) than text, and many of the rituals and poetry we associate with Wicca today were added after Gardner introduced the book to his group (just think of the additions of Doreen Valiente alone). Thirdly, the modern pop-culture associations with a “book of shadows” have almost nothing to do with Gardner’s book. Charmed is hardly paying some subtle tribute to “Ye Bok of ye Art Magical”.
This isn’t to say that the Gardnerian Book of Shadows hasn’t been hugely influential on the development of what we now call Wicca, only that the author assigns Gardner’s original book a certain kind of importance and centrality that it no longer possesses. Nor was Gardner some sort of Moses bringing the tablets of Wiccan law down from on high. I was under the impression it was more cookbook than holy writ, added and changed to adapt to the changing times. I’m sure Owen Davies, who has written at some length on witchcraft (and is flogging a new book concerning grimoires), knows all this and was simply trying to put an entertaining list together. What he’s really in trouble for is ranking Wicca’s “founding text” lower than the entirely fictitious Necronomicon!
PS - Thanks to Brendan Myers for tipping me off to this story.
--Cinosam
There’s a rather entertaining “top 10″ list of grimoires (both fictional and authentic) in a recent Guardian article that has been making the rounds on the Pagan web. What interested me was the entry (coming in at #10) for “Book of Shadows”.
“Last but not least there is the founding text of modern Wicca – a pagan religion founded in the 1940s by the retired civil servant, folklorist, freemason and occultist Gerald Gardner. He claimed to have received a copy of this “ancient” magical text from a secret coven of witches, one of the last of a line of worshippers of an ancient fertility religion, which he and his followers believed had survived centuries of persecution by Christian authorities. Through its mention in such popular occult television dramas as Charmed, it has achieved considerable cultural recognition.”
Now this was obviously a puff piece, not meant for serious scrutiny, but there are all sorts of small quibbles here. First, in this instance it should probably be called “Gerald Gardner’s Book of Shadows”, or the “Gardnerian Book of Shadows”, since all Witches are supposed to keep their own BOS and there are literally thousands of them around today. Secondly, Gardner’s BOS is Wicca’s “founding text” in only the loosest sense of the term (and try telling some other traditional Wiccan groups that Gardner wrote their “founding document”) since the religion is far more about practice (praxis) than text, and many of the rituals and poetry we associate with Wicca today were added after Gardner introduced the book to his group (just think of the additions of Doreen Valiente alone). Thirdly, the modern pop-culture associations with a “book of shadows” have almost nothing to do with Gardner’s book. Charmed is hardly paying some subtle tribute to “Ye Bok of ye Art Magical”.
This isn’t to say that the Gardnerian Book of Shadows hasn’t been hugely influential on the development of what we now call Wicca, only that the author assigns Gardner’s original book a certain kind of importance and centrality that it no longer possesses. Nor was Gardner some sort of Moses bringing the tablets of Wiccan law down from on high. I was under the impression it was more cookbook than holy writ, added and changed to adapt to the changing times. I’m sure Owen Davies, who has written at some length on witchcraft (and is flogging a new book concerning grimoires), knows all this and was simply trying to put an entertaining list together. What he’s really in trouble for is ranking Wicca’s “founding text” lower than the entirely fictitious Necronomicon!
PS - Thanks to Brendan Myers for tipping me off to this story.
--Cinosam
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