Crowley and the Craft
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Was Crowley ever in a coven?
The wikipedia page for George Pickingill en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pickingill states that "The famous magician Aleister Crowley was supposed to have been a Pickingill initiate." The Nine Covens page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Coven states "Members of these covens included, Aleister Crowley (who was thrown out for mis-use of the craft)." I also remember reading in Sutin's Do What Thou Wilt that he hinted at being inside at a very early age. Does this suggest Crowley was a member of a coven and dabbled in witchcraft before joining the GD?
I have been reading about the cunning folk and was not aware of this.
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The entry on George Pickingill is a tissue of lies perpetrated by one "lugh" in a series of articles written for The Cauldron and published as "The Pickingill Papers". They were the wholly invented excuse for the Traditional Witches of Roy Bowyer/Robert Cochrane to claim that their rip-off of Gardnerian witchcraft was actually older. Professor Ronald Hutton, Gareth Medway and myself have ripped the theory to shreds.
Pickingill was a bog-standard Cunning Man (=Hoodoo Man in the USA) who wasn't even the most respected one in his county, Cunning Murrel taking that role.
None of the quotes or stories concerning Crowley have any provenance, he never mentioned it in his writings or diaries (and he diarised every single spiritual experience),
I have a letter from "Lugh" admitting that much of the material was forced upon him by his "elders" and that he published it knowing it to be false. This amounts to everything that can be checked, but we're supposed to accept the uncheckable material as true!
Pickingill was chosen because of a 1959 article about him by Eric Maple, which co-incided with the emergence of Cochrane's craft. That some of these idiots are still promulgating the Pickingill myth shows how desperate some people are for sex, always a stronger element in Cochrane's tradition, often at first initiation. Saying "our tradition is the real thing, Gardner copied us" gives them clout, but we now know that Wicca was originally intended as a Thelemic earth-based religion and that Doreen Valiente tried to "de-Thelemise" Wicca after she persuaded Gardner that the Crowley connection would not help spread the Craft, such that he commissioned her to replace the passages from Liber Al, including the Charge of the Goddess, with her own poetry. However, she left in a quote from the Gnostic Mass that she didn't recognise as Crowley ,
This was extensively covered in my last issue of Aisling magazine in the 1990s, which also identified the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry (which has reverted to being Quaker) as the source of Gardner's New Forest Coven. This paganised pacifist form of Woodcraft (also the origin of the Boy Scouts) even used the Hymn to Pan! -
93, Thank you for your informative reply Sethur. I was surprised to see these references to Crowley being involved with them and immediately skeptical, mainly because I have never seen him write about it, which he typically would, as you point out. It's also never mentioned in any of the biographies, a part of the Beast's life that you would think would be talked about more, if in fact it actually occured.
"None of the quotes or stories concerning Crowley have any provenance, he never mentioned it in his writings or diaries (and he diarised every single spiritual experience)"
So, it is safe to say that the Pickingill-Crowley connection has no real bearing.
"we now know that Wicca was originally intended as a Thelemic earth-based religion and that Doreen Valiente tried to "de-Thelemise" Wicca after she persuaded Gardner that the Crowley connection would not help spread the Craft"
Interesting! I knew he had an influence on Gardnerian Wicca, but did not know it was to this extent. And it seems many wiccans do not know about this either, or play it down as much as possible.
93's