The late Lewis Spence, who was an authority on Ancient Mexico and
also on the subject of Atlantis, made an extraordinary discovery, relevant to the history of the witch cult, in a pre-Columbian manuscript.
This native Mexican painting, known as the Codex Fejervary-Mayer,
shows quite unmistakably, a picture of a naked witch wearing a pointed
hat and riding on a broomstick.
Spence stated in his Encyclopaedia of Occultism (George Routledge,
London, 1920, and University Books, New Hyde Park, New York,
1 959), that he had found good evidence for the existence of a witch cult
similar to that of Europe, in pre-Columbian Mexico. He remarks that
this seems to indicate a very ancient origin for what he calls “the
witch-religion”.
How could the unknown artist of a picture painted in Mexico before
Columbus discovered the Americas, have possibly depicted this very
distinctive figure ? There are witches in Mexico today ; but their existence
can be accounted for by the beliefs brought to the New World by the
Spanish Conquistadores. Nevertheless, before the European conquest
of Mexico, followers of a cult that worshipped a lunar goddess and the
god of the Underworld, of death and the world of spirits, used to meet
at crossroads, as European witches did.
The pointed cap worn by the pre-Columbian witch in the picture
mentioned above, is of course the ancient original of the pointed
‘witch’s hat’ worn by the sorceresses of popular fairy tales. It probably
represents the ‘Cone of Power’ that witches seek to raise by their ritual
It appears also in an even older painting, one in fact dating from the
Stone Age, at Cogul in north-eastern Spain.
Robert Graves in The White Goddess (Faber, London, 1961 and
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1966), describes this latter picture
as “The most ancient surviving record of European religious practice”.
It appears to depict a dance of witches, a group of women dancing in a
circle round a naked man. The women are wearing pointed caps and the
man something that looks very like the ritual garters which are traditionally a mark of rank in the witch cult.
We may then at least speculate, on the evidence, that the witch-cult
is of very ancient origin, and that in some remote period of antiquity
there was some contact between its devotees in Europe and Central
America. The means of that contact may have been the lost continent
of Atlantis.
At least one of the surviving branches of the witch cult in Britain
definitely claims to derive its traditions from Atlantis or, as it calls it,
‘The Water City’. Orthodox historians may scoff at the whole idea of the
sunken continent, and dismiss it as legendary. For many years, the city
of Troy was dismissed in the same way, until Heinrich Schliemann dug
it up