Rediscovering the Craft

I don’t know about anybody else, but my Amazon recommendations are not often very useful to me.  I used to be a great reader of fantasy and science fiction, for example; now, however, my tastes are very limited, and I follow only a few authors.  I have no idea why, when I buy a new book by Lois McMaster Bujold, Amazon assures me cheerfully that I will like novels by half a dozen sf authors I have never heard of, but I cheerfully ignore them.  There may be lots of military space operas out there, but only Bujold’s books have Miles Naismith Vorkosigan in them, and I’m interested in him, his family, and his friends, not military space opera as such.

Once in a while, though, Amazon hits the nail on the head and tosses me a pitch I whack right out of the park.  (How’s that for a mixed metaphor?)  It did so a few weeks ago when I purchased a Halloween-themed Rankin-Bass video I’d never seen, and it reminded me of the Saturday morning cartoon show The Groovie Goolies, a spin-off of Archie & Friends that featured lively pop songs in each episode.  And it did so the other day when I was searching for… something I can’t remember now, and it offered me a book called The Forge of Tubal Cain by Ann Finnin.

I had read enough about the first stirrings of witchcraft in mid-twentieth-century England for the name of “Tubal Cain” to ring a bell, so I took advantage of Amazon’s Look Inside! function and perused the table of contents and the excerpts.  I was instantly hooked and indulged in some instant gratification–as instant as Amazon could give me: I ordered the book with next-day shipping.

I was not disappointed when it arrived.  Finnin’s book falls neatly into two parts: One, a memoir of her and her husband David’s discovery of the 1734 Witchcraft tradition, how they formed the Roebuck tradition on that basis, and how it connects with the Clan of Tubal Cain established in England by the late Robert Cochrane; the other, a sample of Roebuck training procedures and workings.  At this writing, I have read the first part and am well into the second. What makes the book so fascinating is Finnin’s utter frankness.  Without pointing fingers or naming names, she exposes both the good and bad sides of paganism and the Craft, giving a history of its development from the 1970 to the present day through the lens of the Roebuck.  Writers who have been in the Neopagan movement for a long day often sound nostalgic about the Good Old Days when people danced around the bonfires and made love in the woods and touched the gods for the first time.  Finnin is unsparingly frank about the dangers of getting high, sleeping with everybody in your coven, and then attempting to hold magical ritual that actually gets things done.  She’s unsentimental about the extent to which magic and pagan religion attract both wounded waifs and predators, people who can’t function in mundane life and expect The Circle to solve all their problems, and operators who want to take sexual, emotional, or financial advantage of just that sort of victim.  And she’s not impressed with Gardnerian high priestesses who were given all three degrees in one weekend, assured that they now had The Mojo, and then tossed into the drink to swim–or to sink and take their covens down with them.

She’s also immensely informative about what group magical training has to do and how to do it: How to create a group mind which will think in a chosen set of symbols and plug into particular sources of spiritual power.  And while she is not, I am sure, giving away any true secrets of her tradition, she does give the reader a taste of a kind of witchcraft far different from that which Gerald Gardner offered the world–a kind which has remained relatively obscure and strong and not gotten diluted into endless “Wicca 101″ books.

Philip Carr-Gomm, the head of OBOD, has written of combining the strengths of Wicca and Druidry into DruidCraft.  Having started to work with the DruidCraft Tarot, and now having read this book and been reminded of Cochrane’s influence on modern Craft, I find myself intrigued by the possibility of weaving together Druidry and the kind of Craft he represented–something both simpler and more sophisticated than Gardner’s system.  I’ve got more reading to do–and then some experimenting.