CRAFTING THE ART OF MAGIC: A CRITICAL REVIEW
                 by D. Hudson Frew (Morgann   )

     Aidan Kelly's new book, Crafting the Art of Magic
(Llewellyn, 1991) is the self-proclaimed first volume of A
History of Modern Witchcraft. Book I deals with the period from
1939 to 1964 and examines Gerald B. Gardner's contribution to
modern Craft. Kelly attempts to answer the perennial question
"Did Gardner make it all up?" At this task he fails miserably.

     This is not to say that there aren't some good points to the
book that might make it worth buying. First and foremost, the
book contains an amazing collection of texts that no Gardnerian
Witch will want to be without (although there are some serious
problems with the texts that I will address later). Also, the
first chapter is an eloquent defense of the Craft in the face of
the attacks to come:
          In emphasizing that the Craft is a new religion,
     and not the survival of an old religion, I am not
     "debunking" it. Rather I am insisting on its
     ontological equality with every other religion ...
     people start new religions all the time, all over the
     world, whenever they are not forcibly prevented from
     doing so by an established state church ... in a free
     society, people vote with their feet: if their
     religious needs are not being met by the established
     churches, then they will set out to create their own
     religion. (pages 2 - 3)


     Kelly goes on to elucidate six unmet needs to which the
Craft is a "creative response": a sacramental experiencing of
sex, practical paths for spiritual development accessible to the
laity, organizational flexibility, reduced or absent dogmatism, a
future-oriented focus, and creativity. This is a very interesting
and valuable section, but I am a little surprised that Kelly did
not include a need for ecological awareness and empowerment of
women in this list. 

     In Chapter One, Kelly opens with the statement that it
really doesn't matter whether or not Gardner made it all up
because the Craft is a viable religion in its own right. Kelly
returns to this argument in the last chapter (Chapter Eight),
saying that "The fact that the Craft movement has grown so
rapidly in a few decades is proof enough, indeed, the only
relevant proof, that Gardner was doing something right." Kelly
even goes so far as to proselytize in his last sentence:
     Let me merely extend an invitation: if you, dear
     reader, can no longer stomach being in communion with
     Cardinal Ratzinger - or whoever the Chief Son-of-a-
     Bitch of your particular persuasion may be - then come
     circle with the Witches. We offer you liberty,
     fraternity, and equality (page 184).


     Anti-Roman Catholic sentiments aside, I would
enthusiastically endorse almost all of the first half of the
first chapter and the last half of the last chapter of this book.
Everything in between, except for Gardner's own texts, is
virtually worthless. Kelly's thesis is that Gardner was a member
of a circle of friends who, in 1939, decided to invent modern
Witchcraft. He further argues that, after leaving this group to
work on his own, Gardner rewrote the earlier group's material
specifically for the purpose of maximizing the amount of ritual
scourging, a scourging to which Gardner was sexually addicted.
However, Kelly's arguments are so riddled with contradictions,
errors of logic, and speculative leaps that they cannot be seen
as anything approaching scholarly investigation. 

Gardner's "dyslexia", his "conspirators", & the reliability of
     Kelly's texts
     Kelly refers to several persons, all of whom claimed to have
personal knowledge of Craft groups similar to, but pre-dating
Gardner. These persons include Gardner himself, Dafo, and Louis
Wilkinson. Kelly dismisses this corroborative testimony by
arguing that all of these persons were members of a conspiracy,
all engaged in a pattern of deceit to protect the fictitious
origins of the Craft. Kelly first introduces this concept on page
xv, where, after examining papers alleged to be Gardner's (the
Weschke documents, more on these later), he concludes:
     ... Gardner was marginally dyslexic. That is, despite
     his intelligence ... he could not spell or punctuate
     well enough to meet even minimal standards for being
     published, and his grasp of grammar was shaky at best.
     In other words, Gardner could not by himself have
     produced the books published under his name ...
     (emphasis Kelly's)

     By claiming that Gardner could neither spell nor write with
any competence, Kelly prepares the reader to accept that other
persons secretly assisted Gardner in his fabrication. The problem
is that Kelly's own book provides ample evidence that Gardner was
not dyslexic. On page 77, for example, Kelly quotes Gardner's
private magical journal, "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical":
          Ever remember the promise of the goddess, "For
     ecstasy is mine and joy on earth" so let there ever be
     joy in your heart. Greet people with joy, be glad to
     see them. If times be hard, think, "It might have been
     worse. I at least have known the joys of the Sabbath,
     and I will know them again." Think of the grandeur,
     beauty, and Poetry of the rites, of the loved ones you
     meet through them. If you dwell on this inner joy, your
     health will be better. You must try to banish all fear,
     for it will really touch you. It may hurt your body,
     but your soul is beyond it all.


     (On page 100, Kelly says that the author of the above
passage "could not write even a line of verse".) I have quoted
this passage at some length to make a point. True, the text has
been archaized a bit, but either Gardner was not dyslexic or
Kelly has "cleaned up" the text before publication! If the
former, the conspiracy theory starts to unravel. If the latter,
then no text in Kelly's book can be trusted. Why doesn't Kelly
reproduce some of this "dyslexic" text so that readers of his
book can make their own judgement?

     Unfortunately, this spectre of unreliable and doctored texts
raises its head in other places. On page 67, Kelly presents what
he says are Gardner's Sabbat scripts with the following
introduction, reproduced in its entirety:
          On pp. 271 - 288 of "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical"
     are outlines of rituals for the four cross-quarter
     days. The outlines are terse and cryptic, but they do
     not differ in any essential way from the later texts of
     the Sabbat rituals. They can be fleshed out as
     follows. (emphasis mine)


     "Fleshed out" by whom? By what criteria? Which parts have
been "fleshed out"? Kelly doesn't tell us. He has only told us
that we are not dealing with the original texts; in which case,
how can we trust either his reconstruction or his analysis? 

     On page 54, Kelly presents the earliest versions of the 1st
and 2nd degree initiations. He prefaces the texts with:
     I have augmented the text for the first two degrees
     from the full script in High Magic's Aid, pp. 290 -
     303.


     Exactly how has he "augmented" them? Which parts are
"augmented"? We aren't told. We only know for sure that the text
presented to us is not the original text. 

     Why does Kelly assume that the texts of initiation rituals
intended for mass publication, i.e. in High Magic's Aid, are
interchangeable or identical with whatever Gardner did in his
private workings, Rather, I would assume that there would be at
least a few differences. In fact Kelly seems to support this
latter view on page 62:
     On the other hand, some changes in "Ye Bok of ye Art
     Magical" - for example, those about taking the measure
     - were not made in High Magic's Aid at all, and yet
     they appear in later versions of the ritual; so they
     must have been entered in "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical"
     after High Magic's Aid had gone to the printer in about
     1948.


     In other words, Kelly is arguing that, since all of the
details of the initiations were not in the published book, they
must have been written later. It is much easier to assume that
Gardner just held these details back from publication
intentionally, not wanting to reveal all of the mysteries to the
general public.

     It is ironic that Kelly appears to have altered the texts
with which he was working, as he takes Gardner to task for this
very thing on page 45:
     ... Gardner never bothered to word things the same way
     twice; whenever he copied something, he simultaneously
     rewrote it. But this, of course, is the way that an
     author treats his own original material; it is not how
     anyone treats authoritative texts preserved from an
     earlier generation.


     On page 4, Kelly praised the Craft for its flexibility, and
on page 5 for its lack of dogma, so where does he get the idea
that any text in the Craft is "authoritative"? Just because some
later Witches have taken Gardner's words as revealed Gospel
doesn't prove that he or his contemporaries thought of
traditional material that way. Gardner's actions are completely
consistent with a living folk tradition, changing and evolving
with each person through which it passes. Kelly even quotes
Gardner on page 102 as saying to Doreen Valiente (his initiate
and later High Priestess) about the Sabbat scripts, "Well, if you
think you can do any better, go ahead.", but on page 150 again
complains that rewriting "is obviously not how someone treats
genuinely old material." This would seem to be a case of Kelly
projecting his own experience as a student of Biblical texts, as
he tells us on page xiii, onto Gardnerian material. 

     Returning to the claim of a conspiracy, on page 30 Kelly
says:
          In September 1939, probably on the 28th, the
     evening of the full moon, Gerald Gardner, Dorothy
     Clutterbuck Fordham, Dafo, and others of their occult
     circle of friends were, I believe, sitting in Dorothy's
     living room, discussing England's perilous state, now
     at war with Germany. ... Encouraged by the tension of
     that moment, they decided to try to recreate the
     "witch cult of Western Europe" described by Margaret
     Murray. (emphasis mine)


     Kelly does not offer a single shred of evidence to support
his "belief" that this event occurred, yet this does not stop him
from speculating as to the identities of others who joined this
alleged group: Dolores North, Louis Wilkinson, George Watson
McGregor Reid, J.S.M. Ward, Charles Richard Foster Seymour,
Christine Hartley, Mrs. Mabel Besant-Scott, and G.A. Sullivan
(Pages 31 - 33). In the same paragraphs, Kelly calls in Doreen
Valiente to support him on this, but the strongest statement she
can make is that some of these persons "could" have been members.
There is no documentary evidence presented that any of these
individuals were, in fact, members of Gerald's coven beyond the
fact that it is convenient for Kelly's conspiracy theory for them
to be so. Any statements by a "member" that contradict Kelly's
views can be discounted as lies to protect the myth, as Kelly
argues regarding Wilkinson and Clutterbuck on page 106.

     The speculations continue unhindered by a lack of supportive
evidence. Only one page later Kelly says:
          If we are assuming that the New Forest group was
     basing itself on Murray's concepts ...


     Note that the "assumption" that Kelly is acknowledging for
the reader's benefit is only in regards to what "the New Forest
group" practiced. That such a group existed has advanced from
speculation on page 30 to an assumed fact, a "given", on page 34.
This easy sliding from speculation into "fact" is present
throughout the book. On page 41, Kelly notes that Rhiannon
Ryall's coven "must represent a hiving-off from the New Forest
coven sometime before the end of World War II". Once again, Kelly
has not yet proved that his hypothetical coven of conspirators
ever existed, but that does not prevent him from referring to
them as established fact. 

     It is interesting to note, as Kelly does not, that Margaret
Murray was aware of Gardner's claims and endorsed them in her
preface to Gardner's Witchcraft Today (Gardner, 1954, p.15). Of
course, Kelly might point out that Murray could very well have
been lying since Gardner's claims supported her theory, but just
how far are we expected to stretch the conspiracy? 

     Hartley's and Seymour's membership in the group is seemingly
contradicted by Kelly's observations on page 36:
          If the pagan section of the Fraternity of the
     Inner Light had evolved a pagan system of magic by
     1939, Gardner apparently did not know about it.


     Well, the pagan section of the Fraternity, led by Hartley
and Seymour, had at least started to evolve a pagan system of
magic by 1939, as detailed in 20th Century Magic and the Old
Religion by Alan Richardson. Richardson reproduces extracts from
their magical working journals between July 1937 and February
1939, during which time they shifted their ritual focus from
Egyptian to Celtic deities. How can Kelly assert that Seymour and
Hartley were dedicated members of Gardner's alleged group and yet
Gardner had no inkling of their work with pagan magical energies?
If he really wanted to resolve this question, why didn't Kelly
simply ask Hartley about it? On page xiii, Kelly states that he
began his research in 1970. Christine Hartley did not die until
1985. 

     British occultist Louis Wilkinson's alleged involvement in
the "New Forest group" is addressed on page 38, where Kelly
cites Francis King quoting Wilkinson. In response to King's
skepticism regarding the existence of Witches, Wilkinson says
that "he had himself become friendly with members of a witch-
coven operating in New Forest" and goes on to describe their
practices (King, p. 177). Kelly observes that:
     He [i.e. Wilkinson] is ... saying that their
     intellectual (Masonic) occultism was providing a
     framework for the spells, charms, and dances of folk
     magic, precisely what we have already seen is logically
     necessary in order to "reconstruct" the religion that
     [Margaret] Murray describes.


     Rather than take Wilkinson's account as independent
testimony of the existence of a pre-Gardner coven, Kelly argues
on page 39 that:
     ... Wilkinson is almost certainly not an independent
     witness here. He describes himself as a member of the
     occult circle of friends around the New Forest coven,
     and so was probably a member of the coven himself (how
     else would he know the details of its practices?)


     This is nothing but innuendo. I can hear Senator McCarthy
saying, "If you associate with Communists you must be a member of
a cell yourself!" Kelly presses this argument when Wilkinson
describes to King the practice of wearing grease to protect naked
bodies from cold weather. Kelly notes:
          This information about the grease is not in any
     other published source - but the only way Wilkinson
     could have known about it is if he had been there
     himself; that is, again, he appears to have been a
     member of the coven.


     Or one of his Witch friends told him about the grease. Or he
was a guest at that particular ritual. Or he made that part up.
It suits Kelly's purposes to say that Wilkinson is telling the
truth about the grease and is lying about membership in the
coven, but we are not given any supporting evidence or even
criteria to evaluate his statements. 

     What is at all suspicious about Wilkinson's statements?
Wilkinson has said that, as a noted occultist, his Witch friends
felt that they could talk to him a little about their practice.
He does not claim to know secret passwords or the details of
initiation scripts, just a general description of a ritual of
national importance: the protection of Britain against Hitler.
Even if Wilkinson was invited to participate as a guest in that 
ceremony, that would still not prove that he was a member of the
coven. 

     What is interesting here is the convenient and judicious bit
of editing that Kelly does on King's quote. The last line of
Kelly's quote from King on page 38 is as follows:
     [He] went on to tell me various interesting details of
     the practices of these Hampshire witches, ... 


     The complete sentence from King (page 178) is as follows:
     Louis Wilkinson went on to tell me various interesting
     details of the practices of these Hampshire witches -
     details which, I felt sure, made it certain that the
     group was not simply derived from the jaded tastes of
     middle-class intellectuals who adhered to the theories
     of Margaret Murray.


     In other words, King felt that, in his opinion as a
knowledgeable and scholarly occultist, Wilkinson's account
supported the existence of a pre-Gardner coven; an opinion
expressed in a statement almost exactly contradictory to Kelly's
conclusion! No wonder Kelly opted not to inform the reader of
the complete text of the sentence.

     Unfortunately, this is not the only instance where Kelly
omits necessary quotes or parts of quotes in order to avoid
arguing against his own point, as we shall see later. He does so
in the case of "Lugh", once again involving King and Wilkinson. 

Independent evidence of an earlier group
     On page xix Kelly questions the likelihood of there having
been a pre-Gardner coven, saying:
     ... the very ordinary bits of evidence (addresses,
     letters, diaries, even laundry lists) that we would
     expect to find for the existence of a pre-1939 coven
     were nowhere to be found.


     As if this absence of evidence is evidence of absence. But
on page 32, Kelly quotes Doreen Valiente in support of a
different point to the effect that:
     ... the whole occult scene was so secretive in those
     times [pre-1939], so furtive almost (witches were,
     after all, still doing something actually illegal, for
     which they could actually have been prosecuted), tracks
     were very well covered, I can assure you!


     It doesn't seem likely that Witches operating under such
conditions would leave such clues as addresses and letters lying
about. It is unreasonable to assume that a thoroughly closeted
coven would leave the same kind of paper trail behind as those
functioning in the post-1960's atmosphere of religious
tolerance. The pre-1939 mindset would more likely be akin to that
expressed in the Gardnerian text called "The Warning":
          Keep this book in your own hand of write ...
     never let this book out of your hands ... never keep
     the writings of another ... Each should guard his own
     writings and destroy them whenever danger threatens ...
     if any die, destroy their book if they have not been
     able to ... (page 85)


     It is hardly surprising that evidence incriminating to
members of any pre-1939 coven is not forthcoming. (Laundry
lists? You mean like "1 ritual robe w/ hood, black: no starch"?)

Pre-1939 Witch groups & Kelly's research
     On page 20, Kelly says that he has "heard indirectly from
Gavin Frost" that a group imitating Margaret Murray's version of
Witch practice may have been operating "at Cambridge in the
1930s". I can only assume that Kelly is mistakenly referring to a
group to which Pennethorne Hughes belonged at Oxford in 1928. On
page 1 of his book Witchcraft, Hughes describes how he was part
of a short-lived group inspired by Murray's work. It is puzzling
that Kelly seems to be unaware of this group, or at least neither
mentions it nor cites Hughes' pro-Murrayite research, as Hughes'
book is referenced in the bibliography of Gardner's The Meaning
of Witchcraft (on page 287). Was Kelly so intent on discovering
Gardner's "hidden" sources that he didn't check his published
ones? 

The antiquity of other, non-Gardnerian Craft traditions
     On page 21, Kelly says that he does believe that there were
pre-1939 Witch covens whose "existence is well-documented", just
not "proto-Gardnerian" ones. As an example, he gives us the Faery
Tradition and its modern proponent, Victor Anderson:
     According to the researches of Valerie Voigt ...,
     Victor relates that he was initiated into the Harpy
     coven in Ashland, Oregon, in 1932; ...


     I'm not saying that Anderson made the Faery Tradition up,
nor do I consider Voigt unreliable, but I do have to wonder why
in Kelly's eyes the uncorroborated word of one man is definitive
evidence while the corroborative testimony of several individuals
is a conspiracy of deceit. This evidence is especially weak as it
is a 2nd hand uncorroborated claim. Why didn't Kelly ask Anderson
himself about his alleged initiation and print his response for
the readers to evaluate? 

     The same argument applies to Kelly's use of Rhea W. as an
example of a pre-1939 non-Gardnerian Witch on page 23. It starts
to look like Kelly just has it in for Gardner. I shall address
this possibility in greater detail further on in my essay.
Mysterious & unsupported statements of "fact"
     On page 35, Kelly quotes Murray regarding the chief
festivals of the Witch-cult:
          The dates of the two chief festivals, May Eve and
     November Eve, indicate the use of a calendar which is
     ... preagricultural and earlier than the solstitial
     divisions of the year ... The cross-quarter days,
     February 2 and August 1, ... also kept as festivals,
     were probably of later date" 


     Kelly's response to this claim of Murray's is:
          Murray's speculations here are, in fact,
     completely wrong, but that merely proves that the
     Gardnerian Book of Shadows, which in 1953 had rituals
     for only the four Celtic festivals, none for the
     solstices and equinoxes [sic], was based on Murray,
     rather than a more accurate source.


     Kelly is arguing that the fact that the Gardnerians
originally had only four non-solar Sabbats is "proof" that they
were lifted from Murray rather than deriving independently from a
genuine folk tradition. Why? What is "completely wrong" with
Murray's speculation? Kelly neither says nor cites a source. He
just expects us to believe.

     When I asked noted folklorist Holly Tannen about this
passage, she was unable to see what Kelly was claiming to be
"completely wrong". Indeed, the section on "Festivals and Ritual
Gatherings" in Anne Ross' Everyday Life of the Pagan Celts (pages
197 - 201) also delineates these same four festivals as basic to
the Celtic ritual calendar. And Caoimhin O Danachair writes in
"The Quarter Days in Irish Tradition" that:
     ... in the Irish folk calendar there occur four
     festival days which are separated, each from the next,
     by regular intervals of three months, and thus divide
     the year into four quarters. These festivals are La
     Fheile Brighde (Saint Brighid's Day, 1st February), La
     Bealtaine (May Day, 1st May), La Lunasa (1st August),
     and La Samhna (All Saints, 1st November). (O Danachair,
     1959)


     It would appear that, contrary to Kelly's unsupported
assertions, the Gardnerian Sabbats are very much in keeping with
authentic folk tradition.

Kelly's apparent ignorance of folk magic
     On page 37, Kelly refers to the "New Forest group's"
interest in incorporating folk magic in their new tradition:
     ... the problem with folk magic is that it is all
     practice, no theory. ... From a hundred such workings,
     no one could deduce a hundred-and-first, since no
     system lies behind them; they cannot be generalized.

     For this reason, Kelly argues, the alleged "New Forest
group" of conspirators turned to Masonry, Rosicrucianism, the
Hermetic tradition, etc. to create a structure and an underlying
theory for their magic. That Kelly believes they would have had
to do this is strange, since he himself argues on page 134 that
the Gardnerian ritual structure "is a standard sort of magical
procedure, quite in keeping with Frazer's laws of magic." Kelly
seems to assert that folk magic does or doesn't have laws and
structure according to what suits his argument at the time. 
     Additionally, Kelly seems to be unaware of the work of
scholars such as Felix Grendon, whose "The Anglo-Saxon Charms" is
a marvelous structural analysis of the formulaic nature of some
early English folk charms. From these hundred charms, one can
easily deduce the hundred-and-first.

     On page 71, Kelly, speaking of the relative "pagan-ness" of
Gardner's Sabbats, asserts:
     It will not do to argue that "pagans" would have gone
     for the "Great Rite" (by another name), feasting, and
     dancing, and would not have bothered with drawing magic
     circles. ... all religious ritual sets apart some sort
     of "sacred time" and "sacred space" to distinguish it
     from ordinary time and space. Hence a pre-1939 coven
     would have had some way of doing that.


     This is an unfounded assumption. The surviving "pagan"
traditions of Britain, in the form of such festivals as the
Padstow `Obby `Oss and the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, do not
demarcate sacred time and space in any special way. The time and
place simply are sacred. (Bord, 1982)

Ye Bok of ye Art Magical
     As part of his claim of 1939 as the beginning of Gardner's
fabrication of Witchcraft, Kelly states on page 37 that,
subsequent to that September meeting, Gardner "began gathering
his notes on this topic in a notebook titled `Ye Bok of ye Art
Magical'". For all that Kelly spends pages and pages supporting
his chronology of Gardnerian texts based on extensive cross-
comparison, he never proffers any evidence to date the beginning
of the "Bok". Consequently there is no evidence presented that
Gardner did not record material, possibly oral material, from an
earlier coven into the "Bok" before 1939.

     On page 45, Kelly says that Doreen Valiente currently owns
the copy of the Book of Shadows used by Gardner and Dafo at her
initiation: 
     ... Gardner led her to believe that he had copied it
     from Dorothy Clutterbuck's Book of Shadows, but the
     extant evidence is that Dorothy never had any such
     book.


     What "evidence"? The "fact" that Dorothy was part of the
"conspiracy" that decided to make it all up that September
evening in 1939? That claim of Kelly's is never proven. It is
entirely possible that the truth behind this recollection of
Valiente's (almost 40 years after the fact) is that the Book of
Shadows was mostly copied from the "Bok of ye Art Magical", which
in turn could well have been a recording of oral tradition from
Dorothy. 

West Country Wicca
     If Kelly seem unreasonably critical of Gardner, he appears
unusually credulous of others, as becomes obvious with his
treatment of Rhiannon Ryall.

     On pages 41 - 42, Kelly uncritically accepts the claims of
Ryall regarding her membership in a rural coven, arguing that the
ritual texts in her book are "the New Forest coven's rituals as
they were worked before Gardner rewrote them to better meet his
own sexual needs." Most reviewers (including Eran, Wolfe, and
Clifton) have seen the obvious similarities between Ms. Ryall's
rituals and Gardnerian ones and have assumed that Ms. Ryall
"borrowed" hers from published Gardnerian sources, but it should
also be noted that there are reasons to question the 
authenticity of Ryall's work independent of its "Gardnerian"
texts. 

     On page 1 of her book, Ryall states she was taught the Craft
in the 1940s in the West Country of Britain. She cannot produce
any verifying documents because there aren't any "because most
people in those days were illiterate". This is not only
convenient, it is also untrue. The Cambridge Historical
Encyclopedia of Great Britain & Ireland states that "by 1901 the
vast majority of the United Kingdom was literate, including 99%
of Scotland, 97% of England & Wales, and 88.5% of Ireland." 

     Ryall also cannot produce any corroborative testimony
because "now all [her] teachers are dead and those who were [her]
contemporaries have moved on". Apparently, no one in the West
Country perpetuates this tradition that Ryall tells us thrived
there as recently as the 1940s. Once again, as with Victor
Anderson, Kelly accepts the undocumented and uncorroborated
testimony of a single person as truth, seemingly for the sole
reason that he can use it to support his argument. 

     Elsewhere, Kelly is fond of arguing that if Gardnerian
material can be found in published texts, that proves that
Gardner "lifted" said material from those texts, rather than
obtaining it from the folk tradition first-hand. If Kelly is
going to be consistent in his arguments (which he isn't), then he
himself would have to argue that there is no reason to believe
that Ryall's material comes from anywhere other than published
books on Gardnerian Wicca.

     Interestingly, on page 42 Kelly states that he believes that
some of Ryall's material came from "local folk witches". So,
apparently Kelly is willing to admit that there were folk witches
about in England, but that Gardner alone was not in contact with
them.

Kelly's not-so-puzzling ignorance of Book of Shadows construction
     On page 45, Kelly notes with some puzzlement that:
     ... Gardner habitually copied rituals into his book
     piecemeal, on widely separated pages, often onto pages
     containing other material as well. What his reasons
     were for doing this one can only guess.


     Anyone who has ever copied a Book of Shadows by hand will
not find this puzzling at all. The problem with hand-written
material is that, unlike the text I'm word-processing as I write,
you can't easily change it later. As a result, a hand-copied Book
of Shadows almost always contains elements of single rituals
spread over a number of pages. You write material down as you
receive it. If material received after attaining a higher degree,
or even an elder covener's recollections, are pertinent to a
ritual script already recorded in your Book... Tough. You just
have to stick it in somewhere later. Even in this age of
xerography, many of us have 3-ring binders as Books of Shadows,
allowing us to reshuffle material at will and so avoid this
limitation of the hand-copying process.

     Kelly is apparently unaware of this as he himself was never
required to copy a Book of Shadows by hand. The NROOGD Book of
Shadows he wrote himself, and so he could organize it at his
leisure and to his heart's content. The Book he passes to others
as a Faery Tradition Book of Shadows he received as a xerox copy
from Ed Fitch by way of Gwydion Pendderwen, and is actually a
Mohsian Book of Shadows anyway (Pendderwen, 1971 & 1972). The
Gardnerian Book he received on a computer disk, as confirmed by
the officiating Priestess at Kelly's Gardnerian initiation
(Harper, 1991). That's right. Kelly is a Gardnerian priest, as
well as an initiate of the Faery Tradition, neither of which does
he tell the reader. His apparent reasons for not doing so will
be addressed later. 

Gardner's texts & "sources"
     On page 46, Kelly finally presents Gardner's texts... or
are they? As I noted above, Kelly is actually presenting an
arrangement of texts from those sources which support his theory.
It is already quite clear that we are dealing neither with
original texts nor with Gardner's arrangement of them. Kelly
states:
     I am here placing materials in an arbitrary order in
     order to simplify my discussion of them. ... I use
     italics within the text of the documents to flag
     passages that are word-for-word quotes from known
     sources. (emphasis mine)


     Kelly has made a subtle assumption here. The correct and
scholarly form would be to say that passages so flagged appear
word-for-word in other sources, without implying the direction of
flow. Kelly has not yet demonstrated whether Gardner borrowed
from others, others borrowed from Gardner, or both borrowed from
earlier sources, but by introducing the concept in this way, he
predisposes the reader to see Gardner as a plagiarist.

     On page xvi, Kelly states that:
     ... the major published sources from which the
     [Gardnerian] rituals had been constructed included a)
     Mathers' edition of the Greater Key of Solomon; b)
     Aleister Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice; c)
     Leland's Aradia; d) some Masonic rituals akin to those
     described by Duncan and those of the Hermetic Order of
     the Golden Dawn (aside from those transmitted by
     Crowley); and e) Margaret Murray's The Witch-Cult in
     Western Europe. There were also bits and pieces from
     other works by Leland, Jane E. Harrison, Gilbert
     Murray, James Frazer, and the other great classicists
     and mythologists of the 19th century. That accounted
     for EVERYTHING in the rituals. (emphasis Kelly's)


     Aside from the observation made above that a text appearing
in two places does not prove which was taken from which, or even
if one was taken from the other, the problem with this statement
is that it just isn't true! There are many other "sources"
identifiable in the Gardnerian texts presented by Kelly (some of
which will be addressed in my discussion of scourging). Kelly
seems to limit himself to identifying "sources" of which copies
existed in Gardner's library (page 38), but if Gardner did
receive oral and/or written material from a folk tradition, one
wouldn't necessarily expect to find copies in such a library.

     This does not stop Kelly from making statements like:
     These [procedures] are terse and cryptic, and refer to
     data from The Greater Key of Solomon that Gardner had
     copied onto yet other pages (page 47). (emphasis mine)


     This, of course, is pure speculation on Kelly's part. The
Mathers edition of The Greater Key of Solomon (actually titled
The Key of Solomon the King (Clavicula Salomonis)) was published
in 1888. Materials from this text could have entered folk
tradition long before Gardner received it. In fact, material from
the Key of Solomon could have entered the English folk magic
tradition much earlier than that. A manuscript of the Key in
English, Sloane 3847, was in existence in England in the 16th
Century (Butler, 1979, p. 49 & Thompson, 1972, pp. 230 - 238).

     On page 50, Kelly notes that "Gardner uses the Cable Tow in
his initiation rituals quite differently from the way that it is
used in Masonic ritual." This would seem to contradict his
statement that "EVERYTHING" in the Gardnerian rituals can be
found in published sources.

     On page 54, Kelly notes:
     If Gardner had received anything comparable to this
     material [from Crowley & Leland] from an older coven,
     why would he need to lift material wholesale from
     published sources?


     Kelly seems to be completely unaware of the extent to which
published material, especially from the grimoire tradition, can
enter folk magic practice. Prof. Glynn Custred, chronicler of
Andean folk magic in Peru, has noted that he was unable to
understand the spells of the Andean sorcerers he studied until he
familiarized himself with the grimoire tradition of Medieval and
Renaissance Spain. Ritual texts and practices from European
grimoires had entered and permeated the Andean folk magic
tradition, having been brought from Spain by conquistadors
(Custred, 1983). Herbert Leventhal notes that German "magicians"
and cunning folk in America in the 18th century regularly used
the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses in their conjurations
(Leventhal, 1974, pp. 107 - 109), while Will-Erich Peuckert has
shown that this book was a conglomeration of material from many
earlier grimoires (Peuckert, 1957). 

     Indeed, Peuckert has demonstrated that material from the
grimoires permeates the folk magic tradition across all of
Europe, from Italy to Sweden (Peuckert, 1954), so it is no
surprise that some such material might turn up in any folk magic
tradition handed down to Gardner.

     On page 94, Kelly comments on a text of Gardner's on
"gaining the Sight", observing:
     Since we even have early drafts of it in the notebooks,
     we can be quite certain that this document was written
     all in one piece, and does not show any evidence of
     including quotations from earlier traditional
     documents.


     Unless the "early drafts" were "quotations from earlier
documents". It doesn't even matter which text Kelly is
discussing. This kind of fallacious argument is repeated
throughout the book.

     Kelly goes on to say:
          The procedures described in this document, and all
     the comments about them ... seem perfectly sensible as
     part of a basic shamanistic technique. But we need not
     suppose that Gardner had such information from any
     source other than books.


     Faced with what even Kelly has to concede could be remnants
of a genuine shamanist tradition, Kelly has to dismiss it with a
specious, non-falsifiable argument. His observation would be
essentially the same as saying: Since all of the basic concepts
and practices in Michael Harner's books can be found in the works
of Carlos Castaneda, we have no reason to believe that Harner
ever went to the Amazon. How could Gardner have been legitimately
heir to a folk tradition and not have this "reasoning" apply? The
folk and grimoire traditions have been so well documented that it
would be suspicious if Gardner's material did not dove-tail into
well-trodden and well-attested areas of folk study. Kelly's
argument only bolsters Gardner's.

Folk tradition in the Gardnerian circle
     Throughout this book, Kelly denies the existence of any pre-
Gardnerian Witch group, yet he constantly makes reference to the
presence of folk tradition in Gardnerian material:
          We therefore see ... a situation in which Judaeo-
     Christian magic ... provides a framework, a circle,
     within which non-Christian folk magic can be worked
     (page 51). 


     Kelly assumes that the "magic circle" is a "Judaeo-
Christian" innovation which Gardner grafted onto his practice.
This is not supported by the evidence. Dr. G. Storms, in Anglo-
Saxon Magic, demonstrated that the "magic circle", most likely
especially when drawn by an iron knife (e.g. an athame?), is an
established part of English folk magic (Storms, 1948, pp. 76 -
78, 217, 221, and 309). However, the words employed when doing so
have not survived. That Gardner or someone else borrowed casting
words from a popular grimoire does not mean that they got the
concept of casting a circle from that source.

     We also have to ask the question ... what "non-Christian
folk magic"? If there was no earlier group, where did this folk
material come from? Liturgical texts could have come from such
collections as the Carmina Gaedelica, which have been available
since 1900, but the collections that I have had to track down to
find descriptions of practices resembling Gardner's were
collected and published well after 1939.

     On page 94, Kelly reports that:
          In the September 27, 1952, issue of the English
     popular magazine Illustrated appeared an article
     entitled "Witchcraft in Britain" by Allen Andrews. The
     article quoted at length the remarks of Cecil
     Williamson, who had opened a witchcraft museum on the
     Isle of Man in 1951. Williamson described various
     practices of the "Old Religion of the witches,"
     mentioned the New Forest as being the meeting place of
     the "Southern Coven of British Witches," and revealed
     how, on the night of 1 August 1940, the Sabbat of
     Lammas, seventeen men and women had gathered in New
     Forest ...


     Kelly goes on to say on page 101, that:
     Doreen [Valiente] says that other witches were quoted
     in the 1952 Illustrated article as saying that their
     rituals were based on "instructions handed down from
     the elders, eked out with the Clavicules of Solomon",
     and argues that therefore "Gerald Gardner did not
     introduce this practice of blending witchcraft with
     ceremonial magic." However, all the witches known to
     Williamson seem to have been members of the one and
     only coven that we know was then in existence, the
     Southern Coven, and their description of the rituals
     exactly fits those in Gardner's Book of Shadows at that
     time; so there is no independent evidence here.
     (emphasis mine)


     Neither is there evidence against Gardner's claims! Note how
Kelly glosses over the fact that these only "seem" to be the same
group as Gardner's. Note also how the "coven" hypothesized back
on page 30 is now one that we "know" existed. The information
above does not argue against the existence of a "pre-1939" coven,
rather, it is completely consistent with one. 

     It is important to note that the Witches in the Illustrated
article referred to the "Clavicules of Solomon". Kelly claims, on
page 38, that Gardner wrote the Book of Shadows using the Mathers
edition of the Greater Key of Solomon, as found in Gardner's
library. The bibliography of Gardner's The Meaning of Witchcraft
(page 287) lists several works by Mathers, but not this one. This
bibliography does, however, make reference to "KEY OF SOLOMON,
THE. Also known as the Clavicule of Solomon." Both Gardner and
the Witches of the Illustrated article refer to this legendary
grimoire by its folk title "Clavicule of Solomon", and not by the
title of the Mathers edition, the Key of Solomon the King, nor by
its correct Latin title, Clavicula Salomonis, given in Mathers.
If Gardner had owned a copy of this book when he was writing The
Meaning of Witchcraft, wouldn't he have gotten the title right?
And if he owned it and was willing to list it in his
bibliography, wouldn't he have ascribed it correctly to Mathers?

     I think that it is far more likely that Gerald Gardner
acquired a copy of the Mathers edition in much the same way I
did. Being a practitioner of ritual magic, I recognized some of
the materials I received with my Gardnerian initiation as being
the same as in the Key of Solomon. Some time later, I needed some
magical symbols for a piece of paper on which I was going to
write a magical text. There were none in my Book of Shadows,
"but", I thought to myself, "since several of these symbols are
similar to those in the Key of Solomon, why don't I just use the
parchment symbols from that book?" I did, and those symbols are
now in my Book of Shadows. I suspect that once Gardner discovered
that some of the material he received was in the Key of Solomon,
he too went and got a copy to use to fill in gaps in the
traditional texts. Gardner himself seems to have admitted almost
as much to Valiente, as Kelly reports on page 101:
     ... [he told her] that the rituals he had received from
     the old coven were very fragmentary, and that in order
     to make them workable, he had to supplement them with
     other material.


     Gardner himself probably never realized how much of the
traditional material contained references to other grimoires 
besides the Key of Solomon. As we shall see below, neither did
Kelly.

     Well, if the grimoire material didn't all come into the
Craft through Gardner, as Kelly alleges, how did it enter? I
noted earlier just how common it is to find such material in folk
magical practice. We do have in the Gardnerian "history"
identifiable figures who could have done much of this mixing and
matching: George Pickingill, Cunning Murrell, and/or others like
them. I cannot prove that Pickingill or Murrell owned a copy of
the Key of Solomon (although Maple, 1964 p. 170, does describe a
book owned by Murrell that sounds a lot like a Key), nor can I
prove that Gardner's folk material traces to them, but several
interesting connections can be traced that seem to lead to
Gardner. 

     James Murrell, or "Cunning" Murrell, was a folk
magician/sorcerer who lived and worked magic in Hadleigh, Essex
between 1780 and 1860. His life and exploits have been described
and documented by Eric Maple (Maple, March 1960). Ralph
Merrifield, on page 178 of The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic,
notes that Murrell was said to possess "a great chest of magic
books and papers". On the same page, Merrifield reports that
Murrell had pronounced that "there would be `witches in Leigh for
a hundred years; nine in Canewdon; and three in Hadleigh
forever'". As Maple explains elsewhere:
          The Master of the Canewdon witches was always said
     to be a wizard. Cunning Murrell of Hadleigh was
     supposed to have been a Master of Witches, but George
     Pickingale was the last and perhaps the greatest of the
     wizards (Maple, December 1960).


     Maple reports that "Pickingale [or Pickingill] died in 1909
at the age of ninety-three." Additionally, Canewdon is less than
10 miles from Hadleigh. Therefore, when Murrell died Pickingill
would have been forty-four. So here we have 2 "wizards",
contemporaneous and proximate to each other, each a leader of
Witches, and by the admission of Murrell not only connected, but
seemingly representative of a common folk tradition! While the
stories of Pickingill's life do not mention any books, he would
likely have had access to Murrell's copies. Maple says that
Pickingill "was visited by people from great distances". Might
not some of these have been precursors to Gardner? Maple also
notes that although there are no more wizards in Canewdon, "the
last of the tradition lingered on until 1930", well within the
grasp of members of a pre-1939 coven. 

     Mind you, this hypothesis is not proven, but it is an
alternative to the picture painted by Kelly and is not in any way
refuted by the evidence presented.

     Kelly will no doubt be quick to point out that the only
connections between Gardner and Pickingill are the claims of one
"Lugh", who cannot be considered reliable. Kelly addresses the
question of Lugh's claims and his reliability in pages 171 to
178.

     The only solid argument that Kelly can muster against Lugh's
credibility (that isn't based solely on the by-now-familiar one
of "Text A and Text B are the same, so A copied it from B") is
that Lugh makes the statement:
          The Pickingill covens have commemorated a cardinal
     tenet of the Old Religion. All our rites are conducted
     in toto by a woman. This derives from the Scandinavian
     and French models. (Lugh, 1982, p. 10)


     This contradicts Gardner, says Kelly, because "as we saw in
Section 5.1, before 1957, the dominant figure in Gardner's coven
had been the High Priest" (page 174).

     There are several problems with this. First, the earlier
references in "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical" are to Gardner working
alone as a ceremonial magician, then references to making use of
a Witch "if you have one" creep in, until by the end the "Bok"
has become Gardner's first Book of Shadows (Wolfe, 1991). The
"dominance" of the High Priest could easily reflect Gardner's own
evolving practice as he gradually worked more closely with pre-
existant (i.e. pre-1939) Witches, rather than traditional
practice.

     Once again, Kelly omits important parts of Lugh's statements
that clarify matters:
     It is axiomatic that English covens have always been
     led by men. Indeed, the Magister, or Master, has always
     admitted candidates of both sexes (Lugh, 1982, p. 11).


     In other words, Lugh agrees that the High Priest was always
the dominant figure in English covens, but that Pickingill
introduced the concept of Priestess-led groups based on
Scandinavian and French tradition. 

     Kelly and others have shown that Lugh has little grasp of
historical and anthropological theory and that he has a tendency
to repeat gossip, but it has not yet been demonstrated that he is
unreliable on matters of historical events within his experience.
It is entirely possible that Gardner worked in a Priest-dominant
framework until he was fully assimilated into whatever tradition
may have been passed down to him, only later accepting the idea
of Priestess-led groups.

     Kelly also attacks Lugh on the basis of Lugh's assertion
that Aleister Crowley was a member of a Pickingill coven as a
young man (thus providing a possible alternative explanation for
the presence of similar texts in both Crowley's and Gardner's
writings). Kelly dismisses this claim on page 173, saying:
          It seems to me that this story about Pickingill
     and Crowley is an extrapolation on a paragraph in
     Chapter 4 of Witchcraft Today ...


     Once again, corroborative testimony becomes, in Kelly's
view, an ever-widening conspiracy of deceit. Kelly says as much
on the same page:
     However, I think "Lugh" was purposely creating a phony
     history in order to throw researchers off the trail.


     Kelly's conspiracy has now extended sixteen years beyond
Gardner's death in 1964 to Lugh's alleged lies in 1980. Kelly's
observations regarding this conspiracy are expounded in great
detail, but first, let's return to this claim about Crowley.
Kelly states on page 174 that:
          I assume that Gardner simply made up the claim
     that Crowley had been a witch when young. There is no
     corroboration of this anywhere in Crowley's writings
     ...


     Maybe not, but there is corroboration that Crowley was at
least in contact with such a group in the conversation between
Francis King and Louis Wilkinson quoted by Kelly back on page 38.
Part of that conversation, in fact the first half of the quote so
carefully excerpted by Kelly on page 38 (the part that Kelly did
not there and does not here tell the reader about), runs as
follows:
     ... [Wilkinson] said that Crowley had told him that, as
     a young man, he had been offered initiation into the
     witch-cult, but had refused it as he "didn't want to be
     bossed around by women".1
     ...
          I politely asked him if he considered it possible
     that Crowley had been indulging in a gentle leg-pull,
     to which he replied that, while Crowley was apt to
     indulge in such jokes, in this case he was telling the
     truth; for in the late 'thirties or early 'forties, he
     had himself become friendly... [the rest of the quote
     as given by Kelly on page 38] 
     ...
     1 I have since heard from two independent sources that
     Crowley had made this claim to them.

     (King, 1970, p.177)


     So, as it turns out, there seem to be at least four persons,
possibly five, who all claim that Crowley was in contact with
Witches as a "young man", i.e. before his involvement in the
Golden Dawn and O.T.O. Crowley could well have brought (probably
oral) folk material gleaned from these Witches into his later
ceremonial practice, providing yet another possible alternative
explanation for the similarities in his and Gardner's texts. It
looks like Lugh's claims are not as outrageous as Kelly would
have us think; either that or the conspiracy is starting to
embrace a sizable percentage of the British occult community.
This is yet another example of Kelly's selective use of partial
quotations in order to mislead the reader and change the sense of
the quotation.


     Why, then, does Kelly rule out the possibility of a
Gardner/Crowley/Pickingill connection? Kelly tells us on page
176:
     It merely complicates life to suppose that Gardner had
     gotten the Masonic, Golden Dawn, magical, etc., raw
     material that he worked with at second hand, via these
     supposed Pickingill covens, rather than directly from
     the available sources.


     Kelly seems to be saying that any further research would be
too hard and would threaten his thesis, so he'll just stop here.
This is not scholarship! A viable line of inquiry and research
cannot be ruled out solely because it is "complicated"! 

The Eightfold Path
     On page 89, Kelly describes the traditional Gardnerian
"Eightfold Path or Ways to the Centre". These are a number of
practices that may be used to raise energy in a Craft magical
ritual. The Eight Ways are:
          1 Meditation or Concentration ...
          2 Trance, projection of the Astral.
          3 Rites, Chants, Spells, Runes, Charms, etc.
          4 Incense, Drugs, Wine, etc., whatever is used to
     release the Spirit. (Note: One must be very careful
     about this. ... Drugs are very dangerous if taken to
     excess ... hemp is especially dangerous, because it
     unlocks the inner eye swiftly and easily, so one is
     tempted to use it more and more. ...)
          5 The Dance, and kindred practices.
          6 Blood control (the Cords), Breath Control, and
     kindred practices.
          7 The Scourge.
          8 The Great Rite.



     On page 90, Kelly notes that:
     It is clear from his long note after entry 4 that he
     was personally not familiar with the use of drugs as
     part of a magical training process ... and so was not
     trained in such use by an earlier coven; instead, he
     has learned the concept from reading. 


     How is this "clear"? Because Gardner did not spell out in a
document to be given to new initiates any details of the use of
dangerous drugs? Also, Gardner spent years in the Civil Service
in Burma, as Kelly has already told us, at a time when that same
Civil Service actively controlled the opium trade. It is more
likely that Gardner picked up information there than from
"reading". Kelly even observes that "Eightfold Path" is a
"Buddhist term", but says that this only:
     ... points towards the simplest, most probable
     conclusion: that Gardner had learned about all these
     `mind-altering' techniques by reading about Tantric
     systems, but almost certainly at second hand via
     Randolph, whose Eulis was in his library, or Crowley
     ... (emphasis mine)


     Once again, Kelly does not bother to look beyond Gardner's
library for information. Gardner spent years in a Buddhist
country. Are we to assume that he learned nothing of Buddhist
practice while stationed there, solely because Kelly seemingly
does not want to have to look further afield than Gardner's
effects? Granted, I am arguing that some of this material may
have come from Gardner's experience, but it is Kelly's inadequate
analysis that is at issue here.

     Kelly also claims on page 90 that:
          Only the first two or three of these eight "ways"
     make sense as part of the techniques of a magical
     lodge. Where did Gardner get the rest of them?


     This statement is unsupported and is, in fact, untrue. Kelly
accepts "1 Meditation and Concentration" and "2 Trance", but
questions "3 Rites, Chants, Spells, Runes, Charms, etc."? What
else would a "magical lodge" do? Kelly denies the use of "4
Incense, Drugs, Wine, etc." in a valid magical practice. Tell
that to the Dionysiacs, the Native American Church, or the
shamans of Siberia and the Amazon. Kelly denies the use of "5 The
Dance" in a valid magical practice. Tell that to the
practitioners of Voudoun, Santeria, and Umbanda, the Sun Dancers
and Ghost Dancers of the American West, or the Whirling Dervishes
of the East. Kelly denies the use of "6 Blood control & Breath
control" in a valid magical practice. Tell that to the Yogis of
India, Austin Osman Spare (Spare, 1913, frontispiece & pp. 16 -
19), or today's Chaos Magicians (Carroll, 1987, pp. 31 - 35).
Kelly denies the use of "7 The Scourge" in a valid magical
practice. Tell that to the Shiia Muslims, the Scandinavians
(Gander, 1991), Christian ascetics and flagellants, or even the
women from the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii (Fierz-David,
1988, pp. 88 - 138). Kelly even denies the use of "8 The Great
Rite" in a valid magical practice. Tell that to the Tantrics and
Vajrayana Buddhists of India and Tibet.

     I could also note that I, personally, learned all of these
practices as a ritual magician, years before getting involved in
Craft practice. Whether or not Gardner grafted them onto the
Craft, they certainly are representative of long-existing and
worldwide magical traditions.

Charles Cardell & the Weschke documents: reliable sources?
     On page 109, the opening page of "Chapter 5. The Book of
Shadows in 1957", Kelly tells us that the text he gives as the
Book of Shadows in 1957:
     ... has been reconstructed from Witch, the Weschke
     documents, data in Witchcraft Today and Meaning of
     Witchcraft, and the data given by the Farrars 1984.
     (emphasis mine)


     Once again, reconstructed by whom? According to what
criteria? Why should we accept that this is in any way
representative of what Gardner would have said was the Book of
Shadows, before Kelly can criticize it? 

     Also again, the mysterious "Weschke documents" are used as a
source. Kelly never explains where these documents came from,
who gave them to Carl Weschke, or why we should accept them as
reliable. Kelly tells us on page xv that the handwriting and 
typeface in the personal letters in the Weschke papers match
those of the ritual texts in the Weschke papers. Kelly does not
tell us that he ever compared either to known copies of Gardner's
handwriting. As he never reproduces a single page from these
documents, we cannot judge for ourselves.

     Most damning in this case, Kelly uses Witch as a reliable
source. It is not until page 140 that we are told that Witch is
the name of a pamphlet written by one Charles Cardell, a
sensationalist who, with his companion Florannis (nee Olive
Green), set out in 1957 to infiltrate and expose Gardner's
Witchcraft. In order to gain access to Gardner's material,
Florannis sought initiation from Gardner, who was "so infatuated
with her that he wouldn't listen to any warnings". Florannis then
returned to Cardell who wrote Witch as an expose of Gardner as a
"simple-minded old pervert". Kelly, himself, even says on page
142:
     ... I must suppose that Cardell is untrustworthy ...
     This casts a pall of dubiousness over everything else
     he says, even those things that I would tend, for
     independent reasons, to think are true.


     Then why on earth should such a document as Witch be
considered so reliable by Kelly that he uses it to "reconstruct"
Gardner's Book of Shadows? 

     The answer is simple. The ritual texts in Witch, Kelly
tells us on page 141, "are virtually identical to the Weschke
documents". But we don't know where the Weschke documents came
from ... or do we? Florannis was very close to Gardner for a
time; so close that she might have used his typewriter or written
letters for him? The text of Witch is much more poorly written
than is Gardner's Book of Shadows or "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical".
And Kelly himself dates the Weschke documents to circa 1957.
Might not Florannis have been the one with "dyslexia"? 

     Without reproductions of a) the Weschke documents, b)
Florannis' handwriting, and c) Gardner's handwriting, we can't be
sure. All we can be sure of is that a Book of Shadows
"reconstructed" even in part from such documents cannot be
considered an original text, or even a reliable one. Any analysis
based on such a "reconstruction", i.e. the whole of Chapter 5 and
much of Kelly's analysis of the Craft Laws in Chapter 7, is
therefore rendered all but worthless.

     Consequently, the only thing worth noting in Chapter 5 is
Kelly's frequent invocation of Valiente's name without any
corroboration. On page 120:
          I have given here only the four Sabbat rituals
     that Doreen Valiente wrote, as far as I know, for the
     quarter days. (emphasis mine)


     And on page 122:
     Since this document, like 5.7, may have been typed by
     Doreen Valiente, it would fall somewhere in the period
     1954 to 1957. (emphasis mine)




     And on page 128, in the "Commentary on 5.7":
     ... because this one was typed by Doreen Valiente, some
     time between 1954 and 1957.


     "As far as I know"? "May have been typed"? Doesn't Kelly
know for sure? He is in correspondence with Valiente, as is
evidenced throughout the book. Didn't he ask her before going
into print? And what about document 5.7, which "may" have been
typed by Valiente on page 122, but "was" typed by her on page
128? This appears to be yet another case of Kelly's speculations
becoming "fact" a few pages later.

     As an amusing aside, indicative of the general sloppiness of
Kelly's arguments, Kelly states the following in a single
paragraph on page 170:
          In May 1964, the first edition of Cardell's Witch
     was published, and in it Cardell published the names
     Aradia and Cernunnos as the secret names of the deities
     used by the Gardnerians. ... the Gardnerians must have
     been forced to "change the locks" [i.e. select new
     names] and so they have. Monique Wilson apparently did
     choose a new pair of names, and Raymond and Rosemary
     Buckland, who were initiated in 1963, were among the
     first to receive them.


     The Gardnerians had to pick new God-names in 1964, which
were then given to the Buckland's in 1963? I'm surprised an
editor at Llewellyn didn't catch this.



The Craft Laws
     Several of the problems with Kelly's analysis of the Craft
Laws, relating to text reliability, have been pointed out above.
The sole argument of Kelly's regarding the Craft Laws that has
not yet been addressed is his insistence that earlier versions
indicate fabrication. Specifically, on pages 77 to 80 Kelly
reproduces a passage from "Ye Bok of ye Art Magical" titled "To
Help the Sick". This passage contains, in prose form, many of the
concepts of coven secrecy, even to particular phrasing, that 
later appear in the Craft Laws as traditional rules and
regulations. 

     Later, on pages 103 - 107, Kelly tells how when division
arose between the first two "Gardnerian" covens, members of one
group drafted a set of "Proposed Rules for the Craft" and sent
them to Gardner. He responded by sending them:
     ... a long document, with a message saying that there
     was no need for the proposed rules, because these "Laws
     of the Craft" already existed.


     The 2nd group, led by Valiente, rejected these Laws as
Gardner's invention. 

     I would suggest a slightly different interpretation. If "Ye
Bok of ye Art Magical" represents Gardner's notes and recordings
of primarily oral material received from earlier practitioners (a
hypothesis which Kelly has not disproved), then the passage in
"To Help the Sick" may represent genuine traditional material.
Later, faced with a need for "Laws" to govern a burgeoning
tradition that has expanded beyond a single group, Gardner may
have remembered that passage and other sayings and such
*regarding how covens should ideally function, and written that
information up as the "Laws". These are the kind of rules a
person might write down if pressed to codify how their family
functioned when they were a child.

     Did Gardner write the Craft Laws? Undoubtedly. Did he invent
them out of whole cloth? That has not been proven, but I think it
unlikely.

Misdirection
     Much of the last chapter of Crafting the Art of Magic is
given over to Kelly's observations of how skilled Gardner was at
using "misdirection" to protect his claims. He presents for our
consideration the theory of hoaxes put forward by Norman Moss in
The Pleasures of Deception. Proceeding from the assumption that
Gardner was a hoaxer, Kelly says on page 172:
          The application of [Moss'] theory to the
     Gardnerian movement is this. Gardner, by writing his
     books, had created essentially a single channel of
     communication: the only possible source of information
     about "the Craft" was what he himself had devised.


     This is not true. Both Dafo and Wilkinson, independent
sources, were accessible to early joiners of the "Gardnerian"
movement. But is not Kelly our "single channel" to such crucial
sources as the Weschke documents?

     On page 174, in reference to Gardner's claims about Crowley,
Kelly says:
     ... we can see how very devious Gardner is being here:
     Crowley being dead, cannot deny any of this ...


     Isn't this just what Kelly is doing in this book? Further,
as I have shown several times above, Kelly engages in
speculation, then later uses those speculations as unquestioned
assumptions on which to found further arguments. Kelly omits
crucial sections of quotes that would undermine his arguments.
Kelly engages in sloppy "scholarly writing" to imply that Gardner
is a plagiarist, without proving it. Kelly withholds from the
reader the relevant information that he is both a Gardnerian and
a Faery initiate, with the consequent biases. And to top it all
off, Kelly opens and closes the book by saying that the thesis he
has written this entire book to prove, doesn't 
really matter anyway; the implied message being that there really
is no reason to bother criticizing it.

     That Kelly would spend several pages accusing Gardner of
misdirection is ironic to the point of absurdity.


Kelly's hidden agendas
     As Kelly so eloquently argues at the beginning and end of
this book, it doesn't really matter whether or not Gardner made
it all up. The Craft is a thriving, beautiful religion in its own
right and does not require an appeal to the past for legitimacy.

     As a founding member of the California Line of the
Gardnerian Tradition, a progressive branch of the Tradition
centered in Northern California, I cannot help but be pleased at
the ever-changing diversity of ritual scripts that Kelly spreads
before us. His book in many ways argues, however unintentionally,
in favor of a position that I have been promoting for years: that
the nature of the Gardnerian Tradition is to grow and change over
time.

     So why have I gone to all this trouble to rebut his
arguments?
     Two reasons:
     1) Bad scholarship is its own reason for criticism.
     2) Kelly is using the arguments expressed in this book to
further his own agendas within the Craft community, agendas about
which he does not inform the reader.



Kelly's NROOGD agenda
     As a NROOGD Elder, an elder of the Craft tradition that
Kelly helped found, I have always been aware of the grudge that
some older members of the tradition have against Gardnerians.
Since my first initiation, I have been told how the founders of
NROOGD were snubbed by the Gardnerians on the East Coast. Books
by Gardnerians made it to the West Coast long before Gardnerians
did, and it was from such books (and others) that NROOGD was
created. When the first contacts between NROOGD initiates and
Gardnerians occurred in the `70s, the Gardnerians were still
holding on to the belief that they had an unbroken tradition
tracing back to the Stone Age. They looked down on the NROOGD
folk as "upstarts" and did not consider them "real" Witches.

     In Crafting the Art of Magic, Aidan Kelly and other NROOGD
Elders have their vindication. Gardner made his tradition up,
just as Kelly did. Gardner and Kelly have equal places in
history. Unfortunately, there are many people in the Craft, who
have held such a grudge for a long time and will eagerly accept
Kelly's conclusions without critically reading his analysis.

Kelly's Faery Tradition agenda
     At the same time that Kelly feels he has taken Gardner down
a peg, he has boosted Victor Anderson and the Faery Tradition up
one. Kelly is a Faery initiate, a fact of which he does not
apprise the reader. Thus, in Crafting the Art of Magic, Kelly not
only places himself on equal footing with Gardner, he does him
one better by being an initiate of a tradition that really does
trace back into the mists of history, or so Kelly claims. No
doubt there are Witches out there that will like this conclusion,
and also not read the book critically. 

Kelly's Gardnerian agenda
     On page 27, Kelly brings up a theme to which he will return
over and over again. Kelly gives us some details of the life of
the young Gerald Gardner:
     His education for the most part was in the hands of
     "Con", a governess to whom the "Bracelin" biography
     says he was devoted. He did not obtain a university
     education, but instead went to work for the commercial
     branch of the British Civil Service in the Far East.


     Kelly goes on to say that:
     ... what is most important about Gardner's life for
     understanding his role in founding the modern Craft
     movement is the fact that he suffered from a sexual
     addiction. Specifically, he was addicted to being
     whipped.


     Kelly softens our reaction to this provocative statement,
and consequently our skepticism, by saying that:
     To blame him or think ill of him for that would be
     bigotry, ignorance, or hypocrisy, because he had not
     chosen to acquire this addiction. Instead, it was
     forced upon him, as it was upon most Englishmen of his
     generation, by the English educational system.


     A system through which, as Kelly has told us only a
paragraph before, Gardner never passed! On page 28, Kelly tells
us that "Gardner was certainly beaten by Con", but without any
evidence or substantiation. In fact, nowhere in this book does
Kelly offer any corroborative testimony to support this claim of
sexual addiction. He asks us to accept it as a given because it
is, as he admits above, essential to his argument. Kelly's
recurrent use of Gibson's work, The English Vice: Beating, Sex,
and Shame in Victorian England and After, to explain Gardner's
psychological motivations is thus rendered irrelevant.

     Kelly follows up his unfounded statement about Con beating
Gardner by asserting that, as a result, "like Aleister Crowley,
he did not settle for passively hating Christianity. Instead he
set out to replace Christianity." This is pure speculation on
Kelly's part. After all, did all beaten Englishmen set out to
replace Christianity?

     On page 54, Kelly notes that:
     ... the Charge was written in order to create a
     framework for the binding and scourging in the
     initiation that would - for Gardner - lead to sexual
     intercourse.


     Nothing in the text of the Charge explicitly mentions
scourging! Neither is it inextricably linked to the Great Rite,
i.e. sexual intercourse. While it is true, as Kelly points out,
that the rites of the youths of Sparta often involved ritual
scourging, every coven I have been in or attended has used the
Charge as an evocative piece of devotional prose. None of them
made the connection that Kelly makes here.

     On page 72, Kelly describes the directions for the Sabbats
in 1949. Three of the four Sabbats contain a direction to perform
the Great Rite "if possible". If Gardner were the sexual
fetishist Kelly paints him to be, making up a tradition to
satisfy his needs, would he be so weak in asking for his "fix"?
Wouldn't such a person have been more likely to say that the
Great Rite was required at every Sabbat?

     On page 83, Kelly describes how, in the Craft Laws,
"scourging [was used] as a means for enforcing discipline within
the coven". If Gardner was the sole author of the Laws, trying to
promote scourging as a ritual practice, why would he increase its
negative associations and therefore diminish the frequency of
its use in the group? 

     Later on that same page, Kelly claims that the traditional
passage to the effect that "it is not meet to give less than 2
score strokes to the Lady" "means that Gardner needed at least
forty strokes to become aroused." This assumes a) that there is
no numerological reason for the number 40, as we will see there
is, and b) that Gardner, in the throes of his "sexual addiction"
kept count of the exact number of strokes needed. This stretches
credulity!

     A similar argument may be applied to Gardner's "Eightfold
Path or Ways to the Center", described on page 89. The scourge is
listed as one of eight different magical practices that "may" be
used in ritual. Continuing with his discussion of the Eight Ways
on page 121, Kelly quotes Gardner as saying that:
          The great thing is to combine as many of these
     paths into the one operation. No. 1 [i.e. Meditation &
     Concentration] must be in all - for if you have no
     clear picture of what you wish and no certainty you
     will not succeed - `tis useless. No. 2 [i.e. Trance]
     can be combined with this easily. Nos. 3, 4, and 5
     [i.e. Drugs, Dance, & Chants] are all good
     preliminaries - also 6 and 7 [i.e. Blood control & the
     Scourge] ...


     If Gardner really wrote all of this as a sexually addicted
flagellant, why wasn't the scourge the primary tool of magic, 
essential to every good ritual? Rather, it almost seems mentioned
as an afterthought.

     Further, on page 92, Kelly quotes Gardner as saying that
scourging should be done "with light, steady, monotonous, slow
strokes" (emphasis mine). This hardly sounds like the "beatings"
to which Kelly keeps referring, and hardly what one might expect
of a flagellation addict.

     On page 64, having detailed what he believes to be material
"lifted" from the Masons and the Golden Dawn, Kelly goes on to
"consider Gardner's own additions":
          1. The triangle binding of the arms behind the
     back is Gardner's own addition. It is simply the way he
     liked to be bound while being scourged.


     As Kelly has not presented any evidence that Gardner was a
flagellant, this is pure unsupported speculation on his part. He
goes on:
          2. The scourging of forty strokes is Gardner's
     addition. There is no reference to scourging in any
     Masonic or magical ritual that I have yet seen.


     Perhaps not, but then Kelly has already demonstrated that he
is not very well read in the literature of magic. In fact, his
reading seems to be limited to The Greater Key of Solomon, as
that is the only grimoire he ever cites, as on page 88:
     As I have already said, there is certainly no mention
     of scourging in The Greater Key of Solomon, nor of the
     scourge as a magical tool.


     Not in The Greater Key of Solomon, perhaps, but the
grimoire tradition has many more texts in it than just Solomon's.
Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy discusses both ritual
scourging in Book III, Chapters LVI: "Of Penitency, and Almes."
and LVII: "Of those things which being outwardly administred
[sic] conduce to expiation." and the significance of the number
forty in relation to same in Book II, Chapter XV: "Of the Numbers
which are above twelve, and of their powers, and vertues [sic]."
     Kelly suggests, on page 94, that Gardner rewrote the "New
Forest group's" rituals to increase the amount of scourging after
1951, when he was "freed from Dorothy's domination". We know
absolutely nothing about the relationship between Gerald Gardner
and Dorothy Clutterbuck. No one could even prove that she ever
existed until Valiente did in 1980 (Farrar, 1984, pp. 283 - 293).
There is no way that Kelly can know that Dorothy "dominated"
Gardner, but since he has tried very hard to get us to accept
that Gardner was a flagellant, he seems to assume that we will
just accept this claim uncritically.

     The many instances of unsupported assertions that Gardner
was a flagellant all seem aimed at proving one point, the point
Kelly makes on page 65:
          Hear a plain truth: the reason Gardner included
     all this scourging is that he could not "work the Great
     Rite" without it. ...
          Now hear another: anyone who can have sex without
     being scourged has no reason to include scourging in
     the ritual. (emphasis Kelly's)


     One might very well think that Kelly (or persons close to
him) has a strong personal grudge against or psychological
aversion to scourging. As the officiating Priest at Kelly's
Gardnerian initiation, I am well aware of the opinions and
feelings that Kelly has expressed on this subject; opinions which
he himself has recently published in a letter printed in the
Beltane 1991 issue of the Gardnerian journal, The Hidden Path: 
     The fact is that it is the ultraconservative
     [Gardnerians] who have introduced changes [into the
     ritual scripts], and who are attempting to force those
     changes on everyone else [including Kelly]. It is they
     who have decided that the specific way that they were
     initiated is the only correct way to be initiated as a
     Gardnerian (emphasis Kelly's). ... 


     To what is Kelly objecting? Among other things, the use of
the scourge:
          At this point I have identified at least five
     different drafts of the initiation rituals:
          1. As they were worked by the original New Forest
     coven, ca. 1940 -1944; these were something like what
     Rhiannon Ryall describes, and there WAS NO SCOURGE
     (emphasis and caps Kelly's).
          2. As rewritten by Gardner to work in as much
     binding and scourging as possible, and used from 1946 -
     1953; these were as in High Magic's Aid. ... 


     Kelly's wife, Julie O'Ryan, expands on this in a companion
letter printed with another version of Kelly's letter in the
March 1991 issue of another Craft newsletter, Protean Synthesis:
          When Gardner created the rituals, he did just
     that. He created rituals to meet his own spiritual/
     sexual needs, stealing/borrowing from anything that
     worked from whatever sources he could get access to. In
     order to do as Gardner did, we can not simply re-enact
     his rituals; we must meet our own spiritual/sexual
     needs, ...


     So Kelly, and others close to him, have a minor theological
squabble with the rest of the Gardnerian community. Is it really
such a big deal that I can call it a "hidden agenda"? Kelly's
letter to The Hidden Path demonstrates just how important this
issue is to him:
     This is not just a matter of opinion; it is something
     that I could prove in a court of law if I had to - and
     when you are discussing such matters as organizational
     membership and the legal rights thereof [?], ownership
     of the organization's intellectual property [?], and so
     on, which IS what we are discussing, then the court of
     law becomes a very real possibility. And you cannot
     claim that "Craft Law" forbids going to court when that
     "Law" was itself written only in 1957. (emphasis and
     caps Kelly's)


     So, Kelly feels strongly enough about this that he would
take closeted Witches into a public court, but apparently not so
strongly that he feels he should inform the reader of his bias.
Notice also, that he defends his action by pointing to his own
arguments concerning the validity of the Craft Laws.

Conclusions
     Doreen Valiente, probably the closest living source to
Gerald Gardner and any "pre-1939" coven, maintains her belief
that there was such a coven. She points to the testimony of
Louis Wilkinson, Dafo, and her own research on Dorothy
Clutterbuck as supporting evidence. She could also point to the
supporting testimony of Lugh and Margaret Murray. Kelly
criticizes this belief on page 107, saying that these points "do
not prove the existence of anything before 1939". True, but
neither do they disprove it! Kelly continues to criticize
Valiente's belief, saying that "like the resurrection of Jesus of
Nazareth, it does not qualify as historical fact". Also true, but
there are degrees of likelihood involved here. All the
information and evidence presented by Kelly is consistent with
the theory that Gerald Gardner did make contact with a pre-1939
coven; a coven preserving material from the folk tradition,
including material from the grimoires, which Gardner reshaped
using his knowledge of Masonry and Rosicrucianism into the
Witchcraft that we know today. If Kelly is unable to distinguish
between such a plausible chain of events and such an
unprecedented supernatural occurrence as the Resurrection, no
wonder he has had the trouble analyzing data that has been
demonstrated above.

     That Gerald Gardner was initiated in 1939 into a pre-
existing coven preserving fragmentary knowledge of a genuine folk
tradition has been neither proven nor disproven. It is possible
that this claim cannot be either proven or disproven, but I
believe that the preponderance of evidence favors the former. 

     Kelly dismisses the corroborative testimony of persons in a
position to know the truth or falsity of Gardner's claims by
claiming that they conspired to protect the fictitious origins of
modern Witchcraft. Kelly would have us believe that this
conspiracy of deceit included:

     Gerald Brosseau Gardner
     Dafo
     Dorothy Clutterbuck Fordham
     Louis Wilkinson
     Dolores North
     George Watson McGregor Reid
     J.S.M. Ward
     Charles Richard Foster Seymour
     Christine Hartley
     Mrs. Mabel Besant-Scott
     G.A. Sullivan
     "Lugh"
     and presumably, since she endorsed Gardner, 
          Margaret Murray

     None of these individuals ever publicly denied or questioned
Gardner's claims regarding the origins of modern Craft. None of
them ever told any witness "Yes, we made it all up." Is it
really credible to assert that such a conspiracy of deceit and
misdirection could have stayed secure and unbroken for these
past fifty some years without at least one person confessing the
"truth"?

     As I stated at the start of this article, Crafting the Art
of Magic does have its good points. Kelly's are some of the most
eloquent defenses of the Craft as a contemporary religion that I
have read. I wish that they were available in pamphlet form to
distribute. The collection of historical texts presented, such as
can be considered reliable, will delight the scholarly appetites
of many a Gardnerian, or indeed Witch of any tradition. It is
also quite satisfying to see the Wiccan book market move beyond
the plethora of "Introduction to Witchcraft" titles that have
filled the shelves. Kelly's book, along with Luhrman's
Persuasions of the Witch's Craft, represent the first steps
towards a more profound and academically sound approach to Craft
scholarship (albeit with varying success), and as such are
refreshing and long overdue. I can only hope that, as with most
fledgling disciplines, it will improve over time.

Post scriptum
     Prospective readers should also be aware that Kelly's book
has no index. This only adds to the difficulty of checking his
cross-references.

     I must say that I am amazed that Llewellyn felt that Kelly's
manuscript was up to their journalistic standards. I can only
hope that they will more carefully review and fact-check Kelly's
manuscript for Crafting the Art of Magic Vol. 2, dealing as it
will with living, and possibly litigious, people.



Acknowledgements
     The views expressed above are those of the reviewer, but I
would like to extend my grateful thanks to those friends and
associates who reviewed this paper before publication, offering
helpful suggestions: Thank you Tom Johnson, Runach, Gus diZerega,
Ira Steingroot, and Josh Bacon.

     Also, to be fair, I would like to thank Aidan Kelly for
honoring the oath taken from him at his Gardnerian 1st Degree
Initiation. He swore at that time that he would not publish any
Gardnerian material that he received after being initiated,
unless that material had already been published elsewhere. As far
as I can tell, he has scrupulously honored that oath.

     D. Hudson Frew, July 1st, 1991


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