TC Lethbridge | The Sons of TC-Lethbridge | Tekh's Anthological Review

Witches

Investigating an Ancient Religion

Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962

Back on course after the detour of Ghost and Ghoul, Lethbridge continued his study of the old pagan gods of Britain in his 1962 publication Witches. He continues and expands upon Margaret Murray’s theory that witch cults were the survivors of a prehistoric religion. Although this was relatively new ground for him, the notion that the witch religion had prehistoric roots was first aired back in 1948 in Merlin’s Island.

In Witches, Lethbridge turns his attention to magic and the powers of the mind. He understood magic to be simply powers of the mind that were not yet understood by science. He believed that ‘magic’ and ‘miracles’ were the same thing, it was just that magic was perceived in Christian society as dark and threatening. In fact he was right - divine and devilish are the same thing; it just depends upon your viewpoint.

Lethbridge believed that the witch cult was a religion of the suppressed classes and in Witches he attempts to de-mystify the goddess and her consort, the Great Mother and the Great Father in their many guises.

The book is really a concoction of ideas that merge his study of the old pagan gods with ideas aired in Ghost and Ghoul. The study of Dianic belief and the transmigration of souls led him to the belief of a universal, controlling mind and is a theory that is explored later and to a greater extent in The Monkey’s Tail (1969). He links the concept of the evolving mind with the Laws of Karma, the Avatars and other religious teachings of the world and concludes that Druidic belief is not a million miles away from modern psychical research. He also suggests similarities between the Barddas and Pythagorean doctrines.

This sharing of ideas and common ground between eastern and ancient western religions provides him with evidence of the trading of ideas in the ancient world. The sea, so important to Lethbridge, was perceived as a kind of filter for ideas heading into Britain and that no idea on the continent ever arrived into Britain intact. It was this influence that made the study of British customs so intriguing.

Witches is typical of Lethbridge’s work, filled with rants, digressions and amusing stories but a picture emerges of a man at the hub of life’s great adventure. One particular story, which paints an endearing picture of him, is his attempt at aerial photography, with the use of a kite, whilst dowsing for volcanic dykes and searching for Viking burials on Lundy island with his colleague, the geologist Dollar. I was once involved in a similar experiment at the Barbrook III stone circle in the Derbyshire Peak and can empathise with Lethbridge and Dollar’s experiment and can only hope that their results were marginally better than my own blurred pictures of clouds and sky!

Interestingly, in an essay in chapter six on ghost and phantom dogs, Lethbridge relates the tale of the ghost of a white dog that had been observed at Hole House. He also describes a floor-tile that he had unearthed in his garden, which coincidentally depicted a white dog, although from his illustration of the find, to me the creature looks more like a goat! However, when recently passing Hole House, I couldn’t help noticing that upon the gateposts at the end of the driveway were statues of two ‘greyhound-type’ dogs. Obviously there to commemorate a previous owner’s long deceased pet. For wherever Lethbridge went, there always appeared to be a mystery close at hand.

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