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.”
Doreen Valiente claimed that she had discovered that a man who used the pseudonym “Michael Glenister” provided the information for the story to the newspaper. Subsequent enquiries revealed he was a friend of Madeline Montalban (1989: 49). His real name was Paul Le Cornu, and he worked as a clairvoyant in Kensington Market in London. He died in the 1990s in a nursing home in Lampeter, West Wales, and a collection of his magical objets d’art and occult books was sold at a local village hall. I was living nearby and attended the auction, which was packed. In one of his books I noticed a note saying he had done a healing ritual for Doreen Valiente.
The reference in the Pictorial to a nudist camp could have only been directed to the Five Acres Club. Professor Ronald Hutton has said it was the publication of this story that led Edith Woodford-Grimes to resign as the High Priestess of the New Forest Coven and which, with the death of Mother Sabine in 1948 and Dorothy Clutterbuck three years later, led to the coven’s demise (Hutton 1999: 243). The article was followed by another, a year later, claiming to have exposed modern witches practicing devil worship in London. It said there were covens in the capital engaged in “sex rites in secret temples.” These sensational newspaper exposés followed a stereotyped pattern that was repeated at frequent intervals from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Usually they began by informing their readers that “the evil cult of witchcraft” was spreading across Britain, bringing moral degradation in its wake and corrupting the nation’s young people. The witches, who were usually described as devil worshippers who practiced naked fertility rites, were supposed to be busy recruiting the younger generation into their cult. There were always references to mysterious dossiers compiled by reporters from their investigation and passed to Scotland Yard for action—although none was ever taken. These dossiers of evidence were supposed to contain details of wealthy people with important positions in society who were involved. Stock photographs from the newspaper’s photo library illustrated these articles and were recycled time after time.
Some of the articles featured known Satanists or magical practitioners who were described as witches, but most of them in the 1950s and 1960s focused on the (alleged) activities of Gerald Gardner and his coven. In the 1970s, it was Alex and Maxine Sanders who received most of the publicity. It is not a coincidence that these newspaper exposés began when the old Witchcraft Act of 1735 was repealed. Doreen Valiente quoted an article in October 1953, again coinciding with Hallowe’en, about “Black Magic in Britain.” It said clergymen had issued warnings before the Witchcraft Act was repealed that its abolition would unleash an explosion of occult practices that were “undesirable” and “that is exactly what has happened.”
The most serious of these newspaper stories was published in May 1955 by the Sunday Pictorial. It featured the usual claims that its investigative reporters had uncovered a network of covens across the country, practicing sex orgies and animal sacrifices, whose members included famous people. One of the reporters involved in the investigation went to the Isle of Man and interviewed Gerald Gardner. He asked for his reaction to the allegations, and Gardner told him modern witches did not worship the Devil or perform animal sacrifices. Either the reporter was not listening or had already made up his mind, as he went back to London and wrote an article titled “No Witchcraft is Fun.” In it, he called Gardner “a whitewasher of witchcraft,” and accused him of participating in fertility rites where naked men and women danced together and worshipped a pagan horned god. The reporter also called High Magic’s Aid a “foul bait” to lure young girls into Gardner’s coven. He was particularly interested in a description in the novel of a historical witchcraft ceremony where the altar was the naked body of a priestess. Presumably this was because it sounded like the popular description of a so-called “Black Mass” (Gardner 1959: 225–228 and Valiente 1989: 67).
The reason why the newspaper had become interested in Gardner was because their informant in the “black magic cult” had mentioned his name. This was a woman of ethnic origin living in Birmingham. She told the paper she had been the High Priestess of a local witches’ coven and attended nocturnal gatherings held in graveyards. She had also been to indoor meetings in a satanic temple where “frenzied dancing” took place, chickens were sacrificed, and the participants drank their blood.
This woman was, in fact, a well-known police informant known as “Mrs. Jones,” and was regarded by her employers as mentally unstable. She claimed she had been introduced to an “occult society” in the city by her husband, who was an astrologer. He took her to a meeting in the 1940s where she met the head of the group, a former Roman Catholic priest. The priest lent her some books on the occult and began to teach her “strange religious theories.” A relationship of teacher and pupil developed and he telephoned her every day to give her lessons that lasted for about an hour every time. Her occult teacher allegedly told her how to conjure up elemental spirits, use magical power to enslave any man she wanted, “build a temple in her mind,” and pray to the Devil (Ibid., 219 and Newman 2006: 103).
In the article in the Sunday Pictorial, Mrs. Jones said she was finally initiated into witchcraft in February 1948. However, a different source says she was already attending rituals in 1947 in an apartment at King’s Hall, Birmingham, where there were “witchcraft signs on the floor,” and everyone present wore cloaks. During her initiation in 1948 a cockerel was sacrificed and the new members of the group had to drink its blood from a glass. They were then told they had drunk the blood of the Devil himself. At other rituals she acted as a High Priestess, wearing a veil and a robe while the others present were “cowled and masked.” She also claimed that among those who were present at these rites was a “Dr. Gardner.”
Nearly a year passed and another newspaper published further allegations made by a “terrified woman, driven grey-haired by some of the most evil men in Britain.” She had contacted the paper to tell them who was responsible for a famous murder in the village of Lower Quinton in Warwickshire on St. Valentine’s Day, 1945. The mutilated body of an elderly farm laborer named Charles Walton had been found in a field where he had been cutting a hedge for a local farmer. His throat was cut, his arms and chest had been slashed with his own billhook, and his body was impaled to the ground with a pitchfork.
There were rumors that the killing was a ritual murder, and the local police called in detectives from Scotland Yard to investigate the case. Even Dr. Margaret Murray got involved as she anonymously visited the village disguised as a tourist on a painting holiday to try and find what had happened. She concluded that a human sacrifice had taken place to bring fertility to the land, which seems unlikely considering the victim’s advanced age. In fact, Walton was well known as a “cunning man,” and the local theory was that he had either been murdered by someone who feared his powers and believed the old man had cursed them, or in a violent argument over money owed to him by his employer.
The newspaper’s informant for this new article lived in Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, and claimed to belong to a witches’ coven that met in Birmingham and London. The woman said the people who had murdered Charles Walton had been brought to Lower Quinton by car from another part of the country. Either three or thirteen people took part in the ritual—she seemed confused about the exact number. Walton was struck down, his body was mutilated, his robes were soaked in his own blood, and the participants then danced around the body. She claimed one of those present was “the leader of the London branch of the cult,” and the Midlands leader had told her he wanted him out of the way so he could gain control of the cult nationally (Gardner 1959: 237).
It transpired that the newspaper’s informant was the same Mrs. Jones who had supplied the information for the previous exposé. She had reported the details of the killing to Detective-Superintendent Alec Spooner, the head of Warwickshire’s Criminal Investigation Department, who had originally led the murder investigation before Scotland Yard was called in. She said a woman called “Mrs. Crowley, the widow of Aleister Crowley,” living in Cornwall, had been responsible for the Walton murder. She added that the ex-Roman Catholic priest who initiated her into the witch cult was the “leader from the Midlands,” and the one in London was “Dr. Gardner.” Allegedly, Gardner had organized the killing and had encouraged “Crowley’s widow” to carry it out (Newman 2006: 103). A few days after she was told the story, a “circle of silence,” made of twigs and graveyard chippings, was placed on her doorstep. This was a warning to keep quiet about what she had been told. When she said she was going to the police, she was attacked with a doctor’s scalpel and some hair and skin was removed from her head (Gardner 1959: 239).
“Mrs. Crowley” was actually Pat Doherty (aka Deirdre McAlpine), who had had an affair with the Great Beast, encountering him when he was involved in a libel case in 1934. She had accosted Crowley outside the courtroom and asked him if she could be the mother of his child. Subsequently she bore a son. In the late 1930s, Crowley was supposed to have stayed briefly in Cornwall where Pat Doherty was living. There were local rumors that during his visit he attended drug-fueled orgies at country houses and performed magical rituals with fellow occultists at stone circles. It is alleged that some reels of 35mm film taken of these rites may still exist.
Det. Supt. Spooner was naturally skeptical about the fantastic claims made by Mrs. Jones, but he was also determined to solve the Walton murder that had overshadowed his career. He was therefore willing to follow up any new lead, however unlikely it might seem. He contacted his colleagues in the Cornish police and asked them for any intelligence they had on Pat Doherty and her associates. A report came back saying that, according to their files, in 1932 Doherty had met a man who had moved into a converted barn near where she lived. He knew Alister Crawley [sic] and was acting as his “right-hand man” in Cornwall. His task was to recruit local people who wanted to practice black magic, and Doherty and several others belonging to the “county set” in the area joined his group.
One of these new members was supposed to have been an outsider described as coming from “a very wealthy family in the Midlands.” Paul Newman has identified this person as Crowley’s friend Gerald Yorke, an old Etonian descended from the Earls of Hardwicke (2006: 108). Presumably he was supposed to be the head of the witch cult in the Midlands mentioned in Mrs. Jones’ fairy tale. According to the Cornish police report, the group that Pat Doherty belonged to held rituals in a local wood at full moon using a pile of stones as an altar on which small birds were sacrificed (Ibid., 104). Spooner does not seem to have followed up the report. In fact the whole business appears to have been a classic example of rumors and gossip combined with the imaginings of a mentally deranged person. The media used this to justify their fantasy stories that well-known occultists engaged in devil worship, blood sacrifices, sexual orgies, and even ritual murder.
An interesting postscript to the lurid confessions made by Mrs. Jones is a possible connection with Gardner’s friend and magical working partner, Madeline Montalban. She once told me that she knew a defrocked Roman Catholic priest in Birmingham who organized performances of the Black Mass on a commercial basis. Paul Newman has told me privately that Mrs. Jones claimed to have known Madeline by the pseudonym of “Mrs. Montfort.” Professionally, she used many names as an author of romance novels and books on astrology, as a journalist, and in her private life.
In November 1956, Madeline Montalban wrote an article for the astrological magazine Prediction on the effects of karma. She gave the example of a journalist she knew who had written a series of articles on “black magic” for a newspaper. He had drawn a small amount of his material from factual sources and a great deal from hearsay and his imagination to produce a semi-fictional “smear and scare” story. This sounded like the recent articles about Mrs. Jones and the Birmingham witch coven. Montalban warned the man that by creating an interest that did not previously exist and making a profit from exploiting the weak-minded, he would suffer.
Shortly afterwards his editor found out the journalist’s stories were not true and lost confidence in him. He also suffered a series of misfortunes from which he never fully recovered. The last time Montalban saw the journalist he was bewailing his fate and protesting at the injustice of his situation. He claimed he only wanted to expose the alleged “black magicians.” In her article Montalban observed that accusing others of practicing black magic always brings the accuser karmic problems.
After the newspaper stories were published, Doreen Valiente said that Gerald Gardner at first treated the whole affair lightly. He reportedly told her the publicity he had received would have cost thousands of pounds if he had paid for it. Donna Gardner did not agree, and was unhappy about the business. The impression Valiente got was that the couple had lost some non-Craft friends because of the stories. Several people who had recently joined the Brickett Wood Coven were also panicked by the expose and the investigation carried out by the reporters. There were rumors the telephones of coven members had been tapped and their mail was being interfered with, either by private detectives working for the newspapers or by the police. Later, in the 1960s, I was in contact with one of the reporters involved in a News of the World exposé of witchcraft in 1963, and he confirmed private detective agencies were employed during the investigations.
Valiente advised Gardner to destroy any of his private papers and correspondence that might “fall into unfriendly hands,” and he agreed. He also considered fleeing abroad until the whole thing blew over. It was feared there might be an imminent police investigation, and that made sense considering the seriousness of Mrs. Jones’ allegations. In the end nothing happened, probably because the police informant was unstable and unreliable. Valiente spent a year investigating and debunking the various media stories. The results of this research were eventually published as an appendix to Gardner’s book The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959).
In 1957, the pressures of the negative publicity that Gardner, and Wicca in general, were receiving in the press, and his increasingly autocratic style caused tensions to develop within the Brickett Wood Coven. According to Doreen Valiente’s version of events, two different and differing factions had begun to form in the group. She described these as being pro-publicity, led by Gardner and newer members such as Jack Bracelin and his girl friend Amanda, and anti-publicity, led by herself and several other disgruntled older members (1989: 69). Bracelin (who died in 1981) was an ex-member of the police force in British-occupied Palestine (modern Israel). In the 1950s he worked for a paint wholesaler and as the administrator of the Five Acres Naturist Club. He was initiated into the coven in March 1956. He was tall, of slim build with light brown hair, blue eyes, and a small moustache that gave him a military look (Bourne 1998: 20). Bracelin was a close friend of the Sufi master and Grand Sheik, of the Sufi Order in the United Kingdom, Idries Shah. It was Shah who wrote the biography of Gardner published in 1960. Jack Bracelin put his name to it as the author because the Sufi did not want to be publicly associated with witchcraft.
Other members of the Brickett Wood Coven when the split happened between the two groups in 1957 included Frederick “Fred” Lamond (born 1931), an Austrian-born graduate of Clare College, Cambridge, working for the Economic Intelligence Unit and now an international computer consultant. Another leading member was Edward “Ned” Grove (died in 1966), a retired colonel in the Indian Army and city banker, who sided with Doreen Valiente. There were also a couple of housewives, a nurse, a sales executive, and a secretary (Hughes and Akhtov 1999).
Things came to a head in the coven when Doreen Valiente gave Gardner an ultimatum. She told him his “silly publicity seeking” was only adding to the new witch hunt by the press. She demanded that before Gardner gave any more interviews to the newspapers he first checked with the senior members of the coven. Valiente seems to have been independently supported in this position by Edith Woodford-Grimes. After Gardner’s wife, Donna, died in 1960, he asked Lois Bourne to sort out some of his papers. She came across correspondence from Dafo written in a very stern style and castigating Gardner for his “blatant publicity tendencies” (Bourne 1998: 58).
The ultimatum, however, was rejected and the pro-publicity faction led by Jack Bracelin encouraged Gardner to ignore any attempts by the opposing group to curb his publicity efforts on behalf of the Craft. In October 1957, Bracelin and Amanda were even persuaded by a reporter from The People Sunday newspaper to put on a ritual at a house in Finchley, Northwest London, for his benefit. A photograph was published to accompany the article, showing four naked witches sitting around an improvised altar on which were laid out an athame, some cords, a pentacle, and two lighted candles in candlesticks. The text described how the reporter witnessed “a nude priestess” perform a “wild ritual dance,” wearing nothing but a lapis lazuli necklace, a silver bracelet, and a garter. Doreen Valiente was horrified to find out that the original plan was to take the reporter to the witch’s cottage at Brickett Wood, but inclement weather had prevented this and an indoor ritual was hastily arranged in London instead.
Gardner was still busy seeking his own personal publicity. The final straw for the older members of the coven was when he posed for a magazine article on witchcraft, sitting cross-legged in a magical circle in the Isle of Man museum. He was holding a ceremonial sword and pointing at what the magazine described as “the weird image of a bat-winged demon.” When Valiente protested about this fiasco Gardner rather lamely blamed it on his publisher. He said Rider & Company had forced him to do the interview, against his wishes, to publicize his book Witchcraft Today.
It was at this stage that Doreen Valiente and her supporters in the anti-publicity faction decided to take action to save the coven from splitting in two. They drew up what they called “Proposed Rules for the Craft,” and their purpose was to ensure the oath of secrecy taken at initiations was kept. They presented these rules to Gardner, but he astonished them by responding they were not needed, as an archaic set of “Craft Laws” already existed. He sent Valiente a copy of these from the Isle of Man, and they were “full of obscure and archaic stylishes presumably to lend a sense of authenticity and dignity … ” (Rabinovich and Lewis 2002: 197). Valiente said the Laws were “couched in mock archaic language and ornamented with awesome threats … and invocations of ‘the Curse of the Goddess’ upon anyone who dared transgress them” (1989: 70).
Valiente seems to have objected strongly to several of these so-called “Laws of the Craft” because she regarded them as sexist. One stated: “The Gods love the brethren of the Wicca as a man loveth a woman, by mastering her.” Another claimed that the High Priestess received all her power from the Horned God and was only lent it by him. The third, and most significant, ruled that the High Priestess must be a young woman and should “gracefully retire in favour of a younger woman should the coven so decide in council.” Doreen Valiente objected to this because Old Dorothy, allegedly the High Priestess of the New Forest Coven, had remained in that position when she was an elderly woman. Also, no similar demand was made of the High Priest that he should stand aside for a younger man when he got old. Reading between the lines, one can surmise Valiente thought this law undermined and threatened her own position within the coven.
Ned Grove had been responsible with Valiente for drawing up the original “Proposed Rules” and he wrote back to Gardner accusing him of inventing his “Craft Laws.” The anti-publicity faction actually believed Jack Bracelin had helped write them. There followed, said Valiente, a heated exchange of correspondence between Grove and Gardner. At the end of it, nothing had been resolved. As a result of this lack of agreement, and Gardner’s continued love of self-publicity, Valiente, Grove, and several others made the reluctant decision to go their own way. In the frequent absence of Gardner on the Isle of Man, Jack Bracelin and Amanda were left to take over the remainder of the Brickett Wood Coven as its new High Priest and High Priestess.
If the split in the Brickett Wood Coven was a blow to Gardner and his authority, another threat emerged from within the Craft itself. The Bracelin biography says that this was a “certain self-styled witch who claimed to have inherited certain witch relics, and who wanted to gain control of the Museum.” He approached Gardner and tried to get him to agree to moving the museum collection from Castletown to London. He even offered the use of a building so the collection could be displayed to a larger public audience. Gardner was reluctant to have anything to do with this person, regarding him as a newcomer who wanted to become the leader of the witch cult (1960: 176). In another reference to the same person, the biography said the imposter had tried to find out from his initiates about the rituals practiced by Gardner. He did this by claiming they had already been published in a book and that was where Gardner had copied them from. However, he also said Gardner owned only part of the book—the rituals were therefore incomplete and only he had the complete copy (Ibid., 162).
This rival to Gardner was Charles “Charlie” Cardell (aka Major Charles Maynard) who lived with his “sister” Mary Cardell (aka Mary Edwards) in a London apartment and on a large forty-acre country estate called Dumbledene in the village of Charlwood in Surrey (now near Gatwick Airport). Mary Cardell was the daughter of a Cornish preacher and had inherited money from wealthy relatives. Charles Cardell had served in the British Army in India, and on his return to England earned a living as a stage magician. Sometime in the 1950s he set himself up as a psychologist operating from consulting rooms in Queens Gate, Central London. From their estate in Surrey, the Cardells, posing as brother and sister, also ran a company called Dumblecott Magick Productions, offering for sale such cosmetic products as “Moon Magick Beauty Balm.”
Charles Cardell came to public notice in 1958 when he wrote an article for the Spiritualist magazine Light. In it he announced that he and his sister were “Wiccens,” and they invited any genuine witches to contact them. Cardell was heavily involved with the College of Psychic Science (later the College for Psychic Studies), which published the magazine, and with the Spiritualist movement in general. In December 1959, he gave a talk on “Magic” to the Marylebone Spiritualist Association. Unfortunately some members of the college were unhappy about an article promoting witchcraft being published in Light. One of its leading members, Brigadier General Firebrace, said privately that he believed Cardell was “crazy” (Doreen Valiente’s notebooks; entry dated July 20, 1983 in MOW archive).
Despite saying he was a witch, as a practicing psychologist, Charles Cardell said he worked to expose the many charlatans in the occult world preying on the gullible, and in public he presented himself as a skeptic in such matters. He offered £5,000 to any witch, magician, or occultist who could publicly prove they had magical or psychic powers. One occultist, Charles Montague Pace, accepted the challenge. Pace was an old friend of Gerald Gardner, a self-styled “Setanist,” Luciferian, and “Priest of Anubis” who worked as a mortuary attendant. He later became Eleanor Bone’s lodger and the High Priest of her Streatham coven. Pace was also an accomplished artist. In the 1970s, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin employed him to paint occult murals on the walls of Boleskine House, Crowley’s former home in Scotland, which the rock star had bought. Charles Pace was also involved as an informant in several major newspaper exposés of witchcraft and Satanism.
Pace wrote to Charles Cardell, challenging him to a meeting at Stonehenge on Walpurgis Night, April 30, 1965. There he would allegedly witness “the dreaded fire ritual of the Black Peacock Angel [Lucifer]” The Setanist invited Life magazine to report on the event, and told Cecil Williamson they were interested. He had also invited members of the press and a television crew, but the demonstration seems not to have happened. Cardell must have been interested as he had apparently offered to donate the £5,000 to charity, and Charles Pace nominated the Institute for Deaf and Blind Children (letter from Pace to Cecil Williamson dated May 30, 1964, doc. 156/ref. 176 in MOW archive).
Charles Cardell claimed he had inherited his form of witchcraft from his mother, Lilla Maynard, a circus artiste and tightrope walker. Allegedly she had passed on to her son her personal arthame [sic] and “witch bracelet.” Gardner however was convinced that Cardell was not genuine and only wanted to take over the Isle of Man museum and entice away members of his coven. Certainly, according to a letter in the archives of the Church of Wicca in Toronto, those members of Brickett Wood who had broken away were interested in Cardell’s article in Light. In July 1958, Doreen Valiente wrote to Dafo, enclosing a copy of the magazine, and said that she and Ned Grove had met Cardell and had “long talks with him.” This letter is interesting in itself because it shows that despite Valiente’s break with Gardner and the Brickett Wood Coven, she was still in contact with Edith Woodford-Grimes. Valiente concluded her letter by telling Dafo the “rebels [had] a good meeting place” and their plan was “to get together with Cardell and pool our respective traditions.” Despite Gardner’s skepticism, from his own experience in the occult, Ned Groves believed Cardell was the genuine article (Kelly 2007: 87–89).
In fact, Doreen Valiente subsequently did join Cardell’s group, the Coven of Atho, but it is not known if any of the other ex-members of Brickett Wood followed her example. The coven took its name from a large wooden head depicting Atho, “the horned god of witchcraft,” owned by the Cardells’ handyman, Ray Howard. He claimed that when he was a young boy in Norfolk in the 1930s it been left to him in the will of an old Romany woman named Alicia French. She had also taught him a version of traditional witchcraft. Doreen Valiente believed the word “Atho” was an English corruption of the Welsh “Arddu” or “Dark One,” and was somehow linked to Charles Cardell’s family roots in Wales. The coven also worshipped the goddess Andraste, the name engraved on the “witch bracelet” Cardell inherited from his mother, and Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon and hunting. In her book Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978) Valiente published a copy of the Runes of Andred (Andraste) that she said had been given to her by a coven in Sussex. She claimed the Celts and Saxons worshipped this goddess in an ancient forest called Coed Andred (“the wood of Andred” in Welsh) that once covered southern England. The worship of Diana by the Coven of Atho she thought had been derived directly from Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches (entry in DV notebooks dated July 20, 1983, in MOW archive).
The head of Atho was carved from a solid piece of dark-colored oak that was allegedly over two thousand years old. It was adorned with two bull’s horns and inset with silver and jewels. The horns were decorated with the signs of the zodiac and on the forehead were what Doreen Valiente described as “the five rings of witchcraft.” The nose was in the form of a crescent-shaped chalice or wine cup and had a pentagram or five-pointed star on it. The mouth was shaped like a bird, the messenger of the elemental power of air, and the chin was in the form of the triangle of magical art (Valiente 1973: 25–26). When a small crucible of water with a lighted candle under it was placed in the back of the head its red glass eyes lit up and steam came out of the ends of the horns (Seims November 2007).
The meetings of the Coven of Atho were held at Dumbledene—it was rumored in a secret underground temple on the grounds converted from a wartime air-raid shelter (Ibid.). Most of the rituals, however, were performed in a woodland glade where an altar was set near an ancient tree. One ritual that was held indoors was known as the “Man, Maid, and Pupil” ceremony. This involved a magical circle being drawn on the floor around a chair and a small table. Pots containing earth, fire and water were placed around the circle. The pupil sat on the chair while the man directed the rite and the maid gave her “power” to it. Then the pupil went into a light trance and concentrated on healing or whatever the purpose of the rite was (entry dated 1970 in DV notebook in MOW archive).
Doreen Valiente claimed the Coven of Atho had members who included several well-known occultists. These she named as Margaret Bruce, a renowned herbalist, student of Madeline Montalban, and transsexual whose previous gender identity was a Merchant Navy seaman called Maurice Bruce; Jacqueline Murray, co-founder of the Atlantean Society; and Stella Truman, a witch who wrote for Prediction magazine. More controversially, Valiente said that the water and land speed racer Donald Campbell and his wife were members. It was alleged he used to touch the Head of Atho “for luck” before attempting his speed records. Ray Howard acted as the coven’s seer or clairvoyant, and it is possible Madeline Montalban was also involved. It is said that she and her magical partner and lover, Nicholas Heron, visited Cardell’s consulting rooms in London and took part in rituals in his temple (Ibid.).
Although Charles Cardell taught his initiates that the teachings of the Coven of Atho originated in the “Water City” (Atlantis) thousands of years before, in Doreen Valiente’s opinion they were derived from several modern esoteric sources. These included Dion Fortune’s occult novel The Sea Priestess, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Lewis Spence’s books on Atlantis, the American occultist Manly Palmer Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages (1962), the writings of the Ancient Mystical Order of Rosicrucians (AMORC) in the United States, to which Charles Cardell may have belonged, and Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia. In fact, Cardell had reprinted Leland’s book, and it is said Gerald Gardner went around buying up as many copies as he could find and burning them (DV notebooks dated February 27, 1968, in MOW archive).
Charles Cardell was Gerald Gardner’s greatest rival and it is even said he informed the newspapers of the location of the Brickett Wood Coven. In a policy of “divide and conquer,” he then told Gardner it was Doreen Valiente who was responsible for leaking the information. When one exposé was printed, Cardell sent Gardner a telegram saying: “Remember Ameth [Doreen Valiente’s witch name] tonight.” Although Cardell told people he was a hereditary witch and the “guardian of an ancient Celtic tradition,” he was still desperate to find out what rituals the Gardnerians practiced. He told Doreen Valiente that Gardner’s “star pupil,” a young woman named Olive Greene, was in fact working as a spy for him (DV notebook March 1959, in MOW archive).
Olive Greene (aka Olwen Armstrong Maddocks) was the wife of the chairman of the Brazilian Chamber of Commerce in the UK. In 1959, she became friendly with Gardner and persuaded him, without much effort, to privately initiate her into Wicca at his apartment in London. The Brickett Wood Coven had already rejected her because she was well educated and had a “superior attitude.” She was described as “young, pretty, well spoken, and had connections in the medical world” (Bourne 1998: 98). Gardner had decided to initiate her anyway despite the coven’s objections.
The coven’s rejection of her was justified, even if their reasons were not, as it turned out she was working secretly for Charles Cardell. When Greene became disillusioned with Gardner and turned against him, she went over to the other side and joined the Cardells. After Gardner fell ill and was taken into hospital, she obtained the key to his apartment and had access to his private papers. Greene copied and passed these on to Charles Cardell together with secretly taped recordings of Wiccan rituals and her own personal copy of the Book of Shadows. At first Cardell planned to send a copy of the BoS to the newspapers, but in the end he only published it after Gardner’s death in 1964. This was under the title Witch and using the symbolic pen name of “Rex Nemorensis” or “King of the Woods,” his title as the High Priest of the Coven of Atho.
Unfortunately for the Cardells, in 1960 they fell out with their handy-man and initiate, Ray Howard. He left his wife shortly afterwards and Mary Cardell gave evidence in court against Howard during the divorce case. In March 1961, Ray Howard took his revenge by taking a reporter from the London Evening News to spy on one of the rituals held on the Dumblecott estate. Two articles were published headlined “Witchcraft in Wood” and “Devil Worshipper by Night in Surrey Wood.” They described a two-hour ritual featuring “Beth, the Witch Maiden” (Mary Cardell) wearing a red cloak, and “Rex Nemorensis” wearing a black cloak decorated with a silver pentagram.
The reporter described seeing a group of people wearing hooded cloaks gather in a clearing in a wood. One was carrying a lantern on a pole, and its leader (Charles Cardell) drew a circle on the ground around a fire with a sword. On an altar were some bones (human or animal), a toy spider, a crystal ball, a bowl of water, and a shrunken head. As the group chanted, the High Priest took up a hunting horn and blew four blasts in the four directions of the compass around the circle. Mary Cardell, sitting in the fork of a tree, went into a trance to “communicate with the spirits of the dead.” At the end of the ritual, Cardell closed the circle by firing an arrow from a longbow into the trees near where Ray Howard and the reporter were hiding (London Evening News March 7, 1961).
Charles Cardell reacted badly to this betrayal by his former initiate and employee, as he believed it had adversely affected his status as a psychologist. He invited various journalists to Dumblecott for a press conference as a damage limitation exercise. Only the reporter who had written the articles and one from a local newspaper bothered to show up. Afterwards, the Evening News man told his colleagues that Cardell had tried to hypnotize him. A few weeks later Cardell appeared in court charged with threatening Ray Howard by sending him an effigy pierced with a needle (Seims November 2007, quoting unknown newspaper report dated May 4, 1961). After the court case, Ray Howard decided to move from Surrey and opened an antique shop in Norfolk. He took the Head of Atho with him and for a while displayed it in the shop. A photograph of Howard standing by it was published in a local newspaper. He later said it had been stolen during a burglary, although it is also claimed this was only a copy and the original still exists somewhere in Devon.
Ray Howard also owned an old mill in Cornwall for a time, and Lois Bourne visited it on a holiday in the 1960s. She described it as semi-derelict with walls decorated with “semi-occult” pictures of the Horned God and the Moon Goddess, and many implements and symbols of witchcraft (1979: 33). She also said it contained a “large carved wooden head, decorated … with semi-precious stones” (1998: 29). However, Doreen Valiente recorded in one of her personal notebooks that Eleanor Bone, who knew Ray Howard, had talked to the owner of the garage in Charlwood where the Cardells lived. A friend of his had told him Howard’s son had seen his father making the Head of Atho (entry dated February 27, 1968). Gary Nottingham, editor of the magazine Verdelet and organizer of the Esoteric Conference and Occult Fair at Ludlow in Shropshire, also told me that somebody who knew Ray Howard’s son today had told him the same story. It does not really matter if the Head of Atho was thousands of years old or had been made sixty years ago. It was obviously a powerful magical object and was revered as such by the Coven of Atho—esoterically that is all that matters.
Mary Cardell decided, in hindsight unwisely, to sue the London Evening News for libel because of their article about the alleged ritual at Dumbledene. The case finally came to court in 1967 and when giving evidence she denied ever taking part in any witchcraft rituals. Under oath, she said their company, Dumblecott Magick Productions, was set up as a front to attract members of Gardner’s Wicca movement and gain information about their activities. They could then publicly reveal what Gardner and his followers were doing, as they regarded him as a threat to vulnerable young people. Her “brother” also used his professional skills as a psychologist to treat people suffering from mental problems after becoming involved in witchcraft and the occult, and expose bogus clairvoyants preying on the bereaved.
The jury did not accept this explanation, and as a result the Cardells lost the case and were forced to pay all the costs. In 1968, Charles Cardell was back in court, where he was found guilty of circulating defamatory statements about the firm of lawyers who had defended the Evening News and its reporter. As a result, he was declared bankrupt and the Cardells had to sell off some of the land and the house at Dumbledene. In 1970, Doreen Valiente reported that Mary Cardell was reduced to living in a caravan on the grounds of their former estate. Although she was still loyal to her “brother” she was also a “very unhappy woman.” In September 1972, Valiente took a bus from her home in Brighton and made a secret trip to Dumbledene. In her notebook she wrote that she saw Charles Cardell in a shed near the house, chopping wood. The house itself looked “neglected, and in need of a coat of paint.”
Doreen Valiente is supposed to have owned a copy of The Book of Atho, which was Cardell’s equivalent of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows. On the front cover was a trident, the symbol of the first witches’ coven founded in the Water City, or the lost continent of Atlantis. Other symbols in the book included the Witches’ Pyramid and the Eight Paths of Magick, possibly borrowed from Gardner’s BoS. These were represented as a crescent moon, a bell, an alchemical sigil, a chalice, a trident, a spoon, a scourge, and a Hand of Glory (a candlestick made from the mummified hand of an executed criminal). These eight symbols were also associated with a secret handshake and password used in the coven. Other symbols used in the Atho tradition were a key, a lantern, the sun, the waxing and waning moon, a star, and a crown.
When I was initiated into Gardnerian Wicca in 1969, the general consensus was that Charles Cardell was a complete fake who made up the story about his mother being a witch. However, the account of the famous ritual in the wood does sound like a traditional form of witchcraft. Recently someone associated with a surviving group practicing the Atho tradition claimed it originated with Ray Howard. He then passed it on to the Cardells. Ironically some of the Coven of Atho material is supposed to have entered Gardnerian Wicca. This was possibly through Doreen Valiente or Stella Truman, or direct from Ray Howard to Eleanor Bone, as her BoS contained some of its rituals. These were passed to her initiates Madge Worthington and Arthur Eaglen of the Whitecroft Gardnerian tradition. They appeared in their BoS under the title of “The Rites of Atho” (pers. comm. to author).