Progressive Witchcraft

It is apparent that when the Gardnerian form of witchcraft appeared, its practitioners were considered to be "the New-Age fluffy bunnies" of their time (if you’ll excuse the detestable term) by many of the hereditaries, as well as Britain’s general occult community, something the Gardnerians themselves were to accuse others of in the future. This is important, as a pattern soon seems to appear within the tensions of the mainstream Wiccan traditions, which reached its height with the appearance of Alex Sanders in the mid to late sixties.

Pat Kopinsky, a renegade priestess of Patricia and Arnold Crowther, brought Alex Sanders into Wicca. She did not actually initiate him but introduced him to Medea, her initiator, and passed on the Gardnerian Book of Shadows to him. This was done without the Crowther’s permission, although recent letters show that Kopinsky was in contact with Gerald Gardner and that it is also likely that Gardner and Sanders had been in contact with each other:

"Dear Dr Gerald,
I have just had a letter from Alex Saunders who I gather has been writing to you… she (Medea) finally made her mind to initiate him (Saunders) on the 9th of March with me as his sponsor…I have five members in my coven at the moment, counting Alex who comes now and again."

—Abridged letter from Pat Kopinsky to Gerald
Gardner, 5th September 1963¹⁴

Alex Sanders’ claim that he was a hereditary witch initiated by his grandmother¹⁵ to gain acceptance from the wider occult community was hardly surprising. Hereditary origins have been claimed by those wanting acceptance as witches ever since Gardner, and have included many false claims. Its causes lie very much in the arguments we mentioned earlier and the continuing need for validity via the idea of lineage, something we examine more fully in Chapter 2 (see page 42). Initially, Sanders did not use the term Alexandrian to describe the way he worked. There are several stories surrounding how this description came into being. One is that the name was a creation of Janet’s late husband, renowned Pagan writer Stewart Farrar. It was suggested that Stewart coined the term Alexandrian during the writing of What Witches Do. During an interview with Alex in 1969, he asks him how many witches recognized him as "King of the Witches". Alex’s reply confirms the origins of the word Alexandrian:

"O, yes. Probably all of them, apart from Gardnerians…
Gardnerians, and those that don’t want publicity, tend to
refer to my witches as ‘Alexandrians’"¹⁶.

So here we have it, "from the horse’s mouth", so to speak. Regardless of origins, Alexandrian soon became a name for the new tradition of witchcraft created by Alex and Maxine Sanders, and the concept of tradition was compounded even more.

It was into the Alexandrian tradition of Wicca that Janet and Stewart were first initiated. To quote Stewart, Alex had a "scatter gun" approach to initiation. The standing joke was that if the milkman were to hang around the front door too long he’d find himself initiated! His approach paid off: By the early seventies the Alexandrian brand of Wicca had reached the United States and was gaining ground from the Gardnerians. The Gardnerians refused to accept the Alexandrians, and the literate battles in Pagan periodicals seemed to be at their most prevalent in the United States. This situation continued until the 1980s when they finally realized that they had more in common with each other, particularly as new traditions started to arise out of the United States from the early ‘70s onwards. Alex Sanders’ contribution to the modern witchcraft movement was two-fold; he caused growth by initiating so many into Wicca, but more importantly, he introduced the idea of a system of training within Wicca (more on this in Chapter 6), certainly within the UK.

It is Raymond Buckland17 who can be credited with the next stage of development within Wicca: the open creation of new traditions often referred to as "reconstructionalist Wicca". In many ways there was more honesty in these traditions, as they made no false claims of lineage. Ground was initially broken with Buckland’s The Tree: the Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft, which was the ritual liturgy for a whole new tradition, Seax-Wicca. Buckland had lived in the United States since the early eighties and had become very much influenced by its more liberal occult culture. Seax-Wicca was almost completely researched from the literature of the time, the most obvious work being Brian Branston’s Lost Gods of England. Here Ray Buckland explains his reasons for creating it:

"I started it at a time when I realized that Gardnerian [craft] was not totally satisfying for me—this after about twelve years of it! There were things about it—about the make-up of the rituals, specifically—that didn’t work for me… I decided to construct a tradition that was exactly right for me, as an individual…I did not pretend, and never have pretended, that I was reconstructing anything ancient; this was new and I just wanted something right for me that had an ancient flavor to it. I most certainly did NOT start it as a joke, as has been erroneously reported… I would hardly give up Gardnerian and devote my life to a joke!"

—Ray Buckland, 28th November 2002¹⁸

Seax-Wicca also introduced another idea into print that was completely against the grain of the other main traditions: It was acceptable to self initiate. This concept was followed by the publication of Doreen Valiente’s Witchcraft for Tomorrow, which also contained a self-initiation ritual and by our own arguments for it in The Witches Way. Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca had maintained the dogma of "only a witch can make a witch", even though it seemed to contradict the Craft law "there is only one true initiator". The origins of the idea of lineage are not from hereditary witchcraft as one first might suppose. As mentioned earlier, Gardner had adopted rituals from the Co-Masonic influenced Fellowship of Crotona, and one of these rituals was the passing of power at initiation. This rite was in fact of Christian Gnostic origin rather than Pagan and was based on the idea of apostolic succession¹⁹. The same rite can in fact be still seen today in the modern Catholic and Protestant Churches at ordination.

Original witchcraft teachings were passed down in a generational learning process (see page 111) from parent to child for reasons already given. They would happily adopt and train others if they showed promise, but this was not lineage. The reason it was kept "within the family" as a secret was purely a mechanism to survive what modern witches often refer to as "the burning times", the period of repression previously mentioned. If you couldn’t trust your family, since your family would undoubtedly face the same fate as yourself and then who could you trust? In recent years many have challenged whether lineage, which is of Christian origin, has any place in modern witchcraft. We count ourselves among this group.