It would be easy to dismiss the occult underground as a backward-looking reaction to a world suddenly made barren of shadows and spirits, a sweet and fundamentally doomed one. It might be. But why call it a reaction and not a resistance movement? Yeats, Crowley and their motley crew were waging a beautiful guerrilla war against plain common sense, the same plain common sense that argued women were not intelligent enough to vote. They had a point, which we shouldn’t dismiss too quickly. We should be suspicious of common sense. We want all our senses to be extraordinary.
The insurgents didn’t win, but they managed to pass on the flame. Their descendants are still around. London is still a hotbed of magical orders, battling wizards, and strange rituals held in suburban homes. The guerrilla war goes on.
And these insurgents developed some handy skills.
Theatrical magicians had taught me a lesson about the importance of accepting the mystery as something that cannot be solved – not because it is too hard a problem, but because it is not a problem at all. No amount of science will ‘solve’ a mystery, in the same way that no amount of hammer blows will paint a room.
The word mystery has an interesting story behind it, steeped in spirituality. It comes from the ancient Greek muste¯rion, which indicated a secret revealed after initiation into a sacred cult. As the scholar of religion Karen Armstrong puts it, the mystery ‘was not something that you thought (or failed to think!) but something that you did’.3 To join a ‘mystery cult’, the would-be initiate had to go through an exhausting sequence of rituals requiring fasting, processions, hymns and other – more obscure – elements, whose details were kept secret.
This ritual was the only way the mystery could be communicated. In practice, the ritual was the mystery. Words alone were not enough to pass it on, because the muste¯rion was not a specific piece of information. In all likelihood, some piece of information was part of it, but so were the pilgrimage, poetry, music and incense. The muste¯rion was not an abstract idea, but a transformative performance, facilitated by the priests.
The most celebrated of the cults of ancient Greece was the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose roots may have extended back to the Mycenaean era, around the twelfth century BC. At the core of these mysteries was the myth of the abduction of Persephone by Hades, god of the Underworld. At initiations, novices to the Mysteries would live this myth with their own body, in a ritual representation of death and resurrection. As far as we know, the ritual was intensely corporeal, and would involve all the senses through music, incense and other tools. The priests were making the mystery with the initiates. And considering that the mystery cult in Eleusis survived for a thousand years and more – from the age of Homer to the fourth century AD – they must have been on to something.
Our clear-minded understanding of the world has given us many marvels, but if we want to learn how to capture the myriad miracles of life, we need to be able to switch it off every now and then, to go back to a frame of mind in which ambiguous symbols are as important as rational theories. We need to learn how to make the mystery for ourselves.
To learn how to do that, I decided to pick the brains of a High Priestess.
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The Fitzroy Tavern, on the corner of Charlotte Street and Windmill Street, is one of those London pubs where history talks, especially after you buy history a couple of pints. The district of Fitzrovia takes its name from it. It used to be a favourite hangout of London’s bohemians, its patrons including Dylan Thomas and Aleister Crowley (him again). It was here I had lunch with a witch and her dog.
I was not frightened. Witches do not scare me much, and neither do dogs. Besides, Christina Oakley Harrington and I go way back. We met when I first moved to London, in 2008. Searching for some unusual books, I stepped into her shop, Treadwell’s, which in those days was in Covent Garden. So I knew Christina, and I knew Rambo, a good-hearted mongrel rescue terrier who, despite Christina’s and her partner’s best attempts, stubbornly refused to have his name changed to Rimbaud.
Christina has a PhD in History, and before opening her bookshop she was a university lecturer with scholarly publications to her name. She still occasionally lectures at conferences on her specialist topics, occultism and feminism. As a former academic, a public speaker and the owner of a business in central London, she has all the markings of a sensible person. She also happens to be a Wiccan High Priestess.
Now, hold on a moment. At the mention of the word ‘Wicca’ your mind will summon up The Craft and other teenage Nineties movies, and Goth bric-a-brac, but before it became a sweetly bonkers teenage staple, Wicca was born as a religion in the spirit of the ancient mystery cults. It was, in fact, the first new religion home-brewed in England.4
This strand of Wicca, the original one, is a secret oral tradition you can only learn in person: you learn Wicca by doing it. It is not much advertised and not much written about, but it is practised more or less worldwide, albeit, as far as I can make out, by very small numbers of people.
Wicca became a sensation in the Fifties, when a retired colonial civil servant, Gerald Gardner, published Witchcraft Today, in which he posed as an anthropologist revealing the existence of a tiny secret cult, whose rituals had been transmitted orally across the generations from the Stone Age and whose adherents were the ‘witches’ of folklore. Gardner, like Mathers and countless other occultists, was being creative with the truth. This religion did actually exist, but rather than being an age-old hand-me-down, it had been concocted by Gardner himself and a group of countercultural friends scattered across London, Hertfordshire and the New Forest.
Be that as it may, the publication of Witchcraft Today got the new religion going. Gardner was widely interviewed by newspapers and on television shows. People wrote to him asking for more information, and some of them went on to be initiated, and initiated others in turn. Some of the new Wiccans went abroad, taking their mysteries with them, and people from abroad travelled to England to be initiated. And so it is that a mystery religion, closely guarding its secrets, spread across the world.
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With its moon goddess and horned god, Wicca can seem more than a little surreal. But it feels less so when you are in a pub in Fitzrovia with a High Priestess and a mongrel terrier called Rambo. Witches are people and their pets are pets, and having lunch with them doesn’t feel any different from having lunch with any other friend and their dog. I was after practical wisdom, ideas and actions that could be adapted to use in a secular context. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened – mindfulness, now praised by Western doctors and offered as a therapy by the NHS, started life as an Eastern spiritual practice. With a bit of luck, I could find one of my keys to wonder in Christina’s very British tradition.
Christina wouldn’t reveal to me anything specific about what she does, but she agreed to talk about the broad contours of her life. And these would be remarkable enough even without Wicca. She comes from an Anglo-American family. Her father worked for the UN in developing countries, and she grew up in Nigeria, in West Africa, where she attended her first trance possession ritual at the age of six. At eight, she witnessed her first execution. She spent time in Pinochet’s Chile, she visited Buddhist temples in Burma – all this before hitting fifteen, when she moved back to America to go to high school. The impact of her first encounter with the Western world was devastating: she felt, in her own words, ‘spiritually deprived’. In the USA she lived in a wealthy suburb, which made her ‘die inside’. She needed more than big houses and tree-lined streets to be happy. She needed more than things. She explored Buddhism, which she had experienced first-hand in Burma, but it was not a tradition with which she felt comfortable.