Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler Page A

Minneapolis. His remarks were later published in Gnostica as “Witchcult: Fact or Fancy?” He later refined these arguments in a series of articles that appeared in Green Egg in 1976–1977 under the title “Witchcraft: Classical, Gothic and Neopagan.” He has changed these categories slightly in recent years.
    Bonewits’s division of Witches into categories is meant to clear up some of the confusion surrounding the word Witch . For example, the “classical witch” or cunning folk, would be defined as:
    a person (usually an older female) who is adept in the uses of herbs, roots, barks, etc., for the purposes of both healing and hurting (including midwifing, poisoning, producing aphrodisiacs, producing hallucinogens, etc.) and who is familiar with the basic principles of both passive and active magical talents, and can therefore use them for good or ill, as she chooses.
    This “classical witch” would be found among most peoples. In Europe this woman (or man) would be an old peasant, perhaps, “a font of country wisdom and old superstitions as well as a shrewd judge of character.” For this kind of witch, writes Bonewits, religion was fairly irrelevant to practice. Some considered themselves Christians; some were Pagans. In Ireland many said that their powers came from the fairies. Relatively few classical witches exist today in Europe. But Bonewits thinks that most people who call themselves “witches” today are “Neoclassical”—that is they use magic, divination, herbology, and extrasensory perception without much regard for religion. According to Bonewits, 70 percent of the Witches in America today are “Neoclassical.” 51
    Bonewits’s “gothic witches,” now called “diabolic witches,” are those who appear in trial reports between 1450 and 1750. They represented a reversed version of Roman Catholicism, including pacts with the devil, the devouring of babies, and other pieces of propaganda that the Church used during the Inquisition. Gothic witchcraft, according to Bonewits, is a Church fiction. He refutes the Murrayite thesis of a universal Old Religion with the contention that witchcraft in Europe was a creation of the Inquisition, complete with descriptions of the sabbat, covens, and orgies. He regards contemporary Satanism as neogothic witchcraft because it descends from the gothic witchcraft created by Christianity. Most modern Satanists pattern themselves on the ideas created by the Church and proceed from there. (I would amend this to say that a few modern Satanists seem to be misplaced Neo-Pagans who have not been able to get beyond Christian terminology and symbolism.)
    Bonewits does accept the survival of Neo-Pagans into the Christian era, although he is convinced that by the eleventh century most of them had gone underground or had been destroyed. Essentially he takes the orthodox scholarly position that until the middle of the fourteenth century witchcraft simply meant sorcery—the attempt to control nature—and was never an organized survival of Paganism; that the word acquired a new meaning in the fourteenth century, when it was identified as a heresy and was elaborated upon and spread by the Inquisition for its own political ends. We have met his arguments before: official Church policy that witchcraft was illusion was reversed; a new form of witchcraft was created by the Church to root out heresy; many of the old charges against Jews and Gypsies were “dusted off” and combined with the new inventions of the witches’ sabbat and the Black Mass.
    Bonewits believes that some European families may have kept Pagan traditions alive (he notes that rich families often don’t get persecuted) but that there is no evidence of an underground organized religious movement during the European Middle Ages. 52
    Bonewits uses the term “Neopagan Witchcraft” to refer to Wicca. He estimates that of