A chapter from the book in progress on 19th century folklorist and adventurer, Charles G. Leland--known today as possibly the founder of Wicca.

Leland’s view of religion was basically in tune with Neoplatonism. (1) He rejected most organized religion in favor of those lesser restrictive churches. He wrote “To me who hear God, the Unknown, in yonder surf billows roaring in sunshine as if wild with joy, I am worthy of worship, for it is I who conceive God moving in glorious beauty, and it is God in Me who inspires the thought.” (2) Sorcery was, according to Leland’s mind, the original religion. Black magic, witchcraft and shamanism were the basis for Mankind’s religious traditions and those traditions continue in the rural landscapes of modern society. It was Leland’s desire to convince everyone that the romantic world of magic and mystery still existed as it always had. He went to great lengths to create such a world. His parents were Unitarians and Leland was exposed to the Unitarian tradition at an early age. He remained a Unitarian even after his parents eventually joined an Episcopalian church during his adolescence. “In later life,” wrote Margery Silver, “he described his own religion as a kind of rationalistic and ethical pantheism, in which everything and everybody was conceived as an emanation from the mind of God.” (3)

An early influence on Leland’s religious views was Bronson Alcott, the mystic. Alcott was hired by Leland’s mother as a tutor for the young man. “...Mr. Alcott was the most eccentric man who ever took it on himself to train and form the youthful mind,” he would recall later. “He did not really teach any practical study; there was indeed some pretence at geography and arithmetic, but these we were allowed to neglect at our own sweet will. His forte was ‘moral influence’ and ‘sympathetic intellectual communion’ by talking; and oh, heaven! what a talker he was! He was then an incipient Transcendentalist, and he did not fail to discover in me the seeds of the same plant. He declared that I had a marvellous imagination, and encouraged my passion for reading anything and everything to the very utmost. It is a fact that at nine years of age his disquisitions on and readings from Spenser’s “Faerie Queen” actually induced me to read the entire work, of which he was very proud.” (4)

“All of the new theories, speculations, or fads which were beginning to be ventilated among the Unitarian liberal clergy found ready welcome in his dreamy brain, and he retailed them all to his pupils, among whom I was certainly the only one who took them in and seriously thought them over.” (5)

Eventually though Alcott’s eccentric personality became too much and Leland “was removed, and with good cause, from Mr. Alcott’s school, for he had become so very ‘ideal’ or eccentric in his teaching and odd methods of punishment by tormenting without ever whipping, that people could not endure his purely intellectual system.” (6)

Leland was exposed to Transcendentalism by age 17 by his mother. “There came a rumour that there was something springing up in Boston called Transcendentalism,” he would recall. “Nobody knew what it was, but it was dreamy, mystical, crazy, and infideleterious to religion. Firstly, it was connected with Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and finally with everything German. The new school of liberal Unitarians favoured it.” (7)

Two Unitarian ministers by the names of Channing and Furness entranced the young Leland with their sermons. Leland would write in 1847, “I never met a man who was up to Transcendentalism who wasn’t up to almost anything literary!”

Leland was very well read and found much to his liking in the works of Emerson and Carlyle as well as others. He fairly based his religious views on their works. However, he also found fault with them. In his Memoirs, he would relate his disdain of the very men that he would credit his conversion to a Pantheistic faith:
“I was far more deeply read and better grounded than were even its most advanced leaders in Anglo-Saxony. For I soon detected in Carlyle, and much more in Emerson, a very slender knowledge of that stupendous and marvellous ancient Mysticism which sent its soul in burning faith and power to the depth of ‘the downward-borne elements of God,’ as Hermes called them. I missed even the rapt faith of such a weak writer as Sir Kenelm Digby, much more Zoroaster! Vigourous and clever and bold writers they were—Carlyle was far beyond me in literary art—but true Pantheists they were not. And they were men of great genius, issuing essays to the age on popular, or political, or ‘literary’ topics; but philosophers they most assuredly were not, nor men tremendous in spiritual truth. And yet it was precisely as philosophers and thaumaturgists and revealers of occulta that they posed—especially Emerson. And they dabbled or trifled with free thought and ‘immorality,’ crying Goethe up as the Light of Lights, while all their inner souls were bound in the most Puritanical and petty goody-goodyism.

“They paddled in Pantheism, but as regards it, both lacked the stupendous faith and inspiration of the old adepti, who flung their whole souls into God; and yet they sneered at Materialism and Science.

“I did not then see all of this so clearly as I now do, but I very soon found that, as in after years it was said that Comteism was Catholicism without Christianity, so the Carlyle-Emersonian Transcendentalism was Mysticism without mystery. Nor did I reflect that it was a calling people from the nightmared slumber of frozen orthodoxy or bigotry to come and see a marvellous new thing. And when they came, they found out that this marvellous thing was that they had been awakened, ‘only that and nothing more’; and that was the great need of the time, and worth more than any magic or theosophy. But I had expected, in simple ignorant faith, that the sacred mysteries of some marvellous cabala would be revealed, and not finding what I wanted (though indeed I discovered much that was worldly new to me), I returned to the good old ghost-haunted paths trodden by my ancestors, to dryads and elves and voices from the stars, and the archæus formed by the astral spirit (not the modern Blavatsky affair, by-the-bye), which entyped all things . . . and so went elving and dreaming on ’mid ruins old.” (8)

Like most of humankind, Leland was searching for his faith. What he was able to find wasn’t quite “it” though. And so he continued his search among the ancient mystery religions. It was this search that ultimately resulted in his books of questionable scholarship.

His searches would result in some clarification for him in his understanding of religion and how certain aspects of it continued throughout time. He would find, as many do, that certain symbols, icons and teachings to be universal in nature. He came to believe, and wanted to believe that some of those ancient Mystery Cults continued to exist.

While in Germany he would report “…we climbed into an old Gothic church-tower, in which I found a fifteenth-century bell, bearing the words, Vivas voco, mortuos plango, fulgura frango, and much more—
‘The dead I knell,
the living wake,
And the power of lightning break!’
which caused me to reflect on the vast degree to which all the minor uses and observances of the Church—which are nine-tenths of all their religion to the multitude—were only old heathen superstitious in new dresses. The bell was a spell against the demons of lightning in old Etrurian days; to this time the Tuscan peasant bears one in the darkening twilight-tide to drive away the witches flitting round: in him and them “those evening bells” inspired a deeper sentiment than poetry.” (9)

Leland attempted to explain his beliefs in a rambling letter to Lily Doering, a much younger friend who was beginning to take up painting. He wrote to her on November 1, 1879:

“…Everybody seems to take it so much for granted that I have ‘no fixed principles in religion,’ when in fact there is not a man living with such a clearly defined, soul-inspiring faith as mine. …It is a higher, clearer, more definite and more humane form of the Religion of Humanity than any one has yet set forth….It has done me much good, the writing out of this. But I want a few readers—and believers. The object and aim and end of religion should be to make people better—to induce them to work and develop all their powers and never to rest in seeking and realizing the ideals of all things, and the road to this is by Love—by mutual aid and worship. What is Jehovah? An infinite Jew. What is the Virgin? The ideal of maternity….Now since Man has always created God in his own image, why does he not go to the archetype and realize and worship himself in others? …In Man are more excellencies of every kind than are combined in any other being. He or she is the most complete, the most beautiful, the most intelligent—the highest form created. Therefore, if the effort to become better and higher and to rise to the Superior be religion, its true form exists in Humanity…This will one day swallow up all religions, for it is the Beginning and the End of them all. The Son of Man and the Son of God and God’s Messenger all mean Man who has attained a sincere seeking for Ideals. Therefore this Theo-anthropism is Christian…” (10)

Leland was fairly quiet about his religious views—outside those he espoused in his relationships with the Gypsies and the Indians. Other than his experience with the Unitarian Church, he attended the Presbyterian Church at Princeton, as it was a required activity. The sermons couldn’t capture his attention however and it is said that he would read books during the service. He did have a lifelong aversion to the Catholic Church although his reasons have not been stated. He wrote in his Memoirs about the Quakers, comparing them to the Catholic Church:

“Like the Roman Catholic, it is utterly unfit for all the world, and incapable of grappling with or adapting itself to the natural expansion of science and the human mind.” (11)

Leland did appreciate the efforts that the Catholic Church took to obtain and protect works of art, however. He wrote “I like to go into the Catholic churches. You can have no idea of the sublime magnificence of a Catholic cathedral. One really feels overcome by these beautiful, melancholy, old Gothic piles. And then,” he noted, “it is beautiful to see highborn, beautiful ladies kneeling down by poor beggar women, all in enthusiastic prayer. You can see a rough, savage fellow often kneeling in tears before the Virgin. If they are wrong,” he wrote, “they are at least sincere. The Catholics in my humble opinion are much abused.“ (12)

He was strongly opposed to Christian missionaries who were in the process of “converting” the Indians. He wrote, in his rather ethnocentric manner, “How absurd it is to try to force on such people Catholic or Protestant forms, which they do not understand and never will, while their souls take in with joy the poly-pantheistic developments of supernaturalism, and that which suits their lives. Like the little boy who thought he would like to have a Testament, but knew he wanted a squirt, the Indian, unable to rise to the grandeur of monotheistic trinitarianism, is delighted with goblins, elves, and sorcery. He can manage the squirt.” (13)

While his niece wrote that he “not only studied witchcraft with the impersonal curiosity of the scholar, but practiced it with the zest of the initiated,” (14) other than this statement there is no evidence to suggest that he did so. He did carry amulets with him, such as his “Black Stone of Voodoos” and small rocks he had found with holes in them, but the actual practice of witchcraft was more than likely a state of mind rather than an actual physical act. He never indicated in his writings that he was a participant and, in fact, was almost totally silent concerning witchcraft in his Memoirs. In fact, Leland was most certainly a Christian based on his preference for statues of Madonna’s and crucifixes he kept in his apartments.

Leland believed that witchcraft was the “first stage” of shamanism, which he also believed to be the first and universal religion of the paleolithic period. He considered voodoo to be a direct offshoot of this prehistoric and evil religion. “An immense amount of it [witchcraft-shamanism] in its vilest conceivable forms,” he wrote, “still exists among negroes as Voodoo.” (15)

Leland believed that the coming of Cro-Magnon man was “the grandest incident in the history of humanity” and the Cro-Magnon, with his “high civilization” developed a “refined” religion, which would replace the savage shamanistic-witchcraft traditions that existed before. However, he also believed that voodoo and witchcraft continued to exist because “inferior races and the inferior scions of the Cromagnon stock clung to it…” (16)

At the same time, however, he would write that in the present day “…there are men who, with no logical belief whatever in any kind of supernaturalism, study it, and love it, and are moved by it, owing to its endless associations with poetry, art, and all the legends of infancy and youth.” (17) This sounds like the opposite of a belief system followed by “inferior races” who practice a religion of the “vilest conceivable form.” It also sounds as if Leland is describing himself and his love for the romantic paganism of his own creation.

As Leland aged, his views on religion became less about witches and more along the lines of mainstream Christian traditions. He lived in Florence almost exclusively and perhaps it was his environment more than anything else that turned his religious thoughts to the mainstream traditions. His sitting room was adorned with Madonna’s and he would write to his friend Mary Owen in 1890 concerning a silver cross that he felt was unaffordable, “I suffer as much from want of that cross,” he wrote, “as a poor man suffers from want of bread.” (18) Both Leland and Belle journeyed to Rome where they met the Pope during one of his appearances, Leland remarking “…Belle went down on her knees before the Pope…”. “Mrs. Leland,” he wrote, “at least was much gratified with a full sight and quasi-interview with His Holiness.” (19)

We may never be clear as to Leland’s true feelings towards religion or his view of his life in association with religion. Just before his death, he was working on a book titled Mind in Nature, or Materialism the Only Basis for a Belief in God and the Immortality of the Soul. The title is indicative of the very confused nature of Leland and his views of the world and spirit.

Notes

1. Neoplatonism, per Edward Moore of St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology, is often described as 'mystical' or religious in nature, it developed outside the mainstream of Academic Platonism. The origins of Neoplatonism can be traced back to the era of Hellenistic syncretism, which spawned such movements and schools of thought as Gnosticism and the Hermetic tradition.
2. Pennell, Elizabeth Robins. Charles Godfrey Leland a Biography, Vol. 2. London: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd., 1906, 49.
3. Silver, Margery. “Introduction” in Gypsy Sorcery & Fortune Telling. Edison: Castle Books 1995, xiv.
4. Leland, Charles G. Memoirs. London: William Heinemann 1894, 46.
5. Ibid., 47.
6. Ibid. 50.
7. Ibid. 77.
8. Ibid., 78-79.
9. Ibid, 148-149.
10. Pennell, op cit. 48-50.
11. Leland, Memoirs, 30.
12. Pennell, Elizabeth Robins. Charles Godfrey Leland a Biography, Vol.1. London: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd., 1906, 102.
13. Leland. op cit., Memoirs, 357.
14. Pennell, op cit., Vol. 1. 6-7.
15. Leland, Charles Godfrey. Gypsy Sorcery & Fortune Telling. Edison: Castle Books 1995, 6.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 7.
18. Pennell, Elizabeth Robins. Charles Godfrey Leland a Biography, Vol. 2. London: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd., 1906, 335.
19. Leland, Memoirs, op cit., 385.