Product Code Database
Leo Martello (September 26, 1930 – June 29, 2000) was an American priest, gay rights activist, and author. He was a founding member of the Stregheria, a form of the modern Pagan new religious movement of Wicca which drew upon his own Italian heritage. During his lifetime he published a number of books on such esoteric subjects as Wicca, astrology, and tarot.
Born to a working-class Italian American family in Dudley, Massachusetts, he was raised Roman Catholic although became interested in esotericism as a teenager. He later claimed that when he was 21, relatives initiated him into a tradition of witchcraft inherited from their Sicily ancestors; this conflicts with other statements that he made, and there is no independent evidence to corroborate his claim. During the 1950s, he was based in New York City, where he worked as a graphologist and hypnotist. After beginning to publish books on paranormal topics in the early 1960s, he publicly began identifying as Wiccan in 1969, and stated that he was involved in a New York coven.
After the Stonewall riots of 1969, Martello – himself a gay man – involved himself in gay rights activism, becoming a member of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Leaving the GLF following an internal schism, he became a founding member of the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA) and authored a regular column, "The Gay Witch", for its newspaper. In 1970 he founded the Witches International Craft Associates (WICA) as a networking organization for Wiccans, and under its auspices organized a "Witch In" that took place in Central Park at Halloween 1970, despite opposition from the New York City Parks Department. To campaign for the civil rights of Wiccans, he founded the Witches Anti-Defamation League, which was later renamed the Alternative Religions Education Network. In 1973, he visited England, there being initiated into Gardnerian Wicca by the Gardnerian High Priestess Patricia Crowther. He continued practicing Wicca into the 1990s, when he retreated from public life, eventually succumbing to cancer in 2000.
Martello later claimed to have experienced psychic phenomena as a child, sparking his interest in occultism. By his early teenage years, he had begun studying palmistry and tarot card reading with a woman named Marta. He also later claimed that his father had informed him that his grandmother, Maria Concetta, had been a psychic known as a Strega Maga ("Great Witch") in her hometown of Enna, Sicily, Italy. According to Martello's account, Concetta had worked as a folk magician and tarot card reader, and attracted the hatred and envy of the local Catholic clergy. He also related that on one occasion, she had killed a Sicilian Mafia using magic when he threatened her husband for not paying protection money. Martello related that when he was 16, his father told him that he had cousins in New York City who wished to meet him. He proceeded to do so and – according to his account – they informed him that they were initiates of an ancient Italian witchcraft religion, La Vecchia ("the Old Religion"). After identifying his possession of psychic powers, they initiated him into the tradition on his 21st birthday in 1951, making him swear an oath never to reveal the secrets of the La Vecchia. Moving to the city, he studied at Hunter College and the Institute for Psychotherapy.
Martello never produced any proof to support his claims, and there is no independent evidence that corroborate them. An anonymous woman who had known Martello informed the researcher Michael G. Lloyd that during the 1980s, he had told her that he had never been initiated into a tradition of Witchcraft, and that he had simply embraced occultism in the 1960s in order to earn a living. The Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White expressed criticism of Martello's claims, noting that it was "extremely doubtful" that a tradition of Wicca could have been passed down through Martello's Sicilian family. Instead, he suggested that Martello might have been instructed in a tradition of folk magic that he later embellished into a form of Wicca, that the cousins themselves had constructed a form of Wicca that they passed on to Martello, or that the entire scenario had been a fabrication of Martello's.
Martello claimed that in the summer of 1964, he moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he researched the history of the tarot, resulting in the publication of It's in the Cards (1964). Returning to the U.S. in 1965, he moved into an apartment in Greenwich Village, New York City, writing a book on astrology, It's Written in the Stars, and a book on psychic protection, How to Prevent Psychic Blackmail. He also began attending the Spiritualist gatherings that were operated by Clifford Bias at the Ansonia Hotel. At some point High Priestess Lori Bruno founded a witchcraft coven and church, Our Lord and Lady of the Trinacrian Rose, in which Leo was acknowledged as Elder. In 1969 he publicly revealed himself to be a practitioner of Witchcraft; claiming that he had gained the permission of his coven to do so. Intent on countering the negative publicity that Wicca had been receiving, he published The Weird Ways of Witchcraft in 1969, the same year that he also published The Hidden World of Hypnotism.
The GLF was structured around a system of anarchic consensus, which made it difficult for the group to reach conclusions on any issue, and heated arguments became commonplace at its meetings. In November 1969, the group's membership voted to provide political and financial support to the Black Panthers, an armed African-American leftist group. This was heavily controversial among the GLF, given the homophobic nature of the Black Panthers, and resulted in a walk-out of many senior members, including Martello, Arthur Evans, Arthur Bell, Lige Clarke, and Jack Nichols. That month, Martello was invited to a private meeting of these disaffected GLF members which resulted in the formation of the Gay Activist Alliance (GAA). Although continuing the GLF's emphasis on taking a confrontational approach to conventional American society and authority, the group was more tightly organized and structured, and focused exclusively on attaining equal rights for gay and lesbian people. The businessman Al Goldstein agreed to invest $25,000 in the GAA's new venture, a newspaper written by, and aimed at, the country's gay community. It was launched in December 1969 as GAY, and it soon gained a readership of 25,000. Martello contributed a regular column known as "The Gay Witch", reaching his widest audience to date, also authoring a variety of other articles that appeared in it.
Inspired by his victory over the Parks Department, Martello founded an organization devoted to campaigning for the religious rights of Witches, the Witches Anti-Defamation League (WADL), which would eventually be renamed the Alternative Religions Education Network (AREN). For WADL, he authored an essay titled "The Witch Manifesto", likely influenced by Carl Wittman's "Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto" (1970), which demanded that the Roman Catholic Church face a tribunal for crimes committed against accused witches in the Early Modern period and that they pay reparations to the modern Witchcraft community for those actions. During this decade he authored a column for Gnostica magazine which was titled "Wicca Basket", a pun on the phonetic similarity between "Wicca" and "wicker".
In 1971, a young gay Wiccan named Eddie Buczynski contacted Martello, and requested initiation. Due to Buczynski's inexperience in the religion, Martello turned him down, although developed a friendship with him. Martello introduced Buczynski both to other covens who might initiate him, and to Herman Slater, who would become his long-time partner. Slater was ill with various medical complications, and on one occasion was rehabilitating at the New York University Medical Center when Martello performed a healing ritual on him with the assistance of Buczynski. Martello would come to be known as a regular at The Warlock Shop, an occult store opened by Slater in New York. Through The WICA Newsletter, Martello had met Lady Gwen Thompson, the founder of the New England Covens of Traditionalist Witches (NECTW), and decided to introduce Buczynski to her, resulting in Buczynski's initiation into the tradition in Spring 1972. Martello and Thompson later fell out, with some unconfirmed accounts claiming that it was because he lent her money and she did not pay him back. In October 1972, Buczynski founded his own tradition of Wicca, termed Welsh Traditionalist Witchcraft, with Martello becoming an early initiate and taking on the name of "Nemesis" within that tradition. In turn, Martello welcomed Buczynski into his La Vecchia tradition, and initiated him through its three degree system.
In November 1972, Martello lectured at the first Friends of the Craft conference, held at New York's First Unitarian Church. In April 1973, he moved to England for six months, where he was initiated and trained in the three degrees of Gardnerian Wicca by the Sheffield coven run by Patricia Crowther and her husband Arnold Crowther. He continued to encourage acceptance of homosexuality within the Pagan and Witchcraft community, authoring an article titled "The Gay Pagan" for Green Egg magazine. He expressed the view that homophobic Wiccans were "sexually insecure" and that they viewed the religion simply as "a ritual means of fornication". He was also among the prominent male Pagans to endorse feminist and female-only variants of Wicca, such as the Dianic Wicca promoted by Zsuzsanna Budapest.
Although aware that historians had criticized the witch-cult hypothesis adapted by Margaret Murray, Martello stood by her evidence, believing that the cult had been passed through oral tradition and thus evaded appearing in the textual sources studied by historians. Martello thought it unimportant that many Wiccans had lied about the origins of their beliefs, being quoted by Pagan journalist Margot Adler in her book Drawing Down the Moon as having stated
Let's assume that many people lied about their lineage. Let's further assume that there are no covens on the current scene that have any historical basis. The fact remains: they do exist now. And they can claim a spiritual lineage going back thousands of years. All of our pre-Judeo-Christian or Moslem ancestors were Pagans!
| 1961 | Your Pen Personality | Self-published |
| 1964 | It's in the Cards: The Atomic-Age Approach to Card Reading Using Psychological and Parapsychological Principles | Key Publications |
| 1966 | It's in the Stars: A Sensible Approach to and a Psychological Evaluation of Astrology in this "Age of Enlightenment" | Key Publications |
| 1966 | How to Prevent Psychic Blackmail: The Philosophy of Psychoselfism | S. Weiser |
| 1969 | Weird Ways of Witchcraft | HC Publishers |
| 1969 | Hidden World of Hypnotism: How to Hypnotize | HC Publishers |
| 1971 | Curses in Verses: Spelltime in Rhyme | Hero Press |
| 1972 | Black Magic, Satanism, Voodoo | Castle Books |
| 1972 | Understanding the Tarot | Castle Books |
| 1973 | Witchcraft: The Old Religion | University Books |
| 1990 | Reading the Tarot: Understanding the Cards of Destiny | Perigee Trade |
|
|
