‘The Mormons and Christian Scientists began right here in the United States’, Leo Martello explained to a journalist in 1974. ‘They own millions of dollars of property and have full rights’. Martello intimated that the witchcraft religion should aspire to the same.57 But what would a truly American witchcraft religion look like?
In the early years most American pagan witches were of British, northern or central European ancestry, and considering that Wicca originated in Britain, it is no surprise that the Wiccan conception of witchcraft and magic was firmly rooted in English, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish folklore and myth. The notion of a Celtic tradition was and is very strong. In 1967, for instance, American Y Tylwyth Teg covens were founded whose members reclaimed what they described as the ‘Faerie Faith’ of Wales. Scandinavian and Baltic neo-Pagan groups emerged in America later but this takes us away from the conception of a witch religion.58 Considering the strength of American-German identity, it is somewhat surprising that it was only in the 1990s that the idea of German Wicca joined the Pagan mainstream thanks to a raft of publications by Pennsylvania neo-Pagan author Jenine Trayer, a.k.a. Silver Raven Wolf. She has adapted/appropriated (delete as you feel inclined) Pennsylvania Dutch ‘pow-wow magick’ into her pagan world view and practices. The addition of a ‘k’ is a giveaway as to the pagan spin on what is a Christian healing tradition.
Italian pagan witchcraft was an early significant departure from the Anglo- Celtic mainstream. The seeds of an Italian tradition had been sown seventy years before, when American journalist and folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, or The Gospel of the Witches (1899), which claimed to contain the rituals and lore of a Tuscan pagan witch sect purportedly based on the revelations of a female adherent of this ‘Old Religion’. The followers worshipped a goddess named Aradia, and they possessed an ancient Italian explanatory text called the Vangelo that she allowed Leland to translate. While hardly making a splash at the time, this highly dubious book was an important influence on the foundation of Gardnerian Wicca. The founders of neo-Pagan Italian witchcraft in the 1960s, Leo Martello, the son of a Sicilian immigrant farmer, and fellow Italian-American Wiccan, Lori Bruno, whose mother’s family came from around Naples, were inspired by but did not fully embrace Leland’s Tuscan flavour of paganism. They emphasized their own family hereditary traditions regarding who their fellow streghe worshipped and what they practised. From the 1990s the conception of Italian pagan magic was given a boost, and developed in new ways, by the writings of an Italian-American strega named Raven Grimassi who claims to have been initiated into the tradition by an aunt on his Italian mother’s side.59
The American Wiccan adoption of European ancestral religions, imaginary and otherwise, is part of a broader pattern of how second-, third-, or fourth-generation emigrants sought to reconnect with their ancestral homeland cultures through religion, language or custom. There is often a degree of fabrication, adaptation, or change in this process of simulation. Norwegian-Americans, for instance, have adopted the Norwegian expression uffda to enunciate mild discomfort or displeasure as a badge of ethnic identity, and in doing so they use it in contexts that have no resonance back in Norway, and they are even more enthusiastic about lutefisk (dried fish preserved in lye—an acquired taste) than contemporary Norwegians.60 The adoption of religions and practices from completely separate cultures is far more problematic however. This is evident from the relationship between the newly self-identified Pagans and Native Americans—people denounced and harried as pagans by others ever since Europeans embarked on North American shores.
Native American medicine men, who by the mid-twentieth century were regularly being termed ‘shamans’, were thought to possess a pure tradition of spiritual wisdom and nature worship untainted by 2,000 years of Christianity. Theirs was a convincing unbroken history of religion. Neo-Pagans could learn from the Native Americans; they were brothers and sisters in pagan spirit, persecuted for practising their ancient religion. They could point to studies by European historians arguing that elements of shamanism could be identified in the records of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witch trials. Still, implicit in this embrace was a sense that the continuity of ancient lines of European paganism were somehow less authentic—a fact that some Wiccans were beginning to acknowledge by the 1980s.
The British Gardnerian Frederic Lamond recalled how in 1958 his coven experimented with Native American ritual: ‘Someone mentioned that the Lakota Sioux dance for hours on end until they drop from exhaustion to raise power for their spells: we never managed more than 5 minutes at most, but the spells still worked’.61 A decade later, counterculture America became entranced by the publications of anthropologist and cult leader Carlos Castaneda, in which he recounted his supposed initiation by a Yaqui shaman through the use of psychoactive plants such as peyote. The inner circle of Castaneda’s followers was known as ‘The Brujas’ . The neo-Pagan fascination with Native-American religion was not just about the ritual use of drugs; the concept of the Great Spirit, and the dances, chants, dream catchers, and sweat lodges used in communal and individual rituals were all adopted. But some Native-American groups have seen this practical interest as the culturally insensitive appropriation of their sacred beliefs and traditions, a continuation of the earlier European appropriation of medicine bundles and other sacred artefacts as curios and museum pieces.62 Their rituals were rendered meaningless, void of power, denigrated, once inserted into another culturally alien religion.
American witches have been less interested in borrowing from African-American religious and magical traditions, perhaps because of the obvious Christian influences in Voodoo, hoodoo, and conjure; likewise the Hispanic tradition of Santeria.63 But then again, the witch religion is a broad church these days, and there are those who style themselves Christian witches, with Voodoo and Santeria providing templates as to how Catholicism and non-Christian faiths and practices can be blended to create new traditions that have legitimacy in the eyes of others.64 Most of those neo-Pagans who do embrace African-American and Hispanic faiths have an ethnic connection, and seek to explore their cultural roots. There are few African-American or Hispanic Wiccans, though.
Witches, streghe, brujas—the notion of a pagan witch heritage is obviously historically problematic. Up until this chapter I have spent most of the book discussing witches in different American cultures, yet the only time I have referred to paganism has been with regard to European denunciations of Native-American religion and African-American ‘superstition’. While some American Wiccans have argued that those executed and persecuted in colonial America were members of European pagan cults who had secretly re-established their faith in the new land, there has been a general silence about the many Americans from many different cultures who were accused of witchcraft after the ‘Burning Times’, simply because they do not fit the narrative of persecution, secrecy, ancestry, and cultural antiquity. Cunning-folk and witch doctors tend to be used to fill the gap between the witch trials and the emergence of Wicca, but these were not witches as understood at the time, though they were sometimes accused of witchcraft. The witch, as understood by Europeans, African Americans, and Native Americans was a malicious, destructive, and repugnant individual bent on destroying individuals and communities. He or she was never the benign and sympathetic witch of Wicca. Native Americans executed witches into the twentieth century not because they were pagans. Their medicine men were killed if they were suspected of turning to witchcraft to harm their communities. Alberta Gibbons, Alta Woods, and Maria Miranda were not shot dead as witches in the 1950s because they were part of a pagan underground.
That said, as this book has also shown, America is a land of transplanted hereditary magical traditions. Africans and Europeans brought their fears of witches, and their means of identifying and punishing them. They continued to practise the folk medicine of their ancestors, and adapted to what the American environment and other Americans offered in the way of knowledge. Magical practitioners travelled from Europe and Africa to the new land offering their services to all and sundry. But once paganism is injected into this narrative it instantly becomes historically problematic. Martello claimed, for instance, that there was still a large underground network of pagan streghe operating in Italy. That would be news to anyone living in rural Sicily and elsewhere in the country. Much of the basic folk magic and healing lore that he and other Italian-American pagans practised is shared with the old country but not the conception of a witch religion.
In a sense, American Wicca does not need witches. For centuries an exchange of magical knowledge has taken place between different ethnic and cultural groups, blending traditions from non-Christian and Christian faiths alike. Modem American pagans can claim all these traditions as being part of a true and continuous American heritage stretching back several centuries without referring to witchcraft as an ancient religion brought to America. Many Wiccans already acknowledge this, and are sensitive about referring to themselves as witches. Who knows how it will develop in the future, and what role it will play in society—after all, who in 1850 would have believed that Mormons would number in the millions. Maybe in this respect Martello was on to something profound in his vision of a pagan future.