Wicca's Founder Belonged to Nudist Colony in 1930's
Gardner also wove in some personal
idiosyncrasies. One was a fondness for linguistic archaisms: "thee," "thy," "'tis,"
"Ye Bok of ye Art Magical." Another was a taste for nudism: Gardner had
belonged to a nudist colony in the 1930s, and he prescribed that many Wiccan
rituals be carried out "skyclad." This was a rarity even among occultists: no
ancient pagan religion is known, or was thought in Gardner's time, to have
regularly called for its rites to be conducted in the nude. Some Gardnerian
innovations have sexual and even bondage-and-discipline overtones.
Ritual sex, which Gardner called "The Great Rite," and which was also largely unknown in antiquity, was part of the liturgy for Beltane and other feasts (although most participants simulated the act with a dagger — another of Gardner's penchants — and a chalice). Other rituals called for the binding and scourging of initiates and for administering "the fivefold kiss" to the feet, knees, "womb" (according to one Wiccan I spoke with, a relatively modest spot above the pubic bone), breasts, and lips.
Hutton effectively demolished the notion, held by Wiccans and others, that fundamentally pagan ancient customs existed beneath medieval Christian practices. His research reveals that outside of a handful of traditions, such as decorating with greenery at Yuletide and celebrating May Day with flowers, no pagan practices — much less the veneration of pagan gods -- have survived from antiquity. Hutton found that nearly all the rural seasonal pastimes that folklorists once viewed as "timeless" fertility rituals, including the Maypole dance, actually date from the Middle Ages or even the eighteenth century.
There is now widespread consensus among historians that Catholicism thoroughly permeated the mental world of medieval Europe, introducing a robust popular culture of saints' shrines, devotions, and even charms and spells. The idea that medieval revels were pagan in origin is a legacy of the Protestant Reformation.
Hutton has also pointed out a lack of evidence that either the ancient Celts or any other pagan culture celebrated all the "eight feasts of the Wheel" that are central to Wiccan liturgy. "The equinoxes seem to have no native pagan festivals behind them and became significant only to occultists in the nineteenth century," Hutton told me. "There is still no proven pagan feast that stood as ancestor to Easter" — a festival that modern pagans celebrate as Ostara, the vernal equinox. END
One
of Crowley's acquaintances in the last month of his life was
