Lucy Cavendish - Witches and Wizards: Astonishing Real Life Stories Behind the Occults Greatest Legends, Myths and Mysteries

A Rockpool book

PO Box 252

Summer Hill

NSW 2130

Australia

www.rockpoolpublishing.com.au

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First published in 2016

Copyright Lucy Cavendish 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

All images are sourced from flickr.

Exceptions are on are from Lucy Cavendish.

is from Australscope.

is from Fairfax media.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Cavendish, Lucy, author.

Witches and wizards : astonishing real-life stories behind

the occults greatest legends, myths and

mysteries / Lucy Cavendish.

9781925017441 (hardback)

Supernatural series.

Includes bibliographical references.

WitchesAnecdotes.

WizardsAnecdotes.

Wizards in literature.

Witches in literature.

WitchcraftAnecdotes.

133.4

Cover and internal design by Seymour Design

Typeset by TypeSkill

Edited by Katie Evans

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

An Introduction to
Witches and Wizards

By Lucy Cavendish

G ather round, friends, for within these pages there are tales to be told of Wizards conjuring the Grain, of Witches summoning spirits to heal and to harm. Shocking stories of advisors to Queens, of cunning-men and women on windswept hills, of half-mad mages calling on the Gods of ancient Egypt, their cauldrons, wands and Magick still all about us, every single day.

Be aware this is no book of fantasy. The occult legends you will discover within its pages are real. These legends were once (and some still are) flesh and blood like you and like me. They lived and loved, suffered and triumphed, and they all worked Magick in their own particular and sometimes very peculiar way. Each of them is fascinating in their own right, but together they are the very stuff of legend, the truth behind the fantasies that filter through our lives.

Ive been exploring these beings for a very long time now. History, and in particular Magickal peoples lives, are something of an obsession for me. This book is the result of years of study, travel to some fairly obscure and sometimes bizarre locations, research in old libraries and within musty tomes, all in order to truly understand who these people were.

When I first began to learn about these amazing Magickal human beings, their passions, their glories and tragedies, and their powerful influence, I truly had no-one to share my discoveries with. I was an ordinary and slightly odd girl, who lived in the sunburned suburbs in Sydney, and no-one I knew was the least interested in what was so compelling to me Magick, myth and mystery consumed me! In time, I became a practising Witch, and then a public one. My first training circle was back in 1987, and my first tarot deck, bought the same year, was the Crowley-Thoth deck, with its paintings by Lady Frieda Harris. I journeyed into Avalon, and travelled the path of Druidry and the Wizards, and with this training I grew more and more fascinated with the layers behind the Witches and Wizards of legend. As I walked the streets of Sydney I would think about Rosaleen Norton, the Witch of Kings Cross, busking with her art on the pavements to make enough money for her canvases. Walking the labyrinth of esoteric bookstores in Londons Covent Garden I would ponder the members of the Golden Dawn, and the infamous Aleister Crowley, and in the vast British Museum I would hunt out again and again the small cabinet containing the Magickal tools of Doctor John Dee, the Elizabethan Wizard whose work is even more influential today than ever before.

Flawed as they were, I was encouraged by these incredible people and their disregard for convention in far more dangerous times than those in which I live. I found them an inspiration as I began to work publicly as a Witch and encountered the inevitable backlash, misunderstandings and petty prejudices that coming out of the broom closet can bring. And of course I learned there were a lot of people like me people who were intrigued by and drawn to these occult legends.

Now, with the hyper-success of books such as the Harry Potter series and the adaptation of the Lord of the Rings into blockbuster movies, so many people are hungry for the truth behind these fantasies. And while they are fiction, they have at their heart true ancient Magick. Behind these countless books, poems, paintings, fantasy television series and blockbuster movies stands a remarkable group of real-life people.

You see, Magick is no fantasy, and nor are Witches and Wizards. You will discover through their stories that they are not only powerful, they are all too human at times. There is something endearing and touching about knowing that the greatest and most gifted Witches and Wizards struggle just as you and I do. We often assume that when people connect deeply to the Magick within and without, above and below, that they become somehow immune to all the lessons of ordinary living. But this is not true, not for the least, nor for the greatest of us. Their feuds, their love affairs, their addictions, their conflicts, their mistakes and their contradictions are within these pages, not to point fingers, but to see just how human we all are. Sometimes, for all its rewards, being a Witch or a Wizard makes human life even more challenging, sometimes even downright dangerous. For these legends, fitting in might have been the safer option, but it was never a real possibility given their Magickal natures. So they are inspirations to all of us who feel at times more than a little weird according to the dictates of the mainstream.

There are so many who deserve to have their tales told, and this book is in no way even close to a complete history. There are so many people who died during the Burning Times, who were imprisoned during the Salem Witch Trials, or hung upon hills like the witches of Pendle. So many of them have been overlooked, forgotten. So, alongside the stories of the renowned and infamous, Ive included small personal stories. Ive included them so that their lives can have at least a little of the respect they are due.

The late nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw flamboyant Witches and Wizards emerge, some who outright courted attention, and their vibrancy, daring and revolutionary spirits have blazed a trail we are all walking to this day. Perhaps they even changed the course of history. Without the Magickal Battle of Britain, could the Nazis have succeeded? Without the members of the Golden Dawn Society, we may not have tarot cards and divination. Without John Dee, the Merlin of Mortlake, would there be so many people, today, attempting to talk with the Angels?

Please know it is not my intent for Witches and Wizards to be in any way an exhaustive academic work, or a satisfying biography of each person featured within. Instead, this book attempts to bring them back into a context that doesnt trivialize their reality. People like Aleister Crowley and Rosaleen Norton were never far away from tabloid sensation, but they are owed respect, consideration and recognition as agents of amazing social change. Others simply deserve to have their personal stories told, like nineteen-year-old Gobelin of Werzberg, Germany, caught up in the frenzy of the Malleus Maleficarum -inspired witch hunts, or Edward Kelley, charlatan or greatest channeler, or Doreen Valiente, the modern mother of Witchcraft.