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A History of Witchcraft
Part 3: The Mesolithic and Neolithic Periods
(10,000 to 2,000 BC)
The Mesolithic time period begins to give us a clearer picture of the people who inhabited Western Europe between 10,000 and 5,000 BC.
These were not the fully nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Paleolithic with crude stone tools and wooden spears, depending on caves for shelter. Mesolithic hunters used spear shafts tipped with worked stone points, many of them barbed, and had the skill to manufacture polished stone axes and knives as well. They generally lived in wood framed roofed dwellings, some not much more than a lean-to although others were very elaborate with raised floors of split logs and interior fire pits for cooking and heating - which suggests a structured social order.1 The people of the Mesolithic had begun to settle in groups of as many as 100 individuals for long periods, sometimes many years, and created the first formally recognized burial grounds with some holding as many as 170 individual burial plots. Many of these burials were done with obvious rituals including deposits of grave goods and sacrificial animals, dogs in particular.2
Of course they were still hunters and fisherman as well as gatherers of naturally growing edible plants. But these activities were done in an organized and skilled manner with an immense knowledge of their natural surroundings, including the impact of changing seasons on the availability of food sources. As in the Paleolithic, the peoples of the Mesolithic also used artworks to record either the outcome of battles or hunts, or as sympathetic magick in order to depict a desired outcome. And just as their ancestors had done, the Mesolithic people also manufactured clay female figurines for apparently ritual purposes.3
So then, they had a structured society, were knowledgeable of the impact of changing seasons on food availability, buried their dead with ritual, used what is apparently sympathetic magick in their daily lives, and held the female in some form of ritual appreciation. They may not have been Wiccan but they were Pagan, practicing some form of religious ritual or magickal craft and those attributes fit at least part of the definition of witchcraft.
Even before 5000 BC both the Neolithic social and religious structures developing in the British Isles had evolved into more definable and, from our standpoint, recognizable patterns. Coastal and stream fishing were still viable food venues but the organized breeding and domestication of livestock had supplanted hunting as the prime source of meats while the planting, cultivation and harvesting of crops had replaced the opportunistic gathering of naturally growing plant foods. Wood and stone construction of communal as well as individual dwellings was common and a structured matrilineal hierarchy had developed. They participated in organized farming, ranching, and warfare, all under designated leaders. They had become a clan or tribal society, a sedentary society of established autonomous villages with a very well developed religious and social order.4
It is here that we see hard and tangible archaeological evidence of activities that can be recognizably identified with the Old Religion. By about 5000 BC the first circular ritual structures appear that have astronomical alignments with both solar and lunar events; the spring equinox, summer solstice, fall equinox and winter solstice as well as the 18.6-year lunar cycle. The inhabitants of Neolithic Britain were well aware of these cycles, that they were repeating and predictable, and deserving of ritual recognition. This was an agrarian society depending for survival on the organized handling of crops and livestock, one that understood the necessary seasons of planting, cultivating, harvesting, and the fallow time - of crops as well as animals - and most likely treated those seasonal changes with appropriate ceremony and ritual observance.5/6
And as in all agrarian societies they were fully aware of the role of male and female in reproduction and represented this awareness with phallic and vaginal representative carvings and monuments, many examples having been identified throughout the British Isles. Given their awareness of the reproductive process it is only logical to assume they equated the 28-day lunar cycle, from full to new moon and back again, with the menstrual cycle of the human female. An understanding possibly represented by numerous female pottery figurines, such as the Grimes Graves goddess, typically shown in a state of pregnancy. And according to interpretations of some of their stone markings dated to about 3000 BC our Neolithic ancestors apparently recognized the divinity of the Earth itself as female and of the Sun as male, and recognized the Earth Goddess as both a source of life and repose of death.7
Which now brings us to some very important questions. Were our Neolithic ancestors Pagan? Of course they were, by any and all definitions. Were they Wiccan? The Neolithic religion of the British Isles coupled lunar and solar observances with the recognition of an Earth Goddess and a Sun God, thus giving us all the basic elements that form the very identifiable core of what we today call witchcraft, the religion of Wicca. Therefore there is a very recognizable link from our practice of the witchcraft of today that stretches through the eons of history to the Neolithic builders of Stonehenge in 5000 BC. There is absolutely no doubt that our rites and rituals as they are practiced today have very recognizable roots quite visible in the 7000 year-old Neolithic religion of our ancestors and those roots are very much that of witchcraft, of Wicca, by virtually all of its definitions.
- Gary Cantrell
Endnotes
*****
Gary Cantrell has authored two books: Out of the Broom Closet (1998) and Wiccan Beliefs and Practices: Rituals for Solitaries and Small Covens, to be released by Llewellyn in early 2001. A third work, The History of Witchcraft, is in preparation. Visit his website: http://hometown.aol.com/heretic894/myhomepage/ faith.html