I'm not saying we should return to the ox cart. That is obviously ridiculous. To a large extent I believe, along with Bucky Fuller, that if we get the right head-set, this technology that we have can be used in a really beautiful way. But we've got to get off this rape-head. And I think Witchcraft offers an ethical alternative to this. Now, Papa Crowley was a fucked-up man in many ways. But, contrary to popular belief, he led a life of intense suffering, and his life of suffering was for one purpose, and that was to say, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, love under will.” They should inscribe that on the Rock of Gibraltar. It should be hung up in flags from the top of the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. It should be carved on the book that the Statute of Liberty is holding. . . .
Q.
If you were to paraphrase Crowley's statement in a way many people could understand, what would you say?
A.
It means this: So you think you are helpless. You think all this is just happening to you. Well, that's bullshit! Because you are not just a son or a daughter of God. To be a son or daughter of God means you are equal to God and you have a responsibility to the One to get it together and make your Godhood count for something, because other than that, you are just another uckin' insect. Now that's what it means. It also means that if we were all doing what we
really
wanted to do, we would do it in perfect harmony. Why do people kill and rape each other? This is an expression of the denial of love in that person's life. Now, I have been attacked, but frankly, I believe in my heart of hearts that the one who kills is enduring greater suffering than the one who is killed and that all “evil” is an expression of ignorance, an expression of the frustration of the Law of the One. And the Law of the One, whoever She is, in all Her many forms, is that we give to each other constantly. I am not talking about giving to the negation of self, I'm talking about giving to the glory of self. If you were what you could be the best and you did what you loved to do with all your might, you would create such light and such power that it would give pizazz to everybody in your immediate area, and even to those distant, perhaps.
Q.
But how does this relate to the Craft's purposeâif it has a purpose?
A.
I would say the ultimate purpose is to become that. Ifwe become those kinds of people we will create an energy source for the regeneration of the whole world. We won't have to proselytize. We won't have to sell it on the street. That is what I consider my task to be, to bust my ass to achieve my Godhood. And if I fail to do that, I have become hopelessly debauched.
Q.
Could you talk about ritual? One of the things about the Craft is that we do a lot of ritual. Why ritual? What is its purpose? Why do it?
A.
The purpose of ritual is to change the mind of the human being. It's a sacred drama in which you are the audience as well as the participant, and the purpose of it is to activate parts of the mind that are not activated by everyday activity. We are talking about the parts of the mind that produce the psychokinetic, telekinetic power, whatever you want to call itâthe connection between the eternal power and yourself. As for
why
ritual, I think that human beings have a need for art and art is ritual. I think that when we became sapient, we became capable of artistic expression. It is simply a human need.
One of the things I am deeply involved in is that I am trying to recreate the sacred music and dances of the Culdee tradition. I have reconstructed what I believe to be a good approximation of the circle dances, since few Irish circle dances have survived.
Q.
It has seemed to me that much of the modern Craft and the Neo-Pagan movement lacks real music and real dance, in comparison to indigenous Pagan religious movements.
l
A.
That's absolutely true. Many things are lacking in modern Paganism. For example, in all indigenous Paganism possession of the participants by the gods and goddesses occurred frequently. This is not occurring frequently among Neo-Pagans and I consider it to be a sign of ill health in the Pagan movement. I attribute this to our loss of skill in the use of music, rhythm, dance, and psychogenetic drugs. In the Irish tradition music was essential to the success of the rites. I have finally initiated a traditional Irish piper so that we would be able to have the pipes, the harp, and the drums together in our rites. Another thing that was essential to the rites in ancient times was ritual drunkenness and sex. And I find this also lacking. We have to create those ecstatic states again. We have to offer people an energy source and a theological alternative, and we can only do this by offering real experience. We have to introduce real sacraments.
But here the negative aspects of Christianityâthe fascist political Christianity which has become the pervading form of Christianity in the worldâthis form of Christianity has produced fear of ecstatic states, fear of intelligent use of hallucinogens, fear of intelligent and sensitive use of sexuality to produce ecstasy. Now those are the three elements that have really been lacking, and worse still than any of that, Christianity has produced fear of personal responsibility for spiritual development. It has produced fear of independent thinking.
Q.
What is your position on the use of drugs in the Craft? Most people I have interviewed take a very strong antidrug stance. Contrary to popular report, I came across very few groups that permitted any use of drugs in ritual.
A.
I think that drugs, used with intelligence (like anything else), are important. Flying ointment was used in ancient times. Our ancestors definitely used drugs. Frankly, most Pagans and Witches are stumbling around in the dark. A Diabellero would laugh at us. A Southwestern Indian would think us ridiculous. I want people to start getting off. Drugs and sex are an essential part of magical rites. Some of the heaviest power is obtained that way. Do you know that there was a period in Irish history when people were so liberated that they were able to make love in any public place, without shame.
Q.
I would find that very difficult.
A.
Well, it's hard for me too, but I think this is the ideal we should attain to. I'm not saying we should fuck each other in public, but at least let's do it in private. Much of Neo-Paganism lacks the same content I've described before. The raising of power is an accidental occurrence among most of us at the present time. I find that difficult for my own self-esteem. It makes it difficult to work with people. I don't like going through empty ritual with anybody, especially my closest friends. Only once have I been to a Pagan gathering that happily enough “degenerated” into a Great Rite, and that was only because the Lady chose to give it to us at that time. I personally believe that anyone who calls themselves a Witch should have the capability to deal with different types of ecstatic states. But of course, these things have to be done with intelligence.
I wanted to tell you a story that fills me with humility, about a time I almost killed myself through stupidity. I was living on a commune that was situated in the middle of an apple orchard that was shaped like a long oval dish. And a peculiar thing that used to happen was that the dogs would start to bark at one end of the dish as if something was walking around the lip of this dish, and then they would stop. They would bark all the way around, and then stop. This happened a lot. My daughter was two months old at the time and when this “presence” would go around, I would get sensations of cold in my daughter's room. So on Halloween night I went out under the moon and I put on my ritual gear and I went out to look for this entity. The dogs began to bark. It was so beautiful out and I felt really strong. I suddenly felt this presence and I felt I was looking at an old Indian man, an old Pomo Indian. I couldn't see him, it was a feeling of his presence. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was a shaman and that he had died and needed help to get to the other world. He said he had been the last, and that there was no one left when he died to help him, no one who knew how to do it. So I stuck my knife in the ground and out of my knife came a path of lightâagain, I saw this in my mind. Well, he started to walk up this path like someone would walk up a staircase and when he was just about out of sight he looked down at me and said, “By the way, I give to you everything that comes into your hands if you close your eyes and walk back to the house.”
So when he was up there, I pulled up the knife and put it back into my sheath, closed my eyes, and walked back through the orchard toward the house, and I realized at that point that I was in a field of belladonna. When I got to the house my hands were filled with the leaves of the “devil's weed” and I put the belladonna in a little velvet bag that I had and hung it up on the wall and kept it there for a long time.
One day I decided to make a flying ointment. I was doing it in front of a student who I wanted to impress. Well, I made it about a thousandfold stronger than I should have because I was using denatured alcohol instead of spirits of wine to extract it, which is what they did in the old days. And instead of lard I was using hydrophilic ointment. As a result I increased the potency about two hundred to three hundred percent, and I got enough under my fingernails just by mixing it to kill me. And I would have died if it hadn't been for a friend of mine who was a doctor and a magician, whom I called immediately. I learned a very hard lesson. It was my first heavy experience with death, and a lot of bullshit pride went down the toilet with the rest of the flying ointment. So that was my gift from the old Indian man.
Q.
How much of the Craft is really ancient?
A.
I don't think it matters. I think a lot of it is. I think the important part is, again, that we get on it and produce these ecstatic states in which real generation of energy occurs.
Q.
It's always seemed to me that it is going to be difficult to write an accurate history of the Craft revival because so many people lied for so many years about their origins.
A.
Well, that's true, but I'm owning up to my bullshit. I'm not an adolescent anymore. As a matter of fact, I was an adolescent with a streak of psychological difficulties that was a mile wide. But I'm perfectly willing to admit that I was not passed all of this “shit” down and that what I had was largely intense scholarship and, thank Goddess, a little bit of real inspiration.
Q.
Do you think there was a universal Old Religion such as Murray describes?
A.
Not necessarily. I think people have always been very diverse. You get these people together over on one side of a village and three people on the other, and before you know it, you have two magical systems because somebody on one side had a dream about goats and someone on the other side had a dream about frogs. So you end up with a goat god on one side and a frog god on the other. What difference does it make how universal it is? Universality of form,
no!
Universality of content,
yes!
And Margaret Murray missed another point. In Ireland all of the great Witches like Biddy Early were potato diggers. They were not aristocrats. They were among the so-called ignorant. They were denied formal schooling, but they flocked to the hedgerow schoolmasters to get a classical education. They ended up as hard-drinking old peasants with dirt on the floor and no plates to eat their spuds out of, but they were honored by poor people, because they were poor people.
Let me tell you a story, an Irish national liberation story associated with Biddy Early, the greatest of all Irish Witches. Biddy Early lived from the late 1700s to just before the famine in the 1870s. She was from West Clare, and when she died she was a very old lady, well into her nineties. She was a normal woman in many respects. She had a husband and two children. Her first husband died quite young. She married again and survived her second husband by about twenty years. After Biddy Early had been widowed for the last time, she lived in a stone cabin a little way out from town. I visited her house and everything she owned has been carefully preserved by the people in the town of Feacle. The townspeople love her so much, even though she has been dead for a hundred and thirty years. I was shown her grave and I talked to a woman who swears that her son, who almost died of infantile paralysis, was saved from death by the fact that she took him while he was dying and laid him on Biddy Early's grave, and I saw him walking around, so . . .
Like most Irish Witches, she would not necessarily have called herself a Pagan, even though she always used to say that she got her powers from the fairies. She was not on friendly terms with the orthodox Catholic clergy, but the people loved her, and finally she so proved her worth that the parish priest was completely won over to her way of thinking.
She was a drunk during the latter part of her life. She had rheumatism very bad and, like most Witches, she could not heal herself, so she drank to blunt the pain. Well anyway, Biddy Early became old and weird, and her power increased. She saved cattle, healed people, helped women to get pregnant, saved babies, prognosticated, and in general, excited the admiration of everybody so that people came from all over to be with her.
There was a man in the area who was what they call a “cabin hunter,” which means he got bounty from the landlords by hunting out and evicting people who were squatting on basically useless pieces of land without paying rent. In those days dispossession from your home was tantamount to death by starvation, and a cabin hunter was, without doubt, one of the most ruthless and revolting kinds of men to arise on Irish soil.
After this guy had dispossessed a few families, Biddy Early confronted him. She showed up at church one day to everybody's amazement. She walked up to the guy and grabbed him by the collar as he was going out of the church and forced him down on his knees and she said, “I'm putting you down on your knees because I want you to realize that's where you are going to be by the time I get through with you, if you do any more of this to people.” Well, the guy was terrified, but he didn't pay any attention to her, which was a big mistake. He had amassed quite a decent amount of money and had a good-sized farm and a number of servants. Well, word came to Biddy that he was at it again. It was a pouring rainy night and she was at a Ceiliâwhich is a big musical event very common among Irish people. She was sitting around and the rain was pouring down and she said, “Well, he's up and at it again.” “Who?” they asked. And she said, “That cabin hunter.” And she picked up a burning stick near the fire and she blew on it a little, and at that moment the granaries and home of this guy were seized with a terrific fire in the middle of the rain. Everything the guy owned was burned to the ground. Nobody was killed, but his wife and kids barely managed to escape with their clothes. He was reduced to the same level of poverty as the people he had fucked over, and he came begging forgiveness to Biddy Early and she just told him to get out of the district or she would kill him.