In September 1962, Sanders and some of his friends were featured in an article published in the Manchester Evening Chronicle & News performing a “black magic ritual” in the woods at Alderley Edge, outside Manchester, a well-known meeting place for local witches. They “performed their homogenized ritual, the like of which had never been done before nor ever would again,” for the reporter. They all wore ritual robes decorated with symbols taken from the Key of Solomon grimoire and the ceremony was half Egyptian magic and half witchcraft, with overtones of the heretical Order of Knights Templar. Sanders had “borrowed” a copy of the Key of Solomon while working at the John Ryland Library in Manchester and as a result of the newspaper story he lost his job (Johns 1969: 72–71). Patricia Crowther read the article and was not impressed. She recognized part of the ritual described in the newspaper as the “Opening the Mouth” ceremony from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead.
On his final visit to the Crowther’s house in June 1962, Alex Sanders had been introduced to Pat Kopanski, the Maiden of the Sheffield Coven, who had been married to a Polish-American serviceman. Sanders’ second wife, Maxine Morris, says he received his initiation into Gardnerian Wicca from Pat Kopanski (whom she calls Kasprzynski). Following this initiation she says Sanders met and worked with “many covens and magical groups, eventually starting the training group that I was part of.” However, in September 1963, Pat Kopanski wrote to Gerald Gardner from her address in Beeston, Nottingham. She said she understood Sanders had been writing to him recently. She went on to say that she had been let down by “those people in Sheffield” (presumably the Crowthers) and all she had got from them was “backbiting, petty jealousy, and intrigue.” Kopanski complained she had been falsely accused of being involved in the “black magic” ritual at Alderley Edge with Sanders and that is why she had left the coven (letter dated September 5, 1963, MOW archive ref, 571).
There have been persistent rumors that Alex Sanders also received an initiation at the hands of a mysterious woman, whose witch name was “Medea,” although this is also said to have been the secret name used by Mary Bibby. In Greek mythology Medea was the sorceress Circe’s niece and a priestess of Hecate, the goddess of the underworld and witchcraft. Her name means “cunning one,” and she was a spellcaster, herbalist, and “mistress of potions,” who was possibly a goddess represented in human form. Maxine Sanders has confirmed this story of the initiation is true (2008: 103) and Pat Kopanski said Medea was the High Priestess of a coven in Derbyshire. She and her husband had moved to the area from Shropshire and had been living there since the end of World War II.
Apparently Medea had already initiated Kopanski’s friend Sylvia (Tatham), and Kopanski asked her to make her a High Priestess so she could start her own coven in Nottinghamshire. When Medea was told she had been with the Crowthers she at first refused, saying she wanted nothing to do with that “crowd of charlatans.” She also said the other witches she knew in other parts of the country would not associate with them either. Kopanski then introduced Alex Sanders to Medea and she agreed to initiate him into the Craft on March 9, 1963, with Kopanski as his sponsor. The next day Medea also raised Kopanski to the rank of High Priestess and made her friend Sylvia the Maiden of the new coven. In her letter to Gardner quoted earlier, Kopanski invited Gardner to come over from the Isle of Man and spend a week with her so he could meet the members of the new coven, including Sanders, but there is no evidence he did. Another member of this interesting little group became a well-known Cabbalistic magician and wrote several books on Elizabethan magic and Dr. John Dee’s Enochian system (Liddell pers. comm.).
In an interview with the News of the World newspaper in April 1965, Pat Kopanski was quoted as saying that the Nottinghamshire coven was a bit “theatrical” and “a waste of time.” It had broken up after one of its members (Sylvia Tatham) emigrated to New Zealand. In fact, Bill Liddell told me that the real reason was that both Sylvia, who became his common-law wife in New Zealand, and Pat Kopanski were in love with Alex Sanders and wanted to marry him (pers. comm.). In an interview he had done with a local Manchester paper, Sanders had announced he planned to marry the High Priestess of his coven, who lived in Nottingham. An alternative version says that Kopanski left when Sanders introduced Maxine Morris into the group.
According to Bill Liddell, Sylvia Tatham also received a Gardnerian initiation from Monique and Scotty Wilson on the Isle of Man. When she returned to the mainland she raised Alex Sanders to the Gardnerian third degree. After Pat Kopanski left, Tatham became the High Priestess of the Nottingham Coven until Maxine Morris replaced her. Sylvia Tatham told Liddell that she and others were banished from the Isle of Man coven after an argument over the alleged existence of a fourth degree of initiation that Maxine Wilson claimed Gardner only conferred on selected third degree initiates. Pat Crowther has also claimed this existed. In her “girly talks” with Monique Wilson, Tatham said she confided that Gardner needed stimulation to perform the Great Rite. To achieve this Wilson had to scourge him on the buttocks while he hung suspended by tied wrists from an antique meat hook hanging from a beam in the ceiling (Liddell August 2000). Before Tatham left England for New Zealand she told Liddell that Sanders had appointed her as his “High Priestess of Australasia.”
It is not clear whether Medea was of the Wiccan persuasion or not. It is clear, however, that Alex Sanders did not get his copy of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows from his Welsh grandmother Mary Bibby as he claimed, because in the 1930s it did not exist. Patricia Crowther believed that from the comments Gardner had made about Sanders to her, he would not have had anything to do with him, despite Kopanski’s claim that the two men corresponded. Crowther was of the opinion that Sanders obtained a copy of the BoS from a man who belonged to the Isle of Man Coven and whose witch name was “Fian.” He lent his copy to another witch, and Crowther believed that person passed it on to Sanders so he could copy it out (1998: 69–72). A different version was provided by Doreen Valiente, who claimed Sanders visited Gardner on the Isle of Man and was either given a copy of the BoS or allowed to copy it (1989: 166).
News of these events reached Gardner from another source, as Arnold Crowther wrote to him about Sanders on a letterhead from “The Wica [sic] Detective Agency.” Crowther informed Gardner that Sanders had started a coven using a copy of the Gardnerian BoS and material on ritual magic taken from High Magic’s Aid. Presumably this was a reference to the material derived from the Key of Solomon that Sanders “liberated” from the John Ryland Library in Manchester while he was working there. Arnold Crowther also told Gardner that he had heard that Pat Kopanski wanted to initiate Sanders as a “Priest of Isis” (undated letter in the MOW archive).
Ironically, considering the Brickett Wood Coven’s love of publicity, the Wiccans were worried about the media coverage of Alex Sanders’ activities bringing the Craft into disrepute. He had also upset the Wiccans by saying they were “novices,” because unlike him they had not learned about witchcraft from a genuine hereditary source. Ray Bone and Jack Bracelin were delegated to drive up to Manchester and confront Sanders on his home territory. They had not made an appointment and spent several hours sitting outside his house awaiting his return. Eventually, when they did manage to talk to him, Sanders was unrepentant. He told them in no uncertain terms that he would continue to give interviews to the press and was not concerned about any alleged adverse effect this might have on the Craft (Crowther 1998: 72).
This campaign against Sanders and his publicity seeking continued, and in March 1966, the Sun newspaper reported that Ray Bone and Patricia Crowther were protesting to MGM about a movie they were making. This was presumably The Eye of the Devil, starring the English actor David Niven. The film company had hired Sanders as a consultant on the witchcraft element in it and Bone claimed he was no expert. She told the newspaper he had no connection with genuine witchcraft (i.e., Wicca) in Britain. In response, Sanders said that while Bone and Crowther followed
the modern form of witchcraft, his grandmother had initiated him into “the ancient Craft.” Doreen Valiente claimed that the Wiccans could not openly challenge Sanders by saying he was in fact practicing rites that came from their Gardnerian BoS because of the oaths they had taken (1989: 171).
Not everyone agreed with the stance taken by Bone and Bracelin with regard to Sanders being a charlatan and a fraud. Doreen Valiente was of the opinion that the truth lay between “the two extremes of charlatan and magus.” She also believed that if it were not for him the Craft “would not be as strong in adherents as it is today” (Ibid., 177). In a letter to Valiente in 1978, one of Sanders’ leading initiates, Stewart Farrar, agreed. He said that Sanders had “power and knowledge, theatricality and dishonesty, and he abused them all outrageously. But he did draw hundreds of people into contact with the Craft” (letter dated March 3, 1978, in MOW archive).
Around the same time as Alex Sanders was being initiated into Gardnerian Wicca, a new initiate was destined to establish the new movement in the United States. In 1962 Gerald Gardner started to correspond with Raymond “Ray” Buckland (born 1924). Buckland was an Englishman of Romany ancestry who had been educated at a private school in London, and in the 1950s served in the Royal Air Force. In the early 1960s, he emigrated to Brentwood, Long Island, New York, and worked in the States for BOAC (British Overseas Airways), now British Airways. After reading books by Dr. Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner, he wrote to the latter at the witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man.
In November 1963, Buckland flew to Scotland to meet Gardner at the home of Monique and Scotty Wilson in Perth. Wilson gave Buckland a ten-day “extensive course” in Wicca that culminated in his initiation before he returned to the States. On his return, Buckland then initiated his wife, Rosemary, and they founded the Gardnerian Brentwood Coven (DV notebook entry dated November 28, 1963 in the MOW archive). New initiates to the coven took a ritual bath in salt water before their initiation ritual. At the rite, Buckland presided in the circle as the High Priest, naked except for a horned helmet, which he claimed was “the traditional symbol of his priesthood” (Holzer 1971: 127–128).
Inspired by Gardner’s venture on the Isle of Man, Buckland established his own witchcraft museum on Long Island, and began to write a series of books on Wicca and magic as well as screenplays and novels. In 1973, his marriage broke up and his wife briefly took over the coven before passing it to a High Priest and Priestess whose witch names were “Theos” and “Phoenix.” This may have been when Buckland turned his back on Gardnerian Wicca, as he was unable to form a new coven without an initiated High Priestess (Waldron 2008: 140).
Ray Buckland moved to New Hampshire and remarried. About the same time he founded a new form of witchcraft based broadly on Anglo-Saxon mythology, which he called “Seax-Wica.” It was very similar to Gardnerian Wicca, except instead of calling on the witch goddess Aradia (borrowed by Gardner from Leland) and the witch god Cernunnos (an Iron Age stag god from Gaul), the Seax-Wicans invoked the Germanic deity Woden and the Norse fertility goddess Freya. They also wore short tunics in the circle instead of going traditionally skyclad.
Buckland said that he founded Seax-Wica because he had “come to the decision that, as beautiful as Gardnerian Wicca, was, and as well as it had served me for the early years, it wasn’t totally right for my personal religious requirements.” Because there were aspects of Wicca that he did not agree with, and he was fed up with the “ego-tripping” of other witches, he decided to establish his own form of personalized witchcraft (Ibid., x–xi). In a letter to John Score in 1982, Buckland said he had come to the conclusion that Gerald Gardner’s research into witchcraft was “lacking in many ways.” Although he spent about ten years as a Gardnerian Wiccan, he had been questioning a lot of the things he had been taught by Gardner and Monique Wilson, and had finally decided to leave “that branch of the Craft” (letter dated September 18, 1982, in MOW archive doc. 28/ref. 29).
Although Raymond Buckland has said there were no Wiccan covens in the USA before Gerald Gardner asked him to start one, it has been claimed that a hybrid form of Wicca arrived in the Central Valley near Sacramento in California in 1960. This was allegedly introduced into the area by an English woman married to an American GI. Her witch name was “Lady Morgan” or “Queen Morgan.” Originally, Central Valley Wicca (CVW), as it became known, had only three or four members and these individuals formed branches or Orders known as Majestic and Modesto—later changed to the Silver Crescent tradition. In the 1970s, another Order called Kingstone was also formed and all three traditions still exist today.
In the 1970s, CVW seems to have been an eclectic mixture of Wicca, Native American lore, ceremonial magic, European folk magic, and ancient Egyptian, Celtic, and even Mesopotamian rituals. Unlike Wiccan covens, the group wore black silk or linen robes, with cloaks and hoods that covered the face, with eyeholes. The officiating male Elder of the tradition was known as the “Master of the Circle,” and his female equivalent was called the “Queen of the Sabbat,” an honorary title that Gerald Gardner bestowed on Patricia Crowther at her initiation. Sexual induction was also practiced in the traditional way as it had been in the English pre-Gardnerian robed covens.
In the mid-1980s, several CVW initiates were accepted into a branch of Ray Buckland’s original Long Island Gardnerian tradition. Another member was initiated by Donna Cole into the English Gardnerian Whitecroft tradition that had originated with one of Ray Bone’s initiates, Madge Worthington (witch name “Fiona”) and her High Priest, Arthur Eaglen. At a Gardnerian meeting in October 1988, a High Priestess who had visited the Wiccan Church in Toronto showed CVW Elder Allyn Wolfe photocopies of several pages from Gardner’s Ye Bok of Ye Magical Art. Wolfe recognized some of the rituals as being very similar to the ones he had inherited in his tradition.
Wolfe believed that CVW was “a fusion between English and French magisterial traditions and early Gardnerianism.” He said that the CVW rituals “display characteristics usually associated with the old Magister-led covens … I suspect the CVW descended from a traditionalist line which adopted Gardnerian material, rather than being a direct Gardnerian descent” (letter to Eleanor Bone dated February 20, 1989, in MOW archives). He had first thought CVW was merely an offshoot of Gardnerian Wicca, possibly originating from the pre-war New Forest Coven or people who were associated with it (Red Garters International magazine Vol. 19, Nos. 1–3). Craft historian and researcher D. Hudson Frew has also claimed that the material in Ye Bok and CVW rituals are descended from a common Craft source or tradition.
In 1973, Allyn Wolfe established the New Wicca Church in California to represent the different CVW traditions and covens, which today can be found in the Pacific Northwest, California, New England and the Midwest, as well as Britain, Germany, and New Zealand. In The Psychic Reporter (July 1976) Wolfe described a CVW coven meeting attended by a US Army major, a printer, a hospital technician and a university student. The description of the ritual is very similar to Gardnerian Wicca, and in fact a copy of a Kingstone BoS can be found in the Boscastle museum archive that is almost identical to Gardner’s version. A CVW coven known as the Coven of the Hawk had passed this copy to Cecil Williamson in 1972 when he still owned the museum.
Chapter Ten
Pretenders and Rivals
Every winter Gerald Gardner usually went on vacation to a warmer climate to escape the cold and damp British weather. In early February 1964, Gardner departed on a Mediterranean cruise on the SS Scottish Prince to visit Lebanon, where he wanted to explore medieval sites associated with the Knights Templar. Lois Bourne saw him last at a coven meeting in January. He looked pale and drawn, and told her he felt exhausted. Gardner said he had decided to go on the cruise to get some sunshine in the hope his health would improve (Bourne 1998: 92).
On the way back to England, when the ship was off the North African coast, Gardner had a fatal heart attack during breakf
ast. He was buried in a cemetery in Tunis, with only the ship’s captain in attendance. In the late 1960s, there were plans for the cemetery to be redeveloped and transformed into a park. By coincidence Eleanor Bone learned about the plan while she was on holiday in Tunisia. She managed to raise enough money from fellow Wiccans to have Gardner’s remains reburied in another cemetery nearby on the site of the ancient city of Carthage (Rabinovitch and Lewis 2002: 112).
While he was staying in Lebanon, Gardner suddenly decided to visit the British Vice-Consul in Beirut and change his will. Some members of his family were not pleased about this decision or the changes he made. They attempted a legal challenge against the new will, but without success. When the will was published in March 1964, Gardner had left his house at 77 Malew Street, Castletown, “together with all household furniture, silver [and] silver plate linen china pictures books machinery plant works papers articles and manuscripts relating [to] magic and all equipment used in connection therewith … to Monique Marie Mauricette Wilson.” The actual Witches’ Mill building was left to the museum’s elderly caretaker and manager, William Worrall. This was on the understanding he would continue to exhibit all the “antique furniture engravings plate silver magical objects and other objets d’ art situate[d] therein at the date of my death.”
The will stated that if, within five years of Gardner’s death, Worrall himself died or ceased to occupy the Mill or was in breach of the conditions of the will, its ownership would automatically pass to Monique Wilson. The actual contents of the museum were left separately to Monique Wilson, with the provision she continued to exhibit them to the public. If she had died before Gardner the museum collection would have passed to Patricia Crowther. In fact, it turned out that William Worrall did not want the responsibility of the Mill, as he was getting old. Under the provisions laid out in the will, he decided to hand it over to Monique Wilson, so she then owned both the building and its contents.
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