Customer Reviews

Crafting the Art of Magic, Book I: A History of Modern Witchcraft, 1939-1964 (Llewellyn's Modern Witchcraft Series) (Book 1)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Q: How many Alexandrian Witches does it take to change a light bulb?

A: Wait while we go see what Gardner's Book of Shadows says.

In Wicca, many people have been exposed to "ancient" and "hereditary" traditions while the ink in the spellbook was still drying--often on materials that had been lifted from another craft or magical tradition. Much of the Craft today, in its diverse forms, owes its existence to the original work of Gerald Gardner.

Aidan Kelly takes a critical look at the source material for Gerald Gardner's teachings about the craft. This is an excellent textual criticism of the Gardnerian materials. I cannot fault him for his work with "original" documents. I doubt we will ever learn more about when things were written, and from where they were lifted, than Dr. Kelly has presented in his book.

One of the most interesting evolutions is that of the Charge of the Goddess. On p. 52 he presents Gardner's original, a redacted bit of Leland & Crowley. It reads like a hack. This was its state between 1949 & 1953. On p. 114 he presents the Charge, essentially as we know it today, after Doreen Valiente (see my review of her The Rebirth of Witchcraft) had helped him rewrite it. On p. 162 he presents a verse form of of the Charge from 1961, a quintain adaptation of Dorreen's quatrain form (not included).

Kelly argues that nothing in the Craft pre-existed Gardner. He attempts to explain the creation of the Craft as Gerald's way of manipulating strong women into spanking him for sexual gratification. While I find his critical analysis compelling, his theory about Gardner's sexuality seems to be a long reach.

This book is required reading for anybody interested in the history of the Craft. If nothing else it helps decrease the number of times Wannabe Witch utters "Yes, our traditions go back for =THOUSANDS= of years..." While the Goddess may have been worshipped since time immemorial, Kelly makes a good case that She has only been worshipped in this particular Wiccan way since the late 1930's at best.

(If you enjoyed this review please leave me positive feedback. You can see my other reviews by clicking on the link to "more about me." Thanks!)

This book details the history of the witchcraft movement in modern times. It generally focuses in on Gardner, and does not talk about much else. Kelly, states that Gardner was the creator of the Witchcraft movement in modern times. Even if you feel that it is untrue, this book offers many historical background, and is a must for anyone with an interest in the Witchcraft movement. It blowes the whole Gardnrian movement out of the water!

Kelly's book is a pretty well researched history of neo-pagan Gardnerian witchcraft. He documents and discusses Gerald Gardner's creation of Wicca in the 1950s. The contributions of several other people are also credited. The one drawback is that he blurs all his data to support his premise that Gardner (and friends) invented the Wicca as a whole new religion. Kelly hypothesizes that Gardner, Dorothy Clutterbuck, and some other friends formed their first coven in 1939 as a new creation. He insists that there was no prior witchcraft from which they drew workings, beliefs, morality or rituals. Every part of Gardnerian Wicca documents that do not appear to have come from an identifiable source he credits to Gardner himself. Overlooks the fact that there was a witch museum before Gardner took it over. The reader may be tempted to ask, if Gardner invented it all what was in the museum before Gardner? Kelly stretches logic to deny possible connections to prior magical or pagan sources. If you want a book on the development and progression of Gardnerian Wicca during the 1950s, this is a good source. If you're looking for hard evidence about Gardner's sources and prior connections this is probably not your book.

Llewellyn publishes something good in the early 90's an it never comes back, while tripe gets republished over and over.....

Anyway, "Crafting the Art of Magic" is a must for anyone interested in the history of Wicca. Okay, so we all know the usual story--Wicca is 50,000 years old, Wicca is from an unbroken line of English witches, Wicca is blah, blah. Kelly actually goes back to primary sources, picks them over and shows his work. It's not infallible, of course--he puts more faith in a few of his theories than proof--but it's an honest effort and a worthwhile read if you can snag a copy.

While Kelly's book is not perfect, it was by far the best systematic debunking of Wicca until Ronald Hutton came along. Hutton used the same documents that Kelly used (they didn't disappear, they just changed hands) when he wrote his expose. He said so in Triumph of the Moon. Kelly's book, of course has to be taken with a grain of salt. While he realized Wicca was a hoax, he still felt a need to play witch and therefore couldn't totally divorce himself from Wicca. The first chapter is spent unneccsarily attacking the Bible in an attempt to make it appear to be a result of basically "group fraud". The reason Kelly does it is to make the statement "The Book of Shadows is a concocted hoax, but so what? So's the Bible". Any first year seminarian could demolish Kelly's arguments, and it's a pointless exercise in a book about Wicca. Kelly is Theologically ambidextrous, bashing Wicca while trying to save it. He now considers himself a "Christian Pagan", framing his love/hate relationship with both religions. Kelly's personal foibles should be overlooked when reading the book.

A good many Wiccans want to dismiss the book...but it can't be dismissed. Kelly got to see documents Wiccans wet their pants just thinking about. Even though Wiccans say "We know Wicca's a modern religion", most of them don't seem to actually mean it. Kelly forces them to confront the fact that prior to Gardner , there was no duotheistic Neopagan religion calling itself witchcraft. Kelly examines witchcraft of several pre-Wiccan varieties (that alone is worth reading the book) and discovers what people with common sense have known all along: witches worship the devil. Witches, not Wiccans, mind you.

Kelly shows the evolution of the book of Shadows from it's start as a collection of Thelemic material plagiarized from Crowley, to what it is today. Kelly also delves into the psychology of the sado-masochist, illuminating why certain things exist in the BoS the way they do (so Gardner could get off).

This was supposed to be the first in a series of books on Wiccan history (if something so recent can be called history), but the Wiccan community howled until Llewellyn capitulated and stopped sale of the first book, and canceled the rest in the series. Kelly whused out and although he owns the copyright to the book is too scared to publish it (although I don't see why, all the Wiccans hate him anyway).

Dr. Kelly's book attempts a scholarly reconstruction of the origins of the Wiccan movement, and to a great part it succeeds. Through some luck and due diligence, Dr. Kelly acquired access to texts and individuals that were central to the formation of this growing religion, and showed through careful deconstruction and textual analysis how the entire movement in its present form essentially began with one man, Gerald Gardner, the founder of the "Gardnerian Tradition" of Wicca. However, in dissecting its origins and demonstrating them to be wholely a product of the twentieth century, it also drew a furious backlash from the Wiccan community that has to this day convinced Llewellyn to put off any second printing.

Part of the campaign to remove it from the public eye involves discrediting "reviews", such as the one by Frew, referenced by another reviewer on this listing. His self-important article is not so much a review as a prolonged collection of innuendo, misdirection, logical hair-splitting, and frantic micro-analytical fault finding designed to divert the reader from addressing the spine of Kelly's argument: that all of the material present in Gardner's Book of Shadows were derived from presently available literary sources, leaving essentially nothing for a secretive pre-Gardnerian tradition to contribute. In other words, even if Gardner did join a pre-exiting coven of Witches as was his claim, their existence proves irrelevant as they effectively contributed nothing to the formation of present day Wicca. It was all Gardner (and then Valiente, and so on, and so on ...). This aspect of Dr. Kelly's book is scholastically and analytically solid and worthy of study. Where Kelly falters are in his personal speculations on Gardner's supposed sexual obsessions and how they contributed to the craft (wholely gratuitous to his argument), and on the identity, role and character of Dorothy Clutterbuck (as Gardner was prone to misdirection, simply because a woman by that name existed proves very little). He also shows himself to be arrestingly opinionated on many sundry matters not immediately relevant to his thesis, but wherever Kelly sticks to the texts and his interviews, he is lucid and revelatory.

So for those interested in the actual historical foundations of Wicca, this is a must read. But you need not take my word for it. Raymond Buckland, himself a Gardnerian initiate and a respected author of fortyfive works on Wicca and Neopaganism, wrote of the text:

"At long last we have a book that is a thorough, deeply-researched, scholarly examination of the origins of Gardnerian Witchcraft ... In this work, Aidan Kelly (like a metaphysical sleuth par excellence) painstakingly peers down every little alleyway, pieces together minute details, and makes deductions in a Holmeslike manner, to arrive at what must assuredly be the true picture."

Aidan's book is most important for the history of Witchcraft. Its debunkers can be seen for what they are: ignorant and unable to cope with the real roots of their professed religion. The fact that they believe Gardner created/brought back "Wicca" instead of Witchcraft shows how little they understand the real Craft. Gardner did not write "Wicca Today." Crafting the Art of Magic is a scholarly work that anybody interested in Craft history should read.

Kelly's work has perhaps one useful function; as a test of an ability to read critically. Further critique beyond that provided by Frew is probably unnecessary; his detailed examination of Kelly's errors in logic, the unnecessary anti-Catholic commentary and lack of familiarity with academic standards are clear and concise. These points added to the mysteriously-disappearing "Weschcke documents" that Kelly uses as his source material make this an inauspicious beginning to a textual examination of a new religious movement. Fortunately the work by Heselton and Hutton demonstrates that there is room to expand the inquiry into historical research.

This book has more assumption than it does research that has been proven false. See Don Frew's Critical Review here:

http://www.gryffintower.com/kelly.htm