Modern Wicca

by Michael Howard

  At the time that Gardner claimed he received his doctorate in Singapore, he was contributing articles to the Malayan edition of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and in 1936 his influential book Kris and Other Malay Weapons was published. Doreen Valiente suggested that the publisher might not have wanted to take the book because Gardner did not have a suitable academic background. Therefore he invented the Singapore doctorate to give himself some local credibility (letter from DV to Dr. Alan Greenfield, November 29, 1993, in the Museum of Witchcraft archive at Boscastle, Cornwall).

  Because of Gardner’s ongoing health problems, Com persuaded his parents that short trips to foreign climates would be beneficial for their young son. From 1888 to 1898, the nurse and her charge took a series of holidays together in Nice, the Canary Islands, Madeira, and Accra in West Africa. It was in Madeira that Com met David Elkington, a young man who was en route to South Africa. Elkington fell in love with the Irish nurse and this was to change both her life and Gerald Gardner’s. The young man asked Com to marry him and live on a tea plantation in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) that he owned. Somehow Com persuaded Gardner’s parents that a tropical climate would be a cure for his asthma. Elkington offered him a job on the plantation and in 1900 the three of them moved to the tea estate on the island. Interestingly enough, it has been claimed that in that year the English occultists Allan Bennett and Aleister Crowley were also staying at a bungalow nearby. In 1902, Gardner and Elkington had a row and he took a new job on a rubber plantation. He also joined the local militia known as the Planter’s Rifle Corp, which probably triggered his lifelong interest in weaponry.

  The biography of Gerald Gardner, written by the Sufi master Idries Shah, but credited to Jack Bracelin, states that Gardner became a Freemason while he was working in Ceylon (1960: 32–33). The date given is 1908, but according to the archives of the Grand Lodge at Freemasons’ Hall in London, he was initiated into the first degree as an Entered Apprentice in the Sphinx Lodge in Colombo on May 23, 1910. He was then raised to the second degree on June 20, 1910, and became a Master Mason a week later on June 27. According to the lodge’s records, he resigned shortly afterwards.

  When Gardner met Aleister Crowley in 1947, he told him that he held the high degree of a Royal Arch Mason. It is also possible that he was also a Co-Mason and the Bracelin biography says he “had a soft spot for the [Masonic] Craft, and nowadays feels that there are close similarities in the craft of the Witches; in fact he goes so far as to say that Witchcraft is the original lodge” (Ibid., 33). Of course Gardner’s critics merely said that he was influenced by Freemasonry when he created the three degrees of initiation into Wicca.

  In 1908, Gardner answered an advertisement in a local newspaper seeking planters to work in Borneo. He instantly became interested in the local fauna and flora and also managed to get acquainted with a local tribe of headhunters called the Dyaks who usually shunned Europeans. He was particularly interested in their religious beliefs, and was given the rare privilege (for a white man) to be allowed to attend some of their rituals. Gardner became friendly with the family of one of the tribe’s female mediums, and the pawong, or witch-doctor to whom she was related. We can surmise that this was Gardner’s first encounter with the supernatural and the spirit world. Through his experiences with the Dyaks, he said he had “learned to adopt their belief in the naturalness of the occult” (Ibid., 49).

  Gardner left Borneo in 1911 and traveled to Singapore to catch a boat to Ceylon, where he was hoping to find suitable work. Instead he was offered a new position on a rubber plantation in central Malaya. There he met an American called Cornwall, who was responsible for building railway lines and factories in the jungle. Cornwall had lived in the country for many years and had gone native. He wore the ethnic costume, had converted to Islam, and married several Malay women. Even more interesting, as far as Gardner was concerned, the American knew a lot about the local magical practices and voodoo. Gardner told him the story about his witch grandfather, and they spent long evenings discussing the native religious beliefs and the practice of the occult in Europe and the United States.

  In the next few years Gardner worked on several rubber plantations before he returned to England on leave in 1916. He wanted to join the Army fighting in France but failed the physical test. This was partly due to his asthma and also because he had suffered from blackwater fever and malaria while in Malaya. Instead he became an orderly in a hospital in Liverpool where he helped to treat survivors of the Battle of the Somme. At the end of World War I in 1918, Gardner went back to Malaya, but discovered that in his absence the price of rubber had fallen. When he returned in 1920, after another period of leave, he was made redundant. He took up a new job as a plantation inspector, and then in 1923 became a Customs officer, checking on the rubber dealers and hunting down opium smugglers. Bracelin’s biography features a photograph of Gardner standing on his Customs motor launch with a revolver in a holster strapped to his belt.

  While he was a Customs officer, Gardner continued to study the local magical beliefs of the Malay people, especially those of the Sakis, a little-known tribe of small people who lived deep in the jungle. The Chinese Malay feared them as wild people who used spears of fire-hardened bamboo and blowpipes that shot arrows tipped with a deadly poison from a local tree. Gardner managed to locate the tribe and learned their magical techniques. These involved their women dancing around a fire, throwing narcotic plants on the flames, and working themselves into an orgiastic frenzy. The Sakis believed that illnesses and diseases were caused by demons possessing the sick person, and these spirits could only be driven out by the use of spells and rites of exorcism.

  Gardner had also become fascinated by the kris or keris—a curved Malay dagger with a wavy blade that was sometimes used in rituals and for magical purposes. He discovered that the keris featured in a cursing rite that was similar to the “pointing of the bone” ritual practiced by the Australian aborigines. The Malay magicians believed that every keris was inhabited by a spirit or spirit force and this could be used against an enemy. The daggers were believed to protect their owners against physical harm, and allegedly made them invulnerable to bullets. Gardner became an expert on the keris and, as we have seen, wrote a book on the subject that is still regarded as the classic reference work.

  In the 1930s, Gardner became interested in archaeology. He took part in several excavations in Malaya, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine (modern Israel), France, Cyprus, and China. During visits back to England he also participated in digs in Devon and Wiltshire. In January 1936, Gardner worked on an archeological site about twenty-five miles from Jerusalem. This expedition revealed the existence of an ancient temple dedicated to both the Hebrew tribal god, Yahweh, and the Canaanite fertility goddess, Astaroth. She was worshipped as the “Queen of the Heaven,” with sacrificial offerings of incense and cakes at stone altars set up in sacred groves on the hills around Jerusalem. This was at a time when the Hebrews were supposed to be monotheists. This important find revolutionized Middle Eastern history, as it indicated that after their exodus from Egypt the children of Israel had adopted the worship of native deities in Canaan—the so-called “Promised Land” of Moses—in addition to their worship of the one God.

  Gardner had returned to England from the Far East on leave from the Customs Service in 1927. While visiting relatives in Liverpool, out of curiosity he attended the local Spiritualist church. After a short Christian service, a medium took the stage, went into a trance and began to communicate messages from the spirits on the “other side” to the audience. Gardner was not impressed by the quality of the messages, however his interest in psychic matters continued, and he was told that the best mediums could be found working in London. His former nurse Com and her husband David Elkington were now living in retirement in Hereford, and Gardner spent two days with them before traveling on to the capital city.

  Once there, Gardner made appointments to see several
well-known mediums, but again he was disappointed with the results. Then he visited one who used automatic writing to contact the spirits. She correctly described the house he had been born in and gave him the names of his brothers, their wives and children, and his first nurse as a child. However, despite this factual evidence, Gardner was not convinced that spirits were actually giving the woman messages. He dismissed the reading as telepathy, in itself evidence of the use of psychic powers.

  When Gardner visited the Spiritualist Alliance headquarters in London, the medium he saw gave him evidence about his family that convinced him she was genuine A spirit spoke through the medium, claiming to be Gardner’s cousin, and he felt her as a tangible presence in the room. She told him that something nice would happen to him shortly, and that as a result his return to Malaya would be delayed. A few days later Gardner was introduced to a vicar’s daughter, Dorothea Frances Rosedale, known to everyone as Donna, who worked as a nursing sister at St. Thomas’ Hospital. Shortly afterwards they were married by the bishop of London, and Gardner was given permission to extend his leave for two months for a honeymoon in France and Spain.

  In 1936, at the age of fifty-two, Gerald Gardner took early retirement from the Customs Service and returned to England permanently. He and Donna took an apartment on the Charing Cross Road, a Central London street renowned for its many secondhand and antiquarian bookshops. Unfortunately, the cold British weather affected Gardner’s fragile health and he caught a cold that he could not get rid of. When he had been on leave in 1932, a doctor had recommended the healthy benefits of naturism, as it exposed the naked body to sunshine. Gardner inquired about the existence of naturist clubs, and in 1936 finally was able to find one in Finchley, North London. It was situated in a large house with a gymnasium, a ballroom, and a clubroom, and was run under the auspices of the Sub Bathing Society (Heselton 2000: 25). It was at this club that Gardner met people who “had a faint occult interest” in fortunetelling, astrology, palmistry, and Spiritualism, as well as naturism (Bracelin 1960: 142).

  In March 1939, Gardner applied to join the Folklore Society where he met the Egyptologist and anthropologist Dr. Margaret Murray (1863–1963). She was the author of two books on witchcraft, The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931). In her ground-breaking books, Dr. Murray put forward the controversial theory that historical witchcraft was the survival of a prehistoric fertility cult. This meeting may have been significant to the development of Gardner’s later ideas about witchcraft. The two stayed in contact, and in 1954 Dr. Murray wrote an introduction to Gardner’s first nonfiction book, Witchcraft Today.

  Gardner’s relationship with the Folklore Society was apparently a very difficult one and is still remembered. One leading member of the Society, the folklorist Christina Hole, described Gardner as having a “curious personality.” He did not inspire confidence in the other members who also had an interest in witchcraft, and his theories on the subject were generally regarded as “somewhat peculiar.” Writing in the Folklore Society News (July 1992), Jacqueline Simpson, a former president of the FLS, said that Gardner was seen as “flamboyant and sinister.” At one meeting, the ruling council even discussed whether his membership was advantageous to the Society and if he should be asked to resign. When Witchcraft Today was published and Gardner publicly came out of the broom closet as a witch, the FLS distanced itself from him. In fact, when he died, an obituary was significantly not published in the Folklore journal.

  In June 1939, Gardner contributed an article to the journal about a wooden box he had obtained that allegedly contained items once belonging to the infamous seventeenth-century “Witch-finder General” Matthew Hopkins. In the same issue was an article by Lady Raglan in which she first used the term “Green Man” to describe the foliate masks found in pre-Reformation churches. The objects in the box as described by Gardner in his article had been given to him by an unknown benefactor who must have been aware of his interest in witchcraft. The box had a nineteenth-century label on it that read: “This talisman [sic] made and sold by Matthew Hopkins … was given to my father, Joseph Carter of Home Farm, Hill Top, nr Marlborough [Wiltshire] and contains the finger of Mary Holt, the notorious Wiltshire witch. [signed] S. Carter.”

  The objects in the box included some dried flowers, a twig shaped like a cockerel’s claw, some pieces of tree bark, a hawthorn twig covered in moss, a (human?) bone with skin attached, an unidentified bird claw, a scrap of parchment with the words “Matthew Hopkins talisman against all witch-crafts” written on it in modern lettering, a small wax head with hair attached and affixed with a rusty pin, a Seal of Solomon (six-pointed star) made from lead, and a human finger bone that presumably belonged to the aforementioned Wiltshire witch.

  Gardner had also acquired several other objects that he said were connected with the practice of witchcraft. These objects included a small baton or wand measuring twelve and a half inches in length and surmounted by a cross made of (human?) bone. Attached to it was a tattered label stating that the object was “Matthew Hopkins’ scepter or tutti stick,” and it had been used by the witch-hunter “during his travels in the south of England, finding and exposing witches.” Although the article said that the objects had been examined by Dr. Margaret Murray and Gardner’s friend Father Ward of the Abbey Park Folk Museum, who believed they were genuine, there was no evidence that they ever belonged to Hopkins. In fact it is difficult to see how anyone could have verified they were authentic. It is possible that Hopkins confiscated them from the witches he had persecuted and, although he was supposed to have died from consumption, there is a legend that he was swam as a witch himself and drowned. In some cases cunning men or folk magicians acted as witch-finders—it is possible Hopkins was one of these and had a profitable sideline in anti-witchcraft charms.

  Another strange object associated with witchcraft that was in Gardner’s possession at the time was also mentioned in the article. This was described as a “Witches’ Moon Dial,” and resembled a standard sundial, except it was carved with what looked like some kind of runic letters. The piece of paper that accompanied it stated it was a “Witches Moon Dial used by them at midnight. Made of human bone with only seven sections, the seven hours of dread. Found near Wayland the Smith’s cave on the borders of Wiltshire and Berkshire.” The cave referred to is actually a prehistoric burial mound on the Ridgeway near the White Horse hill figure at Uffington. Philip Heselton has speculated that Gardner may have been involved in the excavation of this site during one of his visits to England in 1932 (2000: 27).

  Through his visits to Cyprus, Gardner had met Father John Sebastian Marlow Ward. Gardner visited the island in 1938, and went to the museum in Nicosia. He got into a conversation with the curator about how the Bronze Age inhabitants had manufactured their swords. The museum authorities could not work out how it was done and Gardner borrowed an ancient sword blade, took it away, and managed to fix a haft or handle to it. From this experience and dreams he had about Cyprus before he visited it, Gardner became convinced he had been incarnated there in ancient times as a sword maker. He even recognized some of the places he visited from his dreams. As a result he wrote his first novel, A Goddess Arrives, which is set on the island in pagan times.

  On a return visit to Cyprus in 1939, Gardner met Father Ward and purchased a piece of land that he owned on the island. It was one of the many places that Gardner claimed he had seen in his dreams. His plan was to build a holiday home on it for his winter visits, but World War II intervened and he had to abandon the plan. Cecil Williamson told me that Gardner’s original idea was to erect a temple dedicated to Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Unfortunately the locals objected and the Cyprian government refused to grant planning permission.

  Bracelin’s biography is unclear as to whether Gardner and Father Ward knew each other before their meeting in 1939. Certainly Ward worked in Burma as a Customs officer, and the two men shared common interests.
Ward was a senior Freemason and wrote books about its history and esoteric symbolism, linking it to the ancient mystery cults of paganism. He was also an expert on Chinese secret societies such as the Triads, and co-authored a book on the subject that was used as a standard reference work by police forces all over the world fighting organized crime.

  In Burma, Ward also worked as the headmaster of a Church of England school and from 1918 to 1930 was the director of the intelligence unit of the Federation of British Industries. On his return to England in 1929, Ward and his second wife began to experience visions telling them to prepare for the imminent Second Coming of Christ. Guided by their visions and a guardian angel, the Wards bought a large piece of land at New Barnet in Hertfordshire and founded a group called the Confraternity of Christ the King. Its members gave up their previous lives when they joined the community, changed their names and swore vows of poverty, obedience, and self-sacrifice.

  A fifteenth-century half-timbered tithe barn was purchased and re-erected on the site to serve as the sect’s chapel. The building was consecrated on St. Valentine’s Day, 1931, by the Anglo-Catholic bishop of the nearby town of St. Albans (named after the first Christian martyr), and the bishop appointed a vicar to act as the chaplain to the new community. A school called St. Michael’s College was also founded, teaching such unorthodox subjects as reincarnation, the feminine nature of the Holy Spirit, and that Christ was the son of God, the Father, and God, the Mother. When news of this reached the bishop he refused to approve the renewal of the license for the community’s chaplain. Father Ward, as he was now calling himself, responded by launching a verbal attack questioning the validity and authority of the Anglican bishops and the priesthood.