One chapter I remember well from Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon, one of my favorite books when I first became interested in paganism many years ago, dealt with the formation of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (NROOGD) tradition in the 1970s in San Francisco, California. A description of one of the founders has stuck in my mind all these years. Early in the chapter on magick and ritual, this man enthusiastically described the wonder of feeling the energy of the Goddess for the first time. However, at the close of the chapter he had returned to his Catholic roots and held that "all visions of a universal Goddess come from the influence of Christianity."
I was floored. How could someone who was so energized, so transformed by the Goddess just turn around like that?
When I reread the book recently, it hit me. I know that guy. This founder of NROOGD lives right here in the Puget Sound area, and by all appearances is not Catholic now but quite pagan.
The first time I heard the name Aidan Kelly was several years ago, when a disagreement between two groups in the Tacoma area boiled over into the larger community. I hardly associated him with the quiet, unassuming man I'd met at one of my early Spring Equinox rituals at the Unitarian Universalist Association of Tacoma, after which he shook my hand and said, "It was nice to see a piece of NROOGD in the ritual." He was referring to the cakes, ale and conversation section, borrowed from Northwest Covenant of the Goddess rituals. Later, I was amused to learn that this retiring man was "infamous."
After the Tacoma disagreement, I started hearing more serious rumors about Kelly involving oath-breaking, controversial books and his being ostracized by the Feri and Gardnerian traditions. I wondered what the real story was behind these charges, so I asked him myself. When he agreed to an interview, I told him I would have to address the longstanding charges against him in order for the piece to have any credibility. He said he was looking forward to a chance to "bury some of the pernicious nonsense that's been floating around for years -- as well as own up to the mistakes I actually did make."
When I sat down with Kelly, who is now 62, it was obvious that he's had a long and difficult journey, and it has taken its toll. It took quite a while to see the enthusiastic, energized subject portrayed in Drawing Down the Moon.
That man finally surfaced as Kelly recalled his first "spontaneous mystical experience" at age 15, when the Goddess appeared to him and gave him a "moral imperative to go find out the truth about religion for myself." He says, "One the many resources I came across in my early research was a summary of Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches of Tuscany, by Charles Godfrey Leland, which was printed in a book entitled Witches Still Live, by Theda Kenyon, published in 1928."
When Kelly discovered Aradia, his life changed forever. "Right then I said, this is the religion for me." He describes himself as an "incredibly inhibited kid.... I had deep resentment for the way I had been programmed by the Catholic Church in regards to sexuality." He began to devour any book he could get his hands on, discovering Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today and works by Margaret Murray and Robert Graves as well as anthropological and other scientific works. Although he described this time in his life as "total transformation," he still had to go to Mass each week until he was able to move out of his parents' home at age 18.
Kelly described his next mystical experience, which occurred at the age of 23, as "several weeks starting out as a deep depression, progressing to an ecstatic and highly altered state." One morning, he "woke up and realized that everything had gone into a flat plane and had lost all three-dimensional structure." He recalled the writings of William Blake on eidetic imagery, later cited in his master's thesis, in which Blake asserts that the three-dimensional structure we experience when looking at an object is merely "something we impose on our own perception," according to Kelly.
After several days of not being able to leave his bed for more than 30 minutes at a time due to the physical, emotional and psychic overload he was experiencing, Kelly decided to talk a walk through the park and was surprised to see the auras of and tendrils of energy from all the plants. He described them "bursting into flames" when he looked at them, appearing the same way that the burning bush was described as appearing to Moses in the Old Testament. One afternoon while standing underneath a tree, he used a technique described by Blake and "turned off the tree." What he discovered in the place of his perception was "a 40-foot-tall goddess, with this weird smile on her face, looking at me like I was the funniest thing she had ever seen."
He felt that he was very lucky to have come back from this experience and that it occurred when it did. The event began right after his last final and ended just before the start of the new semester. "If it had happened during the semester, it would have been disaster."
Approximately four years later, as part of a class project at San Francisco State University, he was asked by his then-partner, another graduate student who had been studying witchcraft and the occult, if he knew enough to write an actual ritual. He said he would try. "What I didn't know, I made up."
A 13-member committee formed and began working on the project. On October 31, 1967, the charter was signed and the NROOGD tradition was born. They chose the name New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn because, Kelly says, "I knew perfectly well that the magickal system of the witches came from the Golden Dawn. I didn't know the pathway then, but I do now." Kelly thinks that the fact that the initiations, which he feels come "from the Goddess through the group," worked was "beginner's luck."
NROOGD became a viable tradition and began to grow. "It started out slowly at first but snowballed from there," says Kelly. The gravity of what had actually transpired hit him when he realized, "Hey, that was my bare ass in Time magazine."
After NROOGD, Kelly's history becomes more clouded. Kelly claims to have later studied with and been initiated in the Feri tradition by the late Victor Anderson "in his informal way" from 1971 to 1975. Some of his detractors, particularly the Gardnerian high priest Donald Frew, claim that Kelly never received a full initiation into the tradition and that the Book of Shadows Kelly later passed as Feri is actually an amalgamation of Ed Fitch's Mohsian book and some Feri elements. Frew charges that Anderson has stated that everything reported by Kelly about the Feri tradition is inaccurate.
Sadly, Victor Anderson has passed over and is unable to clear up this particular controversy himself. I have been unable to contact his wife and Feri co-founder Cora Anderson nor any of the first-level initiates to confirm or deny this claim.
By 1976, Kelly realized that he had a serious problem with alcoholism that was affecting every aspect of his life, and he sought out treatment from Alcoholics Anonymous, which at the time was based heavily on Judeo-Christian spirituality. He found that although it was "an interesting spiritual fellowship," it was "too painful to walk a 12-step program and be in the Craft." After concluding that the pagan community was not set up to help him or others in need, he turned back to the Catholic Church. Kelly says, "The ability of a religious community to provide the social services that its own members need is a mark of maturity; it's a mark of whether it's a real religion or just a hobby." Paganism at that time did not have that ability. However, despite claims and accusations to the contrary, Kelly asserts, "I never stopped being a witch. I just didn't practice for a while."
After extensive research into the Inquisition, Kelly came to the conclusion that "the devil really was involved and that the inquisitors were the agents of evil." He describes this revelation that "the Church was sick" as feeling like he had been "punched in the stomach."
Some time after these revelations, Kelly returned to the Craft. He received initiation into the Gardnerian tradition in August 1987. He has been at odds with Gardnerians ever since.
The issues are several. In 1991, Llewellyn published a book written by Kelly titled Crafting the Art of Magic, which he describes as a trade version of the scholarly work the publisher rejected, in which he challenges Gerald Gardner's claim that Wicca is an ancient tradition. Rather, Kelly wrote, Wicca was something that Gardner made up himself. Kelly claims that his research indicates that Gerald Gardner invented modern witchcraft in 1946 and that Aradia was one of Gardner's major sources. Kelly also charges that certain aspects of Gardnerian practice were a result of Gardner's alleged "sexual addictions." In his book, Kelly defends Wicca as "a thriving, beautiful religion in its own right (that) does not require an appeal to the past for legitimacy."
His book stirred up a great deal of controversy, and I have yet to meet a Gardnerian that has anything good to say about his research or motivations. One accusation Gardnerians level at Kelly is that he used oath-bound information in writing his book. Kelly says, "I learned 90 percent of what I know about Gardnerianism by my research as a noninitiate, but because I accepted initiation, I'm sure many people think there is material in my books that I learned after or because of my initiation, which there is not. But most people do not read carefully enough to see that."
Donald Frew, who claims to have been Kelly's initiator, remains one of his biggest detractors, often posting material opposing Kelly on newsgroups. Frew also authored a rather elaborate Web page reviewing and discrediting the scholarship used in Crafting the Art of Magic.
Kelly counters that initiation is passed from female to male in the Gardnerian tradition, and that therefore Frew's claims of being his initiator are false, even though he was acting as high priest during the rite. Kelly says he received his first degree Gardnerian initiation from Lady Brighid, Frew's high priestess, but did not study with Frew himself.
When presented with Frew's Web page and transcripts of his newsgroup postings, Kelly shakes his head. "Don is a bright man, I really don't know why he makes a hobby out of attacking me." Kelly adds, "As far as I can guess, Frew has a bad case of pathological jealousy -- why, I don't know. He has plenty of areas of strength where I am weak."
Gardnerians I have spoken with feel that Frew argues against Kelly because Frew feels guilty for having anything to do with the training and initiation of Kelly, who he charges is an oath-breaker.
Furthering the controversy and high emotions surrounding Kelly's associations with the Feri and Gardnerian traditions was the publishing of a list of contact names and addresses on a set of disks that Kelly sold through mail order. People that I have spoken with from both traditions feel that publishing this list was oath-breaking of the worst kind, pure and simple.
I have a copy of the list, titled "A Geographic Roster of Past and Present Covens, Groves, Neopagan Associations, Journals, and Other Public Evidence of Craft Activity." Kelly claims to have complied the list as a "database to indicate the actual size of the Neopagan Witchcraft movement in North America, not a contact list." Kelly states that the material on the disks had already been published in the Green Egg Yellow Pages of 1972-1974. Because it was already public knowledge, no oath was broken in publishing it, he says. I did note that the disk material states that the list includes information from the Green Egg Yellow Pages "as well as any I have discovered since then."
Kelly claims that the standard of Craft secrecy at the time was "you didn't out a witch to a nonwitch." He believes that the issue is that "Gardnerians don't consider non-Gardnerians to be witches" and that this attitude creates the issue.
It may be true that some Gardnerians regard non-Gardnerians as nonwitches, but I have spoken with others who strongly disagree with this position. Kelly also says that "at that time, the East Coast Gardnerians had adopted a more stringent code of secrecy" than Kelly had known previously. Several Gardnerians I have spoken with have indicated that people lost homes and jobs over the publishing of the disks.
Although he meant the roster and history to be a community service, Kelly admits that if he had it to do over again he would not have sold the disks by mail order. Instead, he would have privately made them available only to scholars and pagans known to him.
All in all, Kelly feels that accepting Gardnerian initiation was a mistake, a mostly negative experience for him, and that he likely wouldn't have done it if he hadn't been manic at the time.
In 1985, Kelly discovered that his sister was suicidal and on antidepressants. He was later diagnosed himself first with depression, then later with bipolar disorder. "The medication they gave me (for the depression) made me manic," Kelly says, "and I started displaying antisocial behavior. My long-term decisions started going downhill."
Alcoholism and bipolar disorder affected Kelly greatly between the years of 1987 and 1997. "I did a lot of things I would not have done if I had been in my right mind the entire time," he readily admits. With a Ph.D. awarded by the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, he admits that if he hadn't made so many bad choices, he might likely be a tenured professor now. He also acknowledges that he did a lot of good things and that if he hadn't made some of the choices he did, for good or bad, he wouldn't have his wife and his four youngest children.
He found that some positive changes had occurred in the pagan community during his time away. "When I came back into the Craft in 1987, I wasn't the only sober pagan. By that time there was a pagan interpretation of the 12 steps, which has been on the Web ever since." In addition to the increase in social services available to and from pagans over the last 15 years, Kelly has also found a medical system here in the Pacific Northwest that is better able to treat his atypical bipolar disorder. He finally feels that his condition is under control.
Although Kelly has done some things he regrets and admits that he would do things differently now, he also still holds many of the same strong opinions that made him such a controversial figure. One of those opinions involves Craft secrecy. "Some secrecy tends to be pathological," he says. "Keeping secrets for the sake of keeping secrets stimulates some of humanity's worst instincts."
Kelly doesn't feel that there is any reason for the Craft to be a secret religion any more. He feels that pagan religious rights are harmed when the religion is hidden. Kelly explains, "What is important is that people get out and demonstrate what kind of people they are. When there is a flood, go out and fill sandbags with your pentacle on the outside. When there is any kind of social services that needs to be performed, go do it with your pentacle on the outside." Kelly feels that if we as pagans and witches demonstrate what kind of people we are, others will come to our defense when necessary. "That is how you protect yourself, not by hiding in the closet."