The magic of second-hand books
On the recent history of Wicca and Kerry Greenwood’s cyberpunk Melbourne
I haven’t had a personal computer since changing jobs at the end of January this year. I have one now so welcome to the next edition of my silly little blog. In the meantime I’ve been lurking in second-hand bookshops and reading cyberpunk novels set in Melbourne uni and true histories of fairly creepy British men who may or may not be responsible for the selection of pagan festivals we girlies like to celebrate today.
In second-hand bookshops, I always look for the esoteric section. I like to see what ends up there. I’ve found horoscope books from 2000 predicting love in the new millennium, horrible self-published steampunk oracle cards, Scientology books and, once, a 1930s edition of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching that was sadly too mouldy to purchase.
I like the hunt for a gem in the backroom of an untidy shop, sifting through knowledge that at one point was deemed important enough to be printed. I once bought a second edition of Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler about American Wiccans in the 1970s and it set off an anthropological / sociological curiosity into who practices Wicca and how they organise. (I am still on this journey.)
In the esoteric section, I look for non-fiction histories or studies of witches. I don’t want handbooks or ‘How-to’ guides. I have said this before in my lil blog, but I think it’s a failing of the contemporary witch community that so much content is driven by instructional guides. Not everyone needs to be a teacher; not everyone is a good teacher. There’s other knowledge that isn’t instructional, history for instance.
Eighty years of British Wicca
During a trip to Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland) I visited the esoteric section of a second-hand bookshop in Devonport. I had to first manoeuvre out a tourist to the genre who was performatively reading on a library stool in front of the shelves I wanted. I wandered around the shop waiting for him to move, but after some time I crouched down at the next shelf along to awkwardly disrupt his performance. He eventually stood and said to the girl waiting for him nearby, “It’s fascinating but I don’t believe it”. Cool dude, I hope she thinks you’re really intelligent and rational.
I unearthed a gem: Modern Wicca: A History from Gerald Gardner to the Present by Michael Howard. It was published in 2009 by Llwelleyn, who are one of the largest esoteric/new age publishers in the USA. Gerald Gardner is the man credited with either founding or popularising Wicca, which many people describe as a neo-pagan religion. By no means is all witchcraft Wicca but Wicca absolutely has tendrils in many forms of Western witchcraft today. The book was NZ$30, basically what it would cost new, but I bought it.
I found it to be a modern, recent history starting in World War Two and reaching until the mid-2000s. The book’s author Michael Howard (1948–2015) was not quite a contemporary of Gerald Gardner but was initiated in perhaps the next generation of Wiccans. Howard was the editor of the British pagan magazine, The Cauldron, and clearly knew enough of the original set of Wiccan witches to record their oral histories.
Howard’s gift to the reader and casual historian is his interviews with eye-witnesses and those who came after them and told tales about events, often stretching the truth. Some may call this recording primary sources, some may call it hearsay and gossip. I find it fascinating. Feminist Marxist historian Silvia Federici writes that gossip has long been associated with witchcraft because the collective noun ‘gossips’ related to groups of women in early modern England, used without derogatory connotations. These groups were later targeted during the witch craze of the seventeenth century and there was even a torture implement for those suspected of witchcraft called the ‘gossip bridle’.1 But I digress.
By sharing multiple viewpoints and often overlapping or contradictory stories, Howard’s work builds a picture of the truth without saying for certain what happened. This approach shows the fabulist nature of many of the participants, but also the relatively mundane truth of infighting in what was essentially a community group. Maybe one day there’ll be histories of Facebook groups like this.
This is what I learned from this book: Howard locates Wicca in its original context of a nudist club or community theatre in an English hamlet. It was early-1940s, war-torn Britain. In the beginning there was naked dancing in forests at midnight and rituals to stop the German air force invading. These included, if some accounts are to be believed, willing blood sacrifices in the form of elderly members of the coven not taking protective measures against the cold night so as to intentionally catch a chill and die without murder or suicide being implied. One interviewee noted that coven members would typically cover themselves in bear fat for insulation, after the fashion of those attempting to swim the English Channel. Apparently members of the coven did die afterwards and not all deaths were intentional because the night was unseasonably cold. But also the Germans didn’t invade Britain. It was wild to read.
In the biography portion of this book, I came to understand that Gerald Gardner was an ex-customs official for colonised Malaya, who was obsessed with Kris knives and looked everywhere for the occult and forms of spiritual enlightenment. Gardner’s involvement in, or establishment of, what became Wicca allowed him to indulge in his love of publicity, nudism, conducting affairs, BDSM and, arguably, annoying friends to the point he got to take over their witchcraft museums, among other things. By all accounts he aged into a crotchety old man prone to do things like claim it was now the rule that all new Wiccan high priestesses must be young and hot. Lmao.
Gardner is generally considered ‘a bit problematic’ in online witch circles. But given the tendrils, I think it’s important to know about him.
Determined to popularise Wicca, Gardner wrote novels said to be accounts of his experiences with a coven of witches who were practicing in an ancient lineage of witchcraft in the New Forest. Spoiler: the ancient lineage claims were debunked some fifty years later. After witchcraft was essentially decriminalised in Britain in 1951, Gardner could write in non-fiction, and covens became less secretive. Schisms formed between Wiccans who sought publicity and those who did not. Howard calls those who gave television and newspaper interviews ‘media witches’. Moral panics kicked off and the British tabloids got involved. From about 1954 onwards, reporters attended real and fake rituals. MPs spoke in parliament about Wiccan devil worship and sex cults.
And over time Gardner was supplanted in fame by another Wiccan leader, Alexander Sanders, who was called the ‘King of the Witches’ by some and derided as damaging the craft by others. Howard mentioned that some initiates in Sanders’ tradition moved to New Zealand so I wonder if this book found its way to Devonport through an interview subject. I can see that this history mirrors the rise and fall of socially progressive values in the mid-twentieth century.
This book tracks the rise in American Wiccans in the 1970s who infused the previously quite patriarchal religion with political consciousness around feminism and environmentalism. Although, Howard points out, Wicca was always a nature-based practice. Howard writes that the fact we see witchcraft as empowering today is because of an intentional reclaiming of the practice by feminist, new-age adjacent Wiccans including Starhawk. Starhawks’ tradition of Wicca is called ‘Reclaiming’ after all. In my first read, I wasn’t paying attention to the writing as much as the story, but reflecting now, Howard didn’t seem that thrilled about these changes and others; he certainly didn’t have a high opinion of self-initiates and solo practitioners.
Modern Wicca concludes with accounting for the explosion of Wiccans in the ’90s and the turn to online environments and platforms. Howard attempts to quantify digital witches with some now-quaint statistics like how many users a certain website has. He mentions The Australian Witchcraft Magazine but not that it had stopped publishing. I wonder if this book took a while to write and the internet chapters were added later. Despite it being published in 2009, the book doesn’t mention social media. I think my favourite note from these late chapters is that Howard is skeptical as to how a nature religion could be practiced online. It may be a blessing he didn’t live to see WitchTok.
I didn’t know it at the time but picking up Modern Wicca meant I had started to read into the contested history of modern pagan witchcraft. The controversy hinges on whether Wicca is a continuous practice handed down from ancient times, as Gerald Gardner claimed, or was created by Gardner and his followers from the 1940s onwards. The truth is two fold, it seems. Wicca was curated and codified by Gardner and others from many sources, including Celtic and Welsh traditions, folklore, herbalism and cunning knowledge, and pre- and non-Christian religions.
The revelation that Wicca was very much a recent practice came primarily from the preeminent academic and historian of British paganism, Ronald Hutton, in his 1999 book The Triumph of the Moon. In a recent interview on Pam Grossman’s The Witch Wave, Hutton describes the shocking impact of these revelations around the world, even if British pagan leaders had come to question Gardner’s claims much earlier. Hutton notes this doesn’t mean there were no witches or pagans before this, but they would not have referred to themselves as ‘Wiccans’ and likely not even witches.
I can’t wait to read more of this history and return to The Triumph of the Moon, which I never finished due to pandemic-induced attention span deficiencies. Even if it wasn’t the most logical or definitive place to start, the random nature of the second-hand bookstore delivered me the starting point I needed.
Boating up the Maribyrnong River in cyberpunk Melbourne
I like to read in contrasts. It helps me maintain attention. I read something until I’m bored and then I pick up a different book. I was inspired in this approach by a housemate who always had multiple open books by her bed.
I finished The Wheel of Time series last year. It took me just under two years and an Audible account, even though I typically abstain from Amazon products. I’m not going to talk about it. Here’s a footnote with some thoughts.2
As a contrast to the series, I listened to twenty or so ‘Phryne Fisher’ books by Kerry Greenwood, best known as the 2012 ABC adaptation Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. I listened to these on the BorrowBox app for free. Join your library!
The Phryne Fisher books are a romp. Set in 1920s Melbourne, they are essentially historical crime fiction, but the real delight is in the characters and escapism of the fashion, jewellery and cocktails. All the while, they are grounded in historical research and social commentary. The main character Phryne is a heroine built after a female James Bond – a resourceful polymath with an eye for hedonism and the good life. But she has a strong moral compass and progressive values that lead her to make daring choices for an aristocratic twenty-eight-year-old such as solve mysteries that challenge authority, employ Catholics, befriend Communists, have heaps of sex with lots of people and take a Chinese-Australian man as one of her lovers. It’s a bit different from the television show.
Greenwood was an absolutely prolific author and sadly passed away this March, 2025. I feel sad I never got around to writing her an email. At the end of each book there was an author’s note in which she invited correspondence and gave her contact details. Her bio always said that she had no children, lived in Melbourne’s west with a registered wizard and spent her free time staring blankly out windows. Vibes. Vale Ms Greenwood.
I was looking at Phryne Fisher books in a second-hand book stall at a Sunday market when the bookseller handed me one of Greenwood’s earlier novels. It was called Feral. The cover was giving Animorphs. It was a post-apocalyptic love story published in 1998, and this was an advanced reading copy marked ‘not for individual sale’. What a treat. I bought it and read it.
The story followed two 20-year-olds navigating Melbourne after a generic three-day apocalypse. One character boats up and down the Maribyrnong River visiting landmarks that are still there such as the Buddhist temple. The other character is a long-haired hacker who’s the son of a high-up professor in the gated community of the University of Melbourne. Dark things happen at the university. The students have been plugged into an alternate-reality video game where they think they are playing out love stories with their rockstar heroes, but in reality they’re sex slaves for the university elite who impregnate them to give birth to future generations. The university is run by some shady supremacist people called the ‘Management’ who live in an old casino, who also have advanced technology and weapons. Oh and some people can transform into large cats and, yes, there was large-cat sex.
Feral was about rising up against oppression, capitalism and old men who run things. It valued reading the classics, learning Latin and books. The characters had a thread of self-imposed loneliness and self-sufficiency that made me wonder if this was a value of the author. Greenwood could clearly keep a story pacey while setting up enough of a world that it feels fully fleshed out. The denouement was very convenient and the shapeshifting large cat storyline perplexed me. I suppose cloning sheep had just happened at the time of writing and the world felt like we might be heading towards human/animal hybrids. The setting and preoccupations of the novel feel very of its time. This a pre-Matrix world but with all the influences that also went into The Matrix – technological oppression, enslaved bodies, alternate realities and advanced weaponry pitted against an underclass surviving on their skills. I applaud Greenwood’s prescient critique of the privatisation and monetisation of universities.
Ebooks surely have their benefits, but it felt rare and special to find this book in physical form. It was an advanced reading copy, so I imagine it was one of a hundred(?) sent out to bookshops and reviewers twenty-seven years ago. Second-hand bookstores are weird and wonderful like this. They’re special places to me. I like their chaos. I like that it feels like vintage shopping when you go to one, hunting for a designer piece at bargain prices, or at least something that is made out of good fibres.
Does AI hallucinate when it reads?
Traditional books are no longer very cheap to produce or easy to sell in high quantities; commercial pressures are far greater. It takes intention to hold out against the search for the next bestseller or, very often, for the next bestseller that’s pretty similar to the current bestsellers in order to capture a ready-made audience hungry for more of the same.
I’ll never forget Louise Adler in 2017 saying that Australian publishers put out 66,500 books that year and 92% of them sold less than 5,000 copies. Five thousand copies now could be considered a very healthy print run for an independently published book. It might earn the author over $10,000 if a good enough amount were sold in bookstores and not with a 50 per cent discount on Amazon. (Don’t quote me, I’m not an expert on book contracts.) Regardless, this is still a very low wage for the author if you think about the years it takes to write and edit and promote a book. The market failure gets me down because I think books and reading are so important. Reading is an ultimate exercise in magical thinking. In your own magical thinking, not that of others. We read words and hallucinate.
I see the irony in talking about new books in an essay about second-hand ones. I also buy new books. I like older books because they feel like relics of a time when books were a key mechanism for communicating entertainment and ideas. I know this is just the kind of nostalgic, wishful thinking that everyone has for the time before, that Tony Soprano feeling that you came after the greats.
Maybe I find solace in second-hand bookshops because they are saturated in old knowledge and old books. And this feels like a panacea to the existential dread I feel because my profession and my loves are being enshittified by AI.
We’re entering a time of ahistorical texts. AI language models simply give information (often incorrect) without any context, historical or otherwise. I like the explicit information in books or papers or even old websites that tell me where the knowledge comes from, and also the implicit cues given by the author’s language, or the feel of the page, or thoroughly outdated cover design as to the motivation to publish. AI writing gives you weird, false certainty and things are so rarely certain. By the thumbs-up ranking at the end of a ChatGPT paragraph, it is incentivised to offer you a lie that sounds right.
‘Publishing disruptors’ are hoping to churn out and sell thousands of books a year written and marketed by AI. I can only hope that the authors who choose to pay these companies a ton of money eventually realise that they are the product, not the book. I maintain that very few people will buy these books.
Moreover, AI language models are built on an eye-watering, heartbreakingly huge amount of theft. They absorbed huge databases of pirated books. I don’t know if I think this just shouldn’t have happened or there should be compensation for it. And I have no idea how to comprehend the fact that we are building computers not to do the washing up or dangerous, menial tasks that humans’ fragile bodies cannot withstand but to create words and art, market things to us and enact influence on our brains.
AI researcher Toby Walsh, whose many books on AI were stolen to feed ChatGPT and other language models, says:
This is Big Brother but not exactly as Orwell imagined. It is not a government, but a large tech company that will know more about us and the world than a human could possibly comprehend. Imagine also that these companies use all this information to manipulate what we do and what we buy in ways that we couldn’t begin to understand.
No wonder religion is on the rise and people are turning to new age spirituality like crystals or paganism. So do you think people are using ChatGPT to do spells or what?
Silvia Federici, ‘On the meaning of “Gossip”,’ Witches, Witch-hunting and Women, PM Press, Brooklyn, 2018.
On The Wheel of Time: I enjoyed it. I would also like to see a revised and edited version of the books that might clarify the structure and like, spend more time on things that mattered and less time on stuff that didn’t. If the television show manages not to shoot itself in the foot with the adaptation, they might get the chance to do this. Fingers crossed American fantasy producers heed the lessons of The Witcher (Netflix).
Love this Willy <3