"Leo Martello: Even Witches Have Civil Rights" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "A Grimoire of Italian Witchcraft: Practical Spells & Rituals of the Old Religion"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 26
Leo Martello: Even Witches Have Civil Rights
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Manhattan, Thursday, October 29,
1970. Two days before Halloween, in a municipal office, four people sit down to
settle a question nobody had ever formally put to the City of New York. On one
side, the Parks Department attorney and a deputy commissioner. On the other,
Barbara Shack of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a forty-year-old
graphologist from Greenwich Village who wants a permit to hold a gathering of
witches in Central Park.
And he got it: on Halloween night
more than a thousand people assembled in the park to dance and sing and declare
themselves openly, in a country where doing so was still a good way to lose
your job. A Global Village crew filmed it, and the documentary aired repeatedly
on Channel 13. It was the first public Witch-In in the world, and it happened
because Leo Louis Martello refused to take no for an answer from a city clerk.
The Parks Department had denied the
application on the grounds that it didn't serve the purpose of the park.
Martello's response was that he'd been under the impression the park existed to
serve the purpose of the people, and that his group would simply congregate as
individuals if that's how it had to be. When the official threatened to involve
the police, Martello did the thing almost nobody in the Craft had thought to do
before: he picked up the phone and called the ACLU. Shack took the case
personally and, within forty-eight hours, the permit was in-hand…
Leo Louis Martello was born in Dudley, Massachusetts, on September 26, 1930, to a working-class Italian American family—though even here the record wobbles slightly, since at least one standard reference gives 1931. His father, Rocco Luigi Martello, had emigrated from Sicily and rented a small parcel to farm. The Depression finished that, and the family moved on to Worcester and then Southbridge looking for work. Leo was raised Roman Catholic and got interested in esotericism as a teenager.
By the 1950s he was in New York
working as a graphologist and hypnotist. He took a doctor of divinity degree in
1955, served as pastor of the Temple of Spiritual Guidance from 1955 to 1960,
and turned out short practical booklets on handwriting analysis and card
reading through the following decade. Then came Stonewall, and everything
accelerated. Martello
was a gay man, and after 1969 he threw himself into gay liberation. He played a
part in the first Gay Liberation Front
demonstration, held against the Village Voice. When the GLF
fractured he became a founding member of the Gay Activists Alliance
and wrote a regular column for its newspaper under the title The Gay Witch.
Martello said that at twenty-one, cousins in New York initiated him into a
witchcraft tradition inherited from their Sicilian ancestors, making him a mago,
a male witch, under a blood oath binding him to the coven's secrecy. Some
accounts date it with striking precision to September 26, 1951: his own
twenty-first birthday. He described the tradition as a survival of the Sicilian
cult of Demeter and Persephone, preserved through the centuries under the cover
of Marian devotion, with families concealing the goddess behind the Virgin.
In 1973 Martello traveled to England
and was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca by Patricia Crowther. However,
while a man with an unbroken ancestral line arguably doesn't need one, a man
building a public religious identity in the America of 1973 very much does.
Everything Martello actually
built is documented: he founded the Witches International Craft Associates, the
Witches Liberation Movement, and the Witches Anti-Defamation League (later
renamed, revealingly, the Alternative Religions Education Network). He
published the WICA Newsletter and Witchcraft Digest and ran his
own imprint, Hero Press. He was also the first public witch to campaign for
legally incorporated, tax-exempt Wiccan churches and paid religious holidays
for practitioners. He demanded reparations and a formal apology from the
Catholic Church. His 1973 book Witchcraft: The Old Religion
was standard reading for a generation of American witches at a moment when the
movement had almost no literature of its own.
A tradition is not finally constituted by whether its origin story survives cross-examination but, rather, constituted by what it makes possible. Martello's actual inheritance to every Pagan in the United States isn't a Sicilian coven of uncertain existence: it's that a witch in this country can rent a public park, incorporate a church, claim a holiday, and call a civil liberties lawyer when somebody says no.
Martello withdrew from public life in
the 1990s and died of cancer on June 29, 2000, at sixty-nine. However, among
the many words he wrote, his legacy can, perhaps be best summed up in a single
sentence, spoken to a hostile municipal official who had just threatened to call
the police:
“Even witches have civil rights.”
That sentence made Martello immortal,
working a form of magic stronger than any Book of Shadows could ever do.
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Leo Martello spent his life insisting that Italian witchcraft was a real and distinct current rather than a footnote to English Wicca, so the recommendation goes to the most practical book on that current currently in print.
A
Grimoire of Italian Witchcraft: Practical Spells & Rituals of the Old
Religion
Raven
Grimassi / Crossed Crow Books
A Grimoire of Italian Witchcraft is exactly what its title says: a working book rather than a theoretical one. Where Grimassi's earlier titles spent their length arguing for the tradition's antiquity, this one is organized around doing—seasonal observances, ritual tools, devotional practice, spells, and a full year-round structure a solitary practitioner can actually run. If you've read about Stregheria and wanted to know what a practice built on it looks like from the inside on a Tuesday, this is the volume that answers.
It also carries history alongside the
practical material, bridging the old and the current—and this is where we'd ask
you to read with the column above in mind. Grimassi's Stregheria is a
constructed modern system, and a well-constructed one, but it is not the family
tradition Martello and Lori Bruno described. Scholars of the subject draw that
line clearly, and Grimassi's own hereditary claims drew the same scrutiny
Martello's did. A magical system is judged by whether it works, not by whether
its founding myth survives a footnote check—which is the argument the piece
above has just spent a thousand words making. So take the rituals seriously and hold the antiquity
claims loosely. That's the correct posture for nearly everything in this field,
and it's a better use of your skepticism than refusing to open the book at all.
As a new and exciting release from Crossed
Crow, it's recent, easy to find, and priced as a working paperback rather than
a collector's item. For readers wanting the primary Martello material
afterward, Witchcraft: The Old Religion remains findable secondhand; A
Grimoire of Italian Witchcraft is a beautiful and worthy successor of that
literary lineage.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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