INTRODUCTION TO THE WISE WOMAN TRADITION

PAGANISM

The history of Paganism began in about 10,000 BC, during the Paleolithic Age. It was a time when primitive people were nomadic, and had to hunt for their food, having to follow the herds of animals to survive. This is where the belief of the God of the hunt first appeared. The men worshipped the sun, the stag horned God, and the language of the animals, as hunting was crucial to their survival. The women, who were the child bearers and the healers, were those who took care of the tribe, and were looked upon as having more power, as they were the givers of life.

Women and Rituals
It was during this time, that the women discovered that their bodies were in tune with the lunar phases, and therefore they worshipped the moon, and the Goddess diety and they were the ones who led the rituals. There were some men however, who stayed behind from the hunt, with the women, as they were old, or sick or injured. And the women, shared these lunar mysteries with these men, and this is how they became priests in the lunar cult.

In around 8000-7500 BC, agriculture was discovered quite by accident, as the food the women stored in the ground began to grow. With this realization, that the people could plant and grow their own food, came the realization of the mystery of fertility. Up until this time, the diety had been the Goddess of the lunar cult, as the men did not understand their role in the cycle of life until this point. The discovery of agriculture proved that the men also had a part in creation. Prior to this, there had been a division between the men and the women for the most part, and after this discovery, they had to work together and they no longer needed follow the herds for food to survive. This was when they became "paganized", the word pagan meaning "country dweller"

Now the people were able to settle in one place and breed animals, and grow their own food. This was when the people began exploring and discovering the mysteries of life, death and rebirth.

Paganism Spreading Worldwide
Time went on, and people migrated from many places to settle in Rome, and those who came from Greece came with many of the same beliefs that the Romans had and though they worshipped different Gods and Goddess's, they shared in many similarities. With the migration, there also came to Rome the nomadic Eutruscans from Asia Minor who were very well versed in the aspects of magic and divinations, and they brought this knowledge with them to Rome. Then came the people of the British Isles, who had also discovered agriculture around the same time as the Indo-Europeans, and these are what we know now to be the Celts. Also, from the islands, came the peoples known as the Mediranian Cult of the Dead. These people were very spiritual and knowledgeable on the theories of death and reincarnation, and they came and spread out all over New Europe. They shared their secrets with the Celts, and these people became the Druids, and they were the ones who oversaw all of the rites of the pagan people.

The Balance of Druids, Wice and Pagans
The Druids were predominately men, with very few women. From the time of 6500-4500, there were still remnants of the solar/lunar cults that dealt with animals, herbs and the mysteries who intertwined in the pagan communities, and these people were known as the "wice" and they developed the power and understanding of life and the earth, and these were the keepers of the mysteries. So during this time of all these different people travelling back and forth and sharing information, three major groups of people developed which were:

• the Druids who mostly held the men’s mysteries of the Cult of the Dead
• the Wice (in an old Scots dialect means “wise”), who held the mystery teachings of the solar/lunar cults, which remained mostly matrifocal, and was made up of mostly woman, and who worshipped the Goddess and
• the pagans, who were the common folk, who were balanced and polaric, and sought out the wisdom and the knowledge of the Druids and the Wice.

THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY

Than, from 0 ACE-650ACE, the Old Testament was being written in the Middle East. After the death of Christ, the people from the Middle East spread out across the land, spreading the word of Christianity, and eventually came to Rome, and this is when the mass conversion began. They started the conversions first with the rulers, the kings and the Queens first by using money and bribery. This way, the country dwellers would have to convert, as they depended upon the rulers for their survival. Pagan temples were destroyed, and Christian churches were built upon the pagan holy grounds. The pagans however, forced to build churches over their pagan temples, incorporated many of their symbols into the building of these churches, which you can still see today.

During this time the first scriptures of the pagans emerged, and was held by two Celts.

In 1100, the dark ages began, and no writing went on during this time, and it was like the "lights went out", and when they came back on, the pagan texts were gone, and the Christian conversion continued to spread, and the Holy Wars began. When the Christians decided that the new ways were not catching on fast enough with the pagans, the Christian leaders began asserting that the pagans worshipped and consorted with "the devil" and the Inquisition began.

WISE WOMEN AND CUNNING MEN

Even after the coming of Christianity to Britain, the village wise women and cunning men cared for the bodies and spirits of those around them, telling their fortunes, treating their bodily ailments, dowsing their lost property, and physicking their farm animals. They were the midwives who brought new life into the world, and who laid out the dead at the end of life. Their natural magic, in harmony with the rhythms of life, centered and nourished the spirits of the whole community. They were honoured for their wisdom and knowledge: when they spoke, people listened.

Such men and women carried on the beliefs and traditions of the Druid priesthood and Saxon sorcerers, keeping the Pagan religion alive. The word Pagan is derived from the Latin paganus, simply meaning 'person of the countryside'. The practices of wise women and cunning men had much in common with shamans and witch doctors around the world - a belief that we are surrounded by spirits and that we can commune with them, that the land is alive and must be honoured and cared for, that our actions affect the world around us and we must seek to live in harmony with it, that we are part of the ebb and flow of the seasons and must perform certain actions at the correct time. This Pagan legacy was apparent even into the early 20th century, when fen folk still made offerings to Yarthkins (fairies) on rocks on the edge of fields, and images of the corn deity were ploughed into fields to return fertility to the land. While most wise women and cunning men wouldn't have understood themselves to be Pagan, or welcomed the term 'witch', their practices certainly stemmed from the earlier beliefs of the Celts and Saxons.

There are reliable accounts of many hundreds of such people in Britain from the Middle Ages until the beginning of the 20th century when every village seems to have housed someone with a magical reputation of some sort.

The numbers of cunning men and women seem to have dwindled after the 1st World War, which changed the face of Britain forever, when men who had faced the horrors of the trenches were no longer impressed by the threatened evil eye of a cunning man. According to Nigel Pennick, the last genuine cunning man was practicing in Cambridgeshire in the 1960s.

These village shamans had many names including wise women, cunning men, blessers, witches, conjurors and currens. They used scrying glasses, crystals, keys, shears, sieves, pitchforks, brooms, divining rods, wax, bottles, paper and anything that came readily to hand from kitchen or farm. Their three most important festivals were May Day, Midsummer and All Hallows, the three spirit nights when the denizens of the Otherworld roam the Earth.

The Burning Times
In 1494 two Dominican monks, who were inquisitors of Papal Bull of Innocent the VIII, by the names of Kramer and Springer, produced the book, the Malleus Maleficarum, "The Witches Hammer" which laid the groundwork for the reign of terror that swept Europe well into the 18th century.

This period was known as the "Burning Times" where it is estimated that 9 million men, women and children were held prisoner, stripped, starved, deprived of sleep for countless days on end, and horribly tortured beyond human comprehension, to obtain a confession of witchcraft, only then to be strangled or burned at the stake.

Ironically, the Malleus Maleficarum was originally rejected by the literary council because of bias and heresy, and was forged so that it could be printed. The last accused witch to die under the laws of the Malleus Maleficarum was in 1747 in Australia.

During The Burning Times, the wise women were the first to be accused of devil worship and evil magic. Whatever the reasons for the witch craze, and they are complex, witches seem to have become the scapegoats of public fears. The worst excesses of the persecutions were in rural communities, where people were more superstitious and easily influenced. It is revealing to note that 80% or more of the accused were women. A Dominican father declared that any woman knew more magic than a hundred men. According to the Malleus Maleficarum "There are more women than men found infected with the heresy of witchcraft "and "a woman is by her nature more quicker to waver in her faith and consequently quicker to abjure the faith, which is the root of witchcraft". The authors prayed "Blessed be the Highest who has so far preserved the male sex from so great an evil" adding that women were weak in themselves, and could only perform magic in league with demons.

While any woman practicing fortune telling, midwifery or herbalism could be executed as a witch, male doctors, astrologers and alchemists were left unscathed - powerful women were something to be feared and put down.

Female healers and the Church had always been at odds. The 15th century Council of Trent specifically forbade women from having anything to do with medicine, a profession they were not to be re-admitted to until the late 19th century. While male, university trained doctors were sanctioned by the Church, if any women stood before a tribunal accused of practicing medicine or healing it was automatically assumed that she must have achieved any cure by witchcraft and she was put to death. According to the Malleus Maleficarum "If a woman dare to cure without having studied than she is a witch and must die". If a woman was accused of healing a patient, the tribunal would call in a male doctor to pronounce on whether she had achieved her cures by witchcraft, and thus he was given the power of life and death over his female rival. Male doctors were trusted implicitly by the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum: "Although some of their remedies seem to be vain and superstitious cantrips and charms... everybody must be trusted in his profession." In particular, the Inquisition targeted midwives, as according to the Malleus Maleficarum "no one does more harm to the Catholic Church than midwives...the witch-midwives exceed all other witches in deeds of shame" If a baby was still-born or miscarried, they said the midwife had killed the child to steal its soul, and that female midwives dedicated new born children to the devil. Preventing pregnancy or terminating a pregnancy was a capital offence.

This persecution of women was made possible by a long history of anti-female philosophy in the Christian Church. For the Christian thinker, God was male, and thus the only true gender was male. From the very beginning, they argued that women were inferior to men, as Eve was made from Adam's spare rib, and being formed by a bent rib she was naturally flawed. Saint Thomas Aquinas (still an authority respected by the modern Catholic Church) proclaimed that every girl child is a defective male, conceived only because her father was ill, weak or in a state of sin at the time. According to Christian mythology, women are responsible for the fall of humankind and its expulsion from paradise, since Eve was tempted to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and persuaded her husband Adam to do the same. According to the Church, a midwife was guilty of sinning if she eased a woman's pain during childbirth, since that suffering was imposed by Jehovah as a punishment on all women for Eve's transgression. Clerics reminded Queen Victoria of this when she asked for chloroform in the royal labour ward.

Under Pagan Celtic and Saxon law, women could be priestesses, teachers, chieftains, property holders, healers and judges. Christianity stripped women of all these rights and left them as mere chattels of their husbands and fathers, who stood as responsible adults for women who, according to the Malleus, "are intellectually like children"; a belief that persists in some monotheistic patriarchal cultures to this day. Moreover, women were denied the role they had enjoyed in Pagan cultures as mothers and creators of life. Church scholars decided that the spark of life comes from the male sperm, and the woman merely serves as the soil in which it is planted. The Church felt that women were more carnal than men, as was clear from their many 'abominations'; women menstruate, get pregnant and give birth, all evidence of the sexual activity which was reviled as sinful by the Church. The Malleus Maleficarum was very unambiguous in its references to women's sexuality as an evil force. A woman was said to be impure "during her monthly periods." Tertullian called women the "devil's gateway". Like Eve, all women were considered temptresses, inciting men to seek the forbidden fruit of lust. If a woman was raped, it was considered to be her own fault. St Thomas Aquinas taught that women exerted an evil influence over men which caused them to have involuntary erections, and thus distracted them from contemplating God.

THE HEDGEWITCH

Hedgewitch derives from original German and is a phrase that means ‘rider of the hedge’. In the old days, these people lived on the edges of the community, were practical in their service to society, and lived by herbs, nature, prophecy and divination as well as magic and healing. The hedgewitch’s practical approach to serving his/her community would have been through midwifery, healing, protection, house blessings and crop and livestock preservation. The hedgewitch was respected because of these abilities. Holding certain powers because of their close relationship to nature and the magical world, it is highly likely that the hedgewitch of old would have used intoxicating herbs for visions and journeys in order to access information from the spirits that were so much a part of life in ancient days.

They tend to be solitary people. They have no loyalty to any particular practice, except their own unique personal blend of magic founded in the natural/supernatural world. They do things their way, as it feels right for them within their highly developed intuitive nature. They are like the cunning folk or wise people of our past, often irreverent of the set ways of others, shamanic, deep, different and unique. But above all the hedgewitch is wise - for as understanding of nature grows, so wisdom grows also.

The blessing ways of this wise path are won, are achieved through practical dedication, through development of the self and with the attitude of a spiritual warrior to evolve and thus claim the real magical powers, known only to the wisest.

Since the most ancient of days we have been guided by the wisest of teachers to “Know Thyself!” the hedgewitch is one who follows the wise paths that offers just this – the ancient wisdom teachings that lead us back to the heart, to the real, to the true, to the simple, the sweet and of course, to the wisdom. Only when we are able to embody the magic do we receive the magic!! Only when we have made ourselves ready and worthy are the real magical secrets revealed to us. There is an old and wise saying “The truth need not be hidden, for it veils itself from the eyes of the ignorant.” If you seek the truth, seek to lift the veils of your ignorance, then know that the only way is to open fully and consciously to yourself first.

A hedgewitch is very much a free spirit. Hedgewitches are also related to the village witches of old. The term, hedgewitch, comes from the fact that your average European village, in time gone by, was surrounded by a hedge or woods. Beyond that hedge was unknown land, beyond their known perception... i.e. the Other World. The village witches of this era usually lived just beyond or just before this hedge. The hedge was a metaphor for some one who practiced shamanic arts, a walker between the worlds.

A hedgewitch would have learned their trade or craft by word of mouth. More than likely they would have learned it from a family member or the former village witch. Once the person left, they would be on their own. So they would have been taught ways to learn from nature such as listening to the winds or watching cloud formations.

Hedgewitches are shamans, charmers, healers, and, priest/esses, a person who studies and practices the Great Mysteries of Nature. Hedgecraft is a very eclectic path. Mostly because it depends on each how it is practiced. Most hedgewitches are very ethical people.

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With thanks to all those whose thoughts have gone into this writing

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