by Wood Avens

WitchyCon was a one-day pagan conference organised by Judith Lewis and held at the civic hall in Wantage, a market town in Oxfordshire, England. That a gathering of witches could take place in such surroundings without attracting notice was, for the author, itself a measure of how far British paganism had come.

This report from the 2006 event preserves four substantive talks: Sally Morningstar on the practical ethics of healing; Ralph Harvey on the legal and folk history of witchcraft in England, including accounts of the Witchcraft Act's repeal and the survival of fairy-lore into the modern era; Steve Patterson on "Archaic Witchcraft" — a project to recover indigenous English folk magic from surviving place-names, nursery rhymes, and customs; and Anna Franklin on returning contemporary Wicca to its pre-Gardnerian roots.

Wood Avens was a long-standing member of alt.religion.wicca.moderated, known for her sharp, scholarly writing. Her accounts of Witchfest 2004, Witchfest 2005, and this report from WitchyCon 2006 constitute the most detailed practitioner documentation of British Wiccan and pagan gathering culture from this period.

WitchyCon 2006

Among the many reasons I like living in England is that a group of witches can hold a conference in the civic hall of a pleasantly conservative market town and the locals don't turn a hair. Perhaps the spirit of the Chalk, the backbone of southern England and the home of Wayland's Smithy and the Uffington White Horse, still whispers through their dreams.

Serious congratulations to Judith Lewis, who not only organised this event single-handed but pulled off the remarkable feat of running it absolutely to time. She opened the proceedings lightly and lyrically, inviting us to contemplate the reasons why a "spork" is a truly magical object. Think about the way liquid passes through a fork and is held by a spoon.

There were talks, and there were workshops, and one couldn't go to both at once. I hadn't signed up for the first workshop and so I decided to try the first talk.

Sally Morningstar — The Art of Wiccan Healing

Sally Morningstar, the author of The Art of Wiccan Healing: a Practical Guide. Pink and fluffy, I predicted, sitting near to the door with an eye to an unobtrusive escape. An hour later I'd written two pages of notes and participated in a dance and a couple of grounding exercises. In between, Sally's audience were seduced into learning some very un-fluffy things about the nature of psycho-social healing and the prerequisites for undertaking it. Half way through, the fire alarm went off — the result, inevitably, of someone lighting incense elsewhere in the building. Once it had stopped, Sally calmed the room instantly with a single strike on a small bell.

She recommended what she called the "Five Rightnesses": right involvement (do I have anything to offer here? Does this situation have anything to offer me?); right attitude (an open mind, no arrogance, well grounded); right intent (know, or discover, the most appropriate approach for the given situation); right focus (be able to hold your direction and to trust the process, even if things appear to be going pear-shaped); and right alignment (preparation at all levels, including the ability to know the right place and time).

If having a fluffy name attracts people who then acquire some practical knowledge they might otherwise not have sought, who am I to object?

Ralph Harvey — The Witchcraft Act and the Fairies of England

Next up was Ralph Harvey. The WitchyCon introduction says that "Ralph is an internationally acclaimed repository of information on the true ways of Witches past and present going back way before the Roman invasion." Ralph's talk, ranging around aspects of witchcraft, went back only as far as 1930, to a court case against a newspaper which had published a set of predictions about Princess Margaret, including some (about marriage and divorce) which outraged the sensibilities of the time. Christmas Humphreys successfully defended this case, which together with the 1944 prosecution of Helen Duncan sowed the seeds of the later (1951) repeal of the Witchcraft Act.

Ralph also told us that we still have a medieval law making it a capital offence to kill a fairy. He has, he said, experienced fairies in Ireland, but in England they were officially declared extinct in 1800 and were last recorded in Sussex. Sources from the Middle Ages record the emergence of fairies from their tumuli as one of the signs of Spring, on a par with primroses in meadows and frogs in ponds. A clergyman in the 1790s noted how few there were by then on Harrow Hill, and claimed a last sighting in 1798. These fairies, it is clear, were not the diaphanous-winged creatures of Victorian imagination: they were roundish and very big-eyed: it is not clear what they really were or are.

Sussex, Ralph said, along with the Isle of Wight, Devon and Cornwall, resisted Christianity, and its eventual acceptance was only superficial. Sussex recorded only nineteen prosecutions for witchcraft, fewer than any other county, and only two executions, one of which was for murder rather than witchcraft. In Sussex, he said, the Church issued people with licences to practice witchcraft.

Steve Patterson — Archaic Witchcraft

Steve Patterson is trying to work out what an archaic English witch might have looked like. He started from the premise that the dominant culture of prehistoric Britain was that of the people who built the megalithic structures, and that their concerns — the movements of the sun and moon, the transitions of life and death — are still to be found in British folklore. He is trying to reconstruct from folklore evidence a picture of what pre-Christian magical practitioners were doing, and building a witchcraft practice from it.

He talked about Meg the Wise Woman, an archetypal figure who seems to occur in folk-lore throughout Britain, associated with sacred sites. Meg is always old; Meg has magical powers; Meg never died, and so she was probably never alive in the conventional sense; she is a local spirit, attached to a specific location.

The spirit of the lane and the path was often "Jack", according to folk-lore: a will-o'-the-wisp, that is. Jack-o'-Lantern is a spirit which will lead you home in the dark; and female local spirits are often Jenny, or, in the North, Annie. Jack and Jenny are common folk-names for plants and birds too, and show up in nursery rhymes, childhood superstitions, and counting games.

Meg would have expected the spirits to have a hierarchy, including a Queen and a King. "Robin" is the catch-all name for a celebrity, someone famous, and in a fourteenth-century ballad Robin marries "the Queen of the shepherds" after a contest in which neither can out-shoot the other. Robin traditionally wears green, and the Queen's colour is grey: these, he said, were England's colours in the days before the red-and-white.

How would Meg expect magic to be done? Weaving is the obvious candidate — weaving, tying things to trees, binding, dressing wells and trees. Weaving was considered sufficiently close to magic that priests were at one time forbidden to do their own weaving. And now "witchy-stitch" knitting is popular (meaning fashionable) in London.

So Archaic Witchcraft looks into folklore and into the occult significance of original folk practices. Steve hopes that people will get together and try to create their own witchcraft, based on what is discoverable in their own locality.

Anna Franklin — Wicce: Back to the Roots

Finally I went to Anna Franklin's talk entitled "Wicce". What she is seeking to do is the return witchcraft to what she sees as its roots. In the past thirty years there has been a burgeoning of information and of acceptance: the bad side of this is the publishing bandwagon, with books giving a false impression, encouraging novices to skip over the religious side and to concentrate on using spells simply to get things they want. There are too many mixed pantheons, and rituals invented by third-degree seventeen-year-olds. Anna went to one Pagan camp where sixty percent of the attenders (most of them under the age of thirty) couldn't identify a dandelion.

So she is aiming to bring witchcraft back to basics. She believes that Gerald Gardner was genuinely initiated and that his New Forest coven actually existed, but that Gerald's witches were much more ritually-based than what she calls "the old witches"; and some of today's Gardnerians may stick rigidly to their Book of Shadows and never go out into the countryside.

The old witches, Anna said, had more in common with a tribal shaman: they usually worked alone and lived slightly apart, and were feared. The concept has still just about survived in some country areas. But these witches were like the fairies, capable of both beneficence and malevolence, and therefore needing to be placated. The good fairies come out of their mounds at Beltane, when the earth is blooming, and go back at Samhain to make way for the maleficent winter-bringers. Up to (and after) the arrival of Christianity, people believed in a multitude of nature spirits, white shining beings who lived in mounds and tombs, with little differentiation between fairies and the spirits of the dead. The Christian authorities destroyed many sacred trees and shrines, but many of the old gods became saints, while the spirits of the land became the fairies. People accused of witchcraft often claimed that their power came not from demons but from fairies, from the spirits of the land rather than from any external force.

Anna's system uses eight paths: the path of the Hunter (concentration, patience, focus); the Shaman (awareness of universal connectedness, travelling outside ego-consciousness); the Hearth-witch (magic rooted in the home and in the herbs of the locality); the Warrior (control, balance of mind, spirit and body, conquering of one's own fears); the Sacred Dancer (sacred worship, changing consciousness); the Bard (the story-teller, using the magical properties of sound, the spoken spell); the Priest or Priestess (the adept at ritual); and the Witch, a total commitment and a combination of all the other paths. Anna's "clan" wants to encourage people to make their own tools, to work outdoors, sensitive to the spirit of the land; and to make their own journeys of self-discovery.

Afterward

I can't judge how much of the material in Anna's, Ralph's and even Steve's talks is substantiated history and how much is what one might call "foundational myth". It seems to me unfortunate if some of the myths are taken literally, as the Christian fundamentalists take the Bible. But once the myths are put in perspective, what they give us is a sense of rootedness, expressed in wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory folk-tales and folk-wisdom. A rootedness in the land and its customs is no bad foundation for any sort of witchery.

And that, of course, is where we came in.

Colophon

Written by Wood Avens, posted to alt.religion.wicca.moderated on 17 April 2006 (re-post of an earlier version). Original Message-ID: [email protected].

Wood Avens was a regular contributor to alt.religion.wicca.moderated in the 2000s, known for her sharp, scholarly writing and her detailed reports from UK pagan events. Her accounts of Witchfest 2004, Witchfest 2005, and this WitchyCon 2006 report constitute the most detailed practitioner documentation of British Wiccan gathering culture from this era.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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