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Devil's Stones and Midnight Rites: Megaliths,Folklore, and Contemporary Pagan WitchcraftEthan Doyle WhitePublished online: 04 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Ethan Doyle White (2014) Devil's Stones and Midnight Rites: Megaliths, Folklore, andContemporary Pagan Witchcraft, Folklore, 125:1, 60-79, DOI: 10.1080/0015587X.2013.860766

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Devil’s Stones and Midnight Rites: Megaliths,Folklore, and Contemporary Pagan Witchcraft

Ethan Doyle White

Abstract

During the middle years of the twentieth century, British pioneers of Wicca, theneopagan witchcraft religion, adopted prehistoric megaliths as ‘sacred sites’ andappropriated the folklore that surrounded them for their own magico-religiouspurposes. In turn, Wiccan interpretations of such sites resulted in the creation of a new‘alternative archaeological’ megalithic folklore.

Introduction

In Britain, it is common knowledge that the contemporary Druids, members of a newreligious movement emphasizing the sanctity of the natural world, utilize many of thecountry’s great megaliths for their own ceremonies, and that every midsummer crowdsof thousands flock to Stonehenge in Wiltshire to witness them perform their rituals inpraise of the solstice sun (Blain and Wallis 2007, 86). Smaller groups also brave thefreezing temperatures to do the same at midwinter, while academics have devotedpapers and book chapters to exploring this neopagan spiritual phenomenon (Blain andWallis 2003, 2007; Cusack 2012; Lucas 2007; Rountree 2006; Wallis et al. 2001; Wallis 2003,142–94; Worthington 2009).1 Despite such interest in the subject of neopagan venerationat these ‘sacred sites’, very little attention has been paid to how the magico-religiousmovement of Wicca has reinterpreted and utilized these monuments and their folklorefor its own ritual purposes. This paper seeks to address this imbalance.Although there is variation among the different denominations, or ‘traditions’, the

religion of Wicca typically revolves around the duotheistic veneration of a Horned Godand a Goddess, the observation of seasonal festivals known as ‘sabbats’, and the practiceof magical rites either solitarily or in groups known as covens (Adler 2006, 90–139;Harvey 2007, 35–52).2 It differs in this way from other contemporary occult groups whoalso refer to themselves as ‘witches’, such as the Luciferians and the multitude ofdifferent types of Satanists, whose theological beliefs are quite distinct from those foundin Wicca (cf. Faxneld and Petersen 2013). As a contemporary pagan, or ‘neopagan’,religion, Wicca is an attempt to reinterpret or revive the polytheistic, pre-Christianreligions of Europe, and it should come as no surprise therefore that many Wiccans, justlike the contemporary Druids, have taken a great interest in the prehistoric monumentsknown as megaliths, seeing them as visible symbols of ancient paganism in thelandscape. However, it is not just the ancient history of these monuments that Wiccanshave delved into for their own purposes; it is also their associated folklore. Much of thisdates to the early modern period at the earliest, and connects the megaliths with ancient

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druids, the Devil, and the supernatural. Indeed, as Jacqueline Simpson once noted, ‘theWicca religion . . . bases many beliefs and rituals on its syncretic interpretations offolkloric materials from the past’ (Simpson 1995, 122).

The Folklore of Britain’s Megaliths

The term ‘megalithic architecture’ is something of a misnomer, for megaliths represent aunity only of building material, and not of style and purpose. Throughout laterprehistory, encompassing as it does the Neolithic, Bronze, and Iron Ages, a wide varietyof monuments were constructed across Britain, not all of which were megalithic innature. While the chambered tombs of the Early Neolithic and the stone circles of theLate Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages were indeed constructed from large stones, otherprominent monument types—namely henges and causewayed enclosures—weremonumental earthworks. Although there is a great variability among Britain’sprehistoric megaliths, their common materiality has meant that they have left animposing imprint on the popular imagination of nineteenth-century, twentieth-century,and twenty-first-century Britain, far more than have the monumental earthworks.Although nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century folklorists and

archaeologists often believed that the rural folklore of their own period mightcontain traces of fossilized ‘folk memory’ from as far back as late prehistory, thisidea has been largely discredited, and it is now apparent that the original purposesof the megaliths were lost within a few centuries of their abandonment (Hutton2009b, 19–20). Taking Avebury as an example, archaeologist Aubrey Burl positedthat by the Romano-British Iron Age the site had been long abandoned and left tobecome a wilderness, but that wealthy tourists must have come to marvel at it justas their counterparts on the other side of the empire marvelled at the Pyramids ofEgypt. Burl argued that this was evidenced by a Romano-British brooch andpotsherds found at the site (Burl 1979, 30–31). If we accept such an interpretation,we can conclude that even by two thousand years ago, those living near themegalithic monuments had no accurate idea of when or why they had beenoriginally created. Instead, they may well have begun to develop their own folkloricideas about them, perhaps attributing their creation to gods, ancestors, or othersupernatural forces.Fresh interpretations of Britain’s megaliths continued to develop during the Middle

Ages, a trend that would carry right on into the early modern period. According toRonald Hutton, it was during the sixteenth century that ‘popular and learned attitudes[regarding Britain’s megaliths] certainly both developed and diverged’, as Englishscholars increasingly began to associate such sites with the Danish incursions ofthe early medieval period, while their Scottish counterparts were instead widely of theopinion that they had been constructed several centuries earlier, in the Iron Age, by themagico-religious priestly class known as druids (Hutton 2009b, 13). These antiquariantheories had little influence on the majority of the largely illiterate population, whoinstead developed new folk beliefs about how these stone structures had come intoexistence. One of the most prominent folk ideas that sprang up at this time, primarilyacross southern England, was that the stone monuments had once been human beingswho had been turned to stone for revelling on a Sunday. As this belief was first recorded

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in 1602, Hutton suspects that it arose as a result of Sabbatharianism, a Christianmovement that placed great emphasis on keeping the Sabbath holy and free from toil(Hutton 2009b, 13–14).In the eighteenth century, the idea of a medieval Danish origin fell out of favour

among antiquarians, and English scholars began to believe that it was the Iron Agedruids who had been responsible for megalith construction (Hutton 2009b, 14–15). Thistheory was championed by William Stukeley, an antiquarian, unorthodox clergyman,and pioneer of the modern Druidic movement, who published his findings in the 1740s(Hutton 2009a, 65–102). The idea of a connection between the ancient druids and theprehistoric megaliths soon spread throughout Britain, permeating its many regions andclasses, and entering into folklore, aided by its increasing propagation in print and alsoby the growth in domestic tourism (Hutton 2009b, 15–16). Thus the stone circles ofBritain came to be popularly known as ‘druidical circles’. The circle at Birkrigg Commonin Lancashire was actually named ‘the Druid’s Temple’, a title it still carries to this day(Burl 2005, 69; Waterhouse 1985, 35–38), while that at Kilmartin in Argyll became the‘Temple Wood Stones’ (Burl 2005, 112).That same century also saw a trend spreading throughout popular folklore across both

Britain and the North American colonies in which notable features in the landscape—including megaliths—came to be associated with, and even named after, the Devil. Thus,place names such as the Devil’s Ditch and the Devil’s Punchbowl came into being.In many places around Britain, older folktales about giants who fashioned the prominentdykes or ditches in the landscape were revised, with the role played by the giant insteadbeing transferred to the Christian bogeyman (Harte 2009, 24–26). At the megalithic siteof Avebury, for instance, several of the stones were re-named after the Devil, with a largemegalith at the southern entrance becoming ‘the Devil’s Chair’ and the stones in thenorth circle becoming ‘the Devil’s Brand-Irons’ (Burl 1979, 36). In the early modernperiod, the Devil had been a prominent figure in the popular imagination, although asDarren Oldridge has established: ‘ideas about Satan were almost as rich and complex asideas about God’ (2010, 7). Satan was interpreted as everything from a monstrousembodiment of evil to a comical character who was regularly outwitted by wily peasants(Oldridge 2010, 7). As Jeremy Harte has demonstrated, it was this more comical, clownishview of the Devil that was dominant among those English-speaking communities thatnamed prominent spots in their local landscape after him during the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. This refutes the idea that these communities named megalithsafter Satan because they were thought to have been fashioned by adherents of a non-Christian, and hence ‘Devil worshipping’ religion (Harte 2009, 27–30).The eighteenth century was thus evidently a turning point in how Britons perceived

their megalithic monuments. The former folkloric associations that they had withmarauding Danes and giants came to be widely replaced by two new motifs: the ancientdruids, and the Devil himself. New problems arose as the new discipline of folkloristicsemerged in the nineteenth century. Infused with the doctrine of survivals, and hencebelieving that folktales were fossilized stories that had been passed down from timeimmemorial, these pioneering folklorists often failed to realize that folklore is a dynamicand constantly changing medium. Therefore, when Wiccans began looking at therecorded folkloric accounts in the twentieth century, and found many megalithsdescribed as being associated with the Devil, there is evidence that some of them

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believed such an association was potentially over a millennium old, going back to thefirst Christianization of Britain when pre-Christian deities were demonized (for instance,Valiente 1973, 304–305). It seems highly likely that it was through this connection withthe Devil and with ancient pagan druids that many megaliths came to be associated withwitchcraft and magical rites, at least in the minds of many twentieth-century Wiccans.Widely believing in the historical existence of Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult (which isexamined below), such Wiccans looked back and saw the connections between Devil-worshipping witches and megaliths in folklore, and came to the conclusion that initiatesof the Witch-Cult had been assembling at these sites in previous centuries. This wouldprovide an impetus for them to start assembling at these sites too. As Doreen Valiente,the woman who has come to be known in the neopagan community as ‘the mother ofmodern witchcraft’, noted, it was ‘[b]ecause of their association with the rites ofpaganism . . . [that] standing stones and stone circles became the natural meeting placefor witches’ (Valiente 1973, 304). She went on to add that ‘some modern witches havedeliberately sought out ancient stones, in order to revive the powers latent in them or inthe aura of the place’ (1973, 305), a practice that would have significant repercussions forthe future of megalithic folklore.

Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner

The origins of Wicca can largely be traced to the influence of the English Egyptologist,anthropologist, and pioneering feminist Margaret Murray (1863–1963). As she wouldrelate in her autobiography, it was after being prevented from returning to excavate inEgypt following the outbreak of the First World War that she set about investigating afield that she was otherwise entirely unfamiliar with: the history of witchcraft in Britain(Murray 1963, 104). Whereas most established historians had taken the view that thewitch-trials of the early modern period had been the result of a variety of economic,religious, and social tensions, and that none of those accused had really been adherentsof a Devil-worshipping form of Satanic witchcraft, Murray took a different position. Sheput forward what has come to be known as ‘the Witch-Cult theory’; that there really hadbeen a religion which the Christian authorities of medieval and early modern Europe hadwanted to eradicate, but that it was not Satanic in nature, instead being the survival of apre-Christian fertility religion centred on the worship of a Horned God. This faith, sheargued, had commemorated four quarter days each year, and practised magical rites(which at times involved human sacrifice) in groups known as covens (Murray 1921,1933). Murray also adopted into her theory the idea that the fairies of British folklorewere not simply fictional or supernatural characters, but were a race of diminutivehumans who were the descendants of the Neolithic and Bronze Age Britons who hadbeen displaced by ‘Celtic’ invaders during the Iron Age. These people, she argued, lived inthe wilderness and followed a pagan religion akin to the ‘Witch-Cult’, thus explaining therelationship between witches and fairies in many of the early modern witch-trial records(Murray 1921, Appendix 1; Murray 1933, 46–64).Murray first published her conclusions in an article for Folk-Lore in 1917, later

producing a book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (Murray 1921), followed by a furtherwork aimed at a wider, non-academic audience, The God of the Witches (Murray 1933). Hertheory was not a novel one (it had formerly been proposed by scholars working in

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continental Europe such as Jules Michelet and Charles Leland), but it was Murray whoelaborated it into its most highly developed form and brought it to far wider publicattention. She came to be popularly perceived as an expert on the subject and wasinvited to write the entry on witchcraft for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1929. Needlessto say, despite the support that she received at the time, Murray’s theories have notlived up to academic scrutiny. Even when she was first publicizing them, a number ofacademics who specialized in either ancient pre-Christian religion or the early modernwitch-trials openly criticized her. However, as Jacqueline Simpson has noted, mostscholars chose simply to ignore her work, and while ‘[n]ormally this is an effectivetechnique for ensuring the oblivion of bad books . . . in this case it backfired, since it lefther theory free to spread, seemingly unchallenged, among an eager public’ (Simpson1994, 95). Just as her ideas about the early modern witches have been thrown out thewindow, so have Murray’s theories about fairies also been discredited. Diane Purkiss, anexpert on early modern fairy beliefs, notes that while she could understand the romanticappeal of such a theory, it faced ‘a complete lack of supporting evidence’ and was heavilyflawed (Purkiss 2000, 5–6).Although Murray believed in magic and was known to perform simple spells and

curses, there is no evidence that she herself ever attempted to revive this ‘Witch-Cult’ orany other form of pagan religion (Hutton 1999, 200–201). Nonetheless, other occultistsacross Britain, taking an interest in her work and in that of other scholars who hadsimilarly proposed the survival of pre-Christian religions, clearly did attempt to revivethe imagined Witch-Cult from the 1930s onward. In an attempt to give historicalauthenticity to what they were doing, almost all of these groups claimed to be genuinesurvivals of an early modern Witch-Cult, having received their teachings from secretiverural covens or from elderly relatives, since deceased. While desperately clinging on tosuch fabricated claims of antiquity, what these pioneers were actually doing wasinadvertently founding the new religious movement of Wicca. Best known amongstthese was an Englishman named Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), who had spent most of hislife in Asia, where he had taken a particular interest in the magical beliefs and practicesof the Malayan peoples. He was also an amateur, yet accomplished, archaeologist andanthropologist. Returning to England upon retirement in 1936, Gardner claimed that hehad encountered a secretive group of practising witches in the New Forest in 1939, andthat they had proceeded to initiate him into their circle (Heselton 2012). While scholarshave debated whether this New Forest coven ever existed (Clifton 2006, 14–16; Heselton2000; Hutton 1999; Kelly 2007; Ruickbie 2004), it is well established that Gardner went onto propagate his own variant of Wicca (now known as Gardnerianism) during the 1950sand early 1960s. He founded a string of covens from Hertfordshire to the Isle of Man,from which his initiates would go on to spread the tradition across the globe.It is here that we must turn our attention to Gardner’s relation with the megalithic

monuments of the British Isles, and to understand this it is worth examining hispublished views on the purported historical Witch-Cult, as they appear in his two non-fiction works on the subject, Witchcraft Today (in 1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft(in 1959). These two books, which duplicate much of the same information, dealprimarily with Gardner’s theories regarding the Witch-Cult, connecting it to everythingfrom Palaeolithic religion to the medieval Knights Templar. In these books, Gardneradopted Murray’s ideas about fairies, describing them as the ‘pre-Celtic aborigines’ of the

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British Isles and making comparisons with what he called the ‘pygmy races’ of Africa.Here he pulled megalithic chambers into the mix, describing such sites as Maeshowe inOrkney as a ‘Pict house’ where these ‘Little People’ lived. This is in stark contrast tomainstream archaeological understanding, which has shown that the only people todwell in the Maeshowe chambered tomb were the Neolithic dead (Gardner 1954, 56–62;Childe 1956; Richards 2005, 229–48). Despite the fact that such a claim can be easilydismissed, it is interesting in that it provides us with evidence for how one of thepioneers of Wicca was weaving Britain’s megaliths into his own religious mythology,which would have repercussions for the public understanding of these monuments inlater years. It is also important for revealing how the folklore of the megaliths wasinfluencing him. In early modern folktales and witch-trial accounts, fairies were oftenassociated with, or said to dwell within, mounds, and it was through hills that one couldreach the realm of faerie. It was these folk beliefs that had led Gardner to rationalize thatthe descendants of the Neolithic Little People actually dwelt in mounds and hills, whichhe clearly equated with the chambered tombs. These tombs, particularly when neglectedand overgrown, do look very much like mounds or hills (see, for instance, the overgrownstate of Newgrange, as shown in Figure 1).In his second book, Gardner also dealt briefly with the megaliths at Avebury, stating

that they were built by an influx of Iberian Beaker people. He then proceeded to arguethat those who constructed the site were similar in their religious beliefs to the followersof Indian Tantra (Gardner 1971, 51–52). Moving on to discuss the later Stonehenge, heargued that while it was ‘built to British ideas, for British gods’, it might have beenconstructed by Egyptian masons, thereby explaining what he saw as similarities to the

Figure 1. Late nineteenth-century photograph by R. Welch depicting the overgrown entrance to the Early Neolithicchambered tomb of Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland (Squire 1905, 136). Author’s collection.

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construction techniques used on some of the ancient monuments in Egypt. He also putforward several interpretations of the site using his experience with Wiccan ritual as abasis, arguing that the stone circle was a symbolic womb that was penetrated by thephallic sunlight at midsummer and noting that:

Stonehenge is circular, even the lintels being rounded inside and out. This must have been for a goodreason, and I can only think that they had found by experience that in some mysterious way a circleretains any power generated inside it, in the same way that a witches’ circle functions. (Gardner 1971, 55)

Finally, he spent a paragraph dealing with the Cornish megalith at Men-an-Tol, which hebelieved was comparable with Stonehenge for it also typified ‘the “male-and-female”imagery of early religion’ (Gardner 1971, 56).Gardner’s association of such megaliths with a male and female sexual duality is of

particular interest here, because it is in keeping with his own religious beliefs. Gardner’stradition of Wicca put the Horned God and the Goddess on an equal footing, somethingthat was in contrast to both some of his contemporaries and later adherents, whoelevated either the Horned God or (more commonly) the Goddess to the senior position.This duotheism was an innovation on the part of Gardner and those around him, for itdiffered from the theology of the Witch-Cult as described by Margaret Murray, whichhad been Horned God-focused. Gardner was therefore bypassing Murray in his effort tofind legitimacy for his new theology, going right back to the age of the megaliths in hisattempt to do so. Whether he genuinely believed that late prehistoric Britons actuallyhad built such fertility symbolism into the megaliths or not is uncertain, but it is quitelikely that he did, as it would have fitted in with his belief that the ancient religionswhich evolved into the Witch-Cult were both duotheistic and fertility based.Philip Heselton, in investigating Gardner’s life and early occult activities, noted a

possible connection between him and Alexander Keiller, the famous archaeologist andmarmalade magnate, known for his excavations at Avebury during the late 1930s. In his1949 novel High Magic’s Aid, Gardner chose the name Morven for one of his chiefcharacters, a medieval witch on the run from the witch-hunters. Heselton suggested thepossibility that this name had been adopted from the Morven Institute, thearchaeological organization founded by Keiller in 1937, which had itself been namedafter Keiller’s family home in Aberdeenshire (Heselton 2003, 241). As a side note, it isworth highlighting that Keiller had an interest in witchcraft and demonology, owning atotal of 243 books on the subject, but had a very different attitude to it than did Murrayand Gardner. Indeed, he even wrote an article for Folk-Lore in 1922 in which he activelycriticized the Witch-Cult theory that Murray had been advocating over the previous fewyears. Despite this, he was also a practising pagan, devising and performing rites inveneration of the ancient Greek deity Pan in the gardens of his manor at Avebury duringthe 1930s (Worthington 2009, 101–102).As this shows, Gardner’s intellectual attitude towards Britain’s megaliths was

multifaceted. He was somewhat accepting of the more conventional archaeologicalinterpretations of these sites that were prominent at the time—that is, he recognizedthem as being ritualistic in purpose and late prehistoric in date. However, he also addedhis own, pseudo-archaeological views, and believed that through his own experiencewith magical rites he could understand sites like Stonehenge in a way that conventionalmethods of archaeological investigation could not. As such, he advocated the idea that

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Stonehenge was a site for the performance of magico-religious rites associated withfertility, here clearly tying it in with Murray’s early modern Witch-Cult and his ownWiccan movement, which were both in his view also fertility-based religions.Accompanying this view of the megalithic stone circles, Gardner also argued that thechambered tombs of the Early Neolithic had been homes for the fairies until they hadbecome extinct in the early modern period. He was clearly unable to connect thisparticularly strongly with his burgeoning religion, which had little place for ‘LittlePeople’ in its rituals.It is also worth examining what practical use Gardner had for megaliths, and how

he utilized them for his own magico-religious rites. It is known from an accountprovided by his High Priestess Doreen Valiente that, on Midsummer’s Day 1953, hetook her to Stonehenge, where they witnessed the modern Druids performing theirannual solstice ceremony. It was at this event that Gardner lent them a ritual swordof his that apparently fitted perfectly into a hole in the Heel Stone, the lone sarsenthat stands in ‘the Avenue’, just outside the main circle (Valiente 1989, 40). In fact,Gardner’s connection with Stonehenge and the Druids who performed their ritesthere was much deeper than this passing visit. From at least 1946, Gardner had beeninvolved in the Ancient Druid Order, being a friend to both its leader, GeorgeWatson McGregor Reid, and Reid’s son Robert, who took up his father’s position inDecember of that year (Heselton 2003, 80–85; Valiente 1989, 40). By this point,Gardner was already sitting on the Ancient Druid Order’s governing council (Hutton1999, 224). Several years later, in 1951, he appeared, dressed in full Scottish regalia,at the Druidic midsummer ritual, leading the delegation from the Isle of Man(Heselton 2003, 88). For the purposes of the present discussion, this is particularlyinteresting because it shows us just how Gardner first came to experience a ritualwithin a stone circle at first hand. For someone with a deep interest in esotericism,the combination of being in such an imposing monument, dressed in what iseffectively ceremonial garb, and taking part in magico-religious rites would probablyhave had a powerful psychological effect. It would be something that he would notforget in a hurry, and would perhaps wish to emulate elsewhere.Ultimately, Gardner would lose his interest in Druidry as his involvement with Wicca

grew during the 1950s. Indeed, by 1951 he was already privately describing Druidic ritesas being full of ‘false Christianity & silly sentiamality [sic ]’ (Heselton 2003, 358–59) andspeculating that this was ‘just what sentimental folk would invent in the eighteenthcentury’ (Hutton 2008, 256). Nonetheless, it appears that he brought this idea ofperforming rituals within a megalithic circle into his new faith, for there are first-handaccounts showing that his primary coven, which met in a sixteenth-century cottage onthe grounds of a nudist club in Bricket Wood, Hertfordshire, chose to change theirmeeting place for one of their rituals in 1959. The site chosen was the megalithic stonecircle known today as the King’s Stones, a part of the wider Rollright Stone complex onthe Oxfordshire/Warwickshire border. This particular ritual came about as an attempt atreconciliation between the coven and a splinter group that had seceded from it severalyears previously. Presumably the Stones were chosen as a site not only because it wasneutral ground that did not belong to either coven, but also because of their ancient andfolkloric associations with the supernatural (Howard 2009, 162–63; Hutton 1999, 250).

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Here, a distinction must be made between the manner in which Druids and Wiccansutilized such sites. This is notably illustrated in the choice of megaliths used. The Druidsgenerally chose the larger, better-known sites like Avebury and Stonehenge; not onlybecause they would attract audiences, but because they had greater space for audienceparticipation. The Wiccans, on the other hand, typically chose the smaller, lesser-known,and more shielded sites, and their rituals were often conducted at midnight, when therewould be few people about. This had much to do with the way in which these tworeligions operated. Druidry was an open, public religion whose rituals were largelycelebratory in nature, while Wicca was (at least in its early years) much more secretive,carrying with it the controversial banner of ‘witchcraft’. Wiccans often performed ritualswhile ‘skyclad’ (naked) and worshipped the Horned God, a deity that would inevitably beassociated with Satan by many members of the public due to the iconographic similarityand the Satanic undertones of ‘witchcraft’.Following Gardner’s example, many of the early Wiccans subscribed to Murray’s

theories of the Witch-Cult, and used folkloric associations between witches andmegaliths to back up their idea that members of the cult had been using such sites fortheir rites in earlier centuries (see, for instance, Valiente 1973, 304–306). However, it isimportant to note that not all Wiccans accepted Murray’s and Gardner’s views on thenature of fairies and their relation with megaliths. In one of her books, Valientecommented on the folk practice of leaving offerings to the fairies at megalithic sites,suggesting that in such cases the fairies would not have been humans but ‘may be thelingering folk-memory of pagan divinities’ (Valiente 1973, 305). This idea has beenexamined by Purkiss, who argues that even if fairies had their origins in pre-Christiandeities, by the late medieval and early modern periods they had become entirelydisconnected from that origin (2000, 7). Harte adds that while there might have beensome pagan influence on fairy beliefs, they also in part derive ‘from every other figure inthe web of story—from saints, ancestors, fiends, heroes, ghosts, familiars, vampires,angels and anything else that is possible to be imagined’ (2004, 23).The use of megalithic monuments as sacred sites in the burgeoning Wiccan movement

was by no means restricted to the Bricket Wood coven. It was therefore not entirelybased upon Gardner’s experiences with Druidry, for there are other accounts of modernwitches using such monuments in the mid twentieth century. In 1952, the reporter AllenAndrews, after discussing the subject with Cecil Williamson, the then director of theFolklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft in Castletown, Isle of Man, noted thatthere was a coven practising near Keswick in Cumbria, which performed its rituals at themagnificent Castlerigg stone circle (Andrews 1952). Unfortunately for researchers,nothing more has been revealed about this alleged coven, and it is an area in need offurther investigation.

The Rollright Stones: A Case Study

While the great megaliths of Stonehenge and Avebury were becoming increasinglyassociated with the Druidic movement both in the popular imagination and amongneopagans themselves, it would be a different stone circle that would rise to theequivalent importance in Wicca. This was the aforementioned King’s Men, the stonecircle within the Rollright Stones complex, used for the 1959 ritual by Gardner’s Bricket

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Wood coven. Speculatively dated to the Late Neolithic, the stone circle at the RollrightStones is designed in the same manner as are a number of circles in the Lake District, andit has been suggested that it was a ceremonial site where stone axes from the Cumbrianregion were brought for exchange (Burl 2005, 72–74; Lambrick 1988, 28–50).By the early modern period, a rich folklore had developed around the Rollrights, first

recorded by the Tudor-era antiquarian William Camden (1551–1623) in his 1586 workBritannia. Camden recorded a story told to him by local people, which held that thestones had once been a king and his knights who had been turned to stone (Camden 1722,294–96). This folktale proved to be an enduring one; in 1879, the folklorist ThomasWright, who in keeping with many of his contemporaries believed that the monumenthad been originally erected by the ancient druids, recorded that the ‘old people of thevillage’ of Rollright still believed in this account (Wright 1879, 177). Several years later,in 1895, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans, renowned for his excavations at theMinoan sites in Crete, published a paper in Folk-Lore in which he made a more in-depthexamination of the Rollright Stones, noting that ‘it would be difficult to find any Englishsite’ where folklore ‘is more living at the present day’. Evans went on to record moreabout the local folktale, relating that ‘as a rule’ the king in question was not named, andthat, according to the version circulating among the locals, the king and his army hadencountered a witch upon the hill (sometimes identified as Mother Shipton). She hadinformed him that he would never become monarch of England, before proceeding notonly to turn them all to stone, but also to transform herself into an elder tree (Evans1895, 18–20). One of Evans’s informants, an elderly woman, supplied some intriguingfurther information, telling him of how her own mother-in-law had described how localswould gather at an elder tree in the vicinity on Midsummer’s Eve to cut and bleed thetree of its sap, illustrating how it had once been a living witch, with blood still in it(Evans 1895, 20). Evans recorded several other folk beliefs held by some of the locals, oneof which was that fairies would dance around the King Stone at night. Members of thelocal community told him of a recently deceased man who had claimed to have seenthem (Evans 1895, 22). Another local tradition held that the stones were alive(presumably a link to the idea of their being petrified knights) and that at night theywould travel down the hill to drink at a local stream. A further story told claimed that itwas impossible for the stones to be counted, suggesting further supernaturalassociations (Evans 1895, 24–26; Grinsell 1976, 146–147; Menefee 1975).This folkloric connection between witchcraft and the Rollright Stones, which as

Evans’s account has shown was particularly strong in the late nineteenth century, wascertainly something of which some contemporary Wiccans were aware. Doreen Valientecommented on it in both her 1962 study of witchcraft in her beloved Sussex, WhereWitchcraft Lives, and in her 1973 encyclopedia, An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present. In theformer, she commented on the site only briefly, describing it as ‘a traditional meeting-place of witches’ and relating that the locals believed ‘that witch meetings take placethere periodically to this day’ (Valiente 2010, 55). In the latter she went further,describing Evans’s tale of knights being turned into stones by a witch, and connecting itto Murray’s Witch-Cult by suggesting that the inclusion of the witch in the legend ‘musthave been very useful in keeping people away from the stones after dark. One wonderswhether the witches themselves aided the spread of this belief’ in order to scare peopleaway from coming across any covens that were performing their midnight rites at the

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stones (Valiente 1973, 304). The question must here be raised of why the folklore of theRollrights was so important to these contemporary witches, and an argument could bemade that the stone circle’s heritage in fact made it perfect for the uses of moderncovens. As a ceremonial site created by a pre-Christian, pagan society, it was a logicalchoice for any group seeing itself as the inheritor of these pre-Christian beliefs.Furthermore, the folklore related to the site firmly associated it with both a witch andwith animistic conceptions of the elder tree and moving stones. As a site, it thereforeexhibited archaeological and folkloric connections to ancient paganism, witchcraft, andthe supernatural; three factors that were central influences on the Wiccan movement.In the end it would not be a Wiccan, but another type of occultist who would take the

greatest interest in the Rollrights. This was the ceremonial magician William G. Gray(1913–2002), who underwent a series of nocturnal meditations at the site in an attemptto commune with the spiritual energies that he believed were contained within them(Richardson and Claridge 2011, 174–76). Believing that the ‘stones acted as storageagencies of human and possibly non-human energies of consciousness’, Gray claimedthat the Rollrights ‘came to stand for our purpose in Life on this planet’, outlining ‘apermanent Pattern leading to our ultimate perfection as people’ (Gray 2011, 5 and 10).Subsequently publishing his findings as The Rollright Ritual in 1975, Gray mentioned thefolktale of the witch and the knights in his foreword, but other than that paid it littleheed. Instead he devoted much of the book to describing a ritual in which occultistscould contact the stones using such ceremonial items as a cord, a shield, a cup, and a typeof forked rod known as a ‘stang’. He included photographs of figures dressed in dark,hooded robes performing their rites at the site. As the prominent contemporaryoccultist Michael Howard has noted, there is a ‘very clear’ influence here from Gray’sfriend, the neopagan witch Robert Cochrane (Howard 2001, 20–21).A Londoner by birth, Cochrane (1931–66) was the leader of a coven of practitioners

known as the Clan of Tubal Cain, which was founded in the early 1960s and which usedthe same tools and costumes described by Gray in his book (Hutton 1999, 309–18; DoyleWhite 2011, 2013). Whether they ever actually performed their rituals at the Rollrightsremains unknown, although following Cochrane’s ritual suicide in 1966, many of itsmembers went on to found a more eclectic neopagan group, The Regency, which didindeed meet at the site. The Regency differed from the Clan in that its sabbat rituals wereopen for anyone to attend. At a Halloween ceremony that they performed at the site in1972, over a hundred people reportedly attended. There was an intention to return tothe site the following year, aided by the group’s good relationship with the site’s ownerPolly Flick, but Flick decided to close off the site to protect it from vandalism (Howard2001, 29; John of Monmouth et al. 2011, 125–27). Part of that vandalism might be blamedon these occultists themselves; Norman Gills, a local occultist who was friends with bothCochrane and Gray, was reported to have taken a piece of stone that had fallen from theWhispering Knights, the dolmen at the Rollrights. This stone was later given to theAmerican witch Joseph Wilson, who took it with him back to California, where it wasplaced in the care of Dave and Ann Finnin, who run a branch of the Clan of Tubal Cainthere (Finnin 2008, 53). Different rumours spread throughout the neopagan communityregarding the closure of the site. In a 1984 article, Prudence Jones, the president ofcampaign group The Pagan Front, related that she had heard of how local Wiccanscontinued assembling at the site until about 1975, when they found the remains of a

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blood sacrifice that someone had performed there. Feeling that the ‘psychic atmosphere’had turned bad, they stopped performing any further rituals at the site (Jones 1984).Nonetheless, neopagan activity has continued and intensified since the 1990s, gainingrecognition from The Rollright Trust that manages the site and which has had an openlypractising neopagan on its board (Blain and Wallis 2007, 173–88). It is apparent thatsome of these neopagans have also left ritual deposits at the site; a 2003 excavationrevealed two large crystals recently buried in the circle’s centre (Blain and Wallis 2007,182). On visiting the site on 9 September 2011, I noticed that there were red rose petalsand lavender bunches strewn around the centre of the circle, with other flowers placedin holes and cracks within the entrance stones. This is certainly indicative of someceremonial—and quite probably magical—activities having taken place there (seeFigures 2 and 3).

Constructing a Pagan Folklore

It is clear that from the early twentieth century onwards Wiccans were increasinglyusing megaliths and other related prehistoric monuments for their own rites and rituals,and were certainly taking an interest in the folklore surrounding such sites. The questiontherefore arises as to how they actually interpreted these monuments themselves.

Figure 2. Flowers placed on one of the stones making up the King’s Men stone circle; most probably a ritual offeringplaced there by neopagans. Photograph by Ethan Doyle White (September 2011).

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Clearly, even though they were symbols of pre-Christian religions, megaliths were notsimply seen as dead relics of extinct societies by the early Wiccans. Instead they wereunderstood as vibrant sites with supernatural links that were worthy of being adopted asplaces of ritual. Wiccan cosmology saw these megaliths as alive, a view perhapsinfluenced in part by the folktales which claimed that they had once been humansturned to stone, or by others which claimed that they had the ability to move around oftheir own accord. Such ideas were supported by the popularization of pseudo-scientificideas such as earth energies and ley lines, the latter of which was initially postulated bypseudo-archaeologist Alfred Watkins in his book Early British Trackways (1922).Theseerroneous theories would be adopted not only by Wiccans, but also by other neopaganand New Age groups during the large-scale popularization of ‘earth mysteries’within thespiritual counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s (Worthington 2009, 102). In imbuingthe megalithic sites with ‘earth energies’, Wiccans and other occultists came to see themas sacred sites, giving a ‘reverential and spiritual element to what is otherwise perceivedas only an academic resource, a dead past, or a destination on a tourist checklist’ (Blainand Wallis 2007, 28).Another factor in the adoption of megaliths by some Wiccans was the nationalist

associations of the monuments, a phenomenon particularly evident in Wales, Ireland,

Figure 3. Rose petals and lavender around a patch showing evidence of fire, in the centre of the King’s Men stone circle.Photograph by Ethan Doyle White (September 2011).

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and Cornwall. Shelley Trower has examined how Cornish nationalists adopted themegaliths within their borders as symbols of Cornishness, in an attempt to ‘root [theirconcept of a Cornish] nation state . . . in the immemorial past, rather than acknowledge[its] construction over the past few hundred years’ (Trower 2009, 111). For suchnationalists, the megaliths were concrete symbols that connected the contemporaryCornish people with their prehistoric forebears, and in many examples such aconnection was cemented by an alleged supernatural force. Trower notes that manyCornish nationalists believed in ‘earth mysteries’ and other neopagan and/or New Ageconcepts, tying in their views of a Cornish race with a belief that Cornwall itself was anembodiment of the Great Goddess and was imbued with earth energies and ley lines thatcould be traced by using the ancient megaliths (Trower 2009, 118–19). Indeed, neopagancovens did spring up in Cornwall during the twentieth century, adopting the region’sfolklore and merging it into the usual beliefs and practices of the religion. One suchgroup was the coven known as Ros An Bucca, founded in the 1990s by a Cornishwomannamed Gemma Gary. Rather than the usual Horned God/Goddess duality of most Wiccantraditions, however, this coven adopted Bucca, a supernatural character found inCornish folklore, to be their deity, and held that the Cornish landscape was imbued witha form of earth energy called the Red Serpent. The megaliths of Cornwall were, in Gary’swords, ‘temples of the land, where the serpentine flow may spiral and pool within ringsof granite, a rock of high quartz content, which, like the serpentine flow, is responsive tothe lunar tides’ (2008, 37).While Wiccans and other occultists were reinterpreting Britain’s megaliths as sacred

sites that sat on points of magical earth energy, and subsequently developing the beliefthat these had been known to Neolithic and Bronze Age societies, it would not be longbefore these beliefs would begin to filter out into other parts of the population, therebycreating a new folklore to surround the enigmatic monuments. One of the earliestexamples of this can be seen in the writings of Robert Cochrane, who believed that themenhir in St Duzec, Brittany, which is engraved with Christian iconography, is actuallycarved with the symbolism of the pagan Witch-Cult. The journalist Justine Glass allowedhim to write about it in her book on Wicca, in which he remarked:

Although the carving upon the stone (i.e. menhir) is either eighteenth or seventeenth century, andsupposed by archaeologists to be a representation of the Passion of the Christian Christ, and depictionsof the implements of the crucifixion, it is in all probability a depiction of basic witch theology for thatarea and that time. (Glass 1965, 142)

Cochrane’s ideas here had some minor influence, being utilized in the 1970 documentaryLegend of the Witches, directed by Malcolm Leigh (2005). Whether they reached a largeaudience remains unknown, but nonetheless this represents an early attempt by apractising modern witch to write the imagined historical Witch-Cult—and therefore hisown religious pseudo-history—into the history of the megaliths.This would be achieved much more successfully in the following decade when the art

historian Michael Dames authored two books looking at the prehistoric landscapearound Avebury, The Silbury Treasure (1976) and The Avebury Cycle (1977). In the course ofhis new pseudo-archaeological interpretation of the Avebury monument, Dames tookneopagan beliefs and transported them back into the Neolithic, claiming that the societythat constructed Silbury Hill and its surrounding monuments had venerated a single

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Great Goddess and celebrated four seasonal festivals, on the dates of the ancient Irishquarter days Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa, and Samhain. These were the same four quarterdays that Margaret Murray had claimed for the Witch-Cult, and which had subsequentlybeen adopted by both Wicca and Druidry in the mid twentieth century. Dames’s theorieswere never accepted by academics, who dismissed his erroneous reasoning and ideas,but they struck a chord with many in the neopagan and New Age communities. Membersof these communities had begun developing similar theories about a prehistoricmatriarchy, devoted to the Great Goddess, encouraged by the work of archaeologists likeJacquetta Hawkes, O. G. S. Crawford, and most notably Marija Gimbutas (Eller 2000;Hutton 1998; Meskell 1995).In turn, a new folklore associated with Britain’s megaliths emerged, embraced by

neopagans, New Agers, and many others with an interest in esotericism. In particular,Great Goddess-worshippers and feminist Wiccans began making pilgrimages to suchBritish sites as Avebury, which they associated with an ancient matriarchal, Goddess-worshipping society. At Beltane in 1985, one such pilgrimage occurred at Silbury Hill inWiltshire, during which two hundred feminists (many of whom were Wiccan ormembers of other neopagan groups) assembled at the great mound’s peak beforeproceeding on a three-day trip to Stonehenge. One of the figures at the forefront of thismarch was the American author and prominent Wiccan Starhawk (born in 1951), aninitiate into the Gardnerian, Feri, and Dianic traditions who had gone on to found theradical Reclaiming tradition of Wicca in 1979 (Worthington 2009, 104).3 Gainingworldwide recognition for her poetic book on neopagan witchcraft, The Spiral Dance(in 1979), Starhawk had accepted the theories about the Witch-Cult and the fairy peoplefrom Murray and Gardner, but had added ideas about an ancient matriarchy drawn fromthe work of Gimbutas and Dames. It was, of course, historically erroneous and based on aselective, flawed use of data, but would have a tremendous effect on how manyneopagans understood their own history. In Starhawk’s view, stone circles weredesigned for magic rituals, and their continual use over the centuries meant that ‘greatreservoirs of power were built up’ at them (Starhawk 1989, 72).The adoption of pseudo-archaeological interpretations of the past, along with the

growing sense of ownership and stewardship that many neopagans were beginning tofeel for prehistoric monuments, inevitably led to clashes with archaeologists. This is bestillustrated by the controversy surrounding Seahenge in Norfolk, the wooden circlerevealed along eroding coastline in 1998. When the timbers emerged, English Heritageimmediately made plans to excavate the site, but these were contested not only bycertain locals who welcomed the boost to tourism that the intact monument wouldbring, but also by members of New Age and neopagan communities who saw Seahenge asa sacred site that was not to be disturbed (Champion 2000; Wallis 2012; Watson 2005).Meanwhile, as some neopagans were focusing on the protection of any newly uncoveredprehistoric monuments, others turned their attention towards building new megalithicstructures, designed with the specific intention of being used in magico-religious rites.As one author writing on the Internet suggested:

If you have room, you might enjoy creating a permanent circle, either inside your home or outdoors.You could incorporate a circle into a garden, perhaps designing a grassy area surrounded by shrubs orflowers. Large standing stones erected at each of the four main compass points—maybe even acomplete ring of stones—would nicely define your circle. (Alexander n.d.)

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Much to the amusement of the Daily Mail, one English Wiccan, a Mrs Suky Burton ofDorchester, really did erect a new megalithic circle in her back garden, but it is unlikelythat such things were common on a domestic scale, due to financial and spatialconstraints (Johnston 2008). More prominent was the circle constructed at the Big GreenGathering festival in north Somerset in 2005, with the intention of connecting with the‘earth energies’ of the place (Geo-Repairman 2013a). In 2012 another was built by NewAgers at Bruton in Somerset, orientated toward the midwinter solstice (Geo-Repairman2013b). In a related move, Wiccans and other neopagans began using stone circles thathad been constructed in recent years for other purposes. For instance, at the public parkof Hilly Fields in Brockley, south-east London, local artists erected a circle incommemoration of the millennium, and neopagan rites soon began taking place there(Bad Witch 2008).

Conclusion

What, then, can be said about the relationship between prehistoric megaliths, thefolklore associated with them, and the various forms of Wicca? It is certainly clear thatmegaliths are by no means central to the rites or beliefs of neopagan witchcraft, but theyare nonetheless an interesting element in how members of this new religious movementperceive their relationship not only with the ancient past, but also with the landscapesin which they live and worship. As the religion developed in the first part of thetwentieth century, the Wiccan pioneers looked to the pre-existing folklore of Britain’smegaliths for traces of how members of Murray’s imagined Witch-Cult had interactedwith them in earlier centuries. Intrigued by mentions of the Devil, ancient druids, orsupernatural goings on, these Wiccans hoped to unveil the practices of their forebears,whether it was those who were forced to worship in secrecy at the height of the earlymodern witch-trials, or those who lived in the prehistoric society that originally erectedthe megaliths.The historical theories upon which these Wiccans developed their views were,

however, seriously flawed. Although Valiente, and quite probably many of hercontemporaries, clearly believed that megalithic folklore offered an insight into the pre-Christian past, this was incorrect, with most of this lore dating to the early modernperiod at the earliest. Similarly, Murray’s Witch-Cult, through which many Wiccansbelieved they could trace their pedigree back into prehistory, was equally an illusion,being created out of nothing more than the misguided ideas of several turn-of-the-century scholars. The historical bedrock on which Wicca’s early pioneers built their ownpast was highly unstable, and has since been exposed as erroneous by the work ofacademic historians.Nevertheless, historical inaccuracy does not detract from the spiritual experiences

that many Wiccans presumably had—and have—while performing rites within theseancient circles and tombs. Nor does it prevent them from feeling that there issomething animistic and alive, and even divine and sacred, in these prehistoric stones.It is these beliefs that have led Wicca, along with other forms of neopaganism andWestern esotericism, to help create a ‘new folklore’ for Britain’s megaliths; one thatsees them as animate and imbued with a supernatural life-force, a part of a wider sacredlandscape embodying a Neolithic Great Goddess. Wicca has also kept older folklore

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alive, retelling tales about witches and living stones, giving them a new and often morepoignant religious significance, and challenging academically-sanctioned narrativesabout the past. In this way, Wicca has made an original contribution not only to Britishfolklore, but also to ‘alternative archaeology’ and to the manner in which manythousands of people understand and interact with the landscapes in which they live andworship.

Notes1 Here the term ‘neopagan’ is used in reference to the modern religious phenomenon in a wider, collective

sense. This group of related religions is more commonly referred to as ‘contemporary Paganism’ by itspractitioners (for a further discussion of this terminology, see Doyle White 2012, 15–17).

2 There are two distinct definitions of ‘Wicca’ currently used within the neopagan community and thescholarship that studies them. The older, more widespread definition uses it in reference to all forms ofneopagan witchcraft that share sufficiently similar beliefs and practices to be considered part of the samereligion. The other definition uses it exclusively for those traditions of neopagan witchcraft that basethemselves on the Gardnerian liturgy (see Doyle White 2010). Here, I use the former definition.

3 In the context of Wicca, a ‘tradition’ is a synonym for a denomination. Gardnerianism is the tradition ofWicca founded by Gerald Gardner in the early 1950s. Feri and Dianic Wicca are two traditions thatsubsequently developed in the United States. The former was founded in the 1960s by Victor and CoraAnderson, and exhibits influences from Hawaiian Kahuna and Haitian Vodou. The latter developed asWicca interacted with the second-wave feminist movement. Usually open only to women, it places theGoddess before the Horned God in terms of importance, in some instances adopting a position of Goddessmonotheism. The Reclaiming tradition of Wicca was founded in San Francisco in 1979; although heavilyinfluenced by Dianic theology, it places a greater emphasis on egalitarianism and left-wing socialactivism.

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Biographical Note

Ethan Doyle White is an independent scholar based in London. An archaeologist and historian ofreligion, he has a particular interest in the development of Wicca and other forms of neopaganism,as well as the manner in which the past is used by new religious movements for their owncontemporary purposes.

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