18/11/2024
Robert Cochrane was not a Pagan
Cochrane loved to play the fool and he loved to cast his grey magic to veil and obfuscate his vision and his work from those beyond the parameters of those he called kin. As a Fool, Cochrane advised Bill Gray how this trickster role established him as a true “follower of Tubal Cain, the Hairy One.” Obviously, this is a matter of some lengthy discussion betwixt Cochrane and Gray. In another response, Cochrane pressed upon Gray his view of the Craft as a repository of occult science, utterly distinct from paganism. He saw that modality as a religious pantheism, a reflection of god’s manifest existence within the corporal world, though he conceded a source origin, common to all spiritual philosophies for it.
“I do not ever think I can ever cross the line between them [pagans] and myself, since the basic philosophy is so very different. I really think it is time that a distinction was made between witchcraft and paganism ( . . . ) there is too wide a gap between religious faith and religious science.”
Cochrane used the term religious quite discriminately, perhaps simply to inspire deeper, more spiritual connections within a Craft he believed had become detrimentally obsessed with spell-work and base ‘magics.’ Both Gerald B. Gardner and Robert Cochrane promoted their uniquely idiosyncratic occult philosophies as the tenets of religion, a fundamental concept rejected by many of their latter-day would-be practitioners and followers.
Cochrane believed spell-craft to be trivial, a minor tool of circumstance rather than desire. Preferring the magick (sic) of a spiritual nature within the context of a mystical religion, he believed desire spurred the ardent pilgrim onwards in the quest for experiential Truth. Nonetheless, religion is a harsh descriptive, wholly unsuited to many modern craft modalities. Primarily, this is because religion has come to typify an erring, proscriptive dogma and predominant intolerance, often to an unacceptable extreme. As a loaded term, religion tends to negate all things of a deeply spiritual nature, though Cochrane’s advocacy of it as the measure of each seeker to rout falsity as a harmonic of devotion is naturally upheld.
“In what passes as Witchcraft today, there is as much illusion and unresolved desire as there is in the outside world. In the closed circles of some covens, there is greater bigotry and dogma than ever there was in many sections of the moribund Christian church. Many witches appear to have turned their backs upon the reality of the outside world, and repeat, parrot fashion, the rituals and beliefs that they know have little or no relationship with the 20th century and its needs.”
Cochrane believed wholeheartedly that it was better to traverse the path alone than follow anything that lacked Virtue, a qualitative power sourced in the divine. Every seeker is seduced to the occulted artes, even within Companie and Clan; no-one is immune.
Beyond a fundamental overlap with other pathways into the Mysteries, Cochrane’s Craft elevated occulted Virtue above all, explored through a spontaneous, trance-inducing regime. He’d perceived the tenets of Wica through those closest to him, brethren who’d once been his companions upon the lonely pilgrimage to gnosis. Finding the philosophical and metaphysical differences too great, he declared all Wicans and Pagans to be: “Naught but dancing peasants.” By the few he’d encountered, all were judged harshly. He saw only a naïve expression of outmoded paganisms instead of another valid pathway through to the Mysteries, modelled by a few, but very sincere, dedicated initiates. Perhaps he had been unfortunate to know more of the former and too few of the latter.
