Diana and Lucifer, the Gods of the Witches

"Satan bless us, every one!"

"Allegory of Summer" by Royer.

The Netflix series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has been mostly embraced by the pagan community as campy fun, usually spoken of as 'nothing to get offended by' - people are referring, of course, to the old-school depiction of witchcraft as overtly Satanic. The line quoted above, from the show's Winter Solstice episode that aired last week, demonstrates this nicely; obviously, nobody is supposed to take this stuff seriously.

But, I wonder if the reaction to Sabrina would be different if the producers had made one slight change to the show. What if all the "Hail Satans" were replaced with "Hail Lucifer?" It would be hard for any historically-minded pagan to argue with this in a depiction of a coven which is portrayed as having been around since at least the era of the early modern witch trials. After all, Lucifer (in an aspect somewhat distinct from the Christian idea of the Devil, but see below), was one of the original gods of the modern pagan revival.



The Society of Diana

Throughout history, witchcraft has been depicted as the "dark side" of spirituality. Witches use magic to manipulate the natural order of the universe, making them seem unnatural and contrary to the will of the gods. Despite this, even early on, they were depicted as enlisting certain magic-friendly gods to their aid, gods associated with the night, or with the underworld, or with the liminal spaces, the thresholds between natural states of being. In classical depictions of magic, sorceresses like Circe and Medea called on Diana Trivia (Greek Hekate) in their spells. This aspect of Diana was associated with the crossroads, the passages to the underworld, and other thresholds. Combined with her role as a goddess of the moon and therefore the night, she was a natural fit as an ally to those who wished to bend the cosmos to their will.

"Diana as Personification of the Night", by Mengs.

Diana's association with magic, the night, and with female magicians in particular, combined with the fact that she was the only goddess mentioned by name in the Christian Bible (Artemis of Ephesus usually became "Diana of Ephesus" in early Latin translations), led to a curious medieval legend. Beginning in the late 9th century, Church officials across south-central Europe wrote down stories of a company of spirits who would travel around the countryside at night, singing, dancing, and visiting homes. If the home was in good order and they were given hospitality, the spirits would dispense advice and good fortune. If not, the family would be cursed. The Church became concerned when members of their congregation began reporting that they had joined in this procession, leaving their homes (and, often, their bodies via some kind of astral projection) to follow the spirits and their leader, who was variously described as Frau Holda or the Biblically-attested figures of Herodias or Diana. Naturally, this phenomenon, which came to be known as "The Society of Diana", deeply troubled the various Church fathers who recorded it, as any spiritual activity outside that sanctioned by the Church was deemed demonic in nature.

An association between Diana and witches would emerge again in the late 19th century, when Charles Leland published his highly influential book of supposed Italian folklore Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches. Leland portrayed witches as using malevolent magic to exact revenge on the upper classes who oppressed them and their people, turning witches into revolutionary figures if not totally benevolent ones as Margaret Murray would eventually do. Central to Leland's conception of rural Italian witchcraft was the central role of Diana and Herodias (Aradia, portrayed not as an alternate name but as Diana's daughter).

Interestingly, Leland was also the first to flip the tradition of witches worshiping Satan on its head. He did portray the witches' primary god as Lucifer, but seemed to depict Lucifer not completely as the Christian-era devil but rather as the classical figure, a personification of the planet Venus. Throughout history, divinities associated with Venus have included stories of their attempts to attain a throne or higher position only to be cast down by more powerful beings. This is of course in reference to the apparent motion of Venus through its cynodic cycle, where the sun blinds the planet from view before it can ever reach the apex of the sky. The story of Lucifer as a proud angel cast down from heaven for attempting to attain its throne is simply the latest variant on the myths of Inanna and Attar, among others.


The God of the Witches

While sorcerers and seekers who utilized the gods' aid in using magic (good or bad) had been practicing since the dawn of history, the modern idea of the witch had always been one of a sorcerer who used magic for evil. Within a Christian context, this of course meant that the witch was not only a magician (magic itself being condemned by the Bible) but also in league with the Devil.

Photo by Steven Meisel for W Magazine

The concept of a "Devil" emerged early in the development of Christianity. Satan, of course, figured into several Old Testament stories, in Jewish tradition he is seen either as a non-entity (merely a metaphor for the evil inclination) or a sort of prosecuting attorney who tests mankind's devotion on behalf of Yahweh (an employee of sorts to Yahweh, not his enemy). The early Church, influenced in large part by the Book of Revelation and not a little synthesis of Zoroastrian ideas, re-interpreted Satan as a spiritual enemy of Yahweh, a sort of ultimate evil to match his ultimate good, and they re-interpreted several passages of the Old Testament in order to make Satan seem more prominent throughout the Bible. This included making the "great serpent" of Revelation (originally a reference to the Chaos dragon Leviathan, an early Hebrew parallel to the Mesopotamian goddess Tiamat) refer instead to the snake who tempts Eve in Genesis. Early critics of Christianity scoffed at these developments, with some like the philosopher Celsus noting how theologically bankrupt it was to imagine the highest god (who he would have equated with the Platonic idea of the One) having an adversary, or having created a universe that included other divine beings in open rebellion against him.

Once the figure of a singular Devil had developed, it was not surprising that people would begin to attribute all evil things to him as they attributed all good things to God, and this included not only witchcraft and other forms of black magic, but any forms of good magic as well. Basically anything that did not fall within Church-sanctioned tradition was ascribed to diabolism.

The witch trials of the early modern period were the result of an early "satanic panic", in which people who practiced unusual folk customs or were simply innocent outsiders were accused of Satanism, and often confessed to various acts of witchcraft and Devil-worship under threat of torture, a form of testimony we now know is worthless. Most of the accused probably just made up stories based on what their culture taught them "Devil-worship" was like.

A common theme that emerged from the trials was that the Devil himself was physically present at witch meetings, and described as a chimera of different animals. Early depictions of the Devil gave him the head of a bull, the wings of a bat, a tail, and bird-like clawed feet (the familiar image of the Devil as goat-like, as in Goya's famous painting, was a later development influenced in part by rustic poetry involving Pan and satyrs, especially during the Romantic movement).

In the 1920s, Margaret Murray argued that rather than being innocent of the accusations against them, the people accused of witchcraft during the trials were actually practicing a non-Christian religion in secret. Murray did not believe people would make up stories to placate their accusers and avoid torture, and she did not believe in the supernatural. Therefore, her only option was that the accused witches were telling the truth, but that the trial officials deliberately or mistakenly misinterpreted their descriptions of pagan religious rites as Devil worship (apparently, Murray also didn't think the accused witches could actually have been earnest Satanists). This prompted Murray to seek naturalistic explanations for any and all fantastical claims made during witch trial testimony. Flying on broomsticks? No, they must have been using brooms to apply hallucinogenic ointments. Cursing crops? A misinterpretation of fertility customs. Cavorting with the Devil? Actually a high priest wearing horns and animals skins. The Devil vanishing in a flash of fire? Human sacrifice of the priest in the manner of James Frazer's dying god motif.

"Witches' Sabbath", by Goya.

Murray invented almost all of modern witchcraft lore in her attempts to think up non-supernatural justifications for the events described witch trial records. Murray came up with 13 as a standard for the number of witches in a coven, based on a single confession, and the concept of witches using flying ointment to arrive at the belief that they could fly to coven meetings originated with her.

Most importantly, Murray invented the idea of the benevolent witch. While there have been many real practitioners of folk and ceremonial magic throughout the ages, none of them would have described themselves as "witches" - witches were always a fantasy, an opponent for these magicians to fight against (and to sell protections against). Murray declared that witches had always been real, and had originally been benevolent. The modern witch was born.

Part of birthing modern religious witchcraft was identifying who the witches had worshiped. Murray of course was relying on depictions of a high priest dressed in a devilish costume, but since she believed this could not have been Satan (or even Lucifer, as Leland claimed), she imagined it must have been a pre-Christian horned god. Looking once again to Frazer for help, she identified this god as Janus, the god he believed had been worshiped with Diana in her sanctuary at Nemi under the name Virbius, but who (by way of a somewhat contested etymology) Frazer thought must have originally been named Dianus. Given Diana Trivia's liminal nature and association with crossroads, it is not surprising that the identification of her masculine counterpart should be given to Janus, the god of thresholds often depicted with two faces looking in different directions.


Goddess and God United

While Margaret Murray spent a lot of effort to elucidate the supposed religious beliefs of her supposed early modern witch-cult, one aspect she conspicuously left out was any talk of a goddess. By the early modern period, legends of the Society of Diana seem to have died out. The cultural expectation was not that witches would follow female spirits, but the one master of all evil spirits, the Devil. None of the witch trial records described any goddesses, and though some claimed a female officer known as "the Maiden" was present at coven gatherings, she was not thought by Murray to embody a goddess the way the priest embodied the god Dianus.

Janus

Gerald Gardner, a contemporary of Murray and fellow member of the British Folklore Society, took her ideas and ran with them, soon claiming that he had been initiated into a surviving coven of Murray's witch-cult (Murray, for her part, firmly believed the cult was long extinct). It is well known that Gardner ended up founding Wicca based largely on Murray's writings. What seems to be somewhat less well known is that Gardner's witchcraft started out, like Murray's, basically patriarchal. Though Gardner did originally include a priest and priestess at equal rank in his coven, his early work did little to emphasize the Goddess within his tradition, instead focusing almost exclusively on the Horned God, Cernunnos (a Gaulish deity associated with the underworld and the hunt who, like Janus, was often depicted multiple faces looking in different directions). Gardner also referred to his witch god as Janicot, which Murray believed was a Basque horned god, and which Gardner believed was a variant of the name Janus, but which in the original witch trial sources state was a local appellation of Christ.

Doreen Valiente joined Gardner's coven in 1953, and soon became one of modern witchcraft's most influential founders. Gardner was reportedly taken aback when Valiente recognized the major influence of Alistair Crowley's work on his supposed archaic witch-cult. Gardner claimed he had supplemented the witch-cult's somewhat bare bones rituals with Crowley's Themelic rituals - nevertheless, he asked Valiente, a talented writer, to re-work his Book of Shadows in order to make it a less obvious adaptation of Crowley's work. While she was at it, Valiente took it upon herself to bring in more emphasis on the Goddess, and she did so by incorporating a good deal of material inspired by or adapted from Charles Leland's work on the subject, including the "Charge of the Goddess" from Aradia and a larger focus on honoring Aradia herself as a goddess of the witches. Valiente later addressed the topic of the witches' god, and why, despite Aradia being a major early source, Gardner opted to honor the Horned God as Cernunnos or Janicot instead of Lucifer. Despite the only semi-Christian nature of Lucifer in Aradia and his strong mythological/celestial character, Gardner wanted to make sure his religion had nothing to do with "Satan". Valiente suspected that modern witches tended to keep Leland's work at a safe distance, feeling that its inclusion of Lucifer in any capacity was "too strong meat" for Wiccans.


Legacy

Despite being, in some sense, the "original" witch-goddess of the medieval and modern eras, in my own experience few witches focus much attention on Diana today. The notable exceptions to this are the various Dianic traditions, which might hold some negative, exclusionary connotations for mainstream witches that create an effect of shying away from Diana entirely. Of course, worship of Diana in her aspect as Trivia is more popular then ever, just under her Greek name, Hekate. Several organizations have emerged in recent years devoted to exploring this aspect of the goddess, like the Covenant of Hekate, which holds the annual, international Rite of Her Sacred Fires. The CoH focuses its study of Hekate on her late-antique Neoplatonic role as the World Soul rather than simply as an underworld aspect of Diana or goddess of magic and crossroads, but much of her original worship remains in their rituals.

Raven Grimassi's tradition of Stregheria, a specifically Italian-centered form of Wicca based more heavily than others on Leland's work obviously includes a special focus on Diana as its primary goddess (though it pairs her with Janus/Dianus as in Murray's work rather than Lucifer as in Leland's... strong meat and all that). The "traditional witchcraft" movement has more thoroughly embraced Leland's work and the early, pre-Wicca roots of modern witchcraft traditions, and therefore have become a bit more "Luciferian" in character. Diana has featured as a goddess specific to witches in a handful of popular media representations (including a somewhat infamous sequence involving a coven of Diana-worshiping witches in the movie Four Rooms), but the day when she is again recognized as a quintessential deity of modern witchcraft might still be a ways off.

As for her male counterpart, whether Janus or Lucifer, it could be a while before that particular deity of the old-time witch-cult makes a return to prominence. Despite campy portrayals of Devil-worshiping witches being back in vogue thanks to shows like The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I don't see many witches who are willing to untangle the long history of "the Devil" as an artificial conglomeration of various distinct Christian and pre-Christian entities, the kind of work that would be required to make that meat a little less pungent.

 

The Goddess Diana is summoned - from Four Rooms, via GIPHY