In the same year that Gardner officially took over the witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man from Cecil Williamson and met Austin Osman Spare, his first nonfiction book on the Craft, Witchcraft Today, was published by Rider & Co. The manuscript was first called New Light on Witchcraft. In 1975, Aidan Kelly found an unedited carbon copy with that title among Gardner’s papers owned by Ripley International (Kelly 1991: xviii). It seems that when Gardner submitted the book, Rider persuaded him to change and shorten the title (Heselton 2003: 378).
The story told by Gardner about the writing of the book is that allegedly the New Forest Coven members were angry when a writer called Pennethorne Hughes, a former schoolteacher and employee of the BBC, wrote a historical book in 1952 about witchcraft. The coven members believed he had presented a distorted view of the subject and they therefore supported Gardner in his desire to write a factual book telling the truth, as they saw it, about witchcraft (The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gardner 1959: 12). The witches wanted their public representative to tell the world they were not sexual perverts, but decent people who just wanted to be left alone to follow their beliefs. While they wanted Gardner to write the book, they also warned him not to give away certain secrets (1954: 26). Having said that, he was allowed to reveal in public for the first time information about their beliefs and rituals that had never been previously known to cowans, or outsiders.
Witchcraft Today is what is known in the publishing business as a bit of a scissors-and-paste job, even though it was supposed to have been edited by “an occult scholar of distinction [who] managed to blue-pencil [remove] most of the more rubbishy passages” (King 1970: 180). This occult scholar was probably Gardner’s old naturist friend Ross Nichols of the Druid Order, who at the time was the editor of The Occult Observer, the magazine produced by Michael Juste of the Atlantis bookshop. In his foreword to Witchcraft Today, Gardner thanked Nichols for “supplying me with supplementary information [and for his] many useful suggestions and comments.” Gardner had submitted a draft of the manuscript to Gerald Yorke for his expert comment as well. Philip Heselton believes that the book was structured as it was because in his contact with the New Forest witches he had not actually received any formal teaching or training from them. Instead he was told things on an ad hoc basis over a period of time. When Gardner came to write the book around 1952–1953, he did not remember all that he had been told years earlier (Heselton 2003: 379–380).
In the publisher’s blurb for the later Arrow Books paperback edition reprinted in 1966, it boldly and rather fantastically says that “G. B. Gardner, until his recent death, was a member of one of the few covens surviving in England with an unbroken oral tradition that goes back to pre-Christian days.” It added that the witch cult worshipped a Horned God, representing death, and a Moon Goddess, representing rebirth and fertility. The male priest in the role of the God presides at the Hallowe’en and February Eve Sabbats, while the priestess conducts the May Eve and August Eve Sabbats.
Somehow Gardner managed to persuade Dr. Margaret Murray to write an introduction to Witchcraft Today, giving the book a degree of academic authority because it described her as “formerly Assistant Professor of Egyptology at University College, London.” Despite the peer criticism that had greeted her two books on witchcraft, she was still highly respected in that field. Gardner had met Dr. Murray at the meetings of the Folklore Society and, although she agreed to write the introduction, she privately referred to him as “a dangerous fool” (pers. comm. to the author from Cecil Williamson). When talking to other people about Gardner she seems to have had little time for him or his witchcraft beliefs.
Despite this, her introduction said that “Dr. [sic] Gardner states that he found in various parts of England groups of people who still practise the same rites as the so-called witches of the Middle Ages, and that the rites are a true survival and not a mere revival copied out of books.” This statement may have been partially true as far as the New Forest Coven had been concerned. However by the time the book was published Gardner, assisted by Doreen Valiente, had created his own version of modern neopagan witchcraft. This bore very little resemblance to the historical or traditional forms of the Craft referred to by Dr. Murray in her introduction.
Witchcraft Today began with a description of how the “witch power” exudes from the human body so as to justify the practice of ritual nudity in modern witchcraft rites. It also refuted Pennethorne Hughes’ view that the Craft was “an evil cult” and modern witches were sex perverts. Other chapters dealt with the history of witchcraft, the Knights Templar, the classical Mysteries, voodoo, Ancient Egyptian religion, witches in Ireland, the Inquisition, the Lammas ritual in 1940, the witches’ circle and working tools, and the true identity of the “Devil” who presided over witch meetings (i.e., the pagan horned god). The book ended with a miscellaneous chapter that covered blood sacrifice (not practiced by modern witches), the Sabbats, love charms, and witch marks.
One of the oddest chapters discussed how old the witch cult was. It is odd because in a previous chapter Gardner, following the theories of Dr. Margaret Murray, had already attempted to trace the origins of the Craft back to the primitive magic of the Stone Age. He said that he knew of surviving witch families whose fathers and grandfathers had been practitioners and had spoken to them of meetings “about the time of Waterloo” (1815). Then they believed “it was an old cult, thought to exist from all time” (1954: 51). Strangely, Gardner then goes on to say that the only person who could have invented modern witchcraft was Aleister Crowley, and mentions that the Great Beast told him he had been “inside when he was very young.” Without any apparent sense of irony, Gardner says that “there are indeed expressions and certain words used that smack of Crowley; possibly he borrowed from the cult writings, or more likely someone may have borrowed expressions from him.” He adds that the only other people he could think might have written the modern rituals were Rudyard Kipling, the members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Hargrave Jennings, Francis Barrett, or Sir Francis Dashwood of the eighteenth-century Hellfire Club (Ibid., 52–53).
Taken at face value, these comments can be seen as a blatant attempt to explain the material in the Book of Shadows that was derived from the sources Gardner quoted in his book. However, Bill Liddell told me he believed what Gardner was actually doing was offering his readers clues or pointers to the different influences that had formed the Craft in the last two hundred years. As described in the Lugh material (1982), they included people such as Hargrave Jennings, George Pickingill, and Crowley. The inclusion in the book of the Templars, suppressed by the Roman Church in the fourteenth century for heresy, devil worship, sorcery, and making secret deals with their Saracen enemies, was according to Liddell a coded reference to how the medieval witch cult was influenced by Arabic beliefs. These had allegedly been introduced into Europe through Moorish Spain and southern France by knights returning from the Crusades in the Holy Land (Liddell 1994: 78–81 and 130–138).
When discussing the rituals practiced by modern witches, Gardner was far from honest as to their origins. In Witchcraft Today he described a Yule rite he had seen his witch friends perform. He said that it was an interesting ritual called “The Cauldron of Regeneration and the Dance of the Wheel.” This involved lighting a fire in a cauldron and then dancing around it, and he says: “The chant I heard was as follows …” and then proceeds to quote from the Yule ritual in the BoS circa 1954. Unfortunately it is not possible, as Gardner suggested, that he heard this chant in the context of some age-old ritual passed down from his parent coven in the New Forest. In fact, as we have seen, Doreen Valiente wrote this chant at his request one December afternoon only a year before the book was published.
Today the term “Wiccan” is universally used to describe modern witchcraft, especially its Gardnerian form, but the fact is that Gardner never used it, or at least not with that specific spelling. In chapter ten of Witchcraft Today he said that witch
es are “the people who call themselves the Wica [sic], the wise people, who practise the age-old rites and who have, along with much superstition and herbal knowledge, preserved an occult teaching and working processes which they themselves think to be magic or witchcraft.” A few lines further on he said “These Wica generally work for good purposes and help those in trouble to the best of their ability” (1954: 121).
Wicca or Wica is linguistically derived from the Anglo-Saxon wicca, meaning a male witch, sorcerer, or magician and wicce, a female witch or sorceress. Although it is a common belief in modern witchcraft circles that it is a word that comes from “wise” or “wisdom” and means the “Wise One,” in fact, its derivation comes from “prophet” or “diviner.” As Melissa Seims has noted, the word “Wica” appears only three times in Witchcraft Today, but seventeen times in Gardner’s second nonfiction book The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959). Wicca is also used and appears five times in discussions of the etymological origin of the word. However, in the Bracelin biography published a year later, it is the Wica spelling that appears twenty-one times without any reference to the alternative of Wicca (Seims August 2008).
In an interview given by Gardner to the Daily Dispatch in August 1954, three months before Witchcraft Today was published, he told the newspaper: “There are men and women witches. Each is called a wica.” In a letter written to The Observer in December 1955, Gardner described witches as followers of “a religion of nature and fertility [that] held regular festivals at which the concept of cosmic fertility was worshipped.” He added that the priests and priestesses who directed these festivals also had the function of surgeons, doctors, midwives, and psychiatrists. It was these people and their followers who came to be popularly called witches. In another letter to The Observer a year later, in December 1955, after his book was reviewed in the newspaper, Gardner described the priesthood of the Wica as “the Wise Ones.”
Melissa Seims has said that Gardner used the term “a wica” to describe an individual witch of either gender and “the Wica” as a collective term for several witches or the Craft as a whole. Arnold Crowther also used the word Wica when writing to Gardner about his investigation into the publicity activities of the King of the Witches, Alex Sanders. Bizarrely, Crowther’s letterhead read “The Wica Detective Agency,” which under the circumstances may have been a joke on his part (letter in the Church of Wicca collection in Toronto quoted in Seims August 2008).
In 1964, an advertisement also appeared in the UK edition of the American magazine Fate (coincidentally published by Athol Publications based in Douglas, Isle of Man) from the Wica Perthshire Circle, seeking new members. Melissa Seims believes Monique and Scotty Wilson placed this notice because they were living in that area at the time. Another advertisement in the same issue for a coven in Cardiff, Wales, described it as “Wicca-Dianic and Aradian.” Seims speculates this was connected with Gardner’s arch-rivals Charles and Mary Cardell, who we shall be discussing later in this book. She believes that Gardnerians like Doreen Valiente decided to use “Wicca” instead of “Wica” as a reaction to the Cardells’ use of the latter term.
By the 1960s, both writers and practitioners were widely referring to Wicca, and Wica had become a historical curiosity used only by a few of Gardner’s original initiates. Melissa Seims points out in her discussion of Wica and Wicca that words have power. She says that the transformation from one word to the other to describe neopagan witchcraft “tells us a story about a period of Craft history that helped shape what we [Wiccans] are today” (August 2008).
In Witchcraft Today, Gardner referred to Pennethorne Hughes’ belief that magic evolved in ancient Egypt. Hughes said it had then divided into two cultural streams with one branch of occult knowledge migrating northwards to southern Europe and becoming the witch cult and the other, possibly following the route of the River Nile, going south into Central and West Africa to form the roots of obeah, juju, and voodoo (Gardner 1954: 183). This was a theory Gardner was willing to accept. When he had visited Pompeii in Italy and viewed the frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries he realized there was a close connection between Greek religious rituals and witchcraft, e.g., scourging and ritual nudity in their respective initiation rites. He believed a “stream of teachings” had come out of Egypt and influenced the classical Mysteries of Greece and Rome. This was confirmed by the existence of witch tradition, as he had been told by his Elders in the New Forest Coven that the cultus had originally come from the Summerland in the East.
In the winters of 1952, 1953, and 1954, Gardner escaped the cold weather in England to stay on the Gold Coast in West Africa (modern Ghana and Nigeria). He wanted to find out about witchcraft as it was practiced in what was still regarded by many ex-colonial Europeans as the Dark Continent. During his visits to Africa, Gardner stayed with a friend of his in Accra who was the curator of the museum there and a member of the Brickett Wood coven. Gardner was well respected and even feared by the local inhabitants. One day they asked Gardner’s friend who the “white master” was who had stayed with him the year before. When he asked why they were interested, they said they were wondering because he never slept. Instead, they said, they had watched him as he “sat up all night talking to devils” (Bourne 1998: 87).
In January 1954, Gardner gave a lecture at the YMCA in Accra, and this was followed by a radio talk. As a result, he and his friend were contacted and taken to a house in the city where manifestations were occurring. It was made up of several wooden huts joined together and covered with a corrugated iron roof. All the windows were permanently closed, and in the backyard were a number of stones and half-bricks and some native-made stools. Gardner and his friend were told the stones and bricks had been deposited in the yard by a spirit similar to the European poltergeist. The occupants of the house said the stones would come into the house through the wooden walls and closed windows. Apparently the manifestations had begun after a young servant girl was dismissed. In Europe such ghostly activities are often associated with pubescent teenagers and their emotional moods.
In the late 1950s, Gardner consolidated his new version of witchcraft. By the end of the decade the earlier policy of making neophytes serve the probationary period of the traditional year and a day had largely been abandoned. This was due to Gardner’s increasing impatience at the slow growth of Wicca and his fear the witch cult would die out in modern times due to a lack of interest. People began to be initiated within a short time of Gardner meeting them. In one case he allegedly took a young female enquirer through all the three degrees in a month and then installed her as a High Priestess. When challenged about this, he responded that it was essential the Craft survive and be passed on to the future generation. Doreen Valiente said that when she first met Gardner he believed a call should be sent out to young people who were witches at heart and had been in the Craft in previous lives.
Gardner was in his seventies by then and not in the best of health. He knew his time was limited and wanted to make sure his legacy survived his death. Considering the evidence for the existence of the pre-Gardnerian robed covens and hereditary witch families in the 1940s and 1950s, Gardner’s worries about the imminent demise of the Craft seems to have been exaggerated. However, they were also losing members as the older ones died off. Also, as an elderly man with health problems, Gardner was desperate to promote his own version of witchcraft and establish it as a popular neopagan religion.
It is difficult to tell how the publication of Witchcraft Today influenced the general public’s perception of witches. It certainly increased media interest in witchcraft and, as we shall see, this had unpleasant consequences for Gardner and his followers. Reviews of the book were generally negative or at best lukewarm. Even the Folklore journal called it “an apology for witchcraft,” and said it could not be regarded as a serious contribution to the subject (Vol. LXVI #2, June 1955). Other critics were less polite, dismissing Gardner’s theories as fantasies, and casting doubt o
n the claim that he had actually encountered a real coven of witches. These criticisms are still being made today.
It was a double-edged sword because, although the book presented a positive image of the Craft in a public arena, the storm clouds were gathering, as it also caused tensions to develop within Gardner’s coven. This was caused in part by Gardner’s lust for self-publicity. While some members of the coven supported him, others were opposed. Outsiders also came out of the woodwork claiming to be real witches. They either dismissed Gardner as a fake or sought to challenge his position as the chief spokesman for modern witchcraft.
The Bracelin biography observed: “Some self-styled magicians, enraged beyond measure at the prominence which his books and Witchcraft Museum have brought Gardner, have attacked him. Few of them have bothered to realize that he is not in the same business, so to speak. They seem to think he will steal their thunder. Others—and these are the real lunatic fringe—have tried to set themselves up as witch kings or the like, sensing in this a possibility of personal prominence. None of them has been able to sustain the part for very long” (1960). In 1955, however, the disagreements within the Brickett Wood Coven were temporarily put on hold when it was forced to confront an outside threat that jeopardized the future of Wicca.
Chapter Eight
Enemies Within and Without
As early as 1951, the British media, especially the tabloid Sunday newspapers that specialized in titillating their working-class readership with scandals and sensationalism, had taken an interest in witchcraft. Cecil Williamson had cleverly used his contacts in the press to get positive publicity when he opened the witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man. Despite this, at Hallowe’en 1951, a time of the year when newspapers always feature stories about witches, the Sunday Pictorial published a piece about a “nudist [naturalist] camp [where] midnight rites” were performed by “nude devotees of both sexes.”
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