In the Bracelin biography, it says that when Gardner met Crowley he was eager to revive the English branch of the OTO. It had “fell under a cloud” during World War I when Crowley, who was secretly working undercover for British Intelligence in the USA, was falsely accused of being pro-German, and the police raided his London temple. Following Crowley’s death in December 1947, Gardner wrote to the owner of the Netherwood’s boarding house asking if he knew who “Alister’s” [sic] executors were. He wanted to contact them to obtain some papers Crowley owned of “typescript rituals,” which he was willing to buy at a reasonable price. He mentioned in the letter that Crowley had given him “a charter making me head of the OTO in Europe” (letter dated December 24, 1947, in the MOW archive). Gardner also wrote to Crowley’s solicitor and said that as the head of the OTO in Britain he was entitled to the Great Beast’s goods and papers (Heselton 2003: 208).
In another letter to John Symonds, Gardner said that after Crowley’s death word was sent to the head of the OTO in the USA, Karl Germer, telling him that Gardner was the European head of the Order. The message was sent by Lady Frieda Harris, the illustrator of Crowley’s Thoth Tarot. Gardner said: “But owing to ill-health I so far haven’t [sic] been able to get anything going. I had some people interested, but some of them were sent to Germany with the Army of Occupation [BOAR or the British Occupation Army of the Rhine].” He adds that he did not have all the OTO rituals, as presumably he had not paid Crowley for all of them, but he did hold “the grades up to Prince of Jerusalem” (letter dated July 12, 1950, in the Warburg Institute, London).
Bill Liddell claimed that after Crowley’s death Gardner’s correspondence with him about the witchcraft rituals and the drafts written by Crowley were discovered by his executors John Symonds and Louis Wilkinson. Francis King had also seen them and he recognized the similarities between some of the rituals and a published version of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows. King immediately jumped to the conclusion that Gardner paid Crowley to write these rituals.
When Crowley wrote the ceremonies for the English branch of the OTO in 1912, Liddell claims he drew heavily on the Pickingill Craft rituals. Some modern Thelemites have in fact recognized Wicca as being an outer court of the OTO. Crowley was certainly eager to promote paganism as the religion of the new age of Aquarius, or, as he called it, the Aeon of Horus. As early as 1914, Crowley wrote to his American disciple Frater Achad (aka Charles Stansfield Jones, 1886–1950) suggesting the formation of a natural religion. This would be dedicated to sun worship and the Great Mother Goddess, and celebrate rites at the equinoxes and solstices (Symonds 1971: 194). It is possible that when Crowley met Gardner he finally saw his chance to achieve this long-held ambition.
Bill Liddell confirms this idea, as he said that Crowley was intrigued to learn that one of George Pickingill’s Nine Covens was still operating in the New Forest. He decided to assist Gardner in launching a new nature religion for the masses that would one day replace Christianity. As well as attempting to remember the rituals of the Norfolk Coven, Liddell said Crowley supplied Gardner with a Black Book of rituals belonging to a deceased Scottish witch. He had allegedly acquired this document while living at Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland in the 1900s. In return Gardner was quite happy to borrow elements from Crowley’s writings and magical rituals such as the Gnostic Mass, which became the basis for the Wiccan Great Rite. In fact, parts of the Mass, Liddell’s Elders had claimed, had been derived in turn from the rituals of the Pickingill Craft (1994).
It was Doreen Valiente’s opinion that Gardner “fell under Crowley’s spell for a while … and incorporated much OTO material into the ‘Book of Shadows,’ possibly displacing other older rituals” (letter to Dr. Allen Greenfield dated August 8, 1986). Valiente always believed that the rituals Gardner obtained from the New Forest Coven were fragmentary and to turn them into a usable system he added extra material from other sources. As Dr. Dave Evans has noted, the rituals of Wicca were “an eclectic mixture of material drawn from [Dr. Margaret] Murray’s researches, OTO material, reconstructed Druidic rites and Co-Masonic sources (among others) with a scattering of nudity and sado-masochism (these being Gardner’s personal tastes) …” (2007b: 233). Professor Diane Purkiss has said that in modern witchcraft there is “a unique opportunity to see a religion being made from readings and re-readings of texts and histories” (1996: 52).
The Wiccan Book of Shadows also contained material taken from Charles Godfrey Leland’s book Aradia: Gospel of the Witches (1899), the Key of Solomon, and even an extract from a poem by Rudyard Kipling that was used in the May Eve celebration. Having read widely, I recognized many of these elements and their sources when Rosina Bishop initiated me into Gardnerian Wicca in 1969. However many Gardnerians, especially American ones, seem to have been unaware of the sources of the BoS. Many were apparently quite shocked when Professor Ronald Hutton’s book The Triumph of the Moon (1999) revealed where they had come from.
Chapter Five
A Magical Book of Shadows
One of the reasons why Gerald Gardner did not pursue the idea of reviving the OTO was that he became ill in the summer of 1947. It was possibly a recurrence of the asthma that had plagued him since the Lammas ritual in 1940, and his doctor suggested he take a vacation to recover his health. He decided to go to America and visit his younger brother, Francis Douglas Gardner, and his wife, Miriam Fleming Gardner, in Memphis, Tennessee. They had emigrated to the USA in 1916 and were running a branch of the family timber business. When Douglas Gardner died, aged seventy-one, a newspaper obituary praised him as a retired timberman and well-known local sportsman who played golf and tennis. It said he had been educated at Merchant Taylors College in London and at the universities of Geneva in Switzerland and Dresden in Germany.
Gardner stayed with his relatives for six months, from November 1947 to March 1948 (Heselton 2003: 205). Their daughter Mimi, who died in 1953, remembered Uncle Gerald as a “funny and eccentric old gentleman” (even though he was only sixty-three at the time!). He used to entertain her and the family with colorful stories about ghosts, witches, and his exotic life in the Far East. While he was staying in America, Gardner traveled to California where he met Jack Parsons, the young rocket scientist who was running the Agape Lodge and had an interest in witchcraft. He also went to New York to see the head of the OTO, Karl Germer, or as he was known to his disciples, Frater Saturnus. Doreen Valiente said that Gardner and Saturnus got on quite well together.
The Bracelin biography says that while he was in America many people came to regard Gardner as Crowley’s successor. In another letter to John Symonds, Gardner claimed that Germer had acknowledged his rank in the OTO (letter dated July 12, 1950, in the Warburg Institute). However, he told Bracelin that he did not have the money, energy, or time to revive the Order (1960: 171). When Germer found out that Gardner had no intention of forming an English lodge, he issued a charter to Kenneth Grant, allowing him to work the first three degrees of the OTO (Heselton 2003: 209).
While he was in the States, Gardner also met Tamara Bourkon, an associate of Dr. Israel Regardie. I also met this Russian-born occultist and magician when she later moved to England. She was running her own magical group called the Order of the Pyramid and the Sphinx in Hampstead, North London. This group practiced Enochian magic and Golden Dawn-type rituals. Its membership was limited to Freemasons or Co-Masons who had to be teetotalers, celibate, and vegans or vegetarians. Over a cup of Earl Grey tea and cucumber sandwiches, Tamara invited me to join her Order. While I was a Co-Mason, I did not fit the other criteria so I had to refuse her kind offer. It would be interested to know what she and Gardner discussed during their own meeting.
While Gardner was staying with his relatives in the States he visited New Orleans, where another of his brothers lived. He managed to locate some occult experts who tried to warn him off investigating voodoo by either saying it did not really ex
ist or people who had tried had died of mysterious fevers. Gardner eventually discovered that many white people actually belonged to the cult, and he had heard of meetings attended by up to a thousand participants, including many of the city’s police officers. He noted many similarities between voodoo rites and European witchcraft even though their methods for raising power were different. He could see elements of African magic and religion in voodoo and this confirmed his belief there was a past connection between them and the fertility principle worshipped by witches.
In Witchcraft Today, Gardner speculated that voodoo had originated in Egypt in ancient times and had been passed to the West African tribes. He also believed some of the witch practices had come from the same original source to southern Europe, possibly through the Roman and Greek Mysteries (Bracelin 1960: 111). He told one of his later initiates, Lois Bourne, that he thought Western magic and witchcraft had originated in the African lunar and stellar cults, especially those of Egypt and North Africa (Bourne 1998: 61). Incidentally, this idea has also been promoted by Kenneth Grant in his books, and is also found in the legends of the Pickingill Craft.
In the period from when he met Crowley in 1946, and 1948 when Old Mother Sabine died, Gardner seems to have parted company with his friends in the New Forest Coven, or at least drifted apart from them. This may have been due to Gardner’s desire to publicize what he had found, and their resistance to the idea. In Witchcraft Today he says the witches in England told him: “Write and tell people we are not perverts. We are decent people, we only want to be left alone, but there are certain secrets that you mustn’t give away.” Further on in the book he says that the witches did not want publicity.
Despite these protestations, Gardner was determined to go public because he believed witchcraft was “a dying cult,” and was in need of reviving. In the end, he says that his witch friends agreed to him writing something of what they did and believed in, providing it was only in the form of a novel. Gardner wrote this in 1946, but it was not until three years later that it was published by Michael Houghton (Juste) of the Atlantis bookshop. In a letter to John Symonds, Gardner said he had shown the draft manuscript of the novel, called High Magic’s Aid, to Aleister Crowley. Crowley wanted him “to put the witch part in full,” but Gardner rejected his advice as the New Forest Coven had only given him permission to put in a few things (letter dated July 12, 1950 in Warburg Institute).
Because whoever was now the leader of the New Forest Coven, either Dorothy Clutterbuck or Edith Woodford-Grimes, had told Gardner not to include any witch magic in the novel, he padded it out with what he called “Jewish ritual magic.” This was derived from medieval grimoires such as the Key of Solomon. Philip Heselton has said that Gardner only obtained a copy of the Key from Gerald Yorke in June 1947. Bill Liddell, however, claims that the New Forest Coven was already using it as a basis for some of their rituals when Gardner was initiated. He added that many English covens had been using it since the early 1900s, and one presumes this was the new translation by Samuel MacGregor Mathers (Liddell 1994: 158).
High Magic’s Aid was basically an adventure story, and one critic described it as an inferior pastiche of Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe. Today the book seems rather tame and, if any publisher accepted it, would probably be marketed for older children. It is a tale of magic and witchcraft in an imaginary medieval England shortly after the Norman Conquest of 1066. Its central character, Vanda Morven, belongs to the witch cult, described in the book by its traditional title of “The Brotherhood.” The two leading male characters get involved in magic and, using a ritual from the Key of Solomon, are given a spirit message to seek out someone named Vanda. She initiates them into the Craft and, although Gardner said the New Forest Coven would not let him reveal any of their secrets, the ritual used is very similar to later ones included in the Book of Shadows.
Because Gardner was dyslexic and had problems with spelling, he needed someone else to edit his books. Michael Houghton suggested that Madeline Montalban, who was working at the bookshop, could help him out, as she had been a journalist before the war. Madeline told me that she used her skills to edit the draft manuscript of High Magic’s Aid, and she also typed the finished copy submitted for publication. Gardner confirmed this in a letter written to Cecil Williamson in May 1952 where he said, “It’s very funny. Mrs. North is Delores [sic]. She used to work at the Atlantis Bookshop, and she typed and put the spelling right in High Magic’s Aid. She made a living at astrology and love philtres. I know she claimed to be a witch but got everything wrong. But she knows High Magic’s Aid and has a lively imagination” (letter in MOW archives).
It has been suggested to me by those in the know that Gardner wrote his novel as a “butterfly net.” His real aim was to write something that would attract the attention of other followers of the Craft. That way he could increase his knowledge and enlist their help in launching a revival of witchcraft. It has also been suggested that he was deliberately linking ceremonial magic, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism to witchcraft. Possibly in attempting to make that connection he was following in the footsteps of George Pickingill.
In later years, Gardner used High Magic’s Aid to test new recruits to his coven. Doreen Valiente told how, when she first met Gardner in 1953, he gave her a parting gift of a copy of the novel. He told her to read it carefully, as it would tell her a great deal about the witch cult and how it had been misrepresented by centuries of persecution. She later discovered he gave a copy to each of his new initiates. This is because he wanted to test their reaction to its account of an initiation ritual involving ritual nudity and flagellation. If they objected in any way, then the process of recruitment would go no further. Valiente said this gave a lie to the newspaper allegations that Gardner lured innocent young women into the Craft (1989: 39–40). This story has also been confirmed by Patricia Crowther and Lois Bourne, who said Gardner gave her a copy of his novel to “test my resolve” (1998: 19).
The publication of High Magic’s Aid seems to have upset the Elders of the New Forest Coven. Justine Glass (aka Enid Carroll) said that after a relatively short time Gardner parted company from his coven. The reason was his continuing urge to publicize the Craft (1965: 131). However, while Gardner had been writing the book, he had also continued searching for esoteric organizations to join. In May 1946, he became a member of the Society for Psychical Research and attempted to get one of his fellow witches to take part in their parapsychological experiments (Gardner 1954: 139). As we have already seen, Gardner was also active in the Ancient British Church, the Folklore Society, the OTO, and with naturism.
In 1946, Gardner also became involved in the Ancient Order of Druids, and met Ross Nichols (1902–1975) at the Spielplatz naturist camp in the 1940s. Nichols was a member of the AOD and in 1964, when he split from the Order, he founded his own Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids (OBOD). Nichols was also a friend of Madeline Montalban, and she told me he asked her to write some of the rituals of the new OBOD. Philip Heselton has speculated that it was Ross Nichols who introduced Gardner to neo-druidism (2003: 127). He owned a piece of woodland with a chalet on it in the countryside outside London that was used by Gardnerian Wiccans and traditional witches, such as Robert Cochrane, for rituals in the 1960s.
Gardner was present at the AOD meeting held at the winter solstice of 1946 when the former Chief Druid’s son, Robert McGregor Reid, was installed as its new head. When the annual summer solstice rituals resumed after World War II at Stonehenge, Gardner attended most of them. In 1948, he wrote a document called The Rites, Ceremonies and Services of the Druid Order that was never published (Evans 2007a: 71). During the Festival of Britain in 1951, a souvenir brochure was printed about the megalithic circle and its alleged association with the historical druids. It described the midsummer ceremony and mentioned that a “Dr. C. Gardner [sic]” attended it. He was accompanied by other delegates from the Isle of Man, wore Scottish costume and an oak leaf
crown he had made himself and carried an ancient sword, presumably the one once owned by Dorothy Clutterbuck and used by the New Forest Coven.
In 1947, Gardner was still in close contact with Mrs. Woodford-Grimes, and they set up a company together called Ancient Crafts Ltd. The idea behind this venture was to raise money to buy the Five Acres Country and Naturist Club at Brickett Wood. Gardner had already bought a plot of land adjacent to the club’s grounds in 1946, and wanted to buy the rest of it for use as a center for folklore studies. Because the Witchcraft Act was still in force, this was probably a cover. He really wanted to use the land as a meeting place for the new coven he planned to form. Gardner was a director of the naturist club and both he and Woodford-Grimes already had a financial commitment to it (Heselton 2003: 157–158).
Cecil Williamson said that Gardner set up his new coven on his land at Brickett Wood around 1947. At first it had to meet in a converted chicken shed, which Gardner was also using as living quarters when he visited Five Acres. The centerpiece however was the Elizabethan witch’s cottage that Gardner had bought from Father Ward when he sold the Abbey Museum and Folk Park in 1945. It was a one-room building dating from the sixteenth century, had wattle and daub, black and white timbered walls, and a thatched roof made from reeds. At the Abbey Folk Park it had been furnished with the equipment of a medieval witch, possibly with Gardner’s advice. A stuffed crocodile hung from the ceiling beams, there was a human skull, and a “sword of exorcism,” and a magical circle was drawn on the floor. When Gardner transferred it from St. Albans to Brickett Wood he had the outside walls rendered with cement, whitewashed the interior walls, and replaced the thatch with tiles, as it was deemed to be a fire hazard (Heselton 2003: 163).
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