Exploring Pop Paganism

In this intriguing episode, we delve into the modern origins of what is known today as witchcraft, Wicca, and Druidism. Discussing key figures like Gerald Gardner, who invented Wicca in the 20th century, and how he convinced people of its ancient roots, we also explore other notable personalities such as Aleister Crowley. The episode sheds light on how these new-age religions were shaped by modern influences and entirely invented narratives. The conversation further debunks misconceptions about ancient connections to current mystical practices, analyzing the role of historic beliefs and comparing them to modern adaptations. Dive into the fascinating history and evolution of these mystical traditions with a critical eye.

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. Today is going to be a very interesting episode on a topic I should have done a long time ago. It's going to be on how the movement that today purports itself to be witchcraft or Wiccan or juridic, all of these religious systems.

are very, very modern. They are some of the youngest religious systems to exist and have literally no ties to any historic pagan faith practices. And even when they were revived, were revised as monotheistic traditions and only became pagan in their later iterations. What?!

Specifically here, I'm talking about the guy who made up the druidic phase, not the Wiccan phase.

And these were both around the 1900s. So we're gonna go into these individuals, how they made it up, how they got people to believe them. We're gonna go into Alistair Crawley, another interesting figure. He didn't even claim to have connections to anything in the past, he was just Okay.

A wackadoo. I didn't know he was a real guy. I, I saw him from the show, right? And I was like, [00:01:00] Oh, a real guy. No, he was a, he was a wacko, but way more fun than the other guys. Cause at least he owned that he was just making everything up. And the other guys, well, and he stole a bunch from Kabbalah and we'll go over where So were the other guys trying practiced as witchcraft today within the Wiccan community, not realizing that what they're practicing doesn't come from ancient witches, but it comes from Jewish mysticism.

Simone Collins: Oh, my God. Do I understand correctly then that the two men who claimed to have either rediscovered or who reignited druidic practices in Wicca sort of pointed to historical materials that they may have made either misinterpreted or made up kind of like Joseph Smith using funerary texts from Egypt?

Malcolm Collins: It's, well, maybe not crazier than the Joseph Smith story, but he said he, he, he met a cult in the woods that taught him about all of this is the first one we're going to go to. And we think we know who some of the figures he was talking about were. So we know that like, they didn't do this. There's been people who have [00:02:00] gone through and, and, and researched him to learn more about this.

So the guy. Was Gerald Gardner, a retired British civil servant, with a taste for the occult. He returned to England in the 1930s, and he claimed that in 1939, he was initiated into a secret coven. in New Forest by a group he called the Wicca, allegedly survivors of an ancient pagan witch cult. His story leaned heavily on the now debunked theories of anthropologist Margaret Murray, who argued in the 1920s that European witchcraft was a remnant of pre christian fertility religions.

Scholars later dismantled Murray's hypothesis. There is no solid evidence of a contiguous witch cult surviving the middle ages, but Garner ran with it. So a quick note here, if you're like, well, where did all of these mystical traditions come from if they didn't come from some ancient religion it turns out that people will invent the same [00:03:00] mystical traditions over and over again.

For example, when you hear a sports player keeps a lucky sock under their helmet or something to win games, you don't go, oh, he must've picked that up from some ancestral religion. You're like, oh yes, humans often end up associating fetishes, not like Sexual fetishes, but like small token stuff with having magical properties and then build rituals around them.

It is a natural and emergent human behavior with the fact that we see today things like chaos magic, which is another group I could go into, where they believe things like McDonald's arches are like abundant signs and stuff like that and can be used like, like just, or you see, pop culture paganism where people will believe that.

Like Loki, not Loki, like the ancient Norse God, but Loki, like the hot guy from Marvel. Oh my God. Is, is. Oh no. The one who all the girls get a crush on. I mean, I don't know. I hear that he's supposed to be the hot one. Not

Simone Collins: the [00:04:00] actual God. No, no, no, no, no, no. They're the different like Marvel characters. Like, Snape wives, right?

Like, yeah. But not, not the. Snape wives. Yes. Snape is definitely not, no connection to anything. Harry Potter, Sephiroth. Like. The actor whatever it's

Malcolm Collins: not that there was no rituals being practiced in these regions but these rituals were almost certainly maybe two generations old. They were not, it's very hard to keep rituals running a long time unless they are being practiced publicly and at the community level when rituals aren't being practiced at the community level or really rigidly within a family structure.

And we've seen this historically over and over again, it's hard to keep a tradition going without public rituals or, or at least publicly saying that you're a member of it but we'll get to like other proof we have that he probably wasn't even pulling this from local folklore of the period.

Not

Simone Collins: even trying, but I, you know what, I like the idea of being a lifelong fan of [00:05:00] cults. And just making the cult you wish existed, right? Can you imagine a lifetime spent in civil service? Your nights and weekends spent, you know, looking, looking to find proof of the thing you wish existed. And you're like, you know what?

Screw it. Just going to make it up.

Malcolm Collins: I'm just going to, no,

Simone Collins: because then people follow people, people like actually started doing all the other people

Malcolm Collins: made up their religions. Like it starts somewhere.

Simone Collins: He, he, you know, the, the, they say, you know, dress for the job. You want to get, you know, be the person you want to be like he did it.

He made the bolt he wanted. I'm so happy for him. That's nice.

Malcolm Collins: So, in the 1930s, he got involved, or he says he got involved with the local esoteric scene in Hampshire. He claimed that in September 1939, he was introduced to a hidden group of witches in the New Forest, led by a woman who he called Old Dorsey, later identified as Dorsey Clutterbuck.

It's still called the very real name of Dorsey Clutterbuck. Clutterbuck, right, yes. This is a real person who later people went and investigated the area [00:06:00] he was and who he was talking to. And Dorsey Clutterbuck did exist. And he, he referred to her as like a wealthy, older woman. Okay. Who fit.

Dorsey Clutterbuck at the time. She was a wealthy conservative Christian woman who lived in Highcliffe near New Forest and died in 1951. Oh, so she would have found this very offensive. Oh yeah. Gardner's associate Doreen Valentin tracked down her diaries via Clutterbuck's housekeeper after her death and confirmed her identities.

The diaries mentioned social events and gardening, but nothing about witchcraft or coven. So, the person who discovered all of this was a true believer in this guy. Okay, it was his assistant, so she had no motivation to lie or try to deceive us. She found the lady who supposedly taught all of this to this guy.

This lady was a devout Anglican. And, and a well known devout Anglican. Not only that. But they had her private diary. So it's not like she was practicing one thing in private and then doing another thing in public, she [00:07:00] privately was a devout Anglican. And interestingly what are they going to say here?

She was on the other hand, the, did know a lot about folklore and was very interested in folklore. So what seems likely is she may have taught him about some local folklore and he took, you know, built the rest of this character himself. Now historian Ronald Hutton in Triumphs of the Moon, 1999, argues that Clutterbuck might have been a figurehead used by Gardner to legitimize his story.

She was an unlikely witch, devoutly, Anglican, and socially prominent, but her eccentricity and interest in folklore could have made her a possible cover if Gardner needed one. Gardner lived in the area in the late 1930s and mingled with occult enthusiast, including members of the rescue.

Raskurian Order Croatan Fellowship, a mystical group with a theater in Christchurch. Some speculate this group, or a splinter of it, might have inspired his coven [00:08:00] story. A member, Edith Woodworth Grimes, nicknamed Dafoe, was close to Gardner, and more plausibly involved in occult activities. But there's no record of her leading a pagan witch cult.

So something important to note here, if somebody is like, is it entirely implausible that a group with old practices was meeting in the woods? Yes, it actually is because there were so many and widely known other occult traditions of this period, like this one that we're going to go into just a second, that people would have just.

Associated with if they had those inclinations instead of going to this secret one that met in the woods you know, why not do what you do today and go with the theater kids where you know They're all I love it that it was theater kids back then theater kids today. But then you're like, okay. This is all very traditional.

Yes. Maybe this Rokurian Order Krotana Fellowship maybe they had some ancient traditions. Here's the problem. We know what they believed, and we know where they said [00:09:00] they got it from. The core beliefs of the ROCF claim to preserve secret knowledge from ancient Egypt and the Renaissance Roscurians. So not local Rosicrucians.

If you're wondering who the Rosicutions were, It was a spiritual and cultural movement that arose in modern Europe in the early 17th century after the publication of several texts announcing to the world a new esoteric order. Rosicutionism is symbolized by a rose cross or a rosy cross.

It was a Christian tied movement that was interested in things like alchemy.

Anyway, a group. Okay. Okay. The point being is it, they said where they got was from Egyptians and persecutions Renaissance ions. It was not from some sort of local hidden witch cult that preserved some ancestral pre Roman tradition that was local to Britain.

Okay. Which is where he said this stuff came from. Okay. They believed in a, uh oh. Hidden great white brotherhood of enlightened masters guiding humanity. Oh dear. Sullivan taught that members could tap into cosmic forces [00:10:00] through meditation, ritual study, think astrology, Kabbalah, and other seophysical ideas about reincarnation. Theatrical flair by the 1930s when Gardner encountered them, R O C F, had their base in Christchurch near the New Forest where they had built Ashram Hall, a tiny theater for mystical plays. Sullivan wrote and performed these dramas The Rite of Isis, for example, blending Egyptian mythology with Christian allegory and to enact spiritual truths.

Members wore robes, chanted, and staged ceremonies, less quote unquote witchy, and more like a cosmic morality play. Practical mysticism, unlike hardcore occult groups like the Golden Dawn, the ROCF, was less about spellcasting and more about self improvement through esoteric philosophy. They attracted middle class seekers, doctors, teachers, retirees, looking for meaning in a post World War I world.

Some rituals involved healing vibrations or channeling [00:11:00] divine energy, but was pretty tame compared to Garner's later Wiccan rites. So keep in mind, Things like trying to talk to the dead and mystics doing like stage performances to scam people was really common in this period. Oh, yeah. Another episode on Houdini's war against mystics.

Yes. Yeah, all these people like

Simone Collins: tapping on seance tables, etc. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: It's fascinating to learn about. But yeah so how did this grow up or go from here in 1954 after Britain repealed its witchcraft act in 1951 specifically which prevented publishing this stuff Gardner published witchcraft today, laying out his version of this ancient religion.

He blended Murray's ideas was bits of ceremonial magic. St. Freemasonry and Alistair Colley's influence, folklore, and his own imagination. His rituals, like the use of a magical circle, astrums, ritual knives, and a dualistic god goddess framework. He did believe in like a dualistic, singular, monotheistic god that had a [00:12:00] feminine and masculine side.

Kabbalah there. We're cobbled together from Victorian occultism, not dusty grimoires from antiquity. Gardner's collaborator, Doreen Valentia, this is the one who later identified who the old lady was joined in the 1950s and polished his work, stripping out some of Crowley's heavier philemic vibes to make it more palatable.

Valentia herself admitted the rituals were modern, not ancient, though she believes they tapped into the timeless spiritual current. So basically, the person who inherited the Wiccan tradition and then built on it admits this guy made it all up.

Simone Collins: That's I mean, I feel like even more so like, OK, I think that validates it more.

Malcolm Collins: So

Simone Collins: long as you're

Malcolm Collins: willing to accept that. It's just like understanding this

Simone Collins: is. The, the culty religion for people who wish there was a culty religion and acknowledge that it just isn't one. Like, that's historical.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. And, and I think you're gonna like this next guy, Simone. Okay. So, you can be like, who is this Alistair Crawley?

You know, [00:13:00] I've heard this term before. Yes, yes. What, what was he about if other people were picking up his ideas? Okay. So, born in 1875 in what? Workshire, England, to a wealthy, strict Plymouth's brethren family, Edward Alexer Crawley rebelled hard against his religious upbringing. After his father's death, he inherited money, ditched Cambridge, where he studied but didn't graduate, and dove into the occult.

By his twenties, he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 1898, a secret society blending Kabbalah, Tor, tarot like tarot cards and ritual magic. Think Victorian England's Hogwarts for mystics. He clashed with its leaders like W. B. Yeats, got kicked out, but it shaped his lifelong obsession with esoterics.

Systems. Oh, I should dig into that secret society more than the hermetic order of the golden dawn. It's a boy crowley styled himself a larger than life figure He called himself the great beast six six six Loved scandalizing polite [00:14:00] society and lived a chaotic life of drugs sex and travel Egypt india mexico sicily and this is traveling in the 1800s.

So this is like wild travel In 1904, while in Cairo with his wife, Rose claimed a spirit named Ayahuas dictated the book of the law to him over three days, a text that became foundational to his philosophy, which was called Thelema. He spent the rest of his life until his death in 1947 spreading Thelema, writing prolifically, poetry, novels, occult treatises, and founding groups like AA, well it's A and then like a triangle, and then A and then a triangle, a magical order, and the Ordo Templi Ortanus OTO, which he retooled to fit his vision.

His reputation, a mix of genius and infamy, papers dubbed him the wickedest man in the world for his libertine lifestyle, opium, orgies, and rumors of black magic, mostly exaggerated, but he was a serious thinker, blending eastern mysticism, western occultism, and his own flair into something unique. Gardner met him in the [00:15:00] 1940s.

Forties through mutual occult circles and crowley's influence seeped into wicked's rituals, even if toned down later, despite the ancient veneer. Crowley did not pretend to limo was a literal hand me down from Pharaohs or medieval wizards. He was upfront that the book of the law was a new revelation dictated to him in 1904 and called it the start of a fresh, spiritual epic, not a dusty relic.

So basically, he's so much an egoist. He's like, I don't need any, you know, this is just all new dictated to me by spirits.

Simone Collins: I mean, that's not that much of a deviation from so many. Historical religious leaders who heard from spirits,

Malcolm Collins: but you can also see why old traditions that get washed out so quickly, if even this guy who was trying his very best to sort of pick up some form of like pure mysticism of England that had any sort of an ancient route ended up being heavily influenced by this other guy who not even a full [00:16:00] generation before it was like, I made all this up.

What? You know, you're like, okay, I can see how if you add in the third, every generation with your next crop of crazy people it's going to really quickly wipe out any historic stuff if you don't have text to be going off of.

Simone Collins: I think so, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Now, I wanted to dig more into the Selemic vibes, because remember it said that a lot of Crawlies Had this Selemic stuff, and the other guy who made up Wiccanism ended up buying into the Selemic stuff and writing it directly into the religion, which is one of how we know it's not ancient, because we know the guy who made it all up.

But the, the person after him, Valentin attempted to remove a lot of this Selena stuff. Because the idea of, well, this gets back to maybe what is a historic religion a bit more.

Selena's central tenet is, do What thou wilt shall be the whole of the law which the Satanists also picked up.

Meaning to follow your true will, your deepest purpose above all else. [00:17:00] Or as Cartman

Simone Collins: says, I'm gonna do what I want.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Self liberation, cosmic exploration, and rejecting conventional morality. The vibe. Solemnic rituals and writings drip with theatricality and intensity. Think elaborate chants, references to Egyptian gods, like Naq al Hadid, etc.

A mix of sex, power, and mysticism. Crawly stuff often feels dense and rebellious with a break all the rules attitude. For example, his Gnostic mass involves a priestess, a priest, and symbolic acts hinting at sacred sexuality, i. e. naked. Priest and priestess way more esoteric than Wiccan's circle casting and moon worship.

Crowley's influence on Gardener. Gardener borrowed the melemic phrasing and structure like Crowley's focus on invoking higher powers or his use of smote it be a Masonic, Selemic sign off that Wicca kept. So Wicca also took some ideas from Freemasons.

Okay, again, just stealing from everywhere, but none of it particularly ancient. Some early Wiccan rites even echoed Crawley's [00:18:00] obsession with polarity, male female, light dark, though Gardner redirected it towards fertility and nature. So, what do you think of this guy? Better? I mean, I do like the person who followed up immediately after Gardner.

It feels like she adds a lot of validity to the Wiccan tradition by one, admitting that it was made up, and then two, trying to remove the parts that are the very most made up. And, and trying to create this sort of, like, nature religion instead of a religion focused on, like, rebellion for rebellion's sake.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: it sort of feels to me like a fan community trying. To make itself work and to make it so itself sustainable. And that's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Let's look at where these communities borrowed from Kabbalah, which is Jewish mysticism, which was largely by my estimation, just pop philosophy of the year like 1000.

That's around when it was collated. So it's a fairly, obviously Jews are going to be very [00:19:00] offended by this, but the ideas in Kabbalah, like you can track where they came from. They have a lot of, of mirrors and other things. They come from a school of Jewish mysticism that was popular around that time and had existed, or we have records of it for a few hundred years before that time Sufi mysticism.

And basically, yeah. Pop mysticism of that time period. But it was genuinely ancient from their perspective. Cause it was about a thousand years old by the, well, not a thousand, you know, like 800, 900 years old by the time they were writing. And if you go back to its inspirations, then you're looking at like maybe 1, 200 years old.

And so that, that's genuinely historic there, but then the idea is, okay, so what from Kabbalah. Ended up being captured in the Wiccan tradition. If you're, if you're like, Oh, what parts of Wiccanism come directly from Kabbalah? Well, one, we know Crowley. So it came through Crowley, not through Garner, maybe directly.

In that Crowley ended up including a lot of Kabbalah in his stuff. He was a huge Kabbalah nerd. He studied it in the [00:20:00] Golden Dawn and made it the backbone of Telema, especially his magical order, A triangle, A triangle. Here's what he lifted. Tree of Life as a map. Crowley used the Tree of Life to structure spiritual progress in his systems.

Initiates climb the Sirfuric like a ladder from Malkut, the physical world, to Keter, union with the divine. Each grade in the A triangle A triangle corresponds to a Seraphie with rituals and meditations to master its energy for example, his book 777 1909 is a kabbalistic cheat sheet linking sephirot to colors, planets, and tarot numerology, tarot, tarot, tarot, tarot, tarot,

Simone Collins: I

Malcolm Collins: don't know numerology and Gemma Crawley was obsessed with combobolistic number crunching.

He analyzed the book of law using Gematria where Hebrew letters, which doubled as numbers, reveal hidden meanings. For instance, he equated will, Thelema in [00:21:00] Greek, equals 93, with love, agape, equals 93. Tying it to its maximum, love is the law, love under will.

This numerological play came straight from Kabbalah's playbook. So here I'll note and this obviously causes a major problem for modern Kabbalists is that the movement that both Wiccanism is descended from and modern Satanism is descended from borrowed a bunch of stuff from their writings which, of course, a lot of the symbols and symbolism.

When you look at like a Kabbalistic symbolism, you'll be like, Oh, that looks like satanic or Wiccan symbolism. And the reason is not that they emerged from the same tradition but that these other two traditions just directly cropping Kabbalism when they were started. And a lot of them forget that this was that that's what they were doing.

Simone Collins: That's really funny. I can see why though. I mean, there's so much to play with.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. No, if you're going to build a mystical tradition, Kabbalism is a great place to start. You know, it's got some claims to [00:22:00] antiquity. It's of the mystic traditions, one of the older that we, and I think modern ish, which you'll notice about Kabbalism, Is that it feels much more like these modern systems of, of mysticism than the ancient systems of mysticism, which come either here, you're looking at like a Greek more general policy of them, which has a very different feel to it, or you're looking at the, the really interesting one what would they call the algebra nerds, the

Yeah, I've got to remember what they're called. It was a Greek philosophical tradition based around mathematics.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-2: The group I was thinking of here were the Pythagoreans. The, uh,, Pythagoreans followed strict rules and rituals aimed at achieving purity and spiritual enlightenment. They believed in reincarnation and sought to escape the cycle of rebirth by living an austere life and adhering to their philosophical and mathematical principles.

Malcolm Collins: Or I've never heard of that. And they practiced a really [00:23:00] interesting philosophy that may have some relations to the branches of, like, early Christianity and Judaism, and it was a very interesting philosophy. But it feels very different from the older traditions, I guess is what I'd say.

And in that respect, Kabbalism did invent a genuinely new way or, or coalesce what was becoming popular in the Middle Ages, a new way of relating to the mystical. Thalamic rites, like the lesser banishing rite of the pentagram inherited from the golden dawn, uses Kabbalistic names for God YHVH, Adoni, and Archangels Michael and Gabriel tied to the Sefirot.

Crawley's Gnostic Mass invokes divine polarity, think . Binah and Chokmah the feminine and masculine Seferit, to mirror Kabbalah's balance of opposites. Symbolism, Krali tied thelemic deities to the tree, Nut, as infinite. Ein Sof, Hadit as the point of consciousness, Keter or Chokmah And then I don't need to go into all [00:24:00] that.

The rock him in as action, give her or Tiefen. He didn't just copy. He rebranded Kabbalah's abstract energies into his Egyptian pantheon, but the framework's Kabbalistic roots are clear.

Simone Collins: Oh gosh. So it's almost like he did a control F and then replaced a bunch of like words. Yeah, he basically controlled F.

Malcolm Collins: Kabbalistic practices. Oh boy, that's great.

If I'm going to be self reflective here, I think that this is where a large part of my negative bias against Kabbalism comes from, is that the first time I would have engaged with this category of mysticism, or a branch of mysticism, , is Partially descended from this tree would have been when my friends, , in high school and middle school were getting into like Wiccanism.

And I would go through some of their books and be like, is there anything to this? Like, what's going on with this? Or other forms of, you know, hermetics and stuff like that. That, you know, I phase, I [00:25:00] think a lot of people go through where they're like, okay, I'm gonna research the edgiest. Of mystical path, , because I'm a middle schooler and I want to see what my parents don't want me to see , and so when I re approached it as an adult , the mental frameworks appeared very similar to ones I was engaging with ideas that were particularly sophomoric or otherwise puerile

It would be a bit like if you grew up in japan and your first experiences with christian theology and cosmology were from neon Evangelion and so when you like read the bible, you're like, oh gosh Yeah, I remember all this stuff from my weird otaku phase when I was really into neon evangelion

crawley didn't claim that Philomel was Kabbalah, he saw it as a new revelation, But I, I find that really interesting and it's, it's kind of a shame for modern because to some people that would be seen as invalidating of Kabbalah, but I'm like, he also borrowed Christian concepts.

You're just, you know, you're going to be more familiar when he talks about angels and Michael.

Simone Collins: It's, it's [00:26:00] kind of, I mean, it really does. Again, it feels a lot like fan fiction and just mixing and remixing and then trying to make it into your own thing that. People get excited about independently, which is exactly what happened here.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So when Doreen Valentin, this is the one who took over from him afterwards, joined Gardner and the one who discovered the old lady joined the coven in 1953, she became his right hand collaborator, helping refine the rituals. This is Gerald Gardner. It's a guy who invented Wiccanisms, right hand collaborator.

collaborator, helping refine the rituals and texts that would define Gardinian Wiccan. Gardiner's early book, The Book of Shadows, the ritual playbook for Wicca, was a mashup of influences, including stuff he picked up from Aleister Crowley, as I mentioned there. Hmm. However Valentin found some of the material too dark, too intense, or just too Crowley specific for the broader nature loving, pagan vibe Gardener wanted to sell.

So she rewrote parts [00:27:00] and softened the edges to make Wiccan more accessible. So I asked, well, what did she Again,

Simone Collins: so fan fiction y. I'm just going to like, re like this, make it a little more It is

Malcolm Collins: very like an early fan fiction community. Yeah. Valentin specifically targeted chunks of the text. Gardner had lifted from Crowley's works the Book of Law and the Gnostic Mass.

For example, Gardner's original rituals included Crowley's dramatic invocations, like calling on, quote unquote, the mighty ones, with a heavy poetic flair and phrases tied to the limit concepts. More on that below. Okay. Valerie replaced these with simpler, more folkloric language emphasizing the goddess and horned god over Crawley's esoteric ideas.

She also toned down some of the sexual undertones and mystical bombasts that Crawley loved, which didn't fit her vision of a gentle, earthier witchcraft. One famous tweak, she rewrote the charge of the goddess from a clunky, crawly, heavy draft to the lyrical versions Wiccans still use today. Why she did it, she wasn't anti crawly, she respected his intellect, but she worried his reputation as quote, the [00:28:00] wickedest man in the world, a type would scare off some newbies and taint Wiccan as a Satanist knockoff.

She also wanted rituals that felt timeless and universal, not tethered to one man's philosophy. In her own words from her 1989 book, The Reverse of Witchcraft, she saw Gardener's Reliance. On Crawley as a crutch and pushed for originality if the result was still modern. So keep in mind, she was still writing in 1989.

That's how modern her rebranding and recreation of what we think of as Wiccanism today was.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So, now we're going to talk a bit about the Druids, because it's with another group from around the same time. And

Simone Collins: this is so funny, because I grew up definitely with the impression that Wicca was kind of a, Like, almost invented, sort of, almost very commercial thing, tradition.

It is my mom. I think misled me to believe that druidic practices were old and ancient because there were in the Bay Area. A bunch of like [00:29:00] stone circles and fairy rings and other weird alters in the woods because we'd go hiking a lot that we'd come across and my mom would be like, Oh, that was probably used for some kind of druidic ritual.

And I'm like, okay, this must be really old. No, it was hippies. That is. That would make sense. This was in California. This was like in the woods around. In California. So this totally makes sense.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, no, it's being okay. So, Stuckley, this is another guy from around the 1900s reimagined. So basically what we like the Druids, the people who think they're actually following druidic practices were largely seeded by a guy called Stuckley, but he imagined Druids.

And this is what's really interesting here. When he recreated their ideas and ideology as noble proto christian philosophers rather than policyistic ritual figures described by Romans, here's his pitch. So he saw them as monotheists, he argued Druids worshipped a single supreme god foreshadowing Christianity.

He saw them as [00:30:00] enlightened priests who taught morality and natural law, not pagan sacrificers. We know that human sacrifices were done, by the way, at the, what's it called? Stonehenge.

Speaker 26: To be buried in that ditch at Stonehenge with the injuries he has, Suggests we have a sacrificial victim.

Malcolm Collins: The, the ancient Oh yes,

Simone Collins: like actually back in the real day of there being a religion practice. Yeah, the

Malcolm Collins: ancient druids were brutal, evil, evil people.

But we know that like they would have a practice where when they make bridges, they would sacrifice children and bury them under the bridges so the bridges wouldn't fall down.

Like that was a practice. Yeah, it's funny, when I've

Simone Collins: gotten tours of the areas around Stonehenge. I think you were actually there.

We did this on our honeymoon. They were like, ah, it was probably just a mistake that there was a child here. Do you remember them saying that? They were like, there's probably an accident.

Malcolm Collins: No, no, no, no. We we have a, not a child, but an adult that was sacrificed at Stonehenge and we can see where they were.

Hit on their head and everything and tied up. Yeah, so we know that these were done at Stonehenge. These are not good guys, and they certainly weren't monotheists by any [00:31:00] understanding we have of the period. This individual who recreated modern Druidism linked it to biblical patriarchs like Abraham, suggesting they inherited primal, universal faith from the Near East, brought to Britain by Phoenician traders and lost tribes.

So, keep in mind, he's saying, oh, this is like the lost tribes of Israel and Phoenician traders. The early Druids tried desperately to attempt to connect their religion to Christianity. And monotheism because they saw that as like an enlightenment ideal, whereas the more modern ones try to say, oh, no, it was the totally disconnected from Christianity, the ancient religion of this area and polytheistic.

So what we know of Druids, they left no written records, but we know from Roman writers, Caesar, Tacitus, Finney or later Celtic myths, and none of this stuff supports them. We know that they had multiple gods for example, Lug, Serranos And they often were tied to bloody rites like the wicker man's burnings that plenty mentioned [00:32:00] plenty mentions

Sorry, I misspoke here. It was actually Julius Caesar who wrote about the Wicker Men ceremonies, not Pliny. Pliny mentioned that they had human sacrifices, but Julius Caesar specifically goes into how these sacrifices were done, in his book, Commentary on the Gallic War, he writes that the Gauls would construct large figures made of ossiers, a type of willow branch, fill them with living men, and then set them on fire as part of their sacrificial rituals.

According to Caesar, these sacrifices were performed by the Druids, who believed that the gods required human life in exchange for propitation.

He notes that the gulls preferred to use criminals for these sacrifices, but if such individuals were scarce, he, they would use innocent people.

And I would also note that this is one of the only DTIC ceremonies that we have a description of. It's not like, oh, we have a description of a bunch of nice ceremonies. They did. And then there's this one crazy one. This is like one of the only DRI ceremonies we have with any degree of historicity to it.

Speaker: What is that? What is that? What is it? Oh, no! [00:33:00] Not the bees!

Malcolm Collins: Stuckley the guy who did this had zero artifacts or texts just speculation as I said to where he got this from it was from the enlightenment the 1700s valued reason order and a single natural god Stuckley projected this onto the past ignoring, He totally misread Stonehenge.

He thought it was a temple. Made by druids We now know that no, it wasn't made by druids. It was made around 2500 bce so the neolithic period well before the druidic religion was ever Came to exist. And it would have been old news by the age of the Druids who were around C 500 BCE to 43 BCE.

So it was further from the Druids than we are from the Druids. That's, that's how old Stonehenge is. Archaeologists now see it as a burial and ceremonial site, not a druidic temple. And, and keep in mind, all the ideas he got about what the druids believed, he got from Stonehenge, which didn't even have a connection to the Stonehenge in the Bible.

That's where he [00:34:00] got it from. A, a final interesting note here is another group, That some people see as, oh, well, they restarted the Druids. Whereas Henry Houle, in 1781, who founded the Ancient Order of the Druids. However this was a fraternity group, much more common to, say, Freemasonry. It didn't itself claim to come from any sort of ancient stuff.

It didn't have the same sorts of rituals or anything like that. So, this is just a misreading of history. It was a, it was a secular society, close to like the Society of Oddfellows and stuff like that. He and also it had ties to Christianity. Again, trying to connect it. So, I gotta go too far here, but, your thoughts, did this, did this blow your brain, given being raised a hippie?

This is

Simone Collins: wild. But I'm also starting to realize that, The way we've seen super soft religions, what, what do they call the religions that people have built around Loki and Snape, for example? Pop Paganism. [00:35:00] Pop Paganism. Yeah, I think Pop Paganism is the ultimate proof point that people don't need provenance in religion.

That they're, they're, it's like the placebo effect where like they've, they've shown in studies that if you say, this is a placebo, people have often found placebos to be quite effective. And then they give them the placebo. People are like, wow, I feel so much better from the placebo, which is an inert medication.

My point here is that people don't need it to be real. They don't need it to be an active medication. They're okay with placebo religions. That is to say religions without Real history without real provenance and the existence of Snape wives and like Loki like show that that we are willing to to induce Suspended disbelief

Malcolm Collins: because it helps us feel a certain way I think these people believe it and I think if you read the writings of Snape wives and stuff like that They because they choose to believe it.

That's what i'm saying. They're [00:36:00] induced. It's induced suspended disbelief Right, but these beliefs are convergent depending on the social context, but you often get the same, like, cluster of beliefs reappearing and reappearing and I do not think that, like, the Snape wise genuinely believe that Snape is a real person who, God, who influenced J.

K. Rowling to write him and I think Yeah, my point is that people are, are willingly deluding themselves into this.

I don't think they are. I, I, I don't think they are. I don't think that they go into this saying, oh, I'm going to choose to believe something that's not true. I think that they, you think they do. We'll let the audience There's not a conscious

Simone Collins: thought process. It's more like, wow, I like the aesthetics of this.

Wouldn't this be kind of cool if it's true? And then you just go into it. With a very, very open mind and you don't look for the evidence to the contrary. You only lean in with full confirmation bias and before you know it, you are convinced because [00:37:00] you've only seen supporting evidence, you've only seen the lore, you've only had spiritual experiences.

In this, in this framework and that it'll get you, it'll get you. It's enough.

Malcolm Collins: I will say one thing that really this Valerie woman, you know, as I go through this who sort of remade Wiccanism, I have to really respect her a lot for a few things. I think she was right in the way that she rebranded Wiccanism.

I think it's a better branding for its growth and getting it to grow. I think that you know, Imagine being like the right hand man to this guy who then you find out made it all up and you're still like, well, yeah, he made it all up. So I'm just going to make it cooler. I guess she probably heavily suspected or was like dealing with a, okay, this guy's crazy.

Or, you know, just, just likes making things up. Which is fine, you know, I, that is, that level of intellectual honesty and branding management, I think is why, when contrasted with the other new [00:38:00] religions this one has done particularly good at spreading. And I think Casting it as, oh, these were what the ancient witches believed or this concept of like Puritan witches and stuff like that.

Keep in mind, we have some understanding of like what the Puritan witches were like supposed to be doing in the woods. And it's nothing like modern Wiccan stuff. I mean, some modern Wiccans have tried to reinvent this stuff, like dancing naked in the woods and stuff like that, or trying to seduce people or whatever, right?

Simone Collins: It also doesn't, it'll resemble the old superstitious things that you saw, for example, across Appalachia, it was like boil a puppy if you feel this way, or like cut off a kitten's tail, remember those, I think they were described in Albion seed that sounds like fricking witchcraft to me.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, I, I was like, what is actual and we know about a lot of these rituals from if you're like, oh, what rituals appeared and then disappeared?

Well, like boiling puppies which was done by my ancestors, the rural Appalachian people.

Simone Collins: I,

Malcolm Collins: no,

Simone Collins: [00:39:00] that is what is described in Macbeth. You know, this is the, you know, you know, eye of newt and, and toe of, of. Frog, but this is, this is the thing that if we're talking about witchcraft as, as seen in like stereotypical Shakespearean works, let's go to Appalachia, let's see what they're up to.

And not necessarily what nineties. Well, I guess she was writing in the 70s, but like, yeah, turn of the century.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and if people are like, well, you know, we don't know anything, so they could have been these various different faiths. It's like, yeah, we don't know much, except for the sacrifice victims.

We've got lots of those. So we do know they loved sacrificing humans. So if you're like, what do we know about these people?

Speaker: Oh, no! Not the bees!

Malcolm Collins: Not the best.

I think Christianity had a right to, as it was moving into these religions, be like, Hey, we really need to stamp out these older religious traditions entirely.

Now some people have been like, well, couldn't there have been pockets of these ancient [00:40:00] religions that were practiced in regions, right? Like with may poles and stuff like that at a few festivals. I would guess there probably could have been pockets, but the thing you have to remember is you get a church crackdown on one of these pockets, and if they don't hold the tradition for, let's say, even 50 or 60 years, it's going to be incredibly hard to recreate it from, like, local memory.

Do you, for example, know the types of rituals that your grandparents got up to? Or the types of, we should probably do an episode on that, just for an example. We can look up the, the common rituals and myths of the 1900s. Like, for example, do you even know if your grandparents ever Did a seance it would be actually if I think that

Simone Collins: I'm pretty sure none of my grandparents would have done a seance Because You know what one's in France during the war one is in you know, Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl and war Then the other two [00:41:00] weren't really born yet until much later like in the 50s and they sort of grew up in The affluent growing America in 1950s.

So like totally not Okay, great grandparents

Malcolm Collins: will say because that would have been the period of seance Yeah, I I even the ones in the war. No a french person

Simone Collins: At that period during the war. Yeah, but then they were like in romania and like fleeing russia. So If your

Malcolm Collins: grandparents have lived in the united states, let's say between 1900 and 1950, chances are, I'd say because you have at least, I'd say over 50 percent that at least one of them participated in a séance.

And yet you don't know about this or not know about it because traditions just don't pass down that much. Folklore is pretty bad at passing down.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that and like, I think that there's just really poor transmission, even from grandparents. Like, I had one Grandmother who thought that she was reincarnated from a Native American woman.

And like, that's all I heard because it kind of like, she's a little [00:42:00] crazy. And like, I didn't hear like the belief system behind that. It was just like, yeah, she thinks this and that's it. You know, it's not like, well, what was that based on? Like, what was her religious framework here? I mean, she took our kids to

Malcolm Collins: frameworks are forgotten.

Like recently we got for our kids a book of Appalachian folktales. After I was reading one that's an old Appalachian, like scary story that they've done a book of, I remember when I was a kid, because I was like, Oh my God, the guy's dogs die. Like I remember the guys. Dogs dying as a kid. It's called Taily Poo, if you wanna get it.

It's a good story, very visceral for kids. They'll remember it. But I read it to the kids and I'd forgotten it. At the end of the story, the guy dies too! Everyone in this story, the guy and his three dogs are murdered! And this was a children's tale! So Slowly and one by one, like the dogs going into the woods and then going quiet, like very horror story esque, not very, but it feels very authentic, you're like, yeah, this was definitely an old story, but then we got some called [00:43:00] Jack's Tales, and we started reading them, and I, and I was reading the book, and I was like, oh, holy sh Jack and the Beanstalk was not a standalone myth.

Jack and the Beanstalk was part of a series of campfire stories about a boy named Jack who got up to crazy sh and I Jack was a

Simone Collins: busy boy, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Completely lost in the cultural memory that that was the case. And so I can see even within my own tradition how quickly these people who want to believe in ancestral traditions being passed down, I would just ask you, How many direct ancestral traditions do you have outside of your mainstream religion from your grandparents?

You may have a few from one of them, but I would best for most people, it's almost none. And keep in mind, you have four grandparents. If even you can't remember the very things that your grandparents went through, how do you think this passes down for like, dozens of times that number? [00:44:00]

Simone Collins: That's fair.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Anyway, I love you to death, Simone. You are absolutely amazing, and thank you for being my wife.

Simone Collins: Thank you for being my husband. I love you so much. My non Druidic husband.

Malcolm Collins: My non Druidic guest. You want to go into early Christianity versus the religions it was replacing we released an episode on Christmas day.

Simone Collins: So like nobody watched it called was Christianity actually a more moral religion. When I asked Grok what his favorite episode of our show was, it picked that episode. So if you guys want to check it out, Grok thinks it's the best.

So, I'm excited for this. You haven't even talked to me about it, so I'm coming in blank. I don't know what to expect.

Malcolm Collins: Mean, do you know anything about this, or how the movement started, or anything?

Simone Collins: You know, I know I had my, like, 90s friends who had their, you know, books from Barnes Noble about Wicca, you know?

It was like, oh, Wicca, that thing, you got a book [00:45:00] at it, Barnes Noble, with a little Gold foil cover that has little spells. That's how

Malcolm Collins: you know it's magical.

Simone Collins: That's how you know. I mean, if not gold, then silver foil. Nothing

Malcolm Collins: could disappoint me more than if our kids end up becoming Wicca. I don't even think it's

Simone Collins: Wicca though.

I'd be more disappointed if they buy spells. on Etsy, or whatever it is, like, you know, from a TikTok influencer or something.

Malcolm Collins: Although, although, I mean, I will tell my sons the truth. You want to, you want to find easy girls, look for Wiccans. Oh my God. That's an easy group.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but that's also a date.

They're like the kind of people that I would expect to cut holes in condoms and stuff. This is a no no. It's true. So just don't,

Malcolm Collins: just don't. Okay. Okay. I'll get started here.

Speaker 3: I didn't say bye. You're gonna be sent to the portal of hell. No! No! You're gonna be sent to the [00:46:00] portal of hell. Uh oh, Octavian. Titan's stealing your backpack. You're going to the portal of hell, toy. No! No! No! Octavian, Titan stole your backpack. Are you going to go get it?

Speaker 4: Don't! Close the door. No, no. Don't play with the door. Octavian, the door is not a toy. Stop.

Speaker 3: Hands up! You're under arrest! Break into the new house for you.

[00:47:00] I

broke the alcohol bottle. Aren't you going to get your backpack back? Tyson has it. Oh, tickle attack! I can't get out of here. I can't get out! Mommy! Hey! You! Hey! [00:48:00] Oh!