There are many of these figures still in existence today. The goddess is usually depicted as very much a fertility deity, with legs spread wide and with greatly enlarged genitalia. The god is shown as a horned head. Incidentally, these carvings of the old god should not be confused with gargoyles. The latter are the hideous faces and figures carved on the four corners of the church towers to frighten away bad spirits. In those early days, when Christianity was slowly growing in strength, the old religion—the Wiccans and other Pagans—was one of its rivals. It is only natural to want to get rid of a rival and the church did not stop by any means to do just that. It has frequently been said that the gods of an old religion become the devils of the new. This was certainly the case here. The God of the Old religion was a horned god. So, apparently, was the Christian’s Devil. Obviously then, reasoned the church, the Pagans were Devil worshipers! This type of reasoning is used by the church even today. Missionaries were particularly prone to label all primitive tribes upon whom they stumbled as devil-worshipers, just because the tribe worshipped a god or gods other than the Christian one. It would not matter that the people were good, happy, often morally and ethically better living than the vast majority of Christians….they had to be converted! The charge of Devil worship, so often leveled at Witches, is ridiculous. The Devil is a purely Christian invention; there being no mention of him, as such, before the New Testament. In fact, it is interesting to note that the whole concept of evil associated with the Devil is due to an error in translation. The Old Testament Hebrew Ha-satan, and New Testament Greek diabolos simply means “opponent” or “adversary”. It should be remembered that the idea of dividing the Supreme power into two—good and evil—is the idea of an advanced and complex civilization. The Old Gods, through their gradual development were very much “human” in that they would have their good side and their bad side. It was the idea of an all-good, all loving deity that necessitated an antagonist. In simple language, you can only have the color white if there is an opposite color, black, to which you can compare it. This view of an all-good god was developed by Zoroaster in Persia in the seventh century B.C.E. The idea later spread westward and was picked up in Mithraism and, later, in Christianity.
As Christianity gradually grew in strength, so the Old Religion was slowly pushed back. Until about the time of the Reformation, the Old Religion still existed in the outlying country districts. Non-Christians at that time became known as Pagans and Heathens. Pagan comes from the Latin Pagani and simply means “people who live in the country.” The word Heathen means “one who dwells on the heath.” So the terms were appropriate for non-Christians at that times, but they bore no connotations of evil and their use today in a derogatory sense is quite incorrect. As the centuries passed, the smear campaign against non-Christians continued. What the Wiccans did was reversed and used against them. They did magick to promote fertility and to increase crops; the Church claimed that they made women and cattle barren and blighted the crops! No one apparently stopped to think that if the Witches really did what they were accused of, they would suffer equally themselves. After all, they too had to eat to live. An old ritual act for fertility was for villagers to go to the fields in the light of the full moon and to dance around the field astride pitch-forks, poles, and broomsticks, riding them like hobby-horses. They would leap high in the air as they danced, to show the crops how high to grow—a harmless enough form of sympathetic magick. Yet the Church claimed not only that they were working against the crops, but that they actually flew through the air on their poles….surely the work of the Devil! Humankind had gone mad. The inhabitants of entire villages where one or two Witches were suspected of living, were put to death with the cry, “Destroy them all…the lord will know his own!” In 1586 the archbishop of Treves decided that the local Witches had caused the recent severe winter. By dint of frequent torture, a “confession” was obtained and 120 men and women were burned to death on his charge that they had interfered with the elements. Since fertility was of great importance—fertility of crops and animals—there were certain sexual rites enacted by the Wicca, as followers of the nature religion. These sexual rites seem to have been given unnecessary prominence by the Christian judges, who seemed to delight in prying into the most minute details concerning them. The rites of the Craft were joyous in essence. It was an extremely happy religion and so was, in many ways, totally incomprehensible to the gloomy Inquisitors and reformers who sought to suppress it. A rough estimate of the total number of people burned, hung, or tortured to death on the charge of Witchcraft is nine million. Obviously, not all of these were followers of the Old Religion. This had been a wonderful opportunity for some to get rid of anyone against whom they bore a grudge! An excellent example of the way in which the hysteria developed and spread is found in the case of the so called Witches of Salem, Massachusetts. It is doubtful if any of the victims hung (In New England the law was as in England: Witches were hung. It was in Scotland and Continental Europe that they were burned at the stake.) there were really followers of the Old Religion.
But what about Satanism? The Witches were called worshipers of the Devil. Was there any truth to this? No. Yet as with so many of the charges, there was reason for the belief. The early church was extremely harsh on its people. It not only governed the peasants’ way of worship, but also their ways of life and love. Even between married couples, sexual intercourse was frowned upon. It was felt that there should be no joy from the act, it being permitted solely for procreation. Intercourse was illegal on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays; for forty days before Easter; for three days prior to receiving communion, and from the time of conception to forty days after parturition. In other words, there was a grand total of approximately two months in the year when it was possible to have sexual relations with your spouse…but without deriving pleasure from it, of course! It was no wonder that this, together with other harsh rules, led to rebellion. The people—this time the Christians—finding that their lot was not bettered by praying to the so-called God of Love, decided to pray to his opposite instead. If God would not help them, perhaps the Devil would. So Satanism came into being—a parody of Christianity; a mockery of it. It was a revolt against the harshness of the church. As it turned out, the “Devil” did not help the poor peasant either. But at least he was showing his disdain for the authorities; he was going against the establishment. It did not take Mother Church long to find out about his rebellion. Satanism was anti-Christian. Witchcraft was also—in their eyes—anti-Christian. Ergo, Witchcraft and Satanism were one and the same. In 1604 King James (the 1st) passed his Witchcraft Act, but this was repealed in 1736. It was replaced by an act that stated that there was no such thing as Witchcraft and to pretend to have occult powers was to face being charged with fraud. By the late seventeenth century the surviving members of the Craft had gone underground into hiding. For the next three hundred years, to all appearances Witchcraft was dead. But a religion that had lasted twenty thousand years, in effect, did not die so easily. In small groups—surviving covens, often times only of family members—the Craft continued
