Modern Wicca Read online

  About the Author

  Michael Howard is a freelance writer, researcher, and editor specializing in witchcraft, the occult, ancient and modern paganism, mythology, folklore, and general esoteric subjects. Since 1970 he has written numerous articles and book reviews for occult and pagan magazines such as Prediction, Insight, Fate, Destiny, The Hedgewytch, Green Egg, Pagan Dawn, Pentacle, Verdelet, Lamp of Thoth, and New Occult.

  He has edited and published The Cauldron, a quarterly journal featuring Wicca, Ancient and Modern Paganism, and Folklore since 1976. He is a member of the Folklore Society, the Royal Stuart Society, the Friends of the Museum of Witchcraft at Boscastle in Cornwall, and an honorary member of the Pagan Federation (UK).

  Howard is the author of twenty-seven books, and has five forthcoming. (see the bibliography, pp. 337.

  Llewellyn Publications

  Woodbury, Minnesota

  Modern Wicca: A History from Gerald Gardner to the Present © 2009 by Michael Howard.

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  First e-book edition © 2010

  E-book ISBN: 9780738722887

  Cover art © 2009 Murat Domkhokov/iStockphoto (pentagram)

  © Creatas/PunchStock (tree)

  Cover design by Ellen Dahl

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  Dedication

  To the memory of Fidelia,

  who showed me the Way

  all those years ago.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part One—Beginnings: 1884–1940

  Chapter One: Journeying to Foreign Lands

  Chapter Two: Into the Witch Cult

  Chapter Three: The Pickingill Connection

  Part Two—Development: 1941–1953

  Chapter Four: Gerald Gardner and the Great Beast

  Chapter Five: A Magical Book of Shadows

  Chapter Six: The Museum of Witchcraft

  Part Three—Expansion: 1954–1963

  Chapter Seven: Witchcraft Today

  Chapter Eight: Enemies Within and Without

  Chapter Nine: New Witch Blood

  Part Four—Evolution: 1964–1980

  Chapter Ten: Pretenders and Rivals

  Chapter Eleven: The King of the Witches

  Chapter Twleve: The Politics of Wicca

  Chapter Thirteen: The Pagan Federation Emerges

  Part Five—The Future: 1981–2008

  Chapter Fourteen: Wicca International

  Chapter Fifteen: Witches in Cyberspace

  Chapter Sixteen: Wiccans in the 21st Century

  Resources and Contacts

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  Professor Ronald Hutton of the University of Bristol has said that Wicca (i.e., modern neopagan witchcraft) is the only religion that England has given to the world (pers. comm.). Wicca was founded, or perhaps created is a better word, by a retired civil servant, Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884–1964) in the 1940s. Gardner had left England as a young man in the early 1900s to work as a tea planter, rubber plantation inspector, and Customs officer in the Far East, where he studied Eastern religions and the magical beliefs and practices of the indigenous peoples of Borneo and Malaysia. On his frequent visits back to England on leave, he attended Spiritualist séances and studied psychic research. In 1936, Gardner retired from the Customs Service and returned home permanently. He became involved in archaeology and naturism (for health reasons), joined the Folklore Society and the Ancient Druid Order, and was ordained as a minister in an unorthodox Christian sect known as the Ancient British Church.

  In 1939, Gardner and his wife Donna moved from London to the New Forest area in Hampshire. Once living there, Gardner joined a Rosicrucian group known as the Fellowship of Crotona, and he claimed to have encountered a surviving coven of witches who belonged to it. They invited him to join the Craft, and in September 1939, a few days after World War II began, Gardner was initiated into the witch cult, as he called it. He was eager to tell the world about his amazing discovery, but his fellow witches were not so keen. As one member of the coven told Gardner, if it was discovered in the village what they were, every time a chicken died or a child became sick they would be blamed. They added: “Witchcraft doesn’t pay for broken windows” (Gardner 1954: 10). Reluctantly the witches gave him permission to reveal a little about what they believed and practiced in a fictional form. This Gardner did in his occult novel High Magic’s Aid, published in 1949.

  Around the same time, Gardner founded his own coven on land owned by the Five Acres naturist camp at Brickett Wood in Hertfordshire, just north of London. Because, as Gardner was later to tell his initiate Doreen Valiente, the rituals he had received from the New Forest Coven were fragmentary, he wrote his own version. These were based on standard occult works such as the medieval grimoire known as the Key of Solomon, the writings of the controversial magician Aleister Crowley, known popularly as the Great Beast 666, whom Gardner had met in 1947, and the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland’s book Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches (1899), based on the teachings of the Italian witch cult in Tuscany.

  In 1951, Gardner became the business partner of Cecil Williamson, an ex-tobacco farmer in Africa, pre-war film producer, and wartime MI6 (Secret Intelligence Service) officer, in launching a witchcraft museum at Castletown on the Isle of Man. When Williamson decided to sell up a few years later Gardner took over the museum and ran it until his death. In 1953, Gardner initiated Doreen Valiente into the Craft. She was responsible for rewriting the “Book of Shadows” (BoS), the ritual manual of Gardner’s version of witchcraft, including the famous invocation known as the “Charge of the Goddess” and the “Witches’ Rune” chant. A year later Gardner’s first nonfiction book, Witchcraft Today, was published. This was followed five years later by The Meaning of Witchcraft.

  Before his death in 1964, Gardner initiated several more women as Wiccan priestesses, including Patricia Crowther, Monique Wilson, Lois Pearson (Bourne), and Eleanor (“Ray”) Bone. All these women went on to found their own covens, and Monique Wilson inherited the witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man in Gardner’s will, which he controversially changed a few days before he died. Wilson eventually sold the collection in
the museum in the 1970s to the Ripley “Believe It or Not” organization in Canada, which then transferred it to the United States for exhibition in their museum on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, Wicca expanded from its original small base in the United Kingdom to other English-speaking countries. In the United States, a Gardnerian coven was established by one of Monique Wilson’s initiates, Raymond Buckland. Separately, a form of Wicca was also brought to the States by an Englishwoman who had married an American serviceman and had emigrated to the Central Valley in California. Wicca was also established in Australia in the early 1960s by an initiate of the Brickett Wood Coven and later by Alex Sanders, the so-called “King of the Witches,” who had followed in Gardner’s footsteps as the leading public promoter of modern witchcraft. Eventually Wicca was also to establish itself in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, and even in Far Eastern countries such as Japan and India, in Central and South America (principally Mexico and Brazil), and South Africa. It is now claimed that Wicca is one of the fastest growing religions in the world.

  With the publication of popular books by American writers such as Z. Budapest, Starhawk (Miriam Simos), and Scott Cunningham there came an interest in eclectic and solitary forms of witchcraft. In the 1970s, Wicca was influenced by the emerging neopagan, feminist, and environmental movements that had originated in the alternative counterculture. Politically oriented groups like the Pagan Federation in the United Kingdom began to campaign for the legal rights of pagans and witches under the United Nations and European Declarations of Human Rights. Activists such as Starhawk also demonstrated against the arms trade, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the use of nuclear power to generate electricity.

  In the 1980s and 1990s, Wiccans became involved in the new interfaith initiative with other religions, and neopagan and Wiccan delegates attended the World Parliament of World Religions in Chicago. Many young people also became interested in Wicca through the influence of television programs and Hollywood movies portraying fantasy versions of the Craft. This spawned the phenomenon of so-called “teen witches” and “cyber witches” using the Internet to communicate with others worldwide. With the widespread concern about environmental problems such as global warming and climate change, Wicca reinvented itself in the early twenty-first century as a green religion involved with Goddess spirituality and healing Mother Earth. At the same time academics, historians, and anthropologists began to take a sociological interest in Wicca and its origins. They also attempted to discover if it had genuine links with historical witchcraft, or had just been invented by Gerald Gardner.

  This book will examine the history of modern neopagan witchcraft and the various personalities who were responsible for practicing it and promoting it publicly during the last sixty years. It will naturally focus on Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders and their initiates, but it will also examine Wicca’s links with older forms of traditional witchcraft such as the Pickingill Craft, the Coven of Atho, and the Clan of Tubal Cain.

  The contents of this book will be illuminated by my own personal experience and involvement in witchcraft going back over forty-five years. I joined the newly formed Witchcraft Association in 1964 and in 1967 became a student of Madeline Montalban, an old associate of Gardner, and her magical group the Order of the Morning Star. Two years later I became a third-degree initiate of Gardnerian Wicca. My initiator was a member of the Regency, the neopagan group founded by two members of Robert Cochrane’s coven (a friend of Doreen Valiente), and she could trace her Craft lineage back to one of Gardner’s last priestesses, Celia Penny (witch name Florannis).

  In 1976, I founded my own witchcraft magazine, The Cauldron, which is still being published today. Through TC I made contact in 1977 with E. W. “Bill” Liddell of the Pickingill Craft, and we have corresponded ever since. In the 1990s I also made contact with Evan John Jones, who was a member of Robert Cochrane’s coven in the 1960s and revived his Clan of Tubal Cain. I have also had lengthy correspondence over the years with many prominent witchcraft figures including Cecil Williamson and Doreen Valiente. This wealth of experience has given me a unique insight into the origins and history of modern Wicca and this is reflected in the contents of this book.

  I would like to acknowledge the following for their support, encouragement, and assistance in the writing of this book: Helen S. for suggesting the idea for the book in the first place; Alan Richardson for recommending me to Llewellyn Publications; Graham King, the owner and curator of the Museum of Witchcraft and Witchcraft Research Centre at Boscastle in Cornwall for all his help and support in my research, and for allowing me unlimited access to the museum’s extensive library and historical documents archive; Hannah Fox, the Museum of Witchcraft’s administrator, for her valuable help in my research and for finding me books and documents from its library collection; Mags Anderson for the information on the history of the Association of Hedgewitches; and last, but not least, Caterina Fusca of Llewellyn Publications for her enthusiasm and support for the project.

  —Michael Howard

  February 2009

  Chapter One

  Journeying to Foreign Lands

  Gerald Brosseau Gardner, who played such an important and central role in the modern revival of witchcraft, remains very much an enigma. A mercurial character as befitted his Gemini star sign, he has variously been described by his friends, critics, and enemies as a brilliant scholar, a lovable rogue, a charlatan, a compulsive liar, and a sexual pervert. Over forty years after his death, controversy still rages as to whether he created Wicca from an eclectic combination of material drawn from esoteric sources, or was the rightful heir to a genuine historical witchcraft tradition.

  Gardner was born on June 13, 1884, into a wealthy middle-class family living at Blundellsands in Lancashire, a Victorian housing development on the coast a few miles north of Liverpool. In those days the city was a busy port and the Gardner family had obtained their wealth from the timber trade. Gardner’s father was a partner in the family business of Joseph Gardner and Sons, which had been founded in the eighteenth century. This background meant that Gardner inherited money in later life and did not have to worry about an income when he retired. The Gardners claimed to have had Scottish ancestry, something that obviously caught Gerald Gardner’s imagination as there are several photographs showing him wearing full Highland regalia, including a kilt. In his will he left to his relatives a dirk (a traditional Scottish ceremonial dagger) that had been passed down through the family.

  In an interview that Gardner gave to the Scottish newspaper the Daily Record, he actually said that he was a Scot and that his parental home was in North Berwick, a place that was coincidentally associated with a famous sixteenth-century witch trial. He also mentioned that his grandfather had lived there and was a witch. This claim was based on a story Gardner had been told by distant relatives that his grandfather Joseph, the founder of the family business, had married a woman who was involved in witchcraft. Allegedly, she had led Joseph Gardner into “wicked ways” by taking him “up into the hills [where] secret meetings and horrible rites were held.” This was regarded as a great scandal in the family and nobody talked about it. (Bracelin 1960: 114–115.) Years later, when Gardner met a coven of witches in the New Forest, he told them he also had a Scottish ancestor called Grizell Gardner who had been burnt at the stake in Newburgh as a witch in 1640. However there is no evidence linking her with Gardner’s branch of the family.

  Despite this, Gardner continued to cultivate his Scottish connections, possibly for romantic reasons, and in the 1950s he initiated Charles Clark, who lived at Saltcoats in the west of Scotland, and Monique Wilson, who lived in Perth. Although Clark gave up his activities in the Craft, Wilson became recognized as the High Priestess of Gardnerian Wicca in the late 1950s and early 1960s. When Gardner died in February 1964, she inherited his witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man, but lost her pos
ition as Wicca’s chief witch.

  In fact, the Gardner family legitimately traced its descent from Simon le Gardiner, who lived in the fourteenth century. Another illustrious ancestor was Alan Gardner, who served in the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century, was promoted to Vice Admiral, became a Member of the British Parliament, and was finally given the title of Baron Uttoexeter. In 1807, he was appointed as the commander-in-chief of the Channel Fleet and in that position had the task of defending England from invasion by Napoleon and his French army. Several forebears of Gardner served the monarch and country in the Navy or the Customs Service, as did Gerald Gardner later in his life when he lived in the Far East.

  As well as his alleged family connections with Scotland, Gardner also claimed more colorful and exotic links with India and the British Raj. A nephew of Baron Uttoexeter belonged to Gardner’s Horse Regiment, an irregular cavalry unit set up by the East India Company, and he also served in a military role for the Maharaja Holkar of Manratta. He married an Indian princess who was supposed to have been descended from Genghis Khan. Unfortunately the Maharaja did not approve of the match and accused the British officer of treachery. He only escaped execution by leaping off a forty-foot cliff into a stream and then disguising himself as a native to reach a British Army camp.

  As a child Gardner suffered from asthma, which has been described as “the occultist’s disease.” His childhood was dominated by the presence of nursemaids who looked after him, and the last of these, an Irish woman named Josephine “Com” McCombie, was to have a major influence on his life. Gardner’s education as a child was elementary and, helped by Com, he taught himself to read using back issues of the Strand magazine. In later years, Gardner used the title of Doctor, and told journalists he had received his doctorate from Singapore University. He said it had been given to him in 1934 and he also had a doctorate in literature from the University of Toulouse in France. When he joined the Folklore Society in 1939, he added a master of arts degree to his educational credentials. Doreen Valiente investigated these claims and has said that the University of Singapore did not exist in 1934 and the University of Toulouse had never heard of Gardner. Valiente suggests, jokingly, that the M.A. may have stood for “Magical Adept” (1989: 41–42).