In 2005 The Tree was republished as Buckland’s Book of Saxon Witchcraft and in a new introduction Buckland addressed a few key points about the tradition of Witchcraft he founded in an attempt to clarify details that are still a point of confusion for those unfamiliar with religious Witchcraft (i.e. “Wicca”), its history, and core iconography.
In particular, Buckland’s statements about God and Goddess names, and the need for them to be Saxon in Saxon Witchcraft (and understanding what “Saxon” means to those with insufficient access to Gardner’s writings, or Buckland’s other primary sources)—or equally, a lack of understanding of what Buckland meant by the necessity of personal identification with the deities in Witchcraft have caused a great deal of confusion.
In founding his own tradition, Buckland recognized the founding of covens with no males or no females as legitimate covens (as Gardnerian Witchcraft traditionally does not), but he never recognized as legitimate, Witchcraft that did not include the Mother Goddess of the Wica, or that made anyone subordinate to anyone else through the Christian conception of marriage. What he did seek to correct in Witchcraft, was the mistreatment of women by men, and the mistreatment of men by women who supposedly loved them, as husbands, fathers, and brothers, in the context of a fertility cult.
To illustrate what I mean, there seems to be an idea that Buckland only expressed the sentiment that Wiccan Priests were considered little more than “altar boys” in Gardnerian covens on some whim, and after his divorce from his first wife (and mother of his children), the woman from whom most American Gardnerian Witches trace their “lineage”, and the woman whose Silver Bracelet is oddly in the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in Ohio instead of with a Gardnerian High Priestess in her downline. Yet this being Buckland’s view, as a supposedly bitter divorcé, is categorically untrue, as he had already said this was an issue with Gardnerian Witchcraft, as he experienced it, in a documented interview he gave to Beyond back in 1968. More early, independent, accounts of Buckland’s character and ideas can be read in Hans Holzer’s The Truth About Witchcraft (1969), The New Pagans (1972), and The Witchcraft Report (1973), as well as Susan Roberts’ Witches U.S.A. (1971). Buckland had also already said on television (specifically The Dick Cavett Show, airdate August 18, 1971) that he felt the Oath of Secrecy regarding the Gardnerian God and Goddess names had outlived their usefulness, and with the appearance of the American Stregheria tradition of Leo Martello, the real reason for this should have been obvious to anyone who had actually received the names as handed down by Gerald Gardner and any of the High Priestesses who actually knew him. Namely, that the secret name of the Wiccan Goddess was not particularly “British” at all.
That Buckland, who obviously loved his religion, and wrote and spoke extensively in defense of it, (and Witchcraft as he taught it was a distinct, identifiable, modern religion), is not afforded more respect among contemporary Pagans due, apparently, to the Christian stigma against divorce, is shameful.
Given all this, why some Saxon Wiccans feel that the name “Frig” (Buckland’s spelling of the Goddess’ name being a direct reference to Brian Branston’s interpretation of her in The Lost Gods of England), a name with no extant myths of her own in the Old English sources, is the more appropriate name for the Goddess of the Seax Wica—beyond particular covens with an Anglo-Saxon focus who prefer this name, for whatever reason—when many scholars agree that “Frig” and “Freya” (and any derivations of spelling of either name in a medieval world that did not have standardized spelling to begin with), likely did not become truly separate Goddesses until the pressures and influences of Christianity in Scandinavia during the Viking Age—and specifically in the face of medieval Christianity’s condemnation of female sexuality in particular—is the real question.
As Hans Holzer so generously put it in Wicca: The Way of the Witches back in 1979:
The real compulsion to destroy the Old Religion, with its reliance on woman’s wisdom and exalted position as priestess, was the inability of the Church to permit sexual freedom, equality of the sexes, and the free expression of love for the natural and the beautiful in the universe, all of which are part of the Old Religion. Instead, loyalty to the church and its rigid doctrine was demanded. By the fifteenth century, that loyalty was also anti-sex, anti-women. The whole medieval Church was decidedly against sex and womanhood. In this it paralleled the attitudes of the feudal system in which women had a very restricted role, slightly above cattle and furniture, but definitely way below men in human and civil rights. The only place where women could be raised to great heights was in song and poetry, but if a woman tried to put into practice what the romantic poems offered her, she wound up a heretic or a traitor or if she was lucky (and her family well connected), in a nunnery.
(Stained glass of the Goddess Frigga, commissioned in 1848 for the “Winter Smoking Room” of Cardiff Castle, built by Normans on the site of a Roman fort. Wales, United Kingdom.)
Lincoln Green 