The Museum of Witchcraft
Cecil Williamson (1909–1999) was a colorful, flamboyant, larger- than-life, and controversial character, and he had an important behind-the-scenes influence on Wicca and the modern witchcraft revival through his relationship with Gerald Gardner. Sadly, it was a relationship that was to end in legal disputes, recriminations, and mutual hatred. This was largely caused by their financial partnership in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic opened by Williamson in Castletown on the Isle of Man in 1951 and later sold to Gardner.
Williamson was born in Devon of upper middle-class parents and his father was a high-ranking officer in the Royal Navy. During World War I, the young Cecil spent his summer vacations with his uncle, the Reverend Russell Fox, the vicar of the village of North Bovey on the edge of Dartmoor. One day Williamson went into the kitchen garden of the vicarage to pick some gooseberries for tea. His attention was distracted by an uproar going on over the garden wall on the village green. He went to investigate and found a gang of farm workers attacking an elderly woman known locally as “Aunty,” and stripping her naked. Williamson intervened and was only saved from a beating himself by the intervention of his uncle who dispersed the mob. He later found out that the woman’s attackers believed she was a witch and had cursed their cattle. They were removing her clothes to search for evidence of the witch’s teat she used to suckle her familiars. As a result of this incident Williamson got to know Aunty quite well, and she taught him “a little about witches” and what they did, and also how to “tickle” trout.
In the 1920s, Williamson did voluntary work in the slums of the East End of London among the poor. There he encountered the “wise women” of the docklands area, who offered their clients fortunetelling, herbal cures, and even abortions. When the war ended, Williamson’s father got a position in the Admiralty in London and the family moved to a town house in fashionable Curzon Street in Mayfair. Through the person who introduced him to voluntary work in the East End, Williamson met a society fortuneteller, Madame De Hoye. She took him on as her assistant, called the “boy in white,” and dressed him up in a white suit with white shoes and white gloves. At the appropriate moment in a reading with a client she asked him questions and he gave answers that were supposed to come from the spirit world.
As a young man, Williamson went to work on a tobacco farm in Rhodesia (now divided into Zambia and Zimbabwe). He became friendly with a local witch-doctor and was taught the secrets of juju. On his return to England he worked for Radio Luxembourg and then became a producer and director in the film industry working for Paramount, Ealing Studios, and British International. In 1933 he met and married Gwen Wilcox, the daughter of the film producer Charles Wilcox, who was working for Max Factor in Hollywood as a make-up artist. During the 1930s he was active in the London occult scene and knew Aleister Crowley, Montague Summers, the Egyptologist Dr. Wallis Budge, the psychic researcher and “ghost hunter” Harry Price, and Dr. Margaret Murray. He was also busy investigating rural witchcraft and found many village witches still practicing their art—healing the sick using herbal remedies, and dealing in love potions, spells, charms, and curses.
After his wartime service for king and country in MI6 and SOE, Williamson decided not to go back to the film industry and instead become self-employed. He had accumulated a large collection of items relating to witchcraft and folk magic and wanted to open up a small museum exhibiting these commercially to the public. In 1947 he went to Stratford-on-Avon because of its association with Shakespeare and his Scottish play with the three witches on the blasted heath. He knew a doctor in the town through his hobby of collecting antique apothecary jars. During the war, the local fire brigade requisitioned the doctor’s large garden and built a garage on it for their engines. He offered this to Williamson to exhibit his collection, but although the tourist board was supportive the locals were not, and Williamson was, quite literally, run out of town.
Williamson was still determined to set up his museum and in 1948 he decided to go to the Isle of Man and try there. He found a group of derelict buildings with a ruined windmill, two cottages, and an enormous barn with room for both his collection and a restaurant that he called the “Witches’ Kitchen.” Before Williamson had bought the place it was known locally as the “Witches’ Mill,” and got its name because a famous coven of witches lived nearby. When the mill burnt down in 1848, they allegedly used its ruins for their rituals and as a “dancing ground” (Heselton 2001: 41). The mill dated back at least to the seventeenth century, and there is a court record in 1611 when its owner was fined two sheep for not turning out the “watch and ward” (the local defense militia) (Gardner 1964).
Although Williamson had faced problems in Stratford-on-Avon, the Manx authorities went out of their way to welcome the arrival of a new tourist attraction to the island. Both the board of commissioners and the chief executive officer of the tourist board offered their assistance and the necessary permits were granted. As a result the work of reconstructing the mill began in the spring of 1951. It is presumed this date was chosen as it was the year in which the old Witchcraft Act of 1735 was repealed. Previously the problem was that the Craft was still officially illegal. In 1944, the Spiritualist medium Helen Duncan had actually been prosecuted under the old act.
The museum was finally opened in July 1951. At first it was called “The Folklore Center of Superstition and Magic,” although by the time Gerald Gardner purchased it some years later, the name had been changed to “The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic.” In the brochure he printed to advertise the exhibition, Williamson said it was impossible to cover all aspects of folklore, so he had decided to focus on superstition and witchcraft. This meant the exhibits also included related and kindred subjects such as magic, spells, charms, amulets, faeries, luck, and omens. Williamson actually told Gerald Yorke that he had opened the museum as a “shop window,” to attract contact with other witches, as well as making him a living (letter dated August 7, 1952, in the Gerald Yorke Collection at the Warburg Institute).
The activities at the museum came under three headings: the exhibition of objects to the public relating to witchcraft and folklore, a visitors’ restaurant, and a membership scheme. Interested visitors were invited to become members of the Folklore Center and in return for their subscriptions they received a journal with views about the museum, articles written by members and non-members, and answers to correspondence queries. In addition the members had access to the museum’s library, were encouraged to collect and donate objects for display, and could join a study group to discuss the practical aspects of magic.
The Witches’ Kitchen was set up to offer refreshments to museum visitors and was also an additional money-making enterprise. It offered meals that were themed to reflect the seasonal festivals of the folk calendar and emphasis was placed on using locally sourced food. In this respect it was quite innovative and forward looking for the time, which was a post-war period when rationing and food shortages were still a depressing feature of daily life.
According to the information printed in the brochure, the museum exhibitions consisted of a large and varied range of display cabinets containing objects relating to the history and practice of witchcraft, ancient and modern. They included the set piece reconstruction of a “medieval sorcerer’s temple for the working of art magic” based on one that might have been used by the Elizabethan astrologer and magician Dr. John Dee. Other planned reconstructions would feature a witch’s kitchen, an alchemist’s den, and a modern African witch doctor’s hut. There was also a replica of a Golden Dawn temple designed and constructed by Kenneth Grant’s artist wife, Steffi. In a series of letters written in the spring of 1951, she kept Williamson informed of the progress with the making of a GD lotus wand, the candlesticks, and the altar. She offered to visit the Isle of Man and help set the exhibit up (letters dated April and May 1951 ref. 96/111, 97/112 and 100/115 in MOW archive). Williamson also employed students from the Douglas School of Art to make some of the items displayed in the temple (Heselton 2003: 339).
Shortly after he had opened the museum, Williamson has said that unexpectedly Gerald Gardner turned up on his doorstep. According to this account, a member of the staff told Williamson there was a gentleman to see him. When he went to see who it was, he found the “pathetic sight of Dr. G. Gardner with a music case that had his pyjamas and a toothbrush in it.” Allegedly Gardner was having financial problems with a family trust and had fallen out with his brother over it. There were also apparently problems with the Brickett Wood Coven and because of this and a shortage of money Gardner had decided to come to the Isle of Man for a vacation. In fact he stayed with Williamson and his wife for three months until the lawyers sorted out the outstanding financial matters.
This account is not strictly true, as Gardner had already been in contact with Williamson before the museum had opened. They had first met at the Atlantis Bookshop in 1947. As early as February 1951 Gardner wrote to him expressing his paranoid concern that the Church of England might stop the museum from opening. He was afraid they could obtain a court injunction and the contents would be confiscated and destroyed (letter dated February 8, 1951). Philip Heselton has suggested that Gardner may even have visited Williamson in March 1951 (2003: 334) and had given Williamson his own private collection of magical objects on loan for display in the museum. An article published in the Isle of Man Examiner newspaper dated July 29, 1951 mentioned Gardner, and says he was to perform the museum’s opening ceremony the next day. He stood in a magical circle drawn on the ground and read part of a ritual from his grimoire [sic] while holding a ceremonial dagger.
It has been suggested to me that Gardner may have had some contact with the Isle of Man before Williamson decided to base his museum there. There was a long history of witchcraft on the island and in his book The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gardner published a drawing of Margaret Ine Quane and her son being burned to death as witches in Castletown in 1617. They had been accused of riding around the fields astride broomsticks to encourage the crops to grow. In his A Second Manx Scrapbook (1932), the folklorist Walter W. Gill referred to a folk dance performed by Manx women to obtain a husband. He said the real reason for its performance was to become an initiate of the witch cult and the husband was the Devil. Gill mentions a woman on the island known as “Queen of the Witches,” and of witches being initiated into the “high degrees of witchcraft.” Gardner himself talked of hereditary witch traditions on the Isle of Man, and one family known to have been “white witches for five generations” (1964).
It has been claimed that Gardner visited the Isle of Man several times in the 1940s and made contact with the local robed covens (Asphodel Summer 1993). It was these Old Crafters who encouraged Gardner to go public and write High Magic’s Aid. The purpose was to make contact with other surviving witch covens and traditions. On Midsummer’s Day, June 24, 1951, Cecil Williamson held a Witches’ Convention on the island. He remarked that Gardner had found himself at odds with the other delegates because of differences of opinion about his form of witchcraft. It is possible some of these were locals. Charles Clark also firmly believed that Gardner had received an initiation into witchcraft on the Isle of Man (e-mail to Michael Howard from Melissa Seims dated November 17, 2005).
If we accept Cecil Williamson’s account, when Gardner arrived at the museum he asked if he could sell copies of High Magic’s Aid. He had paid Michael Juste to print it and the book was not selling well. Juste was storing “so many thousand copies” and wanted them out of the way. Williamson agreed to store this stock and also provided Gardner with a large elm table at the museum he could use to try and sell them. In return he took a commission on each sale (Williamson Winter 1992). Gardner acted as a “resident witch” in these early days at the museum. During the summer season he entertained visitors to the teashop with tales of life in the Far East and provided an extra (living) attraction to the exhibition. He also used his position to recruit new members to the Craft. In 1953, Gardner wrote to Williamson, complaining that he was not passing on enquiries about modern witchcraft to him. He concluded that Williamson was deliberately withholding information about prospective members (letter in MOW archive).
Gardner’s presence on the Isle of Man and at the museum became more permanent when Williamson found him and Donna an old house to live in at 77 Malew Street, Castletown. It had originally been a smithy with a stables attached. When the Gardners moved in, the study was decorated with spears, Saracen scimitars, daggers, medieval pikes, Toledo rapiers, and Malayan keris. Hundreds of books lined the shelves from floor to ceiling and stood in piles on the carpet. Their subjects covered psychic research, secret societies, archaeology, and weapons (Bourne 1998: 32). A bathroom door connected to a two-story building next door with rough stone walls. The top floor was converted into a temple, complete with incense burners, antique lamps, an old oak table as an altar, and a magical circle on the floor. It was in this converted room that meetings of the Isle of Man Coven were held in the 1950s and initiations took place (Crowther 2002: 142).
Cecil Williamson claimed that Gardner’s appearance at the witchcraft museum was not as straightforward as it seemed. In fact he “coveted the museum [and] was up to all sorts of tricks to get me out” (Autumn 1992). Because of his lifelong interest in collecting weaponry and in archaeology Gardner was a great supporter of museums. In 1944, he gave a talk in Christchurch in which he strongly argued for the establishment of a local museum. Unfortunately he was before his time as he advocated the use of models and exhibits to educate people as well as static displays in cabinets (Heselton 2001). He had probably got this idea from Father Ward and his Abbey Folk Park museum.
Gardner introduced Williamson to Edith Woodford-Grimes (Dafo), and described her as the “High Priestess of the Southern Coven.” In fact, Williamson claimed that this was not their first meeting. He had encountered her previously during the war when he was setting up a secret radio station in the New Forest to broadcast propaganda to the German U-boat crews. She was introduced to him as “the leading witch of one of the New Forest covens” (Autumn 1992). Williamson described Woodford-Grimes as a typical English lady wearing “a good tweed skirt and jacket, a string of pearls and sensible shoes” (“Witchcraft in the New Forest” doc.113/ref. 134 in the MOW archives).
Using Gardner as her middleman, Dafo offered to loan some artifacts belonging to the New Forest Coven for exhibition in the museum. They eventually arrived in several cardboard boxes and Williamson told me they were “the sort of stuff produced by an arty-crafty house potter.” They included pots, bowls, and various bottles made from glazed earthenware of a darkish brown or gray color. Many had runic-type (Theban?) symbols on them. There were also several black- and white-handled knives, a scourge, handmade wands, necklaces made of beads, twigs strung on leather thongs, small boxes carved from tree branches, sheets of old parchment covered in magical sigils, antique wooden spoons, and three-pronged forks. This “junk,” as Williamson called it, was evidently some of the ritual-working equipment that was being used by the New Forest witches.
These objects were put on show in a special display cabinet for six or seven weeks. Then Gardner told Williamson that Dafo was upset that he “was not into paganism,” and she wanted them returned. Gardner showed Williamson a letter that he said was from Woodford-Grimes written in the runic script that was on some of the exhibits and said he had offended her. Williamson removed the collection from display and when Gardner arrived next at the museum he was surprised to find them packed up on the table he used to sell his books (Autumn 1992). Evidently they never found their way back to the New Forest coven, as when I first visited the Boscastle museum in 1967, I remember seeing them on display. What happened to them when Williamson sold the museum in the 1990s is not known.
Despite Williamson’s suspicions that Gardner was trying to take over the museum, in 1952 the two men became business partners. The business was running into financial difficulties and Williamson borrowed money to pay the rent owed to the landlord of Old Windmill Farm. Gardner also offered to buy the museum buildings and then offered them back to Williamson on a mortgage (Heselton 2003: 350). However, after about two years of this partnership, the two men fell out over the financial arrangements. Williamson accused Gardner of “wicked double-dealing ways,” and from 1952 to 1954 letters were exchanged between their lawyers. One from a legal firm in Douglas, written to Williamson in 1954, informed him that the notice requiring the repayment of Dr. Gardner’s mortgage was due to expire in two days. It asked him to confirm he could repay it by that date. The letter also mentioned that Mrs. Woodford-Grimes had offered to take over the property with vacant possession for a sum equal to the amount owed to Gardner (letter ref. 39/111 in MOW archive).
Williamson eventually decided to sell the museum buildings to Gardner and return to the mainland. This, however, was also not without its problems, due to the alleged intervention of Mrs. Woodford-Grimes. Gardner told him that before he could make an offer she would have to come to the Isle of Man and inspect the place. When she arrived at the airport Williamson offered to collect her to save Gardner having to pay the costs of a taxi. He was adamant, however, that he would meet her at the plane and bring her back to the museum. Williamson claimed that when Mrs. Woodford-Grimes turned up he immediately recognized her as Mrs. Soames, the owner of a local boarding house (Autumn 1992). Why Gardner should have attempted this subterfuge, if he actually did, is unknown as Dafo had already visited the museum shortly after it had opened (Heselton 2003: 350). Perhaps Williamson was being “economical with the truth” again.
Terms were finally agreed on, and Gardner paid the full asking price for the museum. For that, he got all the buildings, the box office, the restaurant, and the ruined tower of the windmill—without its sails. However, Williamson said he refused to pay for any of the exhibits, so they were not included in the sale. Previously Williamson had purchased most of the collection that had originally been loaned to him by Gardner. After some discussion, however, Williamson agreed to lend him some of the exhibits. There was also a petty disagreement about the special cups and saucers used in the Witches’ Kitchen. They were functional white china, but Williamson had some special transfers of a witch sitting on a broomstick printed on every cup and plate. Gardner was not willing to pay for these either, so all the stickers were removed, leaving the china plain. When Gardner visited the restaurant the next day he found what had happened and, Williamson claims, was so angry he tried to stab him with his athame (Ibid.). Again this story may have been Williamson dramatizing the situation and trying to defame Gardner.
After the sale, Cecil Williamson returned to England, where he founded a new witchcraft museum in Windsor, not far from the castle. After a short while he had a visit from two men in suits intimating they were representatives of the royal family. They politely told him to move on. He then opened the museum up again at Bourton-on-the-Water in Gloucestershire, but was forced to close it down after arson attacks, being denounced in the pulpit by the local minister, and demonstrations by fanatical Christians. Finally, in 1960, he opened the museum in the former fishing village of Boscastle in North Cornwall. He retired in the late 1990s and sold the museum building and its contents to a Hampshire businessman and Wiccan, Graham King, who is still running it successfully today.
When Gerald Gardner took over the Witches’ Mill museum he changed its name and added suits of armor and weapons from his private collection to the exhibits, together with amulets and charms he had found on his travels. A visitor to the museum in the 1950s described Gardner as being about 5’ 6” tall and stocky with snow-white hair and a goatee. He wore a tweed suit, a homespun wool jumper, and sandals on bare feet. His reading glasses hung in a case from a cord around his neck, and his fingers were covered in magical rings. Along with a nervous twitching of his hands and eyelids, his speech was reported as being rather jerky.
In the brochure produced by Gardner to advertise the museum there is no mention of Cecil Williamson’s previous ownership. In fact, most of the books and articles written later by Wiccans and others say Gardner founded the museum himself. The Bracelin biography of Gardner states that, due to bureaucratic difficulties in establishing a witchcraft museum on the English mainland, Gardner found some dilapidated buildings on the Isle of Man. They needed a great deal of restoration work before they were ready to house his collection (1960: 166). Gardner described himself as the museum’s director and said its policy was to “show what people have believed in the past, and still do believe, about magic and witchcraft, and what they have done, and still do, as a result of these beliefs.” He added that the director does not necessarily share these beliefs himself, although he went on to say that he had been initiated into a British witch coven.
On the first floor of the museum Gardner said there were two rooms with one representing a seventeenth-century “magician’s study” containing all the equipment used for practicing ritual magic. On the floor was a magical circle, and there was an altar flanked with two pillars with lights on the top in the style of a Golden Dawn or Masonic temple. The second room was fitted out as a “witch’s cottage,” again with a circle and altar, but it was less elaborate than the magical temple. The altar was a simple wooden chest, and the circle a single chalk line on the floor. Gardner said that the altar was set up for an initiation ceremony and on it was a necklace, which is the only “ceremonial garment” required by a witch. Both these exhibits were already in the museum when Gardner took it over and so he must have borrowed them from Williamson.
In the first gallery were objects connected with magic and witchcraft, including some belonging to a “witch who died in 1951,” presumably Dorothy Clutterbuck, or possibly Old Mother Sabine. These items had allegedly been in the owner’s family for generations, and had been used to make herbal remedies. Patricia Crowther has referred to a large wooden box displayed in the museum that belonged to the same person. She said it contained phials, charms, talismans, and knives (1998: 27).
In other display cases were a collection of magical rings, assorted occult and astrological jewels, and amulets to ward off the Evil Eye. There were also various magical objects used by witches, such as a riding staff that Gardner said was ridden like a hobby-horse in fertility rituals, crystal balls, black mirrors for scrying, and a flask of anointing oil after the sale. The Matthew Hopkins relics mentioned before were also on display, alongside items still used by an existing coven of witches. There were also a collection of talismans made, probably by Gardner, from instructions in the Key of Solomon, some Arabic and Italian charms, and a complete set of secret manuscripts from the Golden Dawn and other magical Orders claiming descent from the Rosicrucians. Other display cabinets in this part of the museum contained packs of different tarot cards, reproductions of pacts made with the Devil, copies of court records of Manx witchcraft trials, books on magic and witchcraft, an Australian Aborigine “pointing bone,” a Malay keris used for cursing, and modern instruments for dowsing and detecting and studying the human aura.
In the upper gallery of the museum there were magical objects from Africa and Tibet, books, letters and personal relics belonging to the “Wickedest Man in the World” and the “Logos of the Aeon of Horus,” Aleister Crowley. These included a copy of the OTO charter given to Gardner by the Great Beast in 1947, although a label accompanying it said he had never actually used it to start a lodge and had no intention of ever doing so. There were also some items loaned by another witches’ coven. This may have been the Cheshire one run by Barbara Vickers and her husband. They included a horned helmet “as used by the male leader in certain rites,” and a foliate mask representing “the old god of the witches as the Green Man or King of the Woods.”
Another case contained objects associated with Satanism and black magic and, in contrast, some items lent by a fraternity of “white magicians” such as a chalice used to perform the Mass for magical purposes. There were also a death-spell or curse prepared by the modern psychic artist and magician Austin Osman Spare and a lamp that had allegedly belonged to the eighteenth-century Hellfire Club. Other cases contained more talismans and charms, and on the wall was a large magical mirror that may have been the same one featured in the photographs of Barbara Vickers mentioned before.
Running the museum came with its own problems, as Gardner was to soon find out. In the first year under his ownership there were 18,000 visitors and they each paid an entrance fee of 1 shilling 6 pence. That provided an annual income of £1,350, which was quite a lot of money in those days. However, Gardner lamented that “the Bastards wont [sic] give us an [alcohol] licence” (letter to Cecil Williamson undated in MOW archive). He complained that other businesses on the island had been granted them and wondered why the museum had been excluded.
In September 1952, an article was published in the Illustrated magazine that was to change the face of Wicca. It was titled “Witchcraft in Britain,” and was written by Allen Greenfield. He had been in contact with Williamson when the Isle of Man museum was opened a year earlier and had written about it then. Greenfield called Williamson a “witchcraft consultant” and described a cursing ritual performed by Williamson involving the making of a poppet, or wax image, for one of his many clients. The article was illustrated with atmospheric photographs of the cunning man, dressed in black robes and working magically in a churchyard.
The article goes on to mention a summons that was sent out to members of “the Southern Coven of witches” on August 1, 1940, when a German invasion of Britain was expected. It goes on to describe the Lammas ritual and adds that “older members of the coven, those who came from a generation when magic enjoyed a matter of fact acceptance in some households, could remember family talk of a similar rite against ‘Boney’ [Napoleon Bonaparte] at the time of the threatened Napoleonic invasion.”
Obviously referring to the New Forest Coven, the article said: “Hereditary witches, who have the lore handed down to them, form a proportion of the covens [sic], whose average ages are rather high.” They make up their numbers by inviting others to join them who have made a wider study of the occult than the local people and constitute the “intellectual wing” of the coven. It goes on to say that nowadays the coven is led by a woman because of a shift in emphasis away from the “lord of death” to “life-goddess.” Their rituals are based on instructions from the elders “eked out with the Clavicles [Keys] of Solomon.” This seems to confirm the descriptions by Louis Wilkinson and E. W. Liddell of the membership of the New Forest Coven being made up of local country folk and middle-class occultists. It also suggests the use of the Key of Solomon in its rituals and a move to Goddess worship, and away from a devotion to a Horned God, as practiced in traditional witchcraft.
One of the readers of the article in Illustrated magazine was a young woman named Doreen Edith Valiente (1922–1999). She had been born in Mitcham, Surrey, although her habit of speaking in a pseudo-rural accent led some people to believe she came from the West Country. Valiente married a Greek man called Joannis Vlechpoulos, who died in 1941. In the Museum of Witchcraft archive at Boscastle are photocopies of her wartime identity card and other documents about her registration as an alien, presumably because she had married a foreign national. She then married a Spanish chef called Casimo “Cassie” Valiente, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and later for the Free French Forces in World War II.
Before she had read the article, Doreen Valiente had already been interested in Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the occult. She had read Dion Fortune’s book The Mystical Qabalah, John Symond’s biography of Aleister Crowley, and had obtained a copy of the Great Beast’s Magick in Theory and Practice through the local library in Bournemouth, where she was living at the time. She had also read Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia, Robert Graves’ The White Goddess (1948), and Dr. Margaret Murray’s books.
In her book Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989), when she was discussing the claims in the Lugh material about George Pickingill’s alleged influence on the Golden Dawn, Valiente said she was interested in the Order’s magical system before she met Gerald Gardner (1989: 200). Melissa Seims investigated this claim and, while Valiente was never a member of any of the surviving GD lodges, discovered that she did own several notebooks that had belonged to members (Seims May 2007). One was Dr. Edward Burridge, a member of the Isis-Urania lodge in London, and another was Henry David Kelf, who was a member of another lodge and died in Bournemouth in 1951.
The notebooks were pocket-sized and dated from 1902 to 1908. One had a label saying it belonged to the “Hermetic Order of the A.O.,” or Alpha Omega lodge, a GD group founded after the schism in 1900 caused by disagreements between Mathers and Crowley. The notebooks contained the initiation rituals for various grades of the Order as well as other rituals, teachings, lecture notes, and examination answers. According to Seims, the books also contained handwritten notes in pencil executed by Doreen Valiente. She also copied some of the material from Edward Burridge’s into her personal Book of Shadows and used Hebrew script in her own notebooks and diaries as taught in the first grade of the Golden Dawn.
In a letter written to Dr. Allen Greenfield in August 1986, discussing the provenance of Gardner’s Ye Book of Ye Art Magical, Valiente asked him: “By the way, has Ripley’s got my Golden Dawn [A.O.] mss, which were in Gerald’s museum? Because if so, I’d jolly well like to have them back” (they belonged to Frater “Nisi Dominus Frustria” [Henry Kelf]) (letter dated August 8, 1986 in MOW archive). The story of how Doreen Valiente acquired these magical Golden Dawn notebooks that ended up in the witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man is actually told in the Bracelin biography of Gardner, although her name is not mentioned.
It says that “one of the most important members of the Craft” (i.e., Valiente) was talking one day to her bank manager. He collected rare books and knew she had an interest in ones on magic. However he was unaware she was a witch. He mentioned that he had been handling the affairs of an elderly doctor who had recently died, and he had purchased some of his books from the widow. She also had a number of magical manuscripts owned by her late husband that she was planning to burn. He had tried to buy them, but the woman was allegedly afraid of their contents and was determined to destroy them.
Valiente managed to find out the area of Bournemouth where the doctor’s wife lived and went there by bus. Her enquiries in the neighborhood led her to a semi-detached house with pebble-dashed walls owned by the doctor’s widow. She knocked on the door and got no answer. Then she noticed a pebble had fallen from the wall onto the ground. She picked it up, took it home and used it in a ritual with some friends for the purpose of retrieving the manuscripts. That night in bed she awoke and felt she had projected out of her body. She found herself standing in front of the widow’s house and willed herself inside. She could see a green satin divan on which were a number of small, dark-colored books.
The next day she received a telephone call from the bank manager saying he had been contacted by the widow who was “in a strange state”. She told him she knew he had a lady friend who would take away the magical manuscripts they had discussed. Valiente arranged with the bank manager to visit the woman that afternoon. There, on a green-covered divan, were the notebooks. The widow said she had tried to burn them, but something had kept her from doing it. She was now very frightened and asked Valiente if she would take them away with her (1960: 162–164).
There were twenty-eight notebooks, two ceremonial swords, and two pentacles. Presumably after reading and annotating them, Valiente donated or loaned the notebooks to the museum, where they were displayed in the GD temple designed by Steffi Grant, and she kept the swords and the pentacles. When Gardner died in 1964, the notebooks were inherited by Monique Wilson and were subsequently included among the collection sold to Ripley’s in 1973. They were then purchased in 1987, along with other documents and correspondence from the museum, by Tamara and Richard James of the Church of Wicca in Toronto, and they still own them.
Because she was living in Bournemouth when she read the article in Illustrated and it mentioned a witches’ coven in the nearby New Forest, Doreen Valiente decided to write to Cecil Williamson at the Isle of Man museum and ask if he would put her in touch with the coven. He passed the letter on to Gerald Gardner, who replied that he had a friend named Dafo living near Bournemouth at Christchurch whom he often visited. An appointment was made for Valiente and Gardner to meet at Dafo’s house for tea.
This significant meeting took place in the autumn of 1952, and Dafo immediately told her that due to social reasons and poor health she was no longer actively involved in the Craft. As soon as Valiente met Gardner she liked him and realized he was not just a pretender to occult knowledge, like the people she had previously met at Spiritualist meetings and lectures at the local branch of the Theosophy Society. She described him as somebody with a sense of humor and a youthfulness in spite of having white hair. This was the Peter Pan quality she associated with all natives of the astrological sign of Gemini.
Strangely, Valiente says he was clean-shaven and “did not have the beard he grew later.” His clothes were informal but made from good quality Harris Tweed cloth. He wore a large silver ring with “strange signs” on it, which he told her spelled out his magical name “Scire” from the OTO in the letters of the Theban alphabet. On his right wrist was a heavy bronze bracelet with symbols on it representing the three degrees of initiation into Wicca (Ibid., 38).
Gardner told Valiente how he moved to the New Forest before the war and joined the Rosicrucian Theatre, where he had met members of a surviving witches’ coven. He was introduced to a woman living locally called Mrs. Clutterbuck and known to the coven as Old Dorothy. It was in her large house that he was initiated into the Craft. As Valiente was leaving, Gardner handed her a copy of High Magic’s Aid to read. She said that he made no attempt during their first meeting to persuade her to join the witch cult. In fact it was not for several months that her actual initiation took place.
This took place at Dafo’s house in Christchurch in June 1953, when Gardner was visiting her to attend the annual midsummer solstice ritual held by the druids at Stonehenge. Doreen and Dafo accompanied Gardner to the ceremony, which Valiente used as a cover story for her husband and her mother, a strict chapel-goer who opposed anything relating to the occult. Gardner brought with him from the museum the famous sword once owned by Old Dorothy, and he loaned it to the Druid Order for the ceremony.
Valiente was duly initiated into Wicca by Gardner and evocatively describes him standing in the circle by an improvised altar in Dafo’s candlelit sitting room. He was “tall, stark naked, with wild white hair, a suntanned body, and arms which bore tattoos and a heavy bronze bracelet.” In one hand he brandished Dorothy Clutterbuck’s sword, while in the other he held a handwritten copy of the Book of Shadows as he read the ritual by which she was made “a priestess and a witch” (Ibid., 47). Valiente noted that the ritual was very similar to the one described in High Magic’s Aid. However, Gardner also read aloud something called “The Charge [to] the Goddess,” and she instantly recognized bits in it that came from Leland’s Aradia.
As all new initiates into Wicca had to do, Valiente dutifully copied out the BoS from her initiator’s copy. In doing this she soon realized from her earlier reading of occult books that a lot of the material in it originated in Crowley’s writings, the Key of Solomon, and Freemasonry. In the ritual for celebrating May Eve she even recognized a verse from a poem by Rudyard Kipling that she had read as a child. When she queried this with Gardner he told her about the OTO charter given to him by Crowley and said this meant he was entitled to use his writings in the rituals. He also said that the original rites he had been given by the old coven were not complete and he had to add other material. He had used a lot of Crowley’s writings because they represented “the very spirit of paganism …” (Ibid., 57). She accepted this explanation and firmly believed that the “ancient rituals” had been in the hands of the elderly members of the coven. Gardner, with his wide knowledge of the occult and magic, had managed to piece these together and then added other material to make them workable.
Valiente specifically noticed that the Great Rite ceremony forming the third-degree initiation was based on the sixth-degree ritual of the OTO. In this, a female cup-bearer represents the “Lady Babalon” mentioned in Revelations, and a male officer takes the role of Baphomet, the goat-headed god worshipped by the heretical Knights Templar. In fact, Bill Liddell’s Elders claimed this was one of the rituals adopted by Crowley from the rites of the Pickingill coven in Norfolk, which he had joined in the 1880s (1994).
However, Valiente was not so “be-glamoured” by Crowley as Gardner seemed to have been and did her “best to sling his stuff out again …” (letter to Dr. Allen Greenfield dated August 8, 1986, in MOW archive). Although she admired Crowley as a brilliant writer and poet, as a person she regarded him as “a nasty piece of work.” His great importance, in her opinion, was that he had opened up the “treasure chest in which the Order of the Golden Dawn had locked up the secret knowledge of the Western Mystery Tradition, and had invited all to share the treasure” (1989: 61).
Unconsciously echoing and anticipating the belief of Bill Liddell’s Old Craft brethren, she told Gardner that she did not believe the witch cult would ever be publicly accepted, which was his primary desire, if it was so closely associated with Crowley. This was because of his popular image as a black magician and Satanist. Gardner saw the wisdom of this statement and agreed. He gave Valiente the go-ahead to revise the existing Book of Shadows and remove as much of the Crowley material as was practical. Her first task was to create a new version of “The Charge of the Goddess,” and she used Leland’s more acceptable material as the template. Valiente said that in the original Charge there was “a little out of Aradia and the rest was purely Crowley” (letter to Michael Howard dated August 26, 1998).
However, in her analysis of the rituals passed on to her by Gardner, Doreen had also concluded there was a basic structure that was not derived from Crowley, Leland, or the Golden Dawn. She said that the oldest and purest form of the BoS rituals had been published in High Magic’s Aid. She noted that the novel was published while Old Dorothy was still alive and Gardner told her it was only published with her permission. Valiente said that there was no material derived from Crowley in it except for the ritual password “Perfect Love and Perfect Trust.” This was taken from an essay Crowley had written in the German magazine The International during World War I, when he was working undercover for the British Secret Service. There are also references to the Lords of the Watchtowers taken from the magical work of Dr. John Dee and the rituals of the Golden Dawn published by Crowley in The Equinox, except they are given the unique title of the “Dread Lords of the Outer Spaces” (Ibid., 63–64).
An interesting sidelight was cast on Gardner’s comments about only inheriting fragmentary rites from his parent coven by an article written by Bill Love and published in Prediction magazine in 1988. Love first came across witchcraft as a university student in Scotland at the beginning of World War II. A friendship with a fellow student led him to the discovery that the Craft was still being practiced in the 1940s. After he left the RAF at the end of the war, Love was initiated into a coven in Essex that had been practicing since the early 1930s. Subsequently he met a woman who belonged to another old coven in a village near Rye in East Sussex. Although there was no contact between the two covens, Love says they shared the same organization and similar rites.
In 1955, Bill Love met Gerald Gardner, and they naturally discussed their respective Craft backgrounds. Love was surprised to find out that the type of witchcraft Gardner was practicing in the 1950s was very different from that of the two covens he knew in Essex and Sussex. However, Love said, “Gardner certainly appeared to have knowledge of the rites and practices of the coven to which I belonged and, from the information I gleaned from him, I formed the opinion that the New Forest coven into which he had been initiated was more akin to my own in its rites than to the system he was now practicing” (Prediction, n.d.).