Manx Magic!

"No man is an island. Well, what about the Isle of Man?" - John Cooper Clarke.

For me, the Isle of Man is famous for TT raining, the kippers my dad used to bring back from there after he'd been to watch said TT racing, and for a belief that many of its inhabitants hold views that could politely be described as reactionary. Or at least regressive. Although I'm absolutely certain those views are not held by any family members of friends I know living there!

I certainly didn't know it was also, in its own unique way, a centre of witchcraft and magic. To be honest, I'm still not sure it is but last week's London Fortean Society talk from Dr John Callow, A New Magic at the Old Mill certainly made a good case for it. Callow's recently written a book, Wicca on the Isle of Man:Gerald Gardner and the Crucible of Modern Witchcraft, and he was upstairs in The Bell in Whitechapel to tell us a little bit, quite a lot actually, about it.

It was well attended, I had to stand up among the flyers for Empirical Sex events (The Nuances of Sexual Consent sounds a timely and topical event, Sexual Pain/Vaginismus a slightly more uncomfortable evening) and it's perhaps because of this, or at least that's what I'm deciding to blame it on, that I lost the thread a few times. Not for the first time at an LFS event!

Dr Callow is knowledgeable, passionate, and articulate but I have to admit he pitched the talk a little over my head. There was almost an assumption everybody there had been to, or at least were well aware of, The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Castletown in the south eastern corner of the island. Perhaps everyone else had. I'd never even heard of it.

The lack of visuals could have made the story of the museum and its 'resident witch' Gerald Gardner hard to follow but, fortunately, Callow has an easy narrative style and he began his tale by describing Gardner as a cuckoo in the IoM nest when he arrived to help out at the folk magician Cecil Williamson's museum but not, as some have suggested, a con man. Despite Gardner's fake doctorate.

Callow peppered the talk with asides relating to the French playwright Moliere, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, sadomasochism, mermaids, black dogs, and general Celtic folklore as he told us of Gardner, a retired colonial civil servant but hardly a typical one, arriving in Castletown and setting about making changes to Cecil Williamson's museum to make it not just a place for people to point and giggle at spooky things but a place where serious research in folklore could be undertaken. While, at the same time, remembering that commercial imperatives demanded the museum continued to attract more casual visitors.

Gardner, Callow asserted, was a countercultural figure before the term counterculture had even been coined. He'd started his own tradition of Gardnerian Wicca, used the 'craft name' Scire, and had mixed with tribal societies away from Judaeo-Christian belief who saw 'magic' as something quite normal and part of everyday practice, rather than something fantastical or even transgressive.

Of course, like the museum (and like John Michell who starred in his own LFS talk last May), I'd never heard of him. I'm quite crap at this whole Fortean business, truth be told. But I'm learning. Slowly. Last week I learnt how Gerald Gardner spent his childhood on Merseyside, how his family prospered in the timber trade, and how instead of going to public school with their money he went to Spain, Africa, and the Malaysian state of Sarawak.

On his travels he worked on tea and rubber plantations and his conversations with locals led him to develop an interest not just in the occult or magic but in trying to find the links between different types of folk belief. On a macro rather than a micro scale. Gardner, praised as a "perfect autodidact", lived in the time of great theories and he was eager to establish his own.

Gardner believed that witchcraft could be a radical voice for the proletariat and could help bring about a fairer, more just, society. But the 'black math' behind it got in the way of this. So Gardner's idea was to eschew Satan from his own version of witchcraft (which Callow believed would aid in attempts to empower women but I didn't really get why).

Cecil Williamson, then running Castletown's Museum of Folklore, was a friend of Gardner (and of Aleister Crowley too) at first but they soon fell out. Callow said he wouldn't tell us why they fell out (which seems a bit of a tease) before going on to break that promise almost immediately. 'Artistic differences' pretty much covers it but there's also some talk about a Mau Mau exhibition that caused a stink on the Isle of Man.

Cecil Williamson had purchased the museum as the shell of a mill while on the island making a film about the TT. It was at a time when the Manx tourist board were trying to encourage more people to visit and a witchcraft/folklore museum was just one of their plans. They also wanted to bring gamblers and 'playboys' to the island. Not gays though. Homosexuality remained illegal on the Isle of Man until 1992 (twenty five years after England and Wales, twelve after Scotland, and a decade after Northern Ireland).

Williamson wanted a resident witch as an attraction for his new museum but there were no witches on the Isle of Man. So Gardner was invited to fill the role. But Gardner soon started getting ideas of his own. He fashioned an altar to the nine million victims of European witch hunts (possibly an inflated figure, but in the pre-Internet days an educated guess rather than an outright fib), jive and skiffle bands play at his behest (there was still only one jukebox on the whole island), and he also suggests bringing in local actors and, somewhat creepily, "pretty young girls".

Gardner reacted badly to Williamson's proposals for mock torture chambers and other attractions more befitting an institution like Madame Tussauds but the museum became a versatile venue hosting events as disparate as a congress of the Manx Labour party, the local fire brigade's Christmas party, and a Women's Institute meeting. Beneath a picture of a witch flying on a broomstick!

Gardner used to enjoy sitting perfectly still, like a waxwork, in the museum and hiding people's dentures for a laugh but, japery aside, he was 'an old man in a hurry' and the museum became central to his vision. He wanted it to outlive him and, Callow thought, he'd have been sad to know it didn't.

Gardner died in 1964 and, in the 1970s, his heir Monique Wilson sold the museum off lock, stock and barrel to Ripley's Believe It or Not! who recreated it as a much more entertainment focused experience in San Francisco. Williamson, who lived until 1999, recreated his version of the museum in various venues from the fifties onwards too. Windsor and Bourton-on-the-Water were both homes and now it continues as an attraction in Boscastle, Cornwall where it houses sculptures of horned Wiccan gods and models of cunning women.

All that was left on the Isle of Man was the gift shop tat (plastic bats etc;) but Gardner's legacy, in Callow's mind, is really in the way he brought forward the availability of occult and ritual badges, knives, and even hilts and even more so in the way Gerald Gardner made people change the way they thought about the occult, magic, and folklore.

John Callow contested, and I'm not one to disagree, that Gardner changed the perception of the witch in the 20c more than anybody else, that he laid down the foundations of a belief system, that he moved occultism away from the Satanic beliefs of Aleister Crowley, and that, unlike for example L Ron Hubbard, he never sought to make money out of any of this or even elevate himself to a leader or figurehead of the movement.

He simply did all this, it seems, because he loved it and he believed in its power. John Callow, despite the occasional lapse into a slightly dry academic manner (and for almost telling off anyone, like me, who has not read Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon), seems to be made from the same material. His talk was enthusiastic and informative and he hung around to answer questions for quite some time after. If it wasn't the best LFS talk I've ever been to (there's a lot of very strong competition) it was, certainly, an evening that helped me to build up a broader picture of the history, beliefs, and schisms that have passed through occult beliefs not just in the Isle of Man but in the whole of Britain. I'd like to think Gef the Talking Mongoose would have approved.