‘MASTERING WITCHCRAFT’

Paul Kane

   This year is the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Paul Huson’s classic book Mastering Witchcraft: A Practical Guide for Witches, Warlocks and Covens by Putnam & Co in the USA and Rupert-Hart Davies in the UK in 1970. MW was a classic work on witchcraft and was both ground-breaking and highly controversial. Over the years it has gained some notoriety and a negative reputation that is completely unwarranted. When discussed on modern Internet forums and chat rooms it is frequently described as “amoral” or even “immoral” and somebody was thrown off one list for recommending it! Most of this criticism relates to Paul Huson’s suggestion in the book that anyone self-dedicating themselves to the Craft should get rid of their Christian conditioning by deliberately reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards.  Those who slavishly follow the so-called ‘Wiccan Rede’ have also protested at the chapters that gave details of cursing rituals and how to invoke demons.
   Paul Anthony Huson was born in London in 1942. His father was an author and his mother was a painter and well known film costume designer. Huson attended London University between 1959 and 1963 as an undergraduate and was also a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he studied painting and design.  From 1965 to 1968 he worked as an art director for BBC Television and Columbia Pictures UK. He emigrated to the United States in 1968 and living in Los Angeles became a writer of books on the Tarot and herbalism, novels, and film and television scripts. Huson wrote and produced the popular TV soap opera The Colbys and co-created Tucker’s Witch, a comedy series about a private detective whose wife was a witch and used her psychic powers to help him solve cases.
   According to an interview with Paul Huson by Owen Rowley in the 2010 edition of The Witches Almanac magazine, his interest in witchcraft began at the age of ten when he began scrying and casting spells. After reading Gerald Gardner’s first book Witchcraft Today in 1954 Huson composed his  own ‘Book of Shadows’ and three years later wrote to Gardner asking if he knew of a group he could join to practice magic. Gardner wrote back suggesting Dion Fortune’s group the Society of the Inner Light. After leaving boarding school in 1959 Huson applied to the SIL and, despite the fact their age limit for students was twenty-one, seems to have been accepted for their correspondence course. Perhaps he was economical with the truth about his real age? He also met the Cabbalistic magician W.E. Gray and Madame Tamara Bourkoun of the Order of the Pyramid and the Sphinx while living in England and was later trained in the Golden Dawn magical system in the United States by Dr Israel Regardie.
   Persistent rumours claim that Paul Huson was involved with Alexandrian Wicca in his early days and also belonged to a traditional coven in Staffordshire known as the Derwent Amber Wove. It has been alleged by an American woman who claimed to have been initiated by Huson that he was ‘blasted’ for revealing the coven’s secrets in his book.  Huson has always denied these stories and in the interview cited above he told Owen Rowley he had never been initiated into any coven or broken any oaths of secrecy. He claims that the information in Mastering Witchcraft was based on research in the Folklore Society library at University College, London when he was a student. It was half compiled from the works of Gerald Gardner, Albertus Magnus, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, Eliphas Levi and Aleister Crowley, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Key of Solomon. The other half was inspired by “meditation and praxis”
The modern magician Gary Nottingham has pointed out that the wording for one of Huson’s cursing rituals in his book was based on one in a manuscript of the Key of Solomon that was not included in McGregor Mather’s translation and was only published recently by Stephen Skinner and David Rankine. Huson could not have found it in the Folklore Society’s library! Huson has also claimed that the ‘traditional’ aspects of witchcraft described in his book came unconsciously from “associates of Robert Cochrane” he had met. In that respect in the interview he specially mentioned Bill Gray. He also states he was surprised when Joe Wilson wrote to him saying that some parts of the book resembled Cochrane’s teachings.
  When MW was published in 1970 it was pretty innovative as there was very little practical material available at the time on genuine witchcraft. In his introduction Paul Huson described the legend of Diana and Aradia as given in Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia, the Gospel of the Witches (1899), which interestingly he does not give as one of his sources. He saw this legend as having gnostic overtones and compared it with the Cabbalistic tradition of the biblical first weaver Naamah and how she was seduced by the fallen angel Azael or Azazel, one of the ancient names for the leader of the Watchers or fallen angels.  He identified this mythical couple with the Sumerian-Babylonian goddess Liliya (the biblical Lilith) and the sun god Shamash in his role as an underworld deity, guardian of treasure (material and spiritual) and an artificer of metals. Huson also said that Azael/Shamash is the alter-ego of Tubal Cain, the brother of Naamah and the first blacksmith in the Bible. He added the additional information that Azael/Tubal Cain is ‘one of the modern witch’s gods’. In this respect he is talking about traditional witchcraft as Tubal Cain is not a mythical figure known to or recognized by modern Wiccans.
  Huson then goes on to describe the biblical myth of the Watchers who ‘had to assume tangible bodies in order to descend upon the Earth’. They mated with ‘the daughters of men’ and were cultural exemplars who taught early humans the magical arts. These arts included charms and enchantments, herbalism, astrology, astronomy, weather lore, agriculture and horticulture. Azazel taught how to ‘make swords, knives and shields and breastplates, and made known to them the metals [of the earth] and the art of working them…’ This is taken from the Book of Enoch, yet another work not mentioned by Huson as a reference source for his book. According to Huson, it is from the fallen angels that all the magical knowledge and occult power is derived. He added that the Watchers are ‘the parents of humanity, whether as masters of wisdom and love, or simply as benevolent powers of fertility and hunting that constitute the witch’s true deities.’
  He related the witch god and witch goddess to the ‘the elven king and queen of the enchanted hill’ and said that the elven race were the offspring of the fallen angels. The introduction concluded with the statement that in modern (traditional) witchcraft ‘there still remains at the centre of the circle a spark of that mysterious dark angelic fire which first breathed life into the day of this world.’ It is pretty obvious that he did not get such concepts from either the Society of Inner Light correspondence course or the teachings of the Golden Dawn.
  The first two chapters of MW deal with the preliminary steps that any wannabe witch should take to follow the Craft. As stated earlier, Huson controversially recommended that the Lord’s Prayer should be recited backwards as part of the self-dedication ritual (probably the first time such a ritual had been offered to readers of books on witchcraft). He justified this by saying it was a relic from the old days when witches were persecuted by the Christian Church and it was also ‘a symbol of defiance towards the dead letter as opposed to the living spirit of organised religion’.  Looked at rationally and logically, it is a very simple method of getting rid of the conditioning we all have, to a lesser or greater extent, as a hangover from childhood. Those traditional witches who practice dual faith observance in the historical manner of their witch ancestors fully understand where Huson was coming from. Other material in these two chapters covered occult basics such as the ‘Witches Pyramid’, spell casting, magical times and seasons, taking a new witch name, magical alphabets, ritual dress, the witch’s working tools and how to cast a magical circle.
  Chapter three described various forms of divination such as magical squares, geomancy, the runes, shewstones and magic mirror for scrying, ‘true dreaming’, necromancy and various recipes for incenses. The chapter also included a ritual to conjure up a spirit called Vassago. He is one of the demonic intelligences mentioned in the Key of Solomon and is described  by Huson as the Lord of the Djinn, or Arabic elemental fire spirits from the pre-Islamic religion. This spirit can predict the past, present and the future. Huson said he is of pre-Christian origin and one of the Nephelim, the half-human, half-angel offspring of the mating between the Watchers and human women who are carriers the ‘elven blood’ or ‘witch blood’.
  In chapter four Huson described the various spells that lovers can use, including the so-called ‘Dumb Supper’ used to see the shade of a dead lover or the wraith of a future lover or partner. This chapter also included a section on sex magic, the art of fascination and recipes for the incenses and perfumes used in amatory spells. Chapter five dealt with counter-magic and psychic protection featuring amulets, acquiring a magistrellus or familiar spirit, working with mandrake plants and exorcism. The next chapter was the most controversial and contentious for it described cursing and vengeance rituals. These included the ‘Spell of the Black Cross’ (the reversed pentagram), invoking the Horned God for cursing, sending elementals servitors to destroy enemies, and the ‘Operation of Grand Bewitchment’ using a wax image or poppet. There was also information on storm raising and making martial incense using poisonous plants and ‘graveyard dust’. All magical procedures that are familiar to the traditional witch or sorcerer.
  The final chapter gave the reader detailed instructions on how to form a coven. This included information on the creation of the coven logo and totem, the officers of the coven, initiation ceremonies and oaths of secrecy, new witch names, ritual insignia and costumes, and seasonal Sabbat rites. Most of this material was based on traditional witchcraft as Huson described the male leader of the coven as the magister, Grand Master or Devil, his female deputy as the Lady or ‘Queen of the Sabbat’, and an additional male officer known as the Summoner or Verdelet (an expert in herbal and plant lore). He specifically identified the Magister as the human representative of the sun god Lucifer, who is revered in some traditional covens. There was also a description of the standard Wiccan initiation that is obviously taken from the works of Gardner, although he must have had also obtained additional information from a Wiccan source as the full version was not available in print back in 1970.
  Compared with the numerous DIY Wiccan books that have been published since Mastering Witchcraft it does seem very controversial. This is because most of the Craft that Paul Huson describes is of a traditional type and is regarded as politically incorrect by today’s neo-pagan witches. Other critics of the book are unhappy about Huson’s apparently indiscriminate mixing of witchcraft with ceremonial magic. However that is found in both historical witchcraft and the modern versions of the Traditional Craft. The linking of witchcraft with the biblical myth of the Watchers and the fallen archangel Lucifer, another prominent feature of some traditional forms of witchcraft, also does not go down well with the Wiccan community.
  It is a shame that these criticisms should be levelled at Huson’s book. However it is indicative of the dramatic way in which the Craft, especially in its popular and public forms, has changed and been sanitised since the publication of Mastering Witchcraft. If you are seriously interested in genuine witchcraft than Paul Huson’s book is still in print forty years after it was first published. That in itself is a tribute to its content and appeal. Ignore the comments of the puritans, the fluffy bunnies, the faint hearted and the ‘weekend witches’. Read this book and experience for yourself a glimpse of that powerful ‘dark angelic fire’.
 
 
 
 

Paul Huson