Gerald Gardner
and the Great Beast
The Bracelin biography of Gerald Gardner is strangely silent about the period from 1940 to 1946, when it says he met the so-called Great Beast 666, Aleister Crowley. In fact, this date is wrong—the two men met in the spring of 1947. It is possible that as it was wartime Gardner kept a low profile during these years. A fellow member of the Folklore Society, Ralph Merrifield, once deputy-director of the Museum of London and author of the classic book The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic, asked Gardner how he became interested in witchcraft. He received the odd reply that Gardner, as an air-raid warden, had fallen in love with a witch while fire-watching during the war.
Philip Heselton has identified this witch as Dafo, or Edith Woodford-Grimes. We have seen that Gardner attended her daughter’s wedding in 1940 and gave the bride away. Woodford-Grime’s husband did not attend the wedding, and the suggestion is that her marriage had broken down and they had separated (Heselton 2000: 266). It has also been suggested that Gardner and Dafo had an extra-marital affair. The theory is that the New Forest Coven never existed and that Gardner invented it and created Wicca so he would have an excuse for the affair if his wife ever found out! An alternative version put forward by Philip Heselton is that Gardner first met Dafo when they were both working as volunteers filling sandbags to protect Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament from possible bomb damage. They began chatting and discovered they were both naturists. Woodford-Grimes in fact belonged to the New Forest Naturist Club and that is why Gardner and his wife moved to Hampshire (Ibid., 263).
Cecil Williamson told me that Gardner had met several other witches apart from those who belonged to the New Forest Coven. He claimed Gardner had spoken to him about an encounter with the High Priestess of a coven in Epsom in Surrey. They had met while Gardner was an air-raid warden in London and he was filling sandbags in Parliament Square (letter dated May 22, 1984, in MOW archive doc.398.ref 419). Gardner is also supposed to have told Williamson that he knew of other covens in the New Forest and others in Highgate, North London, and Leeds in Yorkshire.
If one account is to be believed, wartime London was teeming with witches. Rollo Nordic, a tarot card designer and occultist claimed that “During the war there were two hundred of us [witches] and we met every Tuesday in a certain place in London and always sat in the same place, and we sent out rays to where was the worst fighting. And we could see by the newspapers it would slacken off” (Enchante magazine 1992). It is very hard to believe there were actually two hundred witches in London and they all met once a week together without attracting some attention to their activities.
Rollo Nordic also said she was a student of the taromancer, astrologer, and magician, Madeline Montalban (1910–1982). As we have already seen, Bill Liddell has claimed that she sponsored Gardner’s entry into a Co-Masonic lodge in 1945. Gardner told Doreen Valiente that he first met Montalban during the war and “she had been wearing the uniform of an officer in the WRNS [Wrens or Women’s Royal Navy Service].” This, however, was just a cover—she was secretly working for Lord Louis Mountbatten, the great-uncle of Prince Charles, Admiral of the Fleet, and, after the war, the last vice-royal in India before its independence from the British Empire. Lord Mountbatten, who, it is rumored, was interested in occult matters, had allegedly retained her as his personal clairvoyant and psychic advisor (Valiente 1989: 49–50). However, Madeline Montalban could not have been a member of the New Forest Coven in 1939 as claimed by Aidan Kelly, as Gardner did not meet her until later in the war.
I first met Madeline Montalban during the famous hippie “summer of love” in August 1967. I had read one of the many articles she contributed to the monthly magazine Prediction, and wrote to her. We met at her large apartment in a Gothic-style building at 3 Grape Street, St. Giles, London WC1, which is just behind the Shaftesbury Theatre. At the time the theatre was showing the controversial hippie musical Hair with its scenes of full-frontal nudity. Grape Street was only a few hundred yards from the British Museum and the Atlantis occult bookshop, and only a short walk from the Watkins occult bookshop in Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, St. Giles had been the site of a notorious slum called “The Rookeries” that was the haunt of prostitutes, thieves, beggars, astrologers, herbalists, quack-doctors, and fortunetellers. It is also adjacent to the Bloomsbury district with its historical associations with the Theosophical Society and the Order of the Golden Dawn.
With its turrets, balconies, and bow windows with leaded windowpanes, Madeline’s apartment seemed totally out of place in modern London. It perched over the street like a fairytale tower or a sorcerer’s eyrie, which is, in fact, what it was. Inside, this otherworldly effect was heightened by the apartment’s antique furnishings and glass-fronted cabinets full of occult curios and first editions of arcane books such as Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy and the Key of Solomon. Candles, votary lamps, and incense were continually burning to add to the atmosphere, and it was the most haunted place I have ever known. This was because Madeline refused to banish any of the spirits she conjured up during her magical rituals.
On our first meeting, Madeline cast my horoscope, casually mentioned we had known each other in a past life as priests in ancient Egypt, and told me that I bore the Mark of Cain. As a callow youth, I was suitably impressed, even though it took another thirty years before I fully understood her last remark. She invited me to become a student of her magical group, the Order of the Morning Star, founded in the 1950s with her partner Nicholas Heron (aka Nicholas Breach), who had been a reporter on a local newspaper in Brighton, Sussex, and was a skilled talisman maker. The OMS was based on a mixture of astrology, tarot, angelic magic, and Luciferianism. Madeline ran a correspondence course on these subjects that acted as an outer court for the Order.
Madeline told me a romantic story of how she became involved in the occult world. As a child she had been difficult and rebellious, and her father decided to put her on a train to London from their home town of Blackpool in Lancashire. He gave her a large cheque and the address of the magician Aleister Crowley. The money was supposed to induce the Great Beast to take her on as his sorcerer’s apprentice. She later told me she arrived at Crowley’s lodgings in Half Moon Street and was greeted at the door by his latest vampire-like Scarlet Woman, or magical partner. She was told Crowley was upstairs having an asthma attack in the bath. As either Madeline or one of her relatives suffered from the complaint, she was able to help him recover and he was eternally grateful for her help.
Madeline also claimed that she attended Crowley’s infamous Abbey of Thelema on Sicily in 1922, when she would have been only twelve years old. In fact Madeline met Crowley in the 1930s while she was working as a journalist for the Daily Express national newspaper and was sent to interview him. He was living in Half Moon Street at that time, and invited her for lunch at the Café Royal restaurant in Regent Street. At the end of the meal, Crowley suddenly discovered he had no money to pay for it and Madeline had to foot the bill. She told me that Crowley used her as his “Moonchild,” and she acted as a seer during his magical ceremonies. A fellow member of the OMS told me that she had a full set of magical robes from the AA, or Order of the Silver Star, Crowley’s magical group, in a chest in her apartment. During World War II, Madeline enlisted in the Royal Navy and she confirmed the story Gardner had told Doreen Valiente that she had served on Lord Mountbatten’s personal staff. She also said her rank in the Wrens was a cover to hide the fact from outsiders that she was really his seer. In her apartment I saw a silver-framed photograph of Mountbatten that he had signed for her.
Before 1951 and the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, in common with her contemporaries, Madeline Montalban kept a low profile. They disguised their studies as research into folklore, as that was regarded as a respectable and acceptable hobby. Despite this, Madeline seems to have been active in the esoteric scene in London, and knew people like Gerald Gardner, the Jewish-German refugee Michael Juste (aka Michael Houghton), who had founded the Atlantis bookshop in 1922, and Kenneth Grant, a disciple of Crowley and founder of the Tyhonian OTO (Ordo Templis Orientis or Order of the Temple of the East) and the Nu-Isis Lodge. Grant had met Crowley in the autumn of 1944 and subsequently moved into a cottage on the grounds of the Netherwood Hotel in Hastings, Sussex, where the Great Beast was living. He became Crowley’s secretary-personal assistant and worked without pay in exchange for magical instruction. However the relationship was short-lived, and Grant left Crowley’s employment only a year later in June 1945, as he needed to take up paid work to support his family. When he first met Gardner, Grant said that he “could not understand his remarks, he knows little and talks much” (letter to Cecil Williamson dated April 29, 1951, in the MOW archive).
In the late 1940s, Madeline Montalban was living in an apartment house on the present site of the Centre Point office block at St. Giles Circus. One of her stories was that she had cursed the building because her home had been demolished to make way for it. That is why, she claimed, it was empty for so long after it had been constructed and the company who owned it could not get any tenants to occupy it. Madeline also worked at the Atlantis bookshop for a time. Both she and Gardner applied to join Michael Juste’s occult group, the Order of Hidden Masters, which met in a temple in the shop’s basement, but he rejected their applications. Actual members of the Order included Gerard Yorke, a friend of Crowley, and John Symonds, who was later the Great Beast’s literary executer and first biographer. According to an entry in Doreen Valiente’s personal notebooks, the OHM practiced Golden Dawn-type rituals, and worshipped a dog-headed Sumerian god (MOW archive). Another source described the Order’s members as “sinister occultists,” who used magical rituals to get power over people in high places (Heselton 2003: 244).
Kenneth Grant has claimed that Madeline Montalban and Gerald Gardner worked magical rituals together at this time. In fact, Gardner was living in an apartment in Ridgemount Gardens, just off Tottenham Court Road and near Madeline’s apartment at what is now Centre Point. Grant told me that Gardner introduced him to “Mrs. North” in the late 1940s after he challenged him to show him a real witch (letter dated December 20, 1993). In Grant’s book Nightshade of Eden (1977), there is a curiously inaccurate account of a ritual performed by Gardner and Montalban, who is called “Mrs. South.” Grant says that she was a procuress and whore [sic] who spiced her activities with an “occult flavour calculated to appeal to a certain type of clientele” (122).
The ritual had been instigated by Gardner and its purpose was to demonstrate, presumably to Grant and his wife Steffi, who were also present, his ability to “bring down the power.” The intention was to raise a current of magical energy and contact “certain extraterrestrial intelligences” that Grant was in almost constant rapport with at the time. This was at a period when Grant was in the formative stage of creating his own OTO lodge. The rite consisted of the five participants (Gardner, Montalban, Kenneth and Steffi Grant, and a “young lady who was ‘well-versed’ in the deeper aspects of witchcraft” [Ibid., 123]), circling around a sigil inscribed on a consecrated piece of parchment.
Grant had asked his friend and fellow magical practitioner Austin Osman Spare to design the sigil as he was engaged in similar spirit contact work. At the climax of the ritual the parchment would be consumed in the flame of a candle standing on the altar in the north quadrant of Madeline Montalban’s apartment. Grant says that, apart from the magical equipment, the room contained only two or three shelves of books on witchcraft and the occult. These, he claimed, were merely props to add a little authenticity to her “more usual pursuits.”
The participants circled the altar in a deosil (clockwise) direction with an ever-increasing pace in a diminishing circle. Before the invocation could be said, the proceedings were interrupted by the loud ringing of the doorbell on the front door of the building. The unwelcome caller was “the proprietor of an ‘occult’ bookshop” situated near “Mrs. South’s” apartment (Ibid., 123). This was in fact Madeline’s employer, Michael Juste, from the nearby Atlantis bookshop. When Juste learned that Grant was present, he decided not to come in. He knew that Grant had been one of Crowley’s disciples, and disapproved of the Great Beast, his activities, and his associates. Having been disturbed, the practitioners decided to abandon the rite.
Grant said that the abortive ritual was designed to call up a “particularly potent spirit,” which would undoubtedly have been described by Gardner and Mrs. South as “phallic’’ (Ibid., 124). He says that this was important, as the sudden and abrupt ending of the ritual allegedly had unfortunate consequences. “Mrs. South died under mysterious circumstances,” and Gerald Gardner “was not long following suit,” the bookshop owner’s marriage broke up, and he also died shortly afterwards. In fact, Michael Juste died at age sixty-four in 1961, Gardner of a heart attack in 1964 at age eighty, and Madeline in 1982 at age seventy-two, from lung cancer.
According to Rollo Nordic [op cit], Madeline Montalban was quite happy to adopt the persona of a witch when she knew her. However, in the 1960s when I met her, she denounced Gardner as “a fraud and a pervert.” This description was based on a ritual she had attended where Gardner was tied up skyclad and his genitals were tickled with a feather-duster by a female witch. Gardner’s liking of sadomasochistic scenarios has been confirmed by others who knew him. It is claimed that in his old age Gardner was impotent, and this was the only way he could get sexually aroused.
Any discussion of Wicca in Madeline’s presence when I knew her was forbidden and likely to bring on one of her infamous mood swings when she would get in a rage and throw everyone out. She had a real dislike of the “media witches” who appeared in the newspapers, although she seems to have mellowed with age. In the late 1970s, she did meet Maxine Sanders, the Queen of the Witches (2008: 237–239). However, I remember that when Madeline was interviewed in Man, Myth and Magic, and was described as the “Witch of St. Giles,” she went crazy and threatened to sue them for libel.
When we met in 1967, Madeline was aware of my interest in the Craft and I made no effort to hide it from her. She seemed to tolerate it to a point, as she realized that I was mainly interested in the folkloric and historic aspects and traditional forms of witchcraft. In fact, I had considered writing a book on the subject called The Cult of the Witch. She used her skills as a journalist and author to help me with the project. Oddly, Madeline seemed to always have a young man in her social circle interested in traditional witchcraft and folklore. Her lover, Nicholas Heron, took this role in the 1950s and, although my relationship with her was platonic, I had that position for a short while.
Things came to a head in December 1968, when I met a woman named Rosina Bishop, who was visiting Madeline with her friend Deric James, editor of Insight magazine. Rosina was a Wiccan and had been initiated by a man who had received his own initiation from one of Gardner’s later priestesses, Celia Penny (witch name “Francesca”). We became friendly, and in January 1969, Rosina offered to initiate me into Gardnerian Wicca. Madeline was not happy about this turn of events, and for a while we parted company. She never forgave me for what she regarded as an act of treachery, and our relationship was never the same again.
At Beltane, or May Day, 1947, Gerald Gardner met Aleister Crowley. Officially this was their first meeting, although there have always been persistent rumors they knew each other before that date. Francis King said they actually met first in either 1943 or 1944 (1971: 12). In the 1980s, I was in correspondence with Colonel Lawrence, who ran a witchcraft museum in the United States, and he told me that Gardner had known Crowley before the war. He claimed to have in his possession a silver cigarette case that allegedly included a note in Crowley’s writing saying: “Gift to GBG 1936.”
It certainly appears odd that Gardner should have been back in England for ten years and involved in the London occult scene without meeting Crowley before. Especially as Gardner and Madeline Montalban were friends and magical working partners, and she knew Crowley and was a member of his Order. Cecil Williamson claimed that Gardner and Crowley met each other after he came back from the Far East and Gardner was “running around like Wee Willie Winkie trying to dredge up anyone or anybody who had got anything to do with magic.” Williamson said that the two fell out, and in 1947, Gardner asked him to drive him down to Netherwood to make it up with him. Crowley apparently was not forgiving in nature and was just polite. When Gardner went outside, Crowley told Williamson: “You want to watch him.” He also described Gardner as a “wily old humbug,” and somebody that could not be trusted (Winter 1992). In return Gardner belittled Crowley’s work and according to Doreen Valiente regarded the so-called Great Beast as “a bit of a joke” (letter to John Score September 18, 1970, in MOW archive).
Gardner and Crowley’s relationship was certainly ambiguous. In the Bracelin biography, Gardner is quoted as saying that Crowley “wasted money like water,” and as a result he tried to get money out of people. Gardner also said that he had no proof that the Great Beast had any magical powers except for his hypnotic gaze, and he used it to get things out of people. Gardner added that Crowley shared another mark of the charlatan and that was “the all-pervading, almost overpowering, personal charm which brought him so many dupes” (1960: 156).
The official version of how Crowley and Gardner met in 1947 is that they were introduced by Arnold Crowther (1909–1974), later the High Priest of the Sheffield Coven. He was a ventriloquist, stage magician, and puppeteer who had known Gardner since before the war. They had met in 1939 at a lecture on folklore given by Christina Hole (Heselton 2003: 180). Crowther had only recently contacted Crowley after a woman had approached him at the end of one of his performances in April 1947. She said she knew a real magician with a similar name to his and gave him Crowley’s address at Netherwoods. Crowther wrote to the Great Beast and when he was invited to tea, took Gardner along (Ibid., 182). This event was also recorded by Crowley in his diary.
The most controversial aspect of this meeting between Crowley and Gardner is the Great Beast’s claim that as a young man he had been involved in witchcraft. Bracelin states: “At Oxford [sic], Crowley said, he had been on the edge of witchcraft.” In fact this was either Gardner’s memory failing him or a typing error, because Crowley was a student at Cambridge University, not Oxford. He told Gardner he had not “followed the way of the witches [because he] refused to be bossed around by any damned woman” (1960: 158). Although Crowley was a bisexual sadomasochist, he also had a misogynistic attitude, so this comment has a ring of truth about it. Gerald Yorke, Crowley’s friend and one of his executors, commented that this remark was “in character’’ (Heselton 2003: 191).
Cambridge was supposed to have been a center for occult activities and, according to the Catholic demonologist Montague Summers, Francis Barrett, author of The Magus, founded a magical group in the city. He said: “I have been told that Francis Barrett actually founded a small sodality of students of these dark and deep mysteries and that under his tuition … some advanced upon the path of transcendental wisdom. One at least was a Cambridge man, of what status—whether an undergraduate or a fellow of the college—I do not know, but there is every reason to believe that he initiated others and until quite recent years—it perhaps even persists today—the Barrett tradition was maintained at Cambridge, but very privately, and his teaching has been handed on to promising subjects” (Summers 1946).
The Lugh material compiled by Bill Liddell says that a coterie of academics at Cambridge University formed a pseudo-coven in the first decade of the nineteenth century. This group was allegedly operative by 1810, and based upon Barrett’s The Magus and the pagan rites of the classical Mysteries of ancient Greece and Rome. It is claimed George Pickingill was shown a copy of the so-called Cambridge Rituals during a lodge meeting of the Order of Woodsmen, and adopted them for his version of witchcraft. Liddell also said that there were two magical fraternities associated with the university. One had Rosicrucian-Masonic rituals based on the classical Mysteries and the other practiced sex rites and devil worship of the type associated with the eighteenth-century Hellfire Clubs. Both are supposed to be still active today (Liddell 1994: 107). One is reminded of the possibly apocryphal story that, while he was a student at Cambridge, Crowley fell out with one of his tutors. He made a wax image of the man and pricked it in the leg with a pin. Shortly afterwards the teacher suffered a nasty fall and broke his leg (Wheatley 1981).
When the writer Francis King met the novelist Louis Umfreville Wilkinson in 1953, the latter confirmed that Crowley had been “offered initiation into the witch cult” as a young man. Crowley told Wilkinson he had refused because he “didn’t want to be bossed around by a woman.” King was skeptical, but Wilkinson assured him that, while Crowley did indulge in leg-pulling jokes, he believed that on this occasion he was telling the truth. Francis King said that after meeting Wilkinson he was told by two other independent sources who knew Crowley that he had made the same claim to them (King 1970: 140–141).
Kenneth Grant told me that there was also a possible link between Crowley and an old coven known to Austin Osman Spare. This group was run in Essex by a witch sister of Spare’s own teacher and witch mother, Mrs. Paterson. Grant believed that Allan Bennett might have made contact with this coven, which was “one of the very few manifestations of the genuine witch cult to survive into the twentieth century.” Grant added that it was “therefore likely that Crowley also knew about the Essex coven and may even … have been initiated into it” (letter dated December 17, 1975).
In a letter dated February 8, 1950, Gardner wrote about Crowley’s admission that he had been involved in the witch cult that is lodged in the Museum of Witchcraft archive in Boscastle. He says, “By the way, Aleister Crowley was in the cult, but left in disgust. He could not stand a High Priestess having a superior position or having to kneel to her, and while he approved of the Great Rite [ritual sexual intercourse between the High Priest and Priestess], he was shocked at nudity. Queer man, he approved of being nude in a dirty way, but highly disapproved of it in a clean and healthy way. Also he disapproved of the use of the scurge [scourge] to release power … But he didn’t saimply [simply] pinch lots of witches rituals and incorporate it [sic] in his works. He claimed that the remote rituals for them [sic] but I doubt this.”
In this letter, Gardner says that, despite Crowley thinking witchcraft was “too tame” (Illes 2005: 723), the Great Beast took some of the witchcraft rituals he had learned and used them himself. In his book Witchcraft Today, Gardner speculated that Crowley might have invented the rites of the witch cult. He concluded that he may have “borrowed things from the cult writings, or more likely someone may have borrowed expressions from him” (Gardner 1954: 47). Some critics have said that this was Gardner being his usual tricksy self and trying to disguise the fact that when he wrote the rituals of Wicca in the 1940s he borrowed heavily from Crowley.
There is an alternative explanation provided by Bill Liddell in his early articles in The Wiccan. He claimed that in 1899 or 1900 Crowley had “a fleeting acquaintance with the Craft” when he was inducted into one of Pickingill’s Nine Covens in Norfolk. His introduction came from Allan Bennett (1872–1973), his magical mentor and tutor in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and allegedly also George Pickingill’s star pupil. Crowley was initiated into the Isis-Urania Temple of the GD in London in 1898 and was responsible for the rifts that split the Order a few years later. Liddell said that weird stories circulated in occult circles about Allan Bennett’s supernatural powers and his “blasting rod,” which had not come from his membership of the Theosophical Society or the GD. (The Wiccan #40 and #41, 1974). In 1900, Bennett gave up the magical path and went to Ceylon to become a Buddhist monk. He became an accredited Buddhist teacher, adopted the name Ananda Metteya, and set up a study group on Buddhism when he returned to England.
In 1899, Crowley rented an apartment in Chancery Lane, London, and furnished it as a magical temple. There he and Bennett evoked spirits using material gleaned from medieval grimoires. Doreen Valiente said that in a copy of Crowley’s magazine, The Equinox, there is a rite by Allan Bennett called “The Ritual for the Evocation Into Visible Appearance of the Great Spirit Taphhartharah.” This was a spirit associated with the planet Mercury, and the aim of the magical operation was to conjure it into physical manifestation. It could then be questioned and “the secrets of the magical art and occult wisdom” obtained.
Valiente said that this ritual contains features that are not included in the standard GD rites and are more similar to those in witchcraft. For instance, a small cauldron was placed in the center of a circle over a burning lamp fueled by methylated spirits. The cauldron contained what the article evocatively described as “hell broth” and Bennett took charge of it in his role as “assistant magus of the Art.” The purpose of the potion in the cauldron was to provide the material substance that allowed a spirit to manifest, presumably in the steam or smoke arising from it (Valiente 1978: 18).
In his articles in The Wiccan, Bill Liddell went on to claim that his people owned a photograph that shows George Pickingill with some of his pupils. Allegedly Allan Bennett can be easily recognized and, Liddell said, a young man beside him “is remarkably like a young Crowley.” When asked in 1977 if there was any possibility of getting hold of a copy of this extraordinary photograph to be published with his articles in The Cauldron, Liddell told me it was not available. When Leonora James (aka Prudence Jones) asked the same question in 1983, he replied: “It is highly unlikely that the photograph … will ever be exhibited for view. Its custodian was an old lady who died a few years ago. Several interested parties have purloined this photograph.”
According to Liddell, his great-grandmother was present on three occasions when Bennett and Crowley sought an audience with Pickingill. A possible confirmation of this relationship between Crowley and Old George came in my correspondence with Colonel Lawrence, mentioned before. He said his family had originally emigrated to the States from Scotland, and his great-great-grandmother, Lydia Lawrence, had founded the Unicorn Coven in Galveston around 1900. The coven’s rituals were inspired by a vacation Lydia had in Italy. They were neo-classical in nature, and the coven worshipped Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon and hunting.
On her way back to the States, Lydia visited some of her relatives living in England, and while she was there said she met Aleister Crowley. This meeting was supposed to have taken place in Canewdon where she was studying with George Pickingill, and Crowley was visiting his Craft mentor at the same time. She allegedly brought back to America a blackthorn walking stick that had belonged to the Essex witch master and which was given to her as a parting gift. It was displayed in Colonel Lawrence’s museum, but when it closed down some years ago and its collection was sold off, an American Wiccan couple managed to buy this famous example of a blasting rod.
Crowley apparently did not last long in the Craft—he was expelled from the Norfolk Coven because he would not convene regularly and also because he was a sexual pervert. Liddell claims that his masochistic tendencies meant that he enjoyed being punished (scourged?) by the coven’s High Priestess. As a result she denounced him as a “dirty minded, evilly disposed, vicious little monster,” and he was forced to leave. Liddell said that in fact Crowley was not really interested in the Craft per se, as he was too occupied with “awakening magical powers” (1994: 21–22). His attraction to the Craft and the reason for joining it was Pickingill and Bennett, and their occult abilities.
When Crowley and Gardner met in 1947 and discussed witchcraft, it is claimed, the two men realized they had been brethren in the same Craft tradition. Liddell said that while Crowley had difficulty in recollecting the rites of the Norfolk Coven, his magical papers did contain material from the Pickingill Craft. He therefore volunteered to use a technique of magical recall to obtain the original rituals he had been taught. Francis King claimed that Gardner had paid Crowley “a large fee” to write the rituals of Wicca. There were originally four of these for the celebration of the vernal equinox on March 21, or May Eve (April 30), and three initiation rituals, presumably one for each degree (1971: 12).
This claim by King seems to have been due to a confusion with the fee Gardner paid to the Great Beast for some OTO material, including the charter to start a lodge and the various teaching papers. Cecil Williamson said that Crowley told Gardner he could join the Order providing he paid the going rate for each installment (Winter 1992). When Doreen Valiente met Gerald Yorke, he told her: “Well, Gerald Gardner paid Old Crowley about £300 or so for that [the OTO charter]” (letter to Dr. Allen Greenfield August 28, 1986, MOW archive).
The OTO charter sold to Gardner was displayed in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic at Castletown on the Isle of Man. Crowley signed it with his magical name “Baphomet,” and described himself as the OTO “Sovereign Grand Master,” with jurisdiction over “all English-speaking countries.” The charter authorized his ‘“beloved son Scire [Dr. G. B. Gardner]” as a “Prince of Jerusalem” in the Order to constitute a “camp” (or lodge) of the OTO in “the degree Minerva.” This gave Gardner the authority to initiate people. The charter was written on the back of a piece of parchment that was a land deed for the county of Surrey in 1875, coincidentally the year Crowley was born. It had been written out by Gardner, but was signed by Crowley using his magical name.
In the Bracelin biography, it says that when Gardner met Crowley he was eager to revive the English branch of the OTO. It had “fell under a cloud” during World War I when Crowley, who was secretly working undercover for British Intelligence in the USA, was falsely accused of being pro-German, and the police raided his London temple. Following Crowley’s death in December 1947, Gardner wrote to the owner of the Netherwood’s boarding house asking if he knew who “Alister’s” [sic] executors were. He wanted to contact them to obtain some papers Crowley owned of “typescript rituals,” which he was willing to buy at a reasonable price. He mentioned in the letter that Crowley had given him “a charter making me head of the OTO in Europe” (letter dated December 24, 1947, in the MOW archive). Gardner also wrote to Crowley’s solicitor and said that as the head of the OTO in Britain he was entitled to the Great Beast’s goods and papers (Heselton 2003: 208).
In another letter to John Symonds, Gardner said that after Crowley’s death word was sent to the head of the OTO in the USA, Karl Germer, telling him that Gardner was the European head of the Order. The message was sent by Lady Frieda Harris, the illustrator of Crowley’s Thoth Tarot. Gardner said: “But owing to ill-health I so far haven’t [sic] been able to get anything going. I had some people interested, but some of them were sent to Germany with the Army of Occupation [BOAR or the British Occupation Army of the Rhine].” He adds that he did not have all the OTO rituals, as presumably he had not paid Crowley for all of them, but he did hold “the grades up to Prince of Jerusalem” (letter dated July 12, 1950, in the Warburg Institute, London).
Bill Liddell claimed that after Crowley’s death Gardner’s correspondence with him about the witchcraft rituals and the drafts written by Crowley were discovered by his executors John Symonds and Louis Wilkinson. Francis King had also seen them and he recognized the similarities between some of the rituals and a published version of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows. King immediately jumped to the conclusion that Gardner paid Crowley to write these rituals.
When Crowley wrote the ceremonies for the English branch of the OTO in 1912, Liddell claims he drew heavily on the Pickingill Craft rituals. Some modern Thelemites have in fact recognized Wicca as being an outer court of the OTO. Crowley was certainly eager to promote paganism as the religion of the new age of Aquarius, or, as he called it, the Aeon of Horus. As early as 1914, Crowley wrote to his American disciple Frater Achad (aka Charles Stansfield Jones, 1886–1950) suggesting the formation of a natural religion. This would be dedicated to sun worship and the Great Mother Goddess, and celebrate rites at the equinoxes and solstices (Symonds 1971: 194). It is possible that when Crowley met Gardner he finally saw his chance to achieve this long-held ambition.
Bill Liddell confirms this idea, as he said that Crowley was intrigued to learn that one of George Pickingill’s Nine Covens was still operating in the New Forest. He decided to assist Gardner in launching a new nature religion for the masses that would one day replace Christianity. As well as attempting to remember the rituals of the Norfolk Coven, Liddell said Crowley supplied Gardner with a Black Book of rituals belonging to a deceased Scottish witch. He had allegedly acquired this document while living at Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness in Scotland in the 1900s. In return Gardner was quite happy to borrow elements from Crowley’s writings and magical rituals such as the Gnostic Mass, which became the basis for the Wiccan Great Rite. In fact, parts of the Mass, Liddell’s Elders had claimed, had been derived in turn from the rituals of the Pickingill Craft (1994).
It was Doreen Valiente’s opinion that Gardner “fell under Crowley’s spell for a while … and incorporated much OTO material into the ‘Book of Shadows,’ possibly displacing other older rituals” (letter to Dr. Allen Greenfield dated August 8, 1986). Valiente always believed that the rituals Gardner obtained from the New Forest Coven were fragmentary and to turn them into a usable system he added extra material from other sources. As Dr. Dave Evans has noted, the rituals of Wicca were “an eclectic mixture of material drawn from [Dr. Margaret] Murray’s researches, OTO material, reconstructed Druidic rites and Co-Masonic sources (among others) with a scattering of nudity and sado-masochism (these being Gardner’s personal tastes) …” (2007b: 233). Professor Diane Purkiss has said that in modern witchcraft there is “a unique opportunity to see a religion being made from readings and re-readings of texts and histories” (1996: 52).
The Wiccan Book of Shadows also contained material taken from Charles Godfrey Leland’s book Aradia: Gospel of the Witches (1899), the Key of Solomon, and even an extract from a poem by Rudyard Kipling that was used in the May Eve celebration. Having read widely, I recognized many of these elements and their sources when Rosina Bishop initiated me into Gardnerian Wicca in 1969. However many Gardnerians, especially American ones, seem to have been unaware of the sources of the BoS. Many were apparently quite shocked when Professor Ronald Hutton’s book The Triumph of the Moon (1999) revealed where they had come from.