Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler

all segments of the modern Craft as a hoax. Some Witches said they were of very old traditions that existed long before the time of Gardner. Others said that Gardner’s version of the Craft was a “pure” tradition. And in America descendants of European immigrants insisted that they were Witches through family tradition, and that their Witchcraft didn’t resemble Gardner’s in the least. What’s more, many of them said that Witchcraft was first and foremost a craft and only secondarily a religion . At the same time, covens sprang up in many places, and coven leaders declared themselves to be heirs of traditions that were thousands of years old. Many of these were soon discovered to be liars. One Wiccan priestess told me, “I’ve never seen a really old Book of Shadows. I’m not saying they don’t exist . . . but like unicorns and hippogryphs, I’ve never seen one!”
    What does this controversy have to do with the reality of the modern Craft? Fortunately, not much. Over the last thirty years, while some writers and scholars were dismissing the Craft as “silly” or “fraudulent,” Neo-Pagans and Wiccans began to reassess who they really were and what the Craft was really about. And during this time a number of Neo-Pagan American writers tried to piece together a revisionist history of the Craft.
    In the beginning of this chapter it was noted that Isaac Bonewits had divided Witches into several categories. Now is the time to look at his arguments more closely, particularly as they are related to the origins of the Craft and the place of Witches outside the revival.
    The history of Bonewits’s interaction with the Craft is a stormy one. He is a magician and occultist, who was for many years a priest of the New Reformed Druids of North America. He then founded a revivalist Druid group called Ár nDraíocht Féin. From the beginning, when he wrote Real Magic (1971), Bonewits has always been a bit snide about Wicca. He dismissed the “Myth of Wicca” a little too bluntly, a little too easily, and a little too early, and thereby angered many in the Craft. At the time of Real Magic and his later article, “Witchcult: Fact or Fancy?” most Witches accepted literally the idea of a universal Old Religion such as that described by Murray. Since Bonewits’s views were close to those of more inflexible scholars, he was branded by some as unfriendly to the Craft community. In the book, written when Bonewits was barely out of college, he argued (as he still does) that there never was a unified European-wide Old Religion. There were Pagan religions—many of which were very vital—and many European communities retained Pagan beliefs and even, perhaps, groups well into the Christian era; but Bonewits argued that the “Unitarian Old Religion of White Witches” existed in fancy, not in fact, “the product of local cultural egotism and bad ethnography.” 49 His final sally in Real Magic caused even more friction:
    Some of the witch groups claim to be Christian, and except for the fact that they often do their rites in the nude, you could find more paganism and witchcraft at a Baptist prayer meeting. Other groups claim to be revivals or remnants of the nonexistent “Witch-Cult of Western Europe” (made so popular by author Margaret Murray). They get their “authority” from their Secret Beliefs Handed Down for Generations of Witches in My Family, etc. This sort of witchcraft tends to be a mishmash of halfforgotten superstition, Christian concepts, and Hindu beliefs. Thus, their “fertility rites” are done for “spiritual fertility” rather than physical fertility, though they like to hint that their ceremonies are really very exciting (they’re not—they are hideously boring to anyone who’s been to a good love-in). 50
    Several years later Bonewits addressed a meeting of Witches in