The twentieth century and how to read claims

In this lesson: Crowley, Dion Fortune, Gardner and the New Age, the witch-cult myth and a simple method for checking any occult claim.

The twentieth century turned the occult revival into the practices many of us live with now: Thelema, modern witchcraft, chaos magic and the New Age. It also produced some of the most persistent myths about “ancient” witchcraft. This lesson covers both, and gives you a simple method to check any claim yourself.

Crowley, Fortune and the magical orders

Aleister Crowley, a former Golden Dawn member, said that in 1904 in Cairo he received The Book of the Law, the founding text of his religion Thelema. He wrote prolifically on magic and became notorious in the press. Dion Fortune, another Golden Dawn initiate, founded her own group in the 1920s, later called the Society of the Inner Light, and wrote novels and practical books that shaped British occultism. Historical

Crowley’s central law was “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”, which he explained as following your true will, not doing whatever you like. In 1907 he co-founded his own order, the A∴A∴, and he later led the Ordo Templi Orientis.

From 1920 to 1923 he ran the “Abbey of Thelema” in Cefalù, Sicily, until the Italian government expelled him. British newspapers called him “the wickedest man in the world”. Historians today read him as a talented, difficult and often cruel man who also wrote some of the most influential magical texts of the century. Historical

Dion Fortune was the pen name of Violet Firth (1890 to 1946). Her books Psychic Self-Defence (1930) and The Mystical Qabalah (1935), and novels such as The Sea Priestess (1938), mixed psychology, Qabalah and a growing interest in the goddess. Many later witches read her. The artist Austin Osman Spare, briefly a student in Crowley’s circle, developed his own method of making sigils, which chaos magicians later took up.

Modern witchcraft

In 1921 the Egyptologist Margaret Murray published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, arguing that the people accused in the witch trials belonged to a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion. Historians have since rejected this thesis: the trial records do not support it. But it inspired Gerald Gardner, a retired civil servant, whose Witchcraft Today (1954) presented Wicca to the public.

Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon (1999) shows that Wicca is a genuinely new religion of the twentieth century, built from folk magic, ceremonial magic and Romantic ideas. Modern That makes it no less real as a religion; it makes it honest about its age.

From the 1970s onwards came feminist witchcraft, the New Age movement and, from the late 1970s, chaos magic, each reworking older material for new needs.

Wicca grows up

Gardner said he had been initiated in 1939 into a coven in the New Forest. Historians still debate what, if anything, that group was. The last Witchcraft Act in England was repealed in 1951, and Gardner went public. His priestess Doreen Valiente rewrote much of the ritual material in the 1950s, including the much loved Charge of the Goddess, partly to reduce the borrowings from Crowley. Historical

In the 1960s Alex and Maxine Sanders founded Alexandrian Wicca, and Raymond Buckland brought Gardnerian Wicca to the United States. In the 1970s feminist witches such as Zsuzsanna Budapest linked witchcraft with women’s spirituality, and Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance (1979) became a bestseller. Murray’s theory still sat underneath much of this, partly because she wrote the “Witchcraft” entry in the 1929 Encyclopaedia Britannica, which spread her view for decades. Historical

Chaos magic and the New Age

Chaos magic took shape in England in the late 1970s. Peter Carroll’s Liber Null (1978) taught that belief itself is a tool you can pick up and put down, and drew on Spare’s sigils. The movement valued results over tradition and openly mixed sources, including pop culture. Modern

The New Age is broader and harder to define. It grew from Theosophy, the 1960s counterculture and the astrological hope for a coming “Age of Aquarius”. Communities such as Findhorn in Scotland, founded in 1962, and later events such as the “Harmonic Convergence” of 1987 brought it public attention. Hanegraaff’s New Age Religion and Western Culture (1996) argues that the New Age is best understood as a modern form of Western esotericism, reshaped by psychology and the market. Historical

How to read a claim

Here is the method I use, in four questions:

• When and where does the earliest evidence appear?
• Who first made the claim, and what did they gain from it?
• Do historians who study the period agree?
• Does the practice still have value to me if it is newer than claimed?

Using the four questions well

The four questions work best with a few habits:

• Look for the oldest source you can actually read, not the oldest date someone mentions. A date without a source is a claim, not evidence.
• Notice the gain. A claim of great age gives authority. A claim of persecution gives sympathy. Neither makes it false, but both are reasons to check.
• Read one good historian, then a second. If two careful scholars disagree, write “debated” in your notes.
• Keep the practice and drop the myth. You can love a modern ritual without pretending it is ancient.

Questions beginners ask

Was Crowley a Satanist? He did not call himself one, and Thelema is its own religion. He did enjoy shocking people with devilish imagery, which is why the label stuck.

Did Crowley found Wicca? No. Gardner met Crowley in 1947 and borrowed passages from his writings, which Valiente later reduced. Wicca grew from several sources, Crowley among them.

Is modern witchcraft less real because it is new? No. Every religion was new once. Being honest about age is a sign of respect, not a loss.

How can I tell a careful book from a careless one? Check for dates, named sources, footnotes or a bibliography, and whether the author separates what people believed from what is known.

Myths to drop:

• “Gardner uncovered an unbroken ancient religion.” His claims are debated, and the evidence for an ancient survival is lacking.
• “Nine million witches died.” Historians estimate around 40,000 to 60,000 executions.
• “Chaos magic means anything goes.” Many chaos magicians are very disciplined about method and record keeping.

A worked example

Imagine you read that “nine million witches were burned in the Burning Times”. The earliest source for the figure is an eighteenth-century estimate, repeated in the nineteenth century and popularised in the twentieth. Historians who study the trials today estimate around 40,000 to 60,000 executions across Europe between about 1450 and 1750. The real number is horrifying enough, and remembering it accurately honours the people who died.

A quick self-check. Put these in order: Murray’s Witch-Cult, Crowley’s Cairo working, Gardner’s Witchcraft Today, Carroll’s Liber Null. (1904, 1921, 1954, 1978.) Then say, in one sentence each, what the four questions would ask about Murray’s thesis.

Try this

Go back to the list of “ancient” claims you made in lesson 1. For each, use the four questions to find its earliest documented source and relabel it Historical, Later tradition or Modern. Write two sentences on what surprised you most.

Journal prompts: Which modern movement from this lesson is closest to your own practice? Is there a story about witchcraft you loved that turned out to be a myth? What do you want to keep from it, and what will you let go?

Two short lines from The Book of the Law

Historical Crowley’s Book of the Law is short, strange and much quoted. Two lines from its first chapter explain a great deal of later occult culture. “Every man and every woman is a star” (chapter 1, verse 3) expresses Thelema’s idea that each person has a unique path.

And “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” (chapter 1, verse 40) is the famous law, which Crowley insisted meant finding and following your true will, not doing whatever you like. Whatever you make of Crowley, these lines show how strongly twentieth-century occultism turned toward the individual: personal will, personal experience and personal paths, instead of a single church or tradition.

The four questions, applied to one claim

Let me show the four questions at work on a classic claim: “Wicca is the Old Religion, the pre-Christian faith of Europe.” When and where does the earliest evidence appear? The earliest documents of Wicca as a religion are from the late 1940s and early 1950s in England, including Gerald Gardner’s High Magic’s Aid (1949) and Witchcraft Today (1954). Who first made the claim, and what did they gain? Gardner and, before him, Margaret Murray; the claim gave the new religion roots and dignity. Do historians agree? No.

Historians such as Ronald Hutton find no evidence of a surviving pagan witch religion, though they see real older ingredients, from folk magic to ceremonial magic and Romantic paganism. Does the practice still have value if it is newer? Many Wiccans today say yes, and describe their religion as modern with old inspirations. That is a mature, honest answer.

A practice variation: a claim from your own shelf

Take one book from your own shelf, any book on witchcraft, tarot or magic. Find one historical claim in it, a sentence with a date or a “since ancient times”. Write it down with the page number. Run the four questions over it, using one good reference book or a scholarly website. Then write a short note in the margin of your notebook, not the book: “Supported”, “Debated” or “Not supported”, with your source. Do this for one claim a week, and in a year you will be a careful reader.

Recap

The twentieth century gave us Crowley’s Thelema, Dion Fortune’s work, Gardner’s Wicca, the New Age and chaos magic. Murray’s witch-cult theory, though rejected by historians, helped inspire Wicca, which Hutton shows is a new religion of the twentieth century. To check any claim, look for the earliest evidence, who made it, what historians say and whether it still has value to you as it truly is.

What next

My history of witchcraft covers the trials and the modern revival, the chaos magic history picks up in the 1970s, and the tarot misconceptions and Goetia myths pages put the four questions to work. Press “Mark as done” and continue with Reading a primary source.

Further reading: Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford University Press, 1999; second edition 2019). Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture (Brill, 1996). Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (revised edition, North Atlantic Books, 2010).

Sources

• Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999).
• Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
• Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2013).
• Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (4th edition, Routledge, 2016).

Go deeper: the art history and Goetia pages on this site

Mark as done