Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler Page B

the many thousands of people in America who consider themselves Witches, a statistical breakdown might look something like this:
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    Like many others, Bonewits believes that folklore and literature gave birth to Neo-Pagan Witchcraft: the folklore of Frazer and the theories of mother-right, and Leland’s studies of Pagan survivals among the Italian peasantry. He says that the fields of folklore, anthropology, and psychology really began to develop between 1900 and 1920, as did psychical research and ceremonial magic. He speculates:
    Somewhere between 1920 and 1925 in England a group of social scientists (probably folklorists) got together with some Golden Dawn Rosicrucians and a few Fam-Trads [see below] to produce the first modern covens in England; grabbing eclectically from any source they could find in order to try and reconstruct the shards of their Pagan past. 54
    Bonewits attributes most Neo-Pagan Witchcraft in the United States to Gerald Gardner’s influence, and writes that Gardner took “material from any source that didn’t run too fast to get away.”

Family Traditions
    Bonewits is most illuminating when he talks about the reality of Family Traditions (Fam-Trads). He accepts the idea that some “Classical witches” could have preserved folk traditions and agricultural festivals. While this was no organized universal cult, isolated and powerful families may have preserved many traditions, each family suffering contamination over the years. “There is plenty of evidence,” he writes, “of ancient Pagan traditions surviving under thin Christian veneers in isolated parts of Christendom,” but “there is almost nothing logical to suggest that the people leading these traditions were in touch with each other or shared more than the vaguest common beliefs.” 55 These families often call themselves Witches now, but whether they did a short while ago, or whether they have anything in common with modern Wiccans, remains in question.
    Bonewits stresses the contamination of the European family traditions, as well as of those families that immigrated to the United States (Immigrant Traditions). Classical witches were becoming fewer in number, and “Scientism was rapidly becoming the supreme religion in the West.”
    Most members of Fam-Trads made efforts to conceal their “superstitious” beliefs and Pagan magical systems. Instead they became involved in Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism in the 18th century, Spiritualism and Theosophy in the 19th; for all of these movements were considered more respectable than witchcraft, and still allowed the Fam-Trads to practice occult arts. . . . So as the years went by, members of the Fam-Trads absorbed more and more from non-Pagan magical sources and handed their new information down to each generation, often carelessly letting the descendants think that a Rosicrucian spell or alchemical meditation was a legitimate part of their Pagan heritage. So even today we have Fam-Trad witches who are far closer to being Theosophists or Spiritualists than to being Classical or Neoclassical witches. 56
    Almost everyone who has met members of family traditions notes that their Craft is far different from the Witchcraft of the revival. They far more easily fit Bonewits’s description of “Classical witches.” As one Midwestern priestess observed to me, “I know about family traditions—there are lots of people who have been taught how to do various things. But it’s rarely called Witchcraft. Later on, of course, these people begin reading and they say to themselves, ‘I was taught to do that, and here they say it’s Witchcraft!’”
    In Bonewits’s analysis, the Family Tradition Witches are essentially “Classical witches” who changed with the times. As he told me, “In order to stay unpersecuted, they had to use a lot of protective coloration. When Rosicrucian terminology was in,