Aidan Kelly

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Aidan Kelly is a poet and co-founder of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn, a form of Witchcraft invented in San Francisco, 1968. Kelly and college classmates recreated a Witches' sabbat for a class project, drawing on various sources, including Robert Graves' The White Goddess. The group that resulted was humorously named after the famous Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, although it has no other connection to that group. While in his Ph.D. program in the mid-1970s, Kelly was a co-founder of the Covenant of the Goddess. At that time he was given publicly available documents written by Gerald Gardner, and believed he could reconstruct from them a history of how Gardner founded modern Wicca. In the mid-1970s, Kelly returned to the Catholic Church, but lapsed again and was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca only in the late 1980s by Lady Brighit in California. In 1991 he published a book based on his earlier research, Crafting the Art of Magic, but the publisher let it go out of print. However, the book has been republished in a revised edition titled Inventing Witchcraft in 2007.

[edit] Criticism

The thesis of Kelly's book Crafting the Art of Magic is that Wicca was entirely a creation of Gerald Gardner. He has been criticised by Donald H. Frew of having extensively misquoted source texts to support his hypotheses. For instance, Kelly cites Gardner's Ye Bok of ye Art Magical as containing the text:

"The Knights of the Temple, who used mutually to scourge each other in an octagon, did better still; but they apparently did not know the virtue of bonds and did evil, man to man. But perhaps some did know? What of the Church's charge that they wore girdles or cords?"

The actual text reads as follows (with spelling errors):

"[...] The Knights of the Temple, who used to mutualy scurg each-other in an octagan did better still, but they aparantly did not know the virtue of bonds"

The text ends there, and there is no mention of doing 'evil, man to man', a phrase which Kelly uses to accuse Gardner of homophobia. Frew believes there is a strong agenda in Kelly's work, and points out that several claims of Kelly's are unsupported by any evidence, such as his claim that Gardner was addicted to flagellation.^[1]

[edit] Partial bibliography

[edit] References