Gerald Gardner:
The Man, the Myth & the Magick
By M. A. Howard
Part Three
While living in Bournemouth in Hampshire in 1952 a young student of the occult called Doreen Valiente read an article in Illustrated magazine about modern witchcraft in Britain. This articles provides a fascinating snapshot of witchcraft in the late 1 940s and early 1950s. It mentions groups of witches in Liverpool, Barnet and Cumberland. It also says a coven of three men and four women still met near Meon Hill in Warwickshire, site of the Charles Walton `ritual murder' in 1945. The article also describes an eye-witness account of a ritual held at the Rollright Stones on May 12 1949 (Old May Eve and a full moon) observed by hidden witnesses. Five cloaked figures were seen dancing back to back widdershins around the King Stone led by a man in a horned mask.
The article also described the `Southern Coven of British Witches', who worshipped a Horned God of death and a Goddess of fertility. They told the reporter they based their rituals on `instructions laid down from their Elders and eked out with rituals from The Clavicule [Key] of Solomon'. The 1940 Lammas ritual in the New Forest to stop Hitler was also mentioned. It involved seventeen men and women, some of whom, the article says, were air-raid wardens who because of their expertise tended the fire in accordance with the black-out regulations. The article quotes other members of the coven who told of family traditions of a similar ritual being performed to stop the French invading during the Napoleonic Wars.
According to the article: `Hereditary witches, who have the lore handed down to them, form a proportion of the coven, whose average ages are rather high. They make up the members by inviting certain well-known enthusiasts to join them. These have made a wider study than the locals and constitute the intellectual wing of the coven.' This seems to confirm the stories from various other sources that the membership of the New Forest coven was made up of local country folk and incomers who were middle-class occultists. This is also confirmed in the Jack Bracelin/Idries Shah biography of Gardner, which states that some of his fellow Co-Masons in the Crotona Fellowship in Christchurch `had discovered an old coven' in the New Forest which they had joined and had remained there because of it. In Gardner's own words: `I found that Old Dorothy [Clutterbuck], and some like her, [i.e. Co-Masons], plus a number of New Forest people, had kept the light [of witchcraft] shining...' (1960:166).
The Illustrated article also stated that modern covens were led by women officers. The reason given for this was that there had been a shift of emphasis towards the `life-goddess' from `the Lord of Death'. Again this comment seems to confirm claims that the original New Forest coven founded in the 1920s laid more emphasis on the Horned God (see Liddell 1994:158). This may have been because it was following a `traditional' line, or because the newcomers had been influenced by Dr. Margaret Murray's theories about historical witchcraft.
Cecil Williamson, founder of the witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man in 1950, was also prominently featured in the article. Doreen Valiente wrote to him and asked to be put in touch with the `Southern Coven'. Williamson passed her letter on to Gardner. In his reply Gardner said he had a friend who lived at Christchurch, a town next to Bournemouth, and he asked Valiente if she would like to meet her. In the late autumn of 1952 Valiente was invited for afternoon tea at the home of Dafo (Mrs. Woodford-Grimes), a private music teacher who had been the Maiden of the New Forest coven. Gardner was also present. Dafo told Valiente that because of ill health and social reasons she no longer took a prominent role in the Craft.
Gardner lent Valiente a copy of his historical novel High Magic's Aid (1949). He said that it would tell her much about the witch cult (sic) and how it had been misrepresented over the centuries. Valiente later realized that he gave this book to all prospective initiates to read as a test. If they were shocked by the descriptions in it of ritual nudity, flagellation and the Craft as a `phallic religion' then he would proceed no further. (Valiente 1989:39). This rather contradicts newspaper claims that Gardner enticed young people into sexual rites. Only consenting adults were initiated into his covens and they knew what to expect before initiation.
Having apparently passed the test, Valiente was initiated by Gardner at midsummer 1953. The ceremony took place at Dafo's house in Christchurch. Valiente has evocatively described the scene: `I can seem to see him now standing by our improvised altar in that candle-lit room. He was tall, stark naked, with wild white hair, a sun-tanned body and arms which had tattoos and a heavy bronze bracelet. In one hand he brandished `Old Dorothy's' sword, while in the other he held the handwritten Book of Shadows, as he read the ritual by which I was finally made a priestess and witch.' (Valiente 1989:47).
The next day the three witches attended the Druidic midsummer solstice ceremony at Stonehenge. Gardner had traveled down from the Isle of Man with the sword that had belonged to Dorothy Clutterbuck and which, apparently, was traditionally used by the Druid Order each summer for their solstice ritual. Gardner was certainly a member of the Druid Order and, it is rumored, Old Dorothy had also belonged.
As time passed Valiente became rather disconcerted when she recognized material in the rites of Wicca from the published works of Aleister Crowley and others. When she challenged Gardner about this he told her that the rites he had received from the old coven in the New Forest had been fragmentary. He had therefore been forced to add other material, including extracts from Crowley's works, which `breathed the very spirit of paganism' (Valiente 1989:57). Valiente accepted this explanation and she believed that the fragments of the `ancient rituals' had been in the hands of the elderly members of the coven. She believed that Gardner, with his magical and occult knowledge, had pieced these together and added other material to make them workable.
Gardner had also told her that he held a charter from Crowley to found a lodge of the OTO (Ordo Templis Orientis) and he was therefore entitled to use extracts from the Great Beast's works. Valiente however did not feel that some of Crowley's material fitted and she did a great service to modern Wicca by helping to rewrite the Book of Shadows to tone down the Crowleyanity. In the process she produced a poetic version of The Charge of the Goddess and new rituals for Yule, the summer solstice and the spring equinox.
Bill Love in an article published in 1988 by Prediction gives an interesting sidelight on Gardner’s comments. Love first contacted the Craft as a university student in Scotland in 1942. A friendship with another student led him to believe that witchcraft was still being practised in Scotland in the 1940s as a survival of the pagan old Religion. After his demob from the RAF at the end of the war, Love was initiated into an Essex coven that had been practising before the war. Subsequently he also met a woman who was in another coven that met in a village outside Rye in East Sussex. Although there was no direct contact between the two covens, he found they shared the same organization and identical rites.
In 1955 Love met Gerald Gardner, and was surprised to find out that the version of the Craft he was advocating was very different from the practices and beliefs of the covens in Essex and Sussex. Love says: ` But Gardner certainly appeared to have knowledge of the rites and practices of the coven to which I belonged and, from the information I gleaned from him, I formed the opinion that the New Forest coven into which he had been initiated was far more akin to my own in their rites then to the system he was now practicing.'
In 1954 Rider & Co-published Gardner's first non-fiction book on the Craft, Witchcraft Today. This had an introduction by Dr. Margaret Murray that lent it some academic authority, even if she was regarded by many other academics as an eccentric. Gardner and Murray had met as fellow members of the Folklore Society before the war. Although she had written the introduction, in private Murray called Gardner `a dangerous fool' (Personal communication from Cecil Williamson). Despite this Murray refers to Gardner's claim that he had found groups (sic) of people allegedly still practicing the same rites as the medieval witches. She notes his claim that their rituals were not revivals copied out of books but a true survival.
The book itself is a typical scissors-and-paste job and overall a bit of a hotchpotch, even though it was supposed to have been heavily edited by the druid Ross Nichols. For a book that claims to be the authentic voice of a survival of medieval witchcraft it contains an awful lot of speculation about the possible origins of the Craft in the last two hundred years! It is also heavily influenced by Murray's own theories about Stone Age fertility cults, Robin Hood and the Little People. However, Gardner's views on the Goddess are uniquely his own, and are a departure from the Murrayite version of historical witchcraft where the primary object of worship is the Horned God.
Chapter Four in particular is interesting for a number of reasons. It repeats the story that Crowley had been a witch as a young man. Gardner says: `The only man I can think of who could have invented them [the witch rites] was Aleister Crowley. When I met him he was most interested to know I was a member and said he had been inside when he was very young, but would not say whether he had written anything or not' (1954:46)
Gardner then goes on to mention Rudyard Kipling, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Sir Francis Dashwood, of the so-called Hellfire Club, as other possible originators of witchcraft rites. The more cynical have seen this as an attempt to ward off accusations of plagiarism. Others, perhaps more kindly, have identified coded references to revivals of witchcraft and classical paganism dating from the early 1 800s to before the last war. Neither explanation, nor Gardner's speculative musings, offers any evidence to support `an unbroken tradition of witchcraft dating back to the Stone Age' - or even the Middle Ages as the book claims.
Like so many others who claimed ancient roots, Gardner could be economical with the truth when it suited his purpose. For instance when describing the Yule ritual on pages 26 and 27 of Witchcraft Today, he tells his readers that he has seen a very interesting winter solstice ritual called The Cauldron of Regeneration and the Dance of the Wheel. This involved lighting torches at a blazing cauldron and then dancing around it. So far so good. He then says: The chant I heard was as follows...' and he proceeds to quote from the Book of Shadows. It is unlikely however that Gardner ever heard this chant in the context of an age-old ritual passed down to him from his parent coven or earlier sources as is claimed in the book. In fact Doreen Valiente wrote the words for this Yule ritual at Gardner's request one midwinter afternoon in the 1950s! He told her he had the broad outlines of a Yule ritual allegedly used by New Forest. Valiente spent several hours in his library looking for inspiration and then wrote the words using material from a collection of Celtic Christian hymns collected by the 19th century Scottish folklorist Alexander Carmichael (1940).
During the 1 950s Gardner consolidated his version of witchcraft. By the end of the decade the early concept of letting neophytes wait a year and a day for initiation had been abandoned due to Gardner's impatience with the slow growth of Wicca. People were initiated in a few months after their first meeting with Gardner. In one instance he allegedly took a new female enquirer through all three degrees of initiation in a month, and then installed her as a High Priestess. When challenged Gardner responded that it was essential the Craft survived and was passed on to a new generation. It was evident he felt his own time was running out as he was in his seventies by then and not in the best of health.
Valiente has said that Gardner believed a call should be sent out to young people who were witches at heart and who had perhaps been in the Craft in earlier lives so that it should survive. Considering the fact that there is evidence that there were pre-Gardnerian witches around in the 1940s and 1950s, Gardner's worries about the imminent extinction of the Craft seem a bit over-heated. It is more likely that, as an elderly man, Gardner was desperately seeking to promote his own version of the Craft so that it survived his death and was established as a popular neo-pagan religion.
At the same time Gardner was defending himself from media attacks. In 1955 a Sunday newspaper had published a series of articles linking witchcraft with Satanism (nothing changes!). Gardner became involved when a reporter interviewed him and followed it up with a story describing Gardner as `a whitewasher of witchcraft' who was luring young people into covens practicing sexual rites while claiming in public it was all harmless fun.
According to Valiente, there was serious fear among the witches that the police might get involved. Rumours were flying about concerning telephone taps and intercepted mail and Gardner considered fleeing abroad until things calmed down. As it was there was no police investigation of Wicca, but in 1956 more sensational stories appeared in the papers linking the witchcraft revival with alleged voodoo cults in the West Midlands and the unsolved murder of Charles Walton ten years or so before. Valiente says she spent much of that year investigating and debunking these allegations. Her research was published in Gardner's second non-fiction book, The Meaning of Witchcraft, published in 1959.
Unfortunately, coinciding with all this negative publicity, two rival factions had formed within Gardner's coven at Brickett Wood in Hertfordshire. Some of the group, led by Jack Bracelin and his girl friend Amanda, supported Gardner in the publicizing of Wicca and attracting new blood. The others, including Doreen Valiente, were strongly opposed. They were worried about what might be revealed publicly and they drew up a set of `Rules for the Craft'. The main purpose of these was to `ensure secrecy to which we had been solemnly sworn when we were initiated...' (Valiente 1989:69).
After some delay, Gardner responded by claiming that there was no need of any `Rules' because a set of `Laws for the Craft' already existed and he sent copy of these to the anti-publicity faction. The sudden appearance of these `Laws' was apparently a bit of a surprise to the rebels and they wrote back to Gardner on the Isle of Man and openly accused him of inventing them. In fact it has been rumoured that they had been concocted by Gardner and Bracelin. Recently other sources have claimed that 18th and 19th century versions of the Craft Laws exist, but whether these are similar to those Gardner produced (or even genuine) is at present unknown. A forthcoming book promises to reveal all.
Things came to a head when Gardner allowed himself to be photographed for a popular magazine. He was shown sitting cross-legged in a magickal circle waving a sword at an effigy described as `a bat winged demon'. The anti-publicity faction had had enough and in the summer of 1957 the Brickett Wood split in two. Those who left to form their own group still believed Gardner had found an old coven in the New Forest, but, in Valiente's words, they had had enough of `the gospel according to St. Gerald'. In the 1960s Valiente became a member of the famous group led by the hereditary magister Robert Cochrane. After Cochrane's death in 1966 several prominent Gardnerians were involved in The Regency, a pagan group based on his teachings, and of the Witchcraft Research Association, which attempted to bring together the Gardnerians and other witches. It collapsed in a flood of "bitchcraft and Bicca" between the Gardnerians and those who claimed a pre-Gardnerian heritage.
The rebels misgivings about publicity were justified in 1957 when The Sunday People printed an article on a `repulsive pagan sect' they had found in North London. It included a photograph of Bracelin, Amanda and others sitting skyclad around an altar in a house in Finchley. The reporter said he had been invited to attend the circle and witness the rites. The location of the `witches; cottage' was also published by the same paper in 1959, along with allegations that it was the site of rituals to `the gods of fertility' involving nudity and `the worship of sex'. All this was pretty shocking in the Fifties and Valiente says Amanda lost her job when reporters besieged her office. Gardner fled to the Channel Islands to escape the publicity and distances himself from the whole episode in The Meaning of Witchcraft. Jack Bracelin later abandoned Wicca and converted to Christianity before his death in the 1980s.
The next Hallowe'en three carloads of reporters turned up at the Brickett Wood covenstead looking for witches with a mobile searchlight mounted on a lorry. Eventually the police were called and the frustrated journos were told to leave. Modern Wicca was well and truly out of the broom closet and exposed to the harsh light of publicity, but worse was to come.
Part Four
In 1960 Gardner's wife Donna Rosedale, a clergyman's daughter and an ex-nursing sister, died after a period of ill health. Donna has been described as "one of the most charming people anyone would wish to know" (personal communication from Cecil Williamson). She supported her husband in his Craftwork, although she was never initiated. They have been described as a devoted couple, but it has also said that she was more of a mother than a wife to Gardner. She certainty closed a blind eye to his extra-marital sexual activities.
In the same year Octagon Press published Jack Bracelin’s biography of Gerald Gardner, (Witch). Bracelin had been the high priest of the Brickett Wood coven in Hertfordshire while Gardner had virtually retired to the Isle of Man. Although Bracelin's name was on the cover it is said it had been ghost-written by the Sufi master Sayed Idries Shah (1924-1996). During the 1950s Shah had been Gardner's secretary at the museum on the Isle of Man. He had allegedly been told by his `inner plane' contacts that Wicca was destined to be the religion of the Aquarian Age, but he found it hard to believe. (Washinton 1993).
Shah was the author of several books on Sufism, ceremonial magick and secret societies written under his own name and the nom-de-plume of `Arkon Darual'. In them he promoted the theory that medieval European witchcraft had been influenced by Sufi beliefs and Arabic practices during the period when the Moors occupied Spain and the crusaders invaded the Middle East. Shah believed that words like `athame' and `sabbat' were derived from Arabic and that the ecstatic circle dances of the medieval witches had originated with the Sufi dervishes. (Shah 1964 and Daraul 1961).
The Sufi writer also recognized that in the 18th century and after `various attempts were made to revive witch practices'. He said: ` These can be identified quite easily as bogus because ignorance of the important Oriental elements in the cult causes errors of interpretation and ritual which point to fabrication of the materials' (Darual 1961:158). Bogus or not, these revived `witch practices', mixed with elements of folk magick, theosophical occultism, neo-druidism, Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism provided the basis for a considerable amount of what is today called `traditional witchcraft'.
These ideas were not original. A similar theory had been put forward by the Egyptian occultist Rollo Ahmed in the 1930s. Ahmed ran his own magical group in Brighton in the 1950s and previously had been a member of the Hermes lodge of the Golden Dawn. He was also an occult advisor to the thriller writer Dennis Wheatley for his pre-war novel The Devil Rides Out, and he knew of the existence of the Crotona Fellowship and the New Forest coven. Ahmed says: ` Another effect of the Crusades was the mingling of Eastern and Western ideas and beliefs; men who had been prisoners of the Saracens in particular, bringing back with them the theories and practices of Oriental magic, upon which much of the current witchcraft came to be based.' (Ahmed 1936). Theories about the African influence on witchcraft also feature strongly in the oral legends of the Pickingill Craft (see Liddell 1994) and the Faeri tradition founded by Victor Andersen in the States in the 1940s (Andersen 1994).
In January 1961 Shah took Gardner to visit Robert Graves at the poet's home on Majorca. Shah had previously corresponded with the author of The White Goddess and told him he was carrying out experiments with British witches involving the `sacred mushroom'. Graves was very interested in the properties of hallucinogenic fungi and as a result of this correspondence Gardner and Shah spent several days in intense discussion at Graves' villa. In fact Shah and Graves became close friends.
In the early Sixties Gardner may have had, or may not have had, a brief contact with the founder of Alexandrian Wicca, Alex Sanders (1926-1988). Sanders attracted some sensational publicity in the 1970s with his claims to be `King of the Witches' and his almost casual treatment of the Craft as a branch of show business. To his credit he attracted many young people into his coven and revitalized modern Wicca. Unfortunately his claims to be a hereditary witch who was initiated by his Welsh grandmother in the 1930s are less to his credit. In 1961 he wrote to the High Priestess of the Gardnerian coven in Sheffield, Yorkshire, Patricia Crowther, from an address in Manchester. He had seen her on a television programme and said he had written because he had always wanted to be a witch. Unfortunately up until then he had not found anybody who could grant his wish.
In his letter Sanders said that his grandmother had spent her childhood in Wales and had told him her mother had been a well-known witch in the Snowdonia area. This information had sparked his interest in the occult and also as a child he had experienced instances of the Second Sight. In the 1 950s he had also dabbled in Spiritualism and ceremonial magick. After three meetings with Crowther and the other members of the coven he was rejected for initiation. They questioned his mental attitude and concluded that he was completely confused in his understanding of what the Craft was. This rejection did not prevent Sanders from later falsely claiming to be a member of the coven at his public lectures.
Sometime in 1961, Sanders did receive a first-degree initiation into Gardnerian Wicca from a small coven in Manchester. This was run by an ex-member of the Sheffield coven called Pat Kopanski, who had been the English wife of a Polish ex-servicemen. This group did not last long and soon broke up. It was briefly mentioned in one of the earliest News of the World stories about Sanders. Pat Kopanski is quoted as saying it was "theatrical" and a "waste of time" and that it broke up after one of its members emigrated to Australia. She was Sylvia Tatham, who later moved to New Zealand and became the handfasted wife of `Lugh' (E.W.Liddell). Tatham also received a Gardnerian initiation from Scotty and Monique Wilson on the Isle of Man. Before she left Sanders appointed her as his `High Priestess for Australia". Another member of this interesting little coven in Manchester became a well-known Cabbalistic magician.
At a talk given to the Pagan Conference in November 1996 Patricia Crowther told the audience that Pat Kopanski was a new member of her coven and was only first-degree. Kopanski had met Sanders on the last of his visits to the Sheffield covenstead and had passed her telephone number to him. According to Crowther, as Kopanski was herself a newcomer to the Craft and only first-degree she had no authority to initiate anyone. Doreen Valiente (1989) claims that Sanders also visited Gardner on the Isle of Man and was allowed to copy his Book of Shadows. This has been challenged by others, including Crowther, who were closer to the Old Man at the time. Another version is that Sanders obtained his BOS from the Wilsons. However, it seems more probable that he copied the BOS from another member of the Kopanski coven. Kelly (1991:178) says there is a letter in the Gardner collection of the Church of Wicca in Toronto from Kopanski giving the date and details of Sander's initiation.
When Sanders moved from Manchester down to London in 1967 he expanded on his Welsh links. He claimed to be a descendant of the rebel Welsh prince Owain Gyndwr and that his Welsh grandmother. Mary Bibby, had initiated him into the Craft as a young boy in 1933. He also claimed that he had been initiated into the Egyptian Mysteries as a teenager by Aleister Crowley in a sex rite performed in the Great Beast's flat in Museum Street, London WC. As the Alexandrian BOS is almost identical to the one revised by Gardner and Valiente in the mid-l 950s it seems very unlikely that he was given it by his Welsh granny twenty years before.!
Following Gardner's death from a heart attack during a Mediterranean cruise to Lebanon in February 1964 it is amazing that his version of modern witchcraft survived the events that followed. In fact his original Brickett Wood coven still survives in North London and in 1984 it had thirteen members. Four of them had been initiated during Gardner's lifetime and in the 1980s the coven included a computer consultant, artist, teacher, university lectuerer and an engineer in the music industry. The pentacle and Goddess figurine (Minoan in origin) still used by the coven had originally been owned by Gardner (Luhrmann 1989).
Gardner's fears that Wicca would die out were to be unfounded. In 1962 Gardnerian Wicca was exported to the USA by Rosemary and Raymond Buckland, who had been initiated by the Wilsons, and a year earlier a version of it had arrived in Australia. In 1961 an initiate from Brickett Wood called Anton Miles established a coven in Sydney. This group practised skyclad rituals and worshipped Diana and Pan. Handfastings were held where the couple jumped a broomstick and Miles told reporters that the aim of the coven was to bring its members in harmony with nature. (Valiente 1973:29).
Information first coming into public in the 1980s has claimed that there was a second origin for Gardnerian Wicca in the early Sixties apart from the Bucklands. According to the New Wiccan Church in California, a form of Gardnerian Wicca arrived in the Joaquin Valley on the West Coast via a British woman known by the Craft name of Queen Morrigan. She allegedly settled in the Stockton, California area in 1960-62 and established what is now known as Central Valley Wicca. This has been described as `a fusion between English and French magisterial traditions and early Gardnerism' and is today composed of several Orders or traditions known as Silver Crescent, Majestic and Kingstone. CVW has been described as `proto-Gardnerian Craft' possibly originating from the New Forest tradition or people associated with it. The New Wiccan Church see Gardner as a moderniser and reformer of English Traditional Craft who produced a modernised version of witchcraft with a popular appeal. (International Red Garters Vol # 19 Nos 1-3)
With the publication of Gardner's will in 1964 there was an outbreak of controversy among his followers. He left 25,000 pounds (about 250,000 pounds by today's values) together with the Witches Mill and `all my equipment for making magic' to Lady Olwen (Monique `Monica' Wilson). She also inherited the copyright of his books. His kilt and other Highland regalia, including his grandfather's sword and dirk, were left to his sister-in-law.
At the time the will was published, Monique Wilson and her husband Campbell (Scotty) were living in a pre-fab in New Road, Perth, Scotland. She told reporters she was a hereditary witch whose parents `had the power'. In fact she had been initiated by Gardner only a few years earlier. She had met and married her husband, an ex RAF bomber pilot, in Hong Kong after the war. He still wore his RAF `wings' badge on his jacket lapel and a rather imaginative and over-excited reporter once described it as a `flying penis fertility symbol'! The Wilsons had returned to Britain in 1954 and she was initiated in 1961.
The newspapers also reported that Monique Wilson had inherited the title `Queen of the Witches' along with the museum. If the news stories can be believed, this caused outrage among those female witches who had only received small amounts of money in Gardner's will or had been ignored altogether. One of these ex-High Priestesses, Eleanor Bone, the matron of a rest home for the elderly in Tooting, south London, told the Daily Mirror rather ambiguously that "There is no such thing as the Queen of the Witches. If there were, we other witches would have to approve the person appointed."
The criticism and foreboding that followed the Wilsons inheritance was fully justified in 1973 when they sold the collection of exhibits to the Ripley `Believe it or Not' company in Canada for 120,000 pounds. The 10,000 items from the collection were shipped to the States to create a Museum of Witchcraft and Black Magic at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. They included 3000 books from Gardner's library and his silver chalice, ivory wand and personal altar. It has been said that the Wilsons were reluctant to sell but, according to the Ripley organization, Monique was a sick woman and they needed the money to retire to Spain. (Douglas 1974). They subsequently opened a cafe on the tourist coast where Monique Wilson later died of a heart attack.
Unfortunately with commercial pressures the collection from the Witches Mill did not stay intact for long. In the late 1 970s when the San Francisco museum closed items from the collection began to appear for sale in American occult magazines. One advertisement was placed by the A & B Trading Company in Florida. Other items owned by Gardner turned up for sale from private buyers and even in a tourist gift shop in Augusta, Florida. Most of Gardner's correspondence was purchased in 1987 by the Wiccan Church of Canada. This archive is open by appointment to Gardnerian initiates only at the Church's H.Q. in Toronto.
If the will and the sale of the museum collection was not a bodyblow to the Gardnerians, only a few months after Gardner's death a version of his Book of Shadows was privately published. This was the work of a psychologist and rival witch called Charles Cardell who used the classical nom-de-plume `Rex Nemorensis' . Cardell and his sister, Mary, ran a small mail-order company called Dumblecott Productions from their home near Gatwick Airport in Surrey, which sold perfumes, oils, amulets, talismans and charms. Cardell also had consulting rooms in Queen's Gate, London which included a temple. The Cardells also had their own robed coven which met in woodland on their property. They claimed to follow an old tradition of witchcraft handed down to them by their mother. Because of this they regarded Gardner as a fraud who should be exposed.
The story goes that the Cardells persuaded a young woman to befriend the aged and ailing Gardner and ask for initiation. His coven was not interested in her, but Gardner was so infatuated that he gave her a private initiation at his London flat. This does not seem to have been uncommon in Gardner's later years. She then copied the BOS and passed it to Cardell. This was in 1957 and he waited until the Old Man was dead before publishing it. In common with Aidan Kelly in the 1990s, the Cardells did not gain much praise or public credence for exposing Wicca as a modern made-up religion. Shortly afterwards they sued the London Evening News for libel after it published an account of one of their woodland rituals. In court it was suggested that Charles and Mary Cardell were in fact not brother and sister at all. They lost the case and were forced to pay the legal costs which bankrupted them. Shortly afterwards Charles Cardell was badly injured in a road accident.
Since the Cardell book we have had Aidan Kelly's imaginative and quasi-academic account of how the Gardnerian BOS is supposed to have been created. (Kelly 1991). This included references to the mysterious manuscript known as Ye Bok of Ye Arte Magickal, a grimoire compiled by Gardner and discovered hidden in the Witches Mill by a Ripley representative before it was shipped to the States (Kelly 1984). This document appears at face value to be proto-BOS, possibly compiled around 1948 or earlier. Amado Crowley (a.k.a. Andrew Standish), who claims to be one of Aleister Crowley illegitimate sons, has claimed that it was compiled by his father and Gardner in 1940. Although dogmatic claims have been made about its providence and significance nobody is really sure when this Ms was written or what it really represents.
Over the last twenty years there have been many claims made about the origins of the New Forest coven, its alleged links with the Pickingill Craft and Crowley. Recently Amado Crowley has emerged from the shadows claiming Gardner invented `Old Dorothy' Clutterbuck. He says that his father borrowed the name `Old Mother Clutterbuck' from a pantomime dame and used it as a code name when he was recruited for Operation Mistletoe by MIS and the Naval Intelligence Department in 1941 to perform a ritual to lure Rudolf Hess to Britain. As we know now from Doreen Valiente's research, Dorothy Clutterbuck did exist and was a real person. Amado also claims to have been present when Gardner commissioned Crowley to write the rituals of Wicca at `a guinea a page'. In 1995 speculative revelations emerged attempting to link the origins of modern witchcraft with the `back to nature' movement of the 1920s and neopagan boy scouts such as the Order of Woodland Chilvary and the Woodcraft Folk. The web of speculation - and sometimes fantasy - spreads daily.
As even this brief examination of the life of Gerald Gardner has shown, he was no saint or messiah and even as a guru he left a lot to be desired. We have tried to provide a balanced view within the confines of the information currently available to us. What has emerged has been a complex and enigmatic man. He has been criticized as a showman with a large ego and a flair for publicity who could be economical with the truth. Others have spoken of his generosity of spirit, his gentle nature, his sense of humour and kindness. He has been described as an archetypal English gentleman - and as a `dirty old man' that liked to be tied up and whipped. On the magickal level he was an accomplished magus with `the elemental contacts' who could `raise the power'.
In retrospect, Gardner's `crime' of re-inventing witchcraft for the modern age using material from diverse sources pales into insignificance when compared with the eclectic pick n' mix approach to neopaganism today and its creative spirituality often based on historical fantasy. What is important is not that Gardner invented, or more kindly created, his own version of witchcraft , but the impact that invention or creation has had since the event and whether it works in a spiritual context or not. Gardner did not invent modern witchcraft per se, but he was responsible for what is today its most successful tradition. Over thirty years after his death it is still bringing spiritual comfort to thousands of people worldwide. Surely that is Gardner's greatest legacy, and it is the one he should be remembered for today.
Mike Howard
References:
Part Three
Witchcraft in Britain by Allen Andrews in Illustrated (September 27 1952), Gerald Gardner: Witch
Jack Bracelin (Octagon Press 1960), The Pickingill Papers E.W. Liddell with M.A.Howard (Capall Bann 1994), The Rebirth of Witchcraft and The ABC of Witchcraft Doreen Valiente (Robert Hale 1989 and 1973), Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft Gerald Gardner (Rider & Co 1954 and Aquarian Press 1959), Witchcraft Now by Bill Love in Prediction (n.d.), The Sun Dances: Prayers & Blessings from the Gaelic Alexander Carmichael (1940 Floris Books edition 1977), and The Witchcraft Interviews -Doreen Valiente & Alex Sanders Kevin & Ingrid Carlyon (1989).
References
Part Four
Gerald Gardner: Witch Jack Bracelin (Octagon Press 1961), Secret Societies Arkon Daurual (Frederick Muller 1961), The Sufis Idries Shah (Octagon Press 1964), The Black Art Rollo Ahmed (John Long 1936).
The Pickingill Papers, EWLiddell with Michael Howard (Capall Bann 1994), Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition Cora Andersen (privately printed 1994), Blavatsky and the Baboon. Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru Peter Washington (Secker & Warburg 1993), Robert Graves & the White Goddess 1940-1985 Richard Perceval Graves (Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1995) `ABC of Witchcraft, Doreen Valiente (Robert Hale 1989), King of the Witches: the World of Alex Sanders June Johns (Pan 1971) ,Maxine: the Witch Queen by Maxine Sanders (Star Book s 1976), World News Digest by Alfred Douglas in Prediction (January 1974), Witch Rex Nemorensis (privately printed 1964), The Secrets of Aleister Crowley Amado Crowley (Diamond Press 1991), Crafting the Art of Magic Aidan kelly (Llewellyn USA 1991), Inventing Witchcraft: the Gardnerian Paper Trail by Aidan Kelly in Iron Mountain (Summer 1984), and Persuasions of the Witch ~ Craft: Ritual Magic and Witchcraft in Presentday England Tanya Luhrmann (Blackwell 1989). | 
