Witchcraft Today
After Doreen Valiente’s private initiation in June 1953 at Dafo’s house in Christchurch, later that year Gerald Gardner invited her to his London apartment to meet the other members of his coven. There were about eight or ten of them, most belonging to the Five Acres Naturist Club at Brickett Wood. The next meeting she attended was a celebration at midwinter and the coven had lunch together before the ritual in the evening. After the meal had finished, Gardner suddenly announced that he wanted Valiente to write an invocation for the forthcoming Yule ceremony. She searched through his books in the apartment and found a copy of a book of Gaelic Christian prayers from the Hebrides called Carmina Gadelica by Alexander Carmichael. She took from it part of one of the prayers to St. Brigid and produced a suitable invocation of the witch goddess as the “Queen of the Moon, Queen of Stars.” Later she also used her poetic skills to add material to some of the short seasonal rites used by the coven, including the summer solstice and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Valiente and Gardner also cooperated to write a circle chant for raising power, and between them they created the famous “Witches’ Rune” (Hutton 1999: 246–247).
In September 1954, Kenneth Grant introduced Gardner to the psychic artist, medium, and magician Austin Osman Spare (1888–1956). The son of a London policeman, Spare was a talented artist, and as a young man he had several private exhibitions at leading London art galleries. He was also employed as a war artist during World War I. Many of Spare’s drawings and paintings had an explicit sexual content that shocked and offended the art establishment. Galleries refused to stage any more exhibitions of these erotic works, and Spare, a maverick who despised convention, responded by turning his back on fame. After his apartment in the slums of South London was bombed during the Blitz in 1940, and he lost all his possessions and most of his artwork, Spare became a recluse. He lived in poverty, making a meager living from drawing portraits in public houses of local characters, and making and selling talismans to fellow occult practitioners.
Austin Spare’s unique artwork illustrated the twilight world that he knew existed beyond the normal range of the physical senses. His inspiration was an elderly lady called Mrs. Paterson, whom he called his “witch mother.” She claimed to be a hereditary witch, descended from a family lineage in Salem, Massachusetts. She earned a living by using playing cards to tell fortunes and, like George Pickingill, had the ability to summon up spirits and elementals and materialize thought forms into physical form. She would tell her clients to think about their desires, and they would see symbolic images of them appear in a shadowy corner of the room as conjured up by the old witch. Inspired by his initiator into the witch cult, Spare evoked with pen and pencil the weird denizens of the elemental realm and the grotesque participants, human and nonhuman, of the Witches’ Sabbath. Strange entities, half-human and half-animal, writhed across the pages of his drawing book, and demons and devils danced in wild abandonment with naked hags at forbidden nocturnal rites. These crones were then transformed into beautiful young sirens as the magical glamour of ancient witch magic blurred the edges of reality.
Spare was a skilled psychic artist and he used automatic writing to receive messages from his spirit guide, Black Eagle, a Native American. Spare was highly regarded in the Spiritualist movement for his skill. One of his friends was the late Hannan Swaffer, a well-known Fleet Street newspaper reporter, medium, and editor of the Spiritualist newspaper Psychic News. A few years ago, when an exhibition of Spare’s original paintings and drawings were put on show in a West London art gallery, Psychic News devoted several pages to a review of his artwork and life.
As a young man, Spare had known Aleister Crowley and for a short time belonged to his magical group, the A.A., or Order of the Silver Star. The two occultists parted company on bad terms when Crowley, perhaps a little ironically, accused the artist of being a “Black Brother” or “black magician.” It has been speculated that the real reason for the disagreement was that Spare had resisted the bisexual Crowley’s advances (Beskin and Bonner 1999). Despite their differences, Crowley exerted a tremendous influence on the developing psyche of Spare as both a magus and an occult artist. Both men shared the belief that sexual energy was fundamental to any real and potent form of magical practice. In his book The Focus of Life, Spare said: “There is only one sense and that is sexual.” Because he was heterosexual, unlike Crowley, Spare did not indulge in homosexual magical acts. However, like his former guru, Spare associated with prostitutes and neurotic women, but claimed he channeled the orgasms from these brief encounters as ways to communicate with the spirit world, obtain psychic visions, or raise magical energy.
After he left Crowley’s order, Spare began to work on his own magical system known as “the alphabet of desire.” He based this on symbols or sigils that had arisen from his subconscious mind. They were either interlaced letters signifying the capital letters of a phrase such as “I wish to be rich and famous” or an abstract symbol of his own creation representing either a psychic force or his inner desires. Spare made a pack of cards painted with some of these sigils and carried them in his pocket at all times. His theory was that the magician could visualize the symbol on the card and concentrate on it to awaken his subconscious. He could then attract his desires (sex, wealth, power, etc.) and bring them into manifestation in the material world. He called this magical technique “atavistic resurgence,” and claimed that, like Mrs. Paterson, an advanced practitioner could externalize the image of his or her desires as a projected thought form that could be seen by others and even impregnated into the mind of another receptive person.
His “witch mother” had also taught Spare to summon elemental spirits into physical form. One day two dabblers in the occult turned up at the artist’s basement apartment in a Victorian terraced house in South London. They insisted that Spare prove his magical powers to them by calling up an elemental. He was reluctant to do so, knowing such actions could have unpleasant consequences for all concerned. At first he refused, but they were so persistent in their desire to see a spirit that he finally conceded to their request. Spare used one of his special sigils to evoke the entity, and after a few minutes a pungent fishy smell permeated the room and it began to fill up with a greenish mist. As the two men watched, paralyzed with fear, a long pointed face with demonic features began to form from the swirling mist. Eyes like pinpoints of fire glowed from slanted slits in the face, and the terrified occult dabblers began to plead with Spare to banish the terrifying elemental. The magus complied with their request and the face began to fade away, leaving behind an odor of rotting fish. Within a few days one of Spare’s visitors died suddenly, and the other was committed to a mental hospital.
Spare made an additional living in the early 1950s by manufacturing talismans and amulets and doing spells for other practitioners of the magical arts. This was how he met Gerald Gardner. Kenneth and Steffi Grant had met Spare in 1949 after buying a copy of one of his books from Michael Houghton at the Atlantis bookshop and writing to him. Before Gardner and Spare actually met, Spare was already making overtures to him using an emissary. In a letter dated August 25, 1954, Spare wrote to Kenneth Grant, saying: “Dr. Gardner of the Isle of Man sent along his deputy, a myopic stalky nymph [Diana Walden who at the time was the High Priestess of the Brickett Wood Coven] … with two magical [sic] knives that she insisted on showing me. Harmless and a little tiresome … what she was really interested in I don’t think she herself knew. She believed the Witches’ Sabbath was a sort of folk dance of pretty young things … I agreed that a Maypole may have symbolism” (The Grants 1998: 86).
In September 1954, Kenneth Grant took Spare to see Gardner at the apartment he had in Shepherd’s Bush, West London. At first they did not get on and argued over the meaning of the Witches’ Sabbath, a gathering Spare said he had attended many times on the astral plane while in a trance state. Obviously attempting to play a game of one-up-manship, Gardner showed Spare his athames, including his ritual black-handled knife with the witch symbols carved on the hilt. Spare was not impressed and told Gardner he knew “all the symbols and more.” He told Gardner it was possible to kill somebody just using the power of suggestion. Despite their disagreements on almost everything they discussed, Gardner purchased one of Spare’s famous talismans, jokingly known as flying saucers, because they were made from an ordinary dinner plate that had been painted with magical sigils. (I once saw Madeline Montalban make and use one of these for a cursing ritual that involved her smashing it to pieces with a ceremonial sword.) After the meeting Spare told Grant that he did not think Gardner had ever met a real witch. Grant has described the encounter between the two men as a “screamingly funny interview” (Ibid., 95 and 215).
A few days after their meeting, however, Spare seems to have changed his mind about Gardner. He sent Kenneth Grant a gift to pass on to “the Old Boy,” as he called Gardner. It was a magical stele that had been charged to repel evil and return it to the sender threefold. One wonders if this is where Gardner got the idea for his “Wiccan Rede” and the “Law of Threefold Return”? Spare, who like many occultists was a fanatical cat lover, said that the stele needed a token sacrifice. He therefore suggested that in return for the stele, Gardner send a check for ten shillings to the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) (Ibid., 98).
In 1955, one of the female members of Gardner’s coven whose witch name was “Clanda” decided to leave and join Grant’s Nu-Isis Lodge. Grant described her as a “tall woman … with a squameous appearance … with long wavy hair that clung to her like seaweed,” and made her resemble a mermaid. Because of the way she looked in the lodge, Clanda took the role of the “priestess of the sea and moon.” Gardner was not very happy that she had deserted him and directed a baleful current against the group and its leader. He also consulted Austin Spare in an attempt to get her back. Spare was totally ignorant of the situation and the real reason why he was being consulted by Gardner. He had just been asked to provide a talisman that would “restore that which has been taken from its rightful place.” He dutifully completed the commission and made a talisman using sigils from his magical alphabet to bind the spell (Man, Myth and Magic 1970).
A few days later a ritual was held in the Nu-Isis Lodge to invoke the goddess Black Isis to possess the body of a priestess and speak through her. Clanda was selected as the priestess and in the candlelit temple she lay on an altar surrounded by a circle of violet-robed and hooded lodge members. The air was thick with a specially made incense composed of galbanum, storax, olibanum, and “moon juice” (i.e., menstrual blood). Each of the windows in the room had been covered in black-out curtains left over from the air raids during the war.
The ritual commenced and, in the middle of the invocation to the Egyptian goddess, the young woman lying on the altar suddenly sat upright, her skin glistening with sweat and her eyes staring wildly at the window. A cold wind swept through the temple, and afterward Clanda told the others she had seen a vision of a monstrous, bird-like creature flying through the closed window into the room. It seemed to seize her in its huge webbed claws and carry her out of the window and up above the snow-covered roofs of the houses in the street. Eventually the giant bird entity returned to the room, released her from its taloned grip, and she dropped back onto the altar.
Examination of the window after the ritual ended showed that etched in one of the frost-covered panes was the unmistakable print of a very large bird’s claws. On the windowsill below it was a lump of gelatinous slime. This substance slowly dissolved away in the warmth of the room, leaving behind a strong smell of seawater. Grant said that shortly after this event Clanda decided to emigrate to New Zealand. On the way, the ship she was traveling on sank at sea, and she was drowned.
Kenneth Grant heard that Gardner had commissioned Spare and asked the magus if he had made a talisman for the witch and, as was his usual practice, bound an elemental spirit into it? Spare replied that he had been consulted by Gardner and had conjured up a spirit force to charge the talisman. When pressed for a description of the entity, Spare replied; “It was a sort of amphibious owl with bat wings and the talons of an eagle.” This was an almost identical description of the strange creature that had psychically attacked Clanda during the Isis rite (article in the occult encyclopedic part-work Man, Myth and Magic [c. 1970s] by Kenneth Grant 2003: 31–33).
In the same year that Gardner officially took over the witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man from Cecil Williamson and met Austin Osman Spare, his first nonfiction book on the Craft, Witchcraft Today, was published by Rider & Co. The manuscript was first called New Light on Witchcraft. In 1975, Aidan Kelly found an unedited carbon copy with that title among Gardner’s papers owned by Ripley International (Kelly 1991: xviii). It seems that when Gardner submitted the book, Rider persuaded him to change and shorten the title (Heselton 2003: 378).
The story told by Gardner about the writing of the book is that allegedly the New Forest Coven members were angry when a writer called Pennethorne Hughes, a former schoolteacher and employee of the BBC, wrote a historical book in 1952 about witchcraft. The coven members believed he had presented a distorted view of the subject and they therefore supported Gardner in his desire to write a factual book telling the truth, as they saw it, about witchcraft (The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gardner 1959: 12). The witches wanted their public representative to tell the world they were not sexual perverts, but decent people who just wanted to be left alone to follow their beliefs. While they wanted Gardner to write the book, they also warned him not to give away certain secrets (1954: 26). Having said that, he was allowed to reveal in public for the first time information about their beliefs and rituals that had never been previously known to cowans, or outsiders.
Witchcraft Today is what is known in the publishing business as a bit of a scissors-and-paste job, even though it was supposed to have been edited by “an occult scholar of distinction [who] managed to blue-pencil [remove] most of the more rubbishy passages” (King 1970: 180). This occult scholar was probably Gardner’s old naturist friend Ross Nichols of the Druid Order, who at the time was the editor of The Occult Observer, the magazine produced by Michael Juste of the Atlantis bookshop. In his foreword to Witchcraft Today, Gardner thanked Nichols for “supplying me with supplementary information [and for his] many useful suggestions and comments.” Gardner had submitted a draft of the manuscript to Gerald Yorke for his expert comment as well. Philip Heselton believes that the book was structured as it was because in his contact with the New Forest witches he had not actually received any formal teaching or training from them. Instead he was told things on an ad hoc basis over a period of time. When Gardner came to write the book around 1952–1953, he did not remember all that he had been told years earlier (Heselton 2003: 379–380).
In the publisher’s blurb for the later Arrow Books paperback edition reprinted in 1966, it boldly and rather fantastically says that “G. B. Gardner, until his recent death, was a member of one of the few covens surviving in England with an unbroken oral tradition that goes back to pre-Christian days.” It added that the witch cult worshipped a Horned God, representing death, and a Moon Goddess, representing rebirth and fertility. The male priest in the role of the God presides at the Hallowe’en and February Eve Sabbats, while the priestess conducts the May Eve and August Eve Sabbats.
Somehow Gardner managed to persuade Dr. Margaret Murray to write an introduction to Witchcraft Today, giving the book a degree of academic authority because it described her as “formerly Assistant Professor of Egyptology at University College, London.” Despite the peer criticism that had greeted her two books on witchcraft, she was still highly respected in that field. Gardner had met Dr. Murray at the meetings of the Folklore Society and, although she agreed to write the introduction, she privately referred to him as “a dangerous fool” (pers. comm. to the author from Cecil Williamson). When talking to other people about Gardner she seems to have had little time for him or his witchcraft beliefs.
Despite this, her introduction said that “Dr. [sic] Gardner states that he found in various parts of England groups of people who still practise the same rites as the so-called witches of the Middle Ages, and that the rites are a true survival and not a mere revival copied out of books.” This statement may have been partially true as far as the New Forest Coven had been concerned. However by the time the book was published Gardner, assisted by Doreen Valiente, had created his own version of modern neopagan witchcraft. This bore very little resemblance to the historical or traditional forms of the Craft referred to by Dr. Murray in her introduction.
Witchcraft Today began with a description of how the “witch power” exudes from the human body so as to justify the practice of ritual nudity in modern witchcraft rites. It also refuted Pennethorne Hughes’ view that the Craft was “an evil cult” and modern witches were sex perverts. Other chapters dealt with the history of witchcraft, the Knights Templar, the classical Mysteries, voodoo, Ancient Egyptian religion, witches in Ireland, the Inquisition, the Lammas ritual in 1940, the witches’ circle and working tools, and the true identity of the “Devil” who presided over witch meetings (i.e., the pagan horned god). The book ended with a miscellaneous chapter that covered blood sacrifice (not practiced by modern witches), the Sabbats, love charms, and witch marks.
One of the oddest chapters discussed how old the witch cult was. It is odd because in a previous chapter Gardner, following the theories of Dr. Margaret Murray, had already attempted to trace the origins of the Craft back to the primitive magic of the Stone Age. He said that he knew of surviving witch families whose fathers and grandfathers had been practitioners and had spoken to them of meetings “about the time of Waterloo” (1815). Then they believed “it was an old cult, thought to exist from all time” (1954: 51). Strangely, Gardner then goes on to say that the only person who could have invented modern witchcraft was Aleister Crowley, and mentions that the Great Beast told him he had been “inside when he was very young.” Without any apparent sense of irony, Gardner says that “there are indeed expressions and certain words used that smack of Crowley; possibly he borrowed from the cult writings, or more likely someone may have borrowed expressions from him.” He adds that the only other people he could think might have written the modern rituals were Rudyard Kipling, the members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, Hargrave Jennings, Francis Barrett, or Sir Francis Dashwood of the eighteenth-century Hellfire Club (Ibid., 52–53).
Taken at face value, these comments can be seen as a blatant attempt to explain the material in the Book of Shadows that was derived from the sources Gardner quoted in his book. However, Bill Liddell told me he believed what Gardner was actually doing was offering his readers clues or pointers to the different influences that had formed the Craft in the last two hundred years. As described in the Lugh material (1982), they included people such as Hargrave Jennings, George Pickingill, and Crowley. The inclusion in the book of the Templars, suppressed by the Roman Church in the fourteenth century for heresy, devil worship, sorcery, and making secret deals with their Saracen enemies, was according to Liddell a coded reference to how the medieval witch cult was influenced by Arabic beliefs. These had allegedly been introduced into Europe through Moorish Spain and southern France by knights returning from the Crusades in the Holy Land (Liddell 1994: 78–81 and 130–138).
When discussing the rituals practiced by modern witches, Gardner was far from honest as to their origins. In Witchcraft Today he described a Yule rite he had seen his witch friends perform. He said that it was an interesting ritual called “The Cauldron of Regeneration and the Dance of the Wheel.” This involved lighting a fire in a cauldron and then dancing around it, and he says: “The chant I heard was as follows …” and then proceeds to quote from the Yule ritual in the BoS circa 1954. Unfortunately it is not possible, as Gardner suggested, that he heard this chant in the context of some age-old ritual passed down from his parent coven in the New Forest. In fact, as we have seen, Doreen Valiente wrote this chant at his request one December afternoon only a year before the book was published.
Today the term “Wiccan” is universally used to describe modern witchcraft, especially its Gardnerian form, but the fact is that Gardner never used it, or at least not with that specific spelling. In chapter ten of Witchcraft Today he said that witches are “the people who call themselves the Wica [sic], the wise people, who practise the age-old rites and who have, along with much superstition and herbal knowledge, preserved an occult teaching and working processes which they themselves think to be magic or witchcraft.” A few lines further on he said “These Wica generally work for good purposes and help those in trouble to the best of their ability” (1954: 121).
Wicca or Wica is linguistically derived from the Anglo-Saxon wicca, meaning a male witch, sorcerer, or magician and wicce, a female witch or sorceress. Although it is a common belief in modern witchcraft circles that it is a word that comes from “wise” or “wisdom” and means the “Wise One,” in fact, its derivation comes from “prophet” or “diviner.” As Melissa Seims has noted, the word “Wica” appears only three times in Witchcraft Today, but seventeen times in Gardner’s second nonfiction book The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959). Wicca is also used and appears five times in discussions of the etymological origin of the word. However, in the Bracelin biography published a year later, it is the Wica spelling that appears twenty-one times without any reference to the alternative of Wicca (Seims August 2008).
In an interview given by Gardner to the Daily Dispatch in August 1954, three months before Witchcraft Today was published, he told the newspaper: “There are men and women witches. Each is called a wica.” In a letter written to The Observer in December 1955, Gardner described witches as followers of “a religion of nature and fertility [that] held regular festivals at which the concept of cosmic fertility was worshipped.” He added that the priests and priestesses who directed these festivals also had the function of surgeons, doctors, midwives, and psychiatrists. It was these people and their followers who came to be popularly called witches. In another letter to The Observer a year later, in December 1955, after his book was reviewed in the newspaper, Gardner described the priesthood of the Wica as “the Wise Ones.”
Melissa Seims has said that Gardner used the term “a wica” to describe an individual witch of either gender and “the Wica” as a collective term for several witches or the Craft as a whole. Arnold Crowther also used the word Wica when writing to Gardner about his investigation into the publicity activities of the King of the Witches, Alex Sanders. Bizarrely, Crowther’s letterhead read “The Wica Detective Agency,” which under the circumstances may have been a joke on his part (letter in the Church of Wicca collection in Toronto quoted in Seims August 2008).
In 1964, an advertisement also appeared in the UK edition of the American magazine Fate (coincidentally published by Athol Publications based in Douglas, Isle of Man) from the Wica Perthshire Circle, seeking new members. Melissa Seims believes Monique and Scotty Wilson placed this notice because they were living in that area at the time. Another advertisement in the same issue for a coven in Cardiff, Wales, described it as “Wicca-Dianic and Aradian.” Seims speculates this was connected with Gardner’s arch-rivals Charles and Mary Cardell, who we shall be discussing later in this book. She believes that Gardnerians like Doreen Valiente decided to use “Wicca” instead of “Wica” as a reaction to the Cardells’ use of the latter term.
By the 1960s, both writers and practitioners were widely referring to Wicca, and Wica had become a historical curiosity used only by a few of Gardner’s original initiates. Melissa Seims points out in her discussion of Wica and Wicca that words have power. She says that the transformation from one word to the other to describe neopagan witchcraft “tells us a story about a period of Craft history that helped shape what we [Wiccans] are today” (August 2008).
In Witchcraft Today, Gardner referred to Pennethorne Hughes’ belief that magic evolved in ancient Egypt. Hughes said it had then divided into two cultural streams with one branch of occult knowledge migrating northwards to southern Europe and becoming the witch cult and the other, possibly following the route of the River Nile, going south into Central and West Africa to form the roots of obeah, juju, and voodoo (Gardner 1954: 183). This was a theory Gardner was willing to accept. When he had visited Pompeii in Italy and viewed the frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries he realized there was a close connection between Greek religious rituals and witchcraft, e.g., scourging and ritual nudity in their respective initiation rites. He believed a “stream of teachings” had come out of Egypt and influenced the classical Mysteries of Greece and Rome. This was confirmed by the existence of witch tradition, as he had been told by his Elders in the New Forest Coven that the cultus had originally come from the Summerland in the East.
In the winters of 1952, 1953, and 1954, Gardner escaped the cold weather in England to stay on the Gold Coast in West Africa (modern Ghana and Nigeria). He wanted to find out about witchcraft as it was practiced in what was still regarded by many ex-colonial Europeans as the Dark Continent. During his visits to Africa, Gardner stayed with a friend of his in Accra who was the curator of the museum there and a member of the Brickett Wood coven. Gardner was well respected and even feared by the local inhabitants. One day they asked Gardner’s friend who the “white master” was who had stayed with him the year before. When he asked why they were interested, they said they were wondering because he never slept. Instead, they said, they had watched him as he “sat up all night talking to devils” (Bourne 1998: 87).
In January 1954, Gardner gave a lecture at the YMCA in Accra, and this was followed by a radio talk. As a result, he and his friend were contacted and taken to a house in the city where manifestations were occurring. It was made up of several wooden huts joined together and covered with a corrugated iron roof. All the windows were permanently closed, and in the backyard were a number of stones and half-bricks and some native-made stools. Gardner and his friend were told the stones and bricks had been deposited in the yard by a spirit similar to the European poltergeist. The occupants of the house said the stones would come into the house through the wooden walls and closed windows. Apparently the manifestations had begun after a young servant girl was dismissed. In Europe such ghostly activities are often associated with pubescent teenagers and their emotional moods.
In the late 1950s, Gardner consolidated his new version of witchcraft. By the end of the decade the earlier policy of making neophytes serve the probationary period of the traditional year and a day had largely been abandoned. This was due to Gardner’s increasing impatience at the slow growth of Wicca and his fear the witch cult would die out in modern times due to a lack of interest. People began to be initiated within a short time of Gardner meeting them. In one case he allegedly took a young female enquirer through all the three degrees in a month and then installed her as a High Priestess. When challenged about this, he responded that it was essential the Craft survive and be passed on to the future generation. Doreen Valiente said that when she first met Gardner he believed a call should be sent out to young people who were witches at heart and had been in the Craft in previous lives.
Gardner was in his seventies by then and not in the best of health. He knew his time was limited and wanted to make sure his legacy survived his death. Considering the evidence for the existence of the pre-Gardnerian robed covens and hereditary witch families in the 1940s and 1950s, Gardner’s worries about the imminent demise of the Craft seems to have been exaggerated. However, they were also losing members as the older ones died off. Also, as an elderly man with health problems, Gardner was desperate to promote his own version of witchcraft and establish it as a popular neopagan religion.
It is difficult to tell how the publication of Witchcraft Today influenced the general public’s perception of witches. It certainly increased media interest in witchcraft and, as we shall see, this had unpleasant consequences for Gardner and his followers. Reviews of the book were generally negative or at best lukewarm. Even the Folklore journal called it “an apology for witchcraft,” and said it could not be regarded as a serious contribution to the subject (Vol. LXVI #2, June 1955). Other critics were less polite, dismissing Gardner’s theories as fantasies, and casting doubt on the claim that he had actually encountered a real coven of witches. These criticisms are still being made today.
It was a double-edged sword because, although the book presented a positive image of the Craft in a public arena, the storm clouds were gathering, as it also caused tensions to develop within Gardner’s coven. This was caused in part by Gardner’s lust for self-publicity. While some members of the coven supported him, others were opposed. Outsiders also came out of the woodwork claiming to be real witches. They either dismissed Gardner as a fake or sought to challenge his position as the chief spokesman for modern witchcraft.
The Bracelin biography observed: “Some self-styled magicians, enraged beyond measure at the prominence which his books and Witchcraft Museum have brought Gardner, have attacked him. Few of them have bothered to realize that he is not in the same business, so to speak. They seem to think he will steal their thunder. Others—and these are the real lunatic fringe—have tried to set themselves up as witch kings or the like, sensing in this a possibility of personal prominence. None of them has been able to sustain the part for very long” (1960). In 1955, however, the disagreements within the Brickett Wood Coven were temporarily put on hold when it was forced to confront an outside threat that jeopardized the future of Wicca.