When friends came to visit over the weekend, we talked about many different subjects, and one of the ones which came up was the idea of secrecy in magical traditions. Aleister Crowley famously complained after being initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn that he was made to swear a mighty and terrible magical oath and then shown the Hebrew alphabet! Crowley’s flippancy aside, this does illustrate a point, which is not that the Hebrew alphabet is secret, for obviously it has been in the public domain for many centuries (!), but rather that it was a symbol of the hidden mysteries that would be revealed to him.
So when the ‘secrets’ of a tradition are published, is there any secrecy left? Perhaps what is more pertinent is that every group will have its own secrets, with the variations they have developed on material or introduced. Also the mystery of a tradition cannot be expressed on paper, and has to be lived to open the door those secrets represent. When Sorita and I were putting together the material for Wicca Magickal Beginnings we were presented with the question of secrecy. However when we discussed the ‘secrets’, we were not revealing hidden material, but in fact looking at the origins of the practices, and as a result the material we presented from our research predated the ‘secrets’, and in fact opened the horizons by dispelling the notion that Wicca was made up by Gerald Gardner. Much of the material had never been set in juxtaposition with the derivative Wiccan practices, and the results were eye-opening to say the least!
The secrets of the Book of Shadows are a continuation of the idea of the hand-copied grimoires of the Middle ages and Renaissance, as we discussed in Wicca Magickal Beginnings. In these days of pdfs and usb sticks, the discipline required in recording material by hand is something we must not lose, it is a worthwhile tradition, and those are the ones we must preserve!
