Blue plaques, ranters & mythical personages

The news of a blue plaque being erected on the building inhabited by Doreen Valiente in Brighton has made the mainstream media the past couple of weeks as well as the magical media. Naturally my non-integrationist approach causes me to treat this with caution. I hope that as the skilled witch she was she would have rejected the appelation of 'white witch' which the media have used to soften the witch thing. In fact she is one of the few people I wholeheartedly admire as witches: my favourite quote from her is where she says in The Rebirth of Witchcraft that she is a pagan & the only time she would feel the need to forgive another person would be if she had her foot on his throat. She had the temerity, after Gardner initiated her, to call him out on his wholesale appropriation of Crowley texts in his ritual, leading to his suggestion that if she thought she could do better she should try. After her working relationship with Gardner ended she moved on to work with Robert Cochrane, also being the only one in the coven with the temerity to confront him.

My one reservation about her work is that she comes across in her writings as so wanting to believe in the Old Religion that she let's that belief colour her reading of the evidence. She of course walked out of her convent school (do you detect a pattern developing here?) So was never educated to degree level.

Nonetheless you don't have to have that to be a witch, & I rate her. Note that this is *very* high praise coming from me. I wonder how she would have felt about the plaque, though, since she lived the end of her life quietly in Brighton, & seemed genuinely surprised when she had a speaking engagement, at the standing ovation she got.

Although she may not have been impressed at a blue plaque for her personally, she would probably have been impressed at the marking of a site associated with the Craft.

Personally I prefer us to be more misty creatures. Part of the magic of the witch is that we're a nebulous creature whose very existence can be doubted. I have found a curious parallel with the sect called Ranters, who do actually sound rather like us in some ways:

The Ranters were a sect in the time of the English Commonwealth (1649�1660) who were regarded as heretical by the established Church of that period. Their central idea was pantheistic, that God is essentially in every creature; this led them to deny the authority of the Church, of scripture, of the current ministry and of services, instead calling on men to hearken to Jesus within them. Many Ranters seem to have rejected a belief in immortality and in a personal God, and in many ways they resemble the Brethren of the Free Spirit in the 14th century.[1] The Ranters revived the Brethren of the Free Spirit's beliefs of amoralism and followed the Brethren's ideals which �stressed the desire to surpass the human condition and become godlike.�[2] Further drawing from the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Ranter embraced antinomianism and believed that Christians are freed by grace from the necessity of obeying Mosaic Law. Because they believed that God was present in all living creatures, the Ranters' adherence to antinomianism allowed them to reject the very notion of obedience, thus making them a great threat to the stability of the government.

Though they were not particularly organized and had no leader, their most infamous member was Laurence Clarkson, or Claxton, who joined the Ranters after encountering them in 1649.[3] Claxton quickly adopted Ranter beliefs "that a believer is free from all traditional restraints, that sin is a product only of the imagination, and that private ownership of property is wrong." Under the influence of the Ranters, Claxton published his 1650 tract called A Single Eye. In the tract, Claxton espoused the dissenting group's ideals. They were one of a number of nonconformist dissenting groups that emerged around this time.

They seem to have been regarded by the government of the time as a genuine threat to social order. Ranters were often associated with nudity, which they may have used as a manner of social protest as well as religious expression as a symbol of abandoning earthly goods. Ranters were accused of antinomianism, fanaticism, and sexual immorality, and put in prison until they recanted.

The Ranters were largely recruited from the common people, and there is plenty of evidence that the movement was widespread throughout England. John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress, claimed in his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, to have encountered Ranters prior to his Baptist conversion.[4] They came into contact and even rivalry with the early Quakers, who were often falsely accused of direct association with them.[1]George Fox stated that most of the Ranters were converted to Quakerism at the time of the Restoration. (Source: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranter)

An unorganised sect of naked ecstatics, who were a real threat to social order? That'll be precisely the witch figure, then. I knew of their rumoured existence, I didn't know though, that there is also a theory they didn't exist at all, but were merely an invented 'other', a sort of bogeyman on which all ills can be projected:

More recently, the historian J. C. Davis has suggested that the Ranters did not exist at all. According to Davis, the Ranters were a myth created by conservatives in order to endorse traditional values by comparison with an unimaginably radical other.[6] Though other historians have expressed doubts, Davis has been at least partially persuasive: Richard L. Greaves, in a review of Davis's book, suggests that though a very radical fringe existed, it was probably never as organized as conservatives of the time suggested.[7](Source: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranter)

That's how I like my witch figures: doubtful of proof of their existence. It is merely good magical practice to bury your action so that it can work, just as Gardner buried the sources of his rituals. The focus for the witch has to be their witch craft, not on the witch herself.

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