Terms were finally agreed on, and Gardner paid the full asking price for the museum. For that, he got all the buildings, the box office, the restaurant, and the ruined tower of the windmill—without its sails. However, Williamson said he refused to pay for any of the exhibits, so they were not included in the sale. Previously Williamson had purchased most of the collection that had originally been loaned to him by Gardner. After some discussion, however, Williamson agreed to lend him some of the exhibits. There was also a petty disagreement about the special cups and saucers used in the Witches’ Kitchen. They were functional white china, but Williamson had some special transfers of a witch sitting on a broomstick printed on every cup and plate. Gardner was not willing to pay for these either, so all the stickers were removed, leaving the china plain. When Gardner visited the restaurant the next day he found what had happened and, Williamson claims, was so angry he tried to stab him with his athame (Ibid.). Again this story may have been Williamson dramatizing the situation and trying to defame Gardner.
After the sale, Cecil Williamson returned to England, where he founded a new witchcraft museum in Windsor, not far from the castle. After a short while he had a visit from two men in suits intimating they were representatives of the royal family. They politely told him to move on. He then opened the museum up again at Bourton-on-the-Water in Gloucestershire, but was forced to close it down after arson attacks, being denounced in the pulpit by the local minister, and demonstrations by fanatical Christians. Finally, in 1960, he opened the museum in the former fishing village of Boscastle in North Cornwall. He retired in the late 1990s and sold the museum building and its contents to a Hampshire businessman and Wiccan, Graham King, who is still running it successfully today.
When Gerald Gardner took over the Witches’ Mill museum he changed its name and added suits of armor and weapons from his private collection to the exhibits, together with amulets and charms he had found on his travels. A visitor to the museum in the 1950s described Gardner as being about 5’ 6” tall and stocky with snow-white hair and a goatee. He wore a tweed suit, a homespun wool jumper, and sandals on bare feet. His reading glasses hung in a case from a cord around his neck, and his fingers were covered in magical rings. Along with a nervous twitching of his hands and eyelids, his speech was reported as being rather jerky.
In the brochure produced by Gardner to advertise the museum there is no mention of Cecil Williamson’s previous ownership. In fact, most of the books and articles written later by Wiccans and others say Gardner founded the museum himself. The Bracelin biography of Gardner states that, due to bureaucratic difficulties in establishing a witchcraft museum on the English mainland, Gardner found some dilapidated buildings on the Isle of Man. They needed a great deal of restoration work before they were ready to house his collection (1960: 166). Gardner described himself as the museum’s director and said its policy was to “show what people have believed in the past, and still do believe, about magic and witchcraft, and what they have done, and still do, as a result of these beliefs.” He added that the director does not necessarily share these beliefs himself, although he went on to say that he had been initiated into a British witch coven.
On the first floor of the museum Gardner said there were two rooms with one representing a seventeenth-century “magician’s study” containing all the equipment used for practicing ritual magic. On the floor was a magical circle, and there was an altar flanked with two pillars with lights on the top in the style of a Golden Dawn or Masonic temple. The second room was fitted out as a “witch’s cottage,” again with a circle and altar, but it was less elaborate than the magical temple. The altar was a simple wooden chest, and the circle a single chalk line on the floor. Gardner said that the altar was set up for an initiation ceremony and on it was a necklace, which is the only “ceremonial garment” required by a witch. Both these exhibits were already in the museum when Gardner took it over and so he must have borrowed them from Williamson.
In the first gallery were objects connected with magic and witchcraft, including some belonging to a “witch who died in 1951,” presumably Dorothy Clutterbuck, or possibly Old Mother Sabine. These items had allegedly been in the owner’s family for generations, and had been used to make herbal remedies. Patricia Crowther has referred to a large wooden box displayed in the museum that belonged to the same person. She said it contained phials, charms, talismans, and knives (1998: 27).
In other display cases were a collection of magical rings, assorted occult and astrological jewels, and amulets to ward off the Evil Eye. There were also various magical objects used by witches, such as a riding staff that Gardner said was ridden like a hobby-horse in fertility rituals, crystal balls, black mirrors for scrying, and a flask of anointing oil after the sale. The Matthew Hopkins relics mentioned before were also on display, alongside items still used by an existing coven of witches. There were also a collection of talismans made, probably by Gardner, from instructions in the Key of Solomon, some Arabic and Italian charms, and a complete set of secret manuscripts from the Golden Dawn and other magical Orders claiming descent from the Rosicrucians. Other display cabinets in this part of the museum contained packs of different tarot cards, reproductions of pacts made with the Devil, copies of court records of Manx witchcraft trials, books on magic and witchcraft, an Australian Aborigine “pointing bone,” a Malay keris used for cursing, and modern instruments for dowsing and detecting and studying the human aura.
In the upper gallery of the museum there were magical objects from Africa and Tibet, books, letters and personal relics belonging to the “Wickedest Man in the World” and the “Logos of the Aeon of Horus,” Aleister Crowley. These included a copy of the OTO charter given to Gardner by the Great Beast in 1947, although a label accompanying it said he had never actually used it to start a lodge and had no intention of ever doing so. There were also some items loaned by another witches’ coven. This may have been the Cheshire one run by Barbara Vickers and her husband. They included a horned helmet “as used by the male leader in certain rites,” and a foliate mask representing “the old god of the witches as the Green Man or King of the Woods.”
Another case contained objects associated with Satanism and black magic and, in contrast, some items lent by a fraternity of “white magicians” such as a chalice used to perform the Mass for magical purposes. There were also a death-spell or curse prepared by the modern psychic artist and magician Austin Osman Spare and a lamp that had allegedly belonged to the eighteenth-century Hellfire Club. Other cases contained more talismans and charms, and on the wall was a large magical mirror that may have been the same one featured in the photographs of Barbara Vickers mentioned before.
Running the museum came with its own problems, as Gardner was to soon find out. In the first year under his ownership there were 18,000 visitors and they each paid an entrance fee of 1 shilling 6 pence. That provided an annual income of £1,350, which was quite a lot of money in those days. However, Gardner lamented that “the Bastards wont [sic] give us an [alcohol] licence” (letter to Cecil Williamson undated in MOW archive). He complained that other businesses on the island had been granted them and wondered why the museum had been excluded.
In September 1952, an article was published in the Illustrated magazine that was to change the face of Wicca. It was titled “Witchcraft in Britain,” and was written by Allen Greenfield. He had been in contact with Williamson when the Isle of Man museum was opened a year earlier and had written about it then. Greenfield called Williamson a “witchcraft consultant” and described a cursing ritual performed by Williamson involving the making of a poppet, or wax image, for one of his many clients. The article was illustrated with atmospheric photographs of the cunning man, dressed in black robes and working magically in a churchyard.
The article goes on to mention a summons that was sent out to members of “the Southern Coven of witches” on August 1, 1940, when a German invasion of Britain was expecte
d. It goes on to describe the Lammas ritual and adds that “older members of the coven, those who came from a generation when magic enjoyed a matter of fact acceptance in some households, could remember family talk of a similar rite against ‘Boney’ [Napoleon Bonaparte] at the time of the threatened Napoleonic invasion.”
Obviously referring to the New Forest Coven, the article said: “Hereditary witches, who have the lore handed down to them, form a proportion of the covens [sic], whose average ages are rather high.” They make up their numbers by inviting others to join them who have made a wider study of the occult than the local people and constitute the “intellectual wing” of the coven. It goes on to say that nowadays the coven is led by a woman because of a shift in emphasis away from the “lord of death” to “life-goddess.” Their rituals are based on instructions from the elders “eked out with the Clavicles [Keys] of Solomon.” This seems to confirm the descriptions by Louis Wilkinson and E. W. Liddell of the membership of the New Forest Coven being made up of local country folk and middle-class occultists. It also suggests the use of the Key of Solomon in its rituals and a move to Goddess worship, and away from a devotion to a Horned God, as practiced in traditional witchcraft.
One of the readers of the article in Illustrated magazine was a young woman named Doreen Edith Valiente (1922–1999). She had been born in Mitcham, Surrey, although her habit of speaking in a pseudo-rural accent led some people to believe she came from the West Country. Valiente married a Greek man called Joannis Vlechpoulos, who died in 1941. In the Museum of Witchcraft archive at Boscastle are photocopies of her wartime identity card and other documents about her registration as an alien, presumably because she had married a foreign national. She then married a Spanish chef called Casimo “Cassie” Valiente, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and later for the Free French Forces in World War II.
Before she had read the article, Doreen Valiente had already been interested in Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the occult. She had read Dion Fortune’s book The Mystical Qabalah, John Symond’s biography of Aleister Crowley, and had obtained a copy of the Great Beast’s Magick in Theory and Practice through the local library in Bournemouth, where she was living at the time. She had also read Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia, Robert Graves’ The White Goddess (1948), and Dr. Margaret Murray’s books.
In her book Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989), when she was discussing the claims in the Lugh material about George Pickingill’s alleged influence on the Golden Dawn, Valiente said she was interested in the Order’s magical system before she met Gerald Gardner (1989: 200). Melissa Seims investigated this claim and, while Valiente was never a member of any of the surviving GD lodges, discovered that she did own several notebooks that had belonged to members (Seims May 2007). One was Dr. Edward Burridge, a member of the Isis-Urania lodge in London, and another was Henry David Kelf, who was a member of another lodge and died in Bournemouth in 1951.
The notebooks were pocket-sized and dated from 1902 to 1908. One had a label saying it belonged to the “Hermetic Order of the A.O.,” or Alpha Omega lodge, a GD group founded after the schism in 1900 caused by disagreements between Mathers and Crowley. The notebooks contained the initiation rituals for various grades of the Order as well as other rituals, teachings, lecture notes, and examination answers. According to Seims, the books also contained handwritten notes in pencil executed by Doreen Valiente. She also copied some of the material from Edward Burridge’s into her personal Book of Shadows and used Hebrew script in her own notebooks and diaries as taught in the first grade of the Golden Dawn.
In a letter written to Dr. Allen Greenfield in August 1986, discussing the provenance of Gardner’s Ye Book of Ye Art Magical, Valiente asked him: “By the way, has Ripley’s got my Golden Dawn [A.O.] mss, which were in Gerald’s museum? Because if so, I’d jolly well like to have them back” (they belonged to Frater “Nisi Dominus Frustria” [Henry Kelf]) (letter dated August 8, 1986 in MOW archive). The story of how Doreen Valiente acquired these magical Golden Dawn notebooks that ended up in the witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man is actually told in the Bracelin biography of Gardner, although her name is not mentioned.
It says that “one of the most important members of the Craft” (i.e., Valiente) was talking one day to her bank manager. He collected rare books and knew she had an interest in ones on magic. However he was unaware she was a witch. He mentioned that he had been handling the affairs of an elderly doctor who had recently died, and he had purchased some of his books from the widow. She also had a number of magical manuscripts owned by her late husband that she was planning to burn. He had tried to buy them, but the woman was allegedly afraid of their contents and was determined to destroy them.
Valiente managed to find out the area of Bournemouth where the doctor’s wife lived and went there by bus. Her enquiries in the neighborhood led her to a semi-detached house with pebble-dashed walls owned by the doctor’s widow. She knocked on the door and got no answer. Then she noticed a pebble had fallen from the wall onto the ground. She picked it up, took it home and used it in a ritual with some friends for the purpose of retrieving the manuscripts. That night in bed she awoke and felt she had projected out of her body. She found herself standing in front of the widow’s house and willed herself inside. She could see a green satin divan on which were a number of small, dark-colored books.
The next day she received a telephone call from the bank manager saying he had been contacted by the widow who was “in a strange state”. She told him she knew he had a lady friend who would take away the magical manuscripts they had discussed. Valiente arranged with the bank manager to visit the woman that afternoon. There, on a green-covered divan, were the notebooks. The widow said she had tried to burn them, but something had kept her from doing it. She was now very frightened and asked Valiente if she would take them away with her (1960: 162–164).
There were twenty-eight notebooks, two ceremonial swords, and two pentacles. Presumably after reading and annotating them, Valiente donated or loaned the notebooks to the museum, where they were displayed in the GD temple designed by Steffi Grant, and she kept the swords and the pentacles. When Gardner died in 1964, the notebooks were inherited by Monique Wilson and were subsequently included among the collection sold to Ripley’s in 1973. They were then purchased in 1987, along with other documents and correspondence from the museum, by Tamara and Richard James of the Church of Wicca in Toronto, and they still own them.
Because she was living in Bournemouth when she read the article in Illustrated and it mentioned a witches’ coven in the nearby New Forest, Doreen Valiente decided to write to Cecil Williamson at the Isle of Man museum and ask if he would put her in touch with the coven. He passed the letter on to Gerald Gardner, who replied that he had a friend named Dafo living near Bournemouth at Christchurch whom he often visited. An appointment was made for Valiente and Gardner to meet at Dafo’s house for tea.
This significant meeting took place in the autumn of 1952, and Dafo immediately told her that due to social reasons and poor health she was no longer actively involved in the Craft. As soon as Valiente met Gardner she liked him and realized he was not just a pretender to occult knowledge, like the people she had previously met at Spiritualist meetings and lectures at the local branch of the Theosophy Society. She described him as somebody with a sense of humor and a youthfulness in spite of having white hair. This was the Peter Pan quality she associated with all natives of the astrological sign of Gemini.
Strangely, Valiente says he was clean-shaven and “did not have the beard he grew later.” His clothes were informal but made from good quality Harris Tweed cloth. He wore a large silver ring with “strange signs” on it, which he told her spelled out his magical name “Scire” from the OTO in the letters of the Theban alphabet. On his right wrist was a heavy bronze bracelet with symbols on it representing the three degrees of initiation into Wicca (Ibid., 38).
Gardner tol
d Valiente how he moved to the New Forest before the war and joined the Rosicrucian Theatre, where he had met members of a surviving witches’ coven. He was introduced to a woman living locally called Mrs. Clutterbuck and known to the coven as Old Dorothy. It was in her large house that he was initiated into the Craft. As Valiente was leaving, Gardner handed her a copy of High Magic’s Aid to read. She said that he made no attempt during their first meeting to persuade her to join the witch cult. In fact it was not for several months that her actual initiation took place.
This took place at Dafo’s house in Christchurch in June 1953, when Gardner was visiting her to attend the annual midsummer solstice ritual held by the druids at Stonehenge. Doreen and Dafo accompanied Gardner to the ceremony, which Valiente used as a cover story for her husband and her mother, a strict chapel-goer who opposed anything relating to the occult. Gardner brought with him from the museum the famous sword once owned by Old Dorothy, and he loaned it to the Druid Order for the ceremony.
Valiente was duly initiated into Wicca by Gardner and evocatively describes him standing in the circle by an improvised altar in Dafo’s candlelit sitting room. He was “tall, stark naked, with wild white hair, a suntanned body, and arms which bore tattoos and a heavy bronze bracelet.” In one hand he brandished Dorothy Clutterbuck’s sword, while in the other he held a handwritten copy of the Book of Shadows as he read the ritual by which she was made “a priestess and a witch” (Ibid., 47). Valiente noted that the ritual was very similar to the one described in High Magic’s Aid. However, Gardner also read aloud something called “The Charge [to] the Goddess,” and she instantly recognized bits in it that came from Leland’s Aradia.
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