Into the Witch Cult
Despite the infamous meeting in 1938 between the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the German chancellor Adolph Hitler, at which “peace in our time” was declared, most realists believed that a war with Nazi Germany would soon begin. Gerald Gardner had returned from Cyprus, and he and Donna were living in an apartment near Victoria railway station in London. The authorities were already preparing civil defense precautions, and plans had been drawn up to evacuate every house within a mile of railway stations and depots. The world had already witnessed the German Luftwaffe bombing towns during the recent Spanish Civil War, and it was known that British railway stations would be prime targets if war broke out. Apparently the Gardners already had friends living in the New Forest area of Hampshire on the south coast of England and that is where they decided to move to escape the danger of bombing. It has been speculated that these friends were fellow naturists and possibly members of a local naturist club on the fringes of the Forest (Heselton 2000: 28).
Gerald and Donna Gardner moved into a house in a village on the outskirts of the New Forest called Highcliffe, near Christchurch. The local people seemed to have regarded Gardner as a rather eccentric and odd figure. In later years he was to dress in heavy tweed suits and a duffle coat, but when Gardner first moved to Highcliffe he was always seen out and about in all weathers in shorts and sandals. The village children regarded him as a figure of fear and used to cross the road to avoid him (Ibid., 39). Interestingly, when Gardner attended the International Congress on Maritime Folklore and Ethnology in Naples in the 1950s to give a talk on Manx fishing craft, a fellow delegate described him as “a strange man with a copper snake bracelet on his arm.” When Gardner went to the bus stop on the harbor, the local fishermen crossed themselves and made the sign against the Evil Eye.
Gardner certainly seems to have had a powerful presence, and I was once told by the owner of Sexton’s antiquarian bookshop in Brighton, Sussex, of the day he came in to look at some occult books. The owner said that Gardner’s aura was “so powerful that it could be felt by people standing outside the shop.” He said that Gardner was carrying a mountaineer’s hammer as a walking stick and had one fingernail on his left hand longer than the others. This was allegedly so he could make the “Devil’s Mark” on his initiates.
Today Gardner is still remembered in Highcliffe. In 2001, a local artist was commissioned by the Highcliffe Castle visitors’ center and tea-rooms to paint a portrait of Gardner from an old photograph. The finished painting was a central feature of an exhibition at the center called “Myths and Magick” that attracted many visitors and media interest. In 2005, the artist donated the painting to the Museum of Witchcraft at Boscastle, Cornwall, where it is still on display.
According to the Bracelin biography, shortly after Gardner moved to Highcliffe he was out cycling one day when he came across a building in Christchurch that had an inscription carved on its stone frontage that declared it was “The First Rosicrucian Theatre in England.” This discovery was to eventually lead to Gardner being invited to join a local witch coven (1960: 145). Philip Heselton, however, believes this account is not strictly true and in fact Gardner was introduced to the theater through his contacts in the local naturist club who were members (2003: 20). The Rosicrucian Theatre had been started by an esoteric group known as the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship (ROCF) that modeled itself on the original medieval Order of the Rosy Cross. In fact, the group had been founded in 1920 by an amateur playwright and actor called George Alexander Sullivan and had a link with the Order of the Temple of the Rosy Cross started eight years earlier by the occultist Annie Besant (1847–1933).
Besant came from a middle-class social background and was originally an atheist and leading member of the humanist National Secular Society. In the 1880s, she was active as a socialist and pacifist involved in the suffragette movement, trade unions, and campaigns in support of birth control, workers’ rights, and home rule for India. In 1888 she abandoned atheism to join the Theosophist Society and on the death of its founder, the Russian mystic Madame Helena Blavatsky, she became its co-leader. In 1926, George Sullivan announced to the world in a privately printed pamphlet that he was the founder and head of the ROCF and the “Rite of the Egyptian Mysteries,” which incorporated both Western and Eastern occult teachings. He further claimed to have founded “the Order of Twelve” in 1911, which suggests a link with Besant’s original Rosicrucian Order founded around that time.
From 1925 to 1928, Sullivan published a magazine called The Rosicrucian Gazette, and by the 1930s the ROCF was fully operational, practicing a mixture of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry. Annie Besant’s daughter, Mabel Besant-Scott (1870–1952), who was then the head of the Co-Masonic movement, joined Sullivan’s group in 1935, bringing with her several fellow Co-Masons. As its name suggests, Co-Masonry was open to both men and women, and it had been founded in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Gardner described Mrs. Besant-Scott as a “rather pleasant, sometimes uncertain old lady,” who claimed to have been an incarnation of Queen Elizabeth I (Bracelin 1960: 149). As the so-called High Priestess of the Order claimed to have been Mary, Queen of Scots, that must have led to some interesting conversations between the two women. Another prominent member was Peter Caddy who, with his wife Eileen, was later to found the famous New Age community of Findhorn in Scotland.
George Sullivan was also an eccentric character who used the occult name of “Aurelius” as the High Priest of the Order and believed that in his previous incarnations he had been the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, the medieval magician Cornelius Agrippa (also shared with Aleister Crowley), and Francis Bacon, when he had written the Shakespeare plays. Sullivan confided in Gardner that an old lamp hanging by chains from the ceiling of the Order’s temple was in fact nothing less than the Holy Grail. He also claimed to be immortal, but sadly this illusion was shattered for his devoted followers when he died.
In 1938, Mrs. Besant-Scott and George Sullivan had founded the Rosicrucian Theatre. Sullivan had aspirations to become a Shakesperian actor, having written his plays in a past life, and his role was the traditional Victorian one as an actor-manager. As well as putting on plays on druidism and Pythagoras, the Rosicrucian Theatre also held lectures on hypnotism, practical occultism, and esoteric Christianity that were open to the general public. This heady occult mixture seems to have attracted Gardner’s curiosity and that of other people living in the area around the theater who were also interested in esoteric and arcane matters. Gardner attended several of the plays at the theater put on by Sullivan and his followers, and it has been suggested that he even performed in one. A photograph taken of the cast of one of the plays features someone who, while disguised in a false beard, looks suspiciously like the normally clean-shaven Gardner of the period.
There was a small sub-group in the ROCF who kept to themselves, but seemed to be quite interesting. Unlike the other members, they were genuinely interested in the occult and had read widely on the subject. Gardner began to mix with them socially, and around the time his first book, A Goddess Arrives, was published, one of them said to him: “You belonged to us in the past—why don’t you come back to us?” (Bracelin 1960: 150). In The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), Gardner says that his new friends were very interested to hear that one of his ancestors had allegedly been burnt as a witch. As the comment above suggests, they also believed they had known Gardner in past lives and added, “You are of the [witch] blood. Come back to where you belong.”
Gardner realized he had stumbled on something interesting, but it was only when he was half-initiated, and heard them use the word “Wica” [sic] that he realized the Old Religion still existed. He says he also discovered the inner meaning of the words of Fiona McLeod (aka William Sharp) that “The Old Gods are not dead. They think we are” (1959: 11). He was to discover that the people he had met were members of a witch coven that consisted of an odd mixture of the local New Forest people and the Co-Masons who had followed Mabel Scott-Besant. Once in the New Forest they had discovered that an old coven still operated in the area.
According to Gardner’s own account, a few days after war was declared in September 1939, he was taken to a large house that belonged to “Old Dorothy,” who he described as “a lady of note in the district [county] and very well-to-do.” Her high social status was indicated, as far as Gardner was concerned, by the fact that she always wore an expensive pearl necklace. He was initiated into the Craft in this lady’s house and found out that Old Dorothy and some like her, plus a number of locals “had kept the light shining.” He added that “it was, I think, the most wonderful night of my life. In true witch fashion we had a dance afterwards and kept it up until dawn” (Bracelin 1960: 150–151).
Not everyone believed Gardner’s account of his initiation into modern witchcraft. In 1980, Professor Jeffrey B. Russell boldly stated that “In fact there is no evidence that ‘Old Dorothy’ ever existed …” (1980: 153). Aidan Kelly has also said that Gardner and others invented modern witchcraft in September 1939 (1991: 30), and in some quarters this claim has now become an accepted fact. Unfortunately for these critics, in the 1980s Doreen Valiente established from her own personal research that Old Dorothy existed and was a real person. She also identified the house in the New Forest she owned, where Gardner claimed he had been initiated (The Farrars, 1984).
Old Dorothy was a widow named Dorothy Clutterbuck-Fordham (1880–1951). As Gardner said, she was a well-known figure in the area, with a high social standing. Her father had served in the British Army in India and she had been born in that country. She moved to Highcliffe in the 1930s and was a High Anglican churchgoer, friend of the local vicar, and a loyal Tory. Her local social connections included membership and support for the Conservative Association, the Horticultural Society, the Beekeepers’ Association, the British Legion, the Girl Guides, the Boy Scouts, the Seamen’s Mission, and other charitable groups. A photograph taken in 1950 shows her standing next to the mayor of Highcliffe at a social function. The fact that Dorothy Clutterbuck was a churchgoer has led some biased writers to reject the idea that she was a witch. However, in Witchcraft Today, Gardner commented that he knew a witch who went to church at times, although he adds that she was at best only an occasional conformist (1956: 38).
Dorothy Clutterbuck’s wide range of social activities and connections led Professor Ronald Hutton to comment that she “must have lived one of the most incredible double lives in human history; a pillar of conservatism and respectability who was also the leader of a witch coven …” (1999: 210). Philip Heselton, however, has revealed that Old Dorothy was not so conservative or respectable as her public image suggested. In 1935 she married Rupert Fordham, who was killed in a car crash only four years later. It turns out that the marriage was not legal, as Fordham’s first wife was still alive and did not die until 1955 (2003: 23). So Dorothy Clutterbuck-Fordham was therefore a bigamist. Heselton also refers to her diaries, which were found in the cupboard of a firm of lawyers after her death, and were illustrated in watercolors by her friend Christine Wells. The diaries are a mixture of poetry and prose about the seasons, nature, and fairies. According to Heselton, they prove that she was “a pagan in all but name,” and indicate that her “deepest spiritual experiences came from nature” (Ibid.).
From the description that Gardner gives of his initiation, Heselton does not believe that Old Dorothy was actually present when he entered the witch cult (2000: 179, and 2003: 24). One suggestion is that while Clutterbuck was not a member of the New Forest Coven, she did allow her house to be used while she was not there for its meetings and rituals. Alternatively she was a member and was just not present for some reason on that night. In her first autobiography, Patricia Crowther, a later initiate of Gardner’s, says he told her he was taken to “Old Dorothy’s house and that she was the ‘High Priestess’ of the coven.” The following night he went back to the house and was initiated into the Craft (1974). As Heselton has pointed out, it seems that Gardner was first taken to see Dorothy Clutterbuck to be introduced to her. Then on the second occasion he was initiated while she was not there by another member of the coven.
If Old Dorothy did not initiate Gardner, then who presided over the ceremony? The most likely candidate is a known member of the coven, Edith Rose Woodford-Grimes (1887–1975). Her Craft name was “Dafo,” and she has been identified as the “Maiden” of the New Forest Coven (Frederick Lamond, in Kelly 2007: 26). Gardner probably met her around 1938 or 1939—a photograph exists showing him attending her daughter’s wedding and actually giving the bride away. Woodford-Grimes was a private music teacher in the nearby town of Christchurch, and a leading member of the Rosicrucian Theatre. When Dorothy Clutterbuck died in 1951, Dafo allegedly replaced her as the High Priestess of the coven (Ibid.). She features in a list of shareholders of the company, Ancient Crafts Ltd., that Gardner set up in the late 1940s, and she was involved in the negotiations to purchase the witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man from Cecil Williamson in the 1950s. She was also present when Gardner initiated Doreen Valiente in 1953, and when he was recovering from an illness in 1961, he went to stay with her for several days. However, by that time she had ceased to be active in the Craft, and when my friend Deric James visited her in the 1960s, she denied all knowledge of being ever involved in witchcraft.
What of the other members of the New Forest Coven? Aidan Kelly produced a highly speculative and fantastical list of possible members that included Sylvia Royals (aka Dolores North and Madeline Montalban); George Watson McGregor, the chief druid of the Ancient Order of Druids; Father J. S. M. Ward; Christine Hartley, a member of Dion Fortune’s Fraternity of the Inner Light; her magical colleague and partner, Colonel Charles “Kim” Seymour; Mrs. Mabel Besant-Scott from the Rosicrucian Theatre; and the novelist Louis Wilkinson (1991: 31–32).
The evidence provided by Kelly to support his claims that these people belonged to the coven is flimsy and circumstantial. It largely rests on the fact that all of them, except for Hartley and Seymour, either knew Gardner (North, McGregor Reid, Ward, and Besant-Scott) or knew of the New Forest Coven (Wilkinson). As we shall see later, Gardner was a friend of Madeline Montalban, but he told Doreen Valiente he first met her during the war when she was in the Royal Navy, which would have been after he was initiated (Valiente 1989: 49–50). Gardner was also a member of the Druid Order, and it is a fact that a sword owned by Dorothy Clutterbuck was used by the druids at their summer solstice ceremony at Stonehenge (Ibid., 40). The wording of the reference is ambiguous as, while the sword was allegedly owned by Old Dorothy, it was taken by Gardner to the druid ceremony in the 1950s after she had died. In that case it would have been McGregor Reid’s son, Robert, who was the chief druid then as he succeeded to the title after his father’s death in 1946.
This famous sword is still in existence and is owned by the North London coven that is the direct descendant of the one founded at Brickett Wood by Gardner in the late 1940s. The design of the sword comes directly from a description given in the Key of Solomon, a grimoire that both Gardner and the New Forest Coven were familiar with. According to the story told to Philip Heselton by the leaders of the modern coven, the sword had belonged to Dafo, and not to Dorothy Clutterbuck (2003: 90). The sword has a hilt of brass and horn and the blade, according to Heselton, probably came from a nineteenth-century officer’s weapon. It has a guard composed of two crescent moons and it is engraved with magical Hebrew names and Wiccan symbols. Coincidentally, when I knew her in the 1960s, Madeline Montalban owned an almost identical sword, and she used it in cursing rituals.
The most unlikely members of the New Forest Coven named by Aidan Kelly are Christine Hartley and Colonel Seymour. Both were, like many occultists of the time, sympathetic to paganism, and Seymour wrote some very evocative and inspiring essays on what he called the Old Religion. I met Christine Hartley in the 1970s and she sponsored my induction into an Egyptian lodge of Co-Masonry that she belonged to in London. Christine was a liberal Catholic, an unorthodox Christian offshoot of the Theosophical Society, and had her own private chapel in her country house in Hampshire, where a liberal Catholic priest used to celebrate Mass. This priest, who also held Anglican orders, had expressed to me an interest in being initiated into Wicca, although nothing came of it. Some years later he knew Maxine Sanders, the so-called “Queen of the Witches,” when she became interested in the liberal Catholic Church.
When we first met, Christine Hartley knew of my own involvement in the Craft and she was sympathetic to witchcraft. She hinted in one of our conversations around the log fire in the sitting room of her country house that she had also been involved in the past. I have since learned that in the 1960s or 1970s she attended a meeting organized by some ex-members of Robert Cochrane’s coven (pers. comm. from Alan Richardson). Despite these contacts, there is no evidence or reason to believe that she knew Gerald Gardner, or that she was ever a member of the New Forest Coven. As Christine knew I was a Gardnerian initiate, she would have surely mentioned it during our conversations.
While still speculative, Philip Heselton claims to have identified several local people who he thinks might have belonged to the New Forest Coven. Apart from Woodford-Grimes and Clutterbuck, he has identified a family from nearby Southampton called the Masons, who also belonged to the Crotona Fellowship and the Rosicrucian Theatre. This family was Susie Mary Mason, her brother Ernest “Ernie” William Mason, and their sister Rosetta. A friend of Ernie Mason told Heselton that the whole family were witches and “mind control people,” but had given up witchcraft because the rituals were too serious (2000: 101–102).
Ernie Mason was an amateur astronomer, photographer, and chemist who Heselton says fitted the typical image of an eccentric inventor. He also enjoyed mental exercises and he had been taught these by George Sullivan. This would explain the odd comment by his friend that the family were “mind control people.” A large room in the house shared by Ernie and Susan Mason in Southampton was converted into a Rosicrucian temple and Heselton has printed a photograph of Ernie Mason taken in 1935 wearing a ritualistic hooded robe (2000: 109).
Another possible candidate for membership in the coven, as identified by Heselton, was a well-known children’s writer named Katherine Oldmeadow. She also lived in the village of Highcliffe, in a house about a quarter of a mile from Dorothy Clutterbuck’s home. From 1919 to 1958 Oldmeadow wrote thirty fictional books for children as well as a factual book called The Folklore of Herbs (1946). It was rumored that her extensive knowledge of herbs had been gained by studying with the New Forest gypsies. As with Dorothy Clutterbuck’s diaries, many of Oldmeadow’s books contained what Heselton calls “a rich awareness of nature,” and the enchanted landscape of the English countryside (2002). They also have frequent references to nature spirits, fairies, witches, and classical gods like Pan and Mercury. Rituals involving dancing barefooted, and the use of knives, wands, candles, and crystals are also mentioned.
In her nonfiction book on herbal lore, Oldmeadow specifically refers to the existence of white and black witches, and comments that the modern witch “still holds queer beliefs …” (Heselton 2003: 48–51). In one of her children’s books she describes white witches as “wise old women” who “know all about herbs that heal” (Ibid., 61). Of course it is possible, as Professor Hutton has pointed out, that the classical pagan and folkloric references in Katherine Oldmeadow’s novels merely reflected an early-twentieth-century interest in such subjects and had nothing to do with the actual practice of witchcraft. The fact that she was living in the same village as Gerald Gardner and in the alleged vicinity of a practicing witch coven is, however, rather coincidental.
Doreen Valiente identified another possible member of the New Forest Coven in her personal copy of Bracelin’s biography, Gerald Gardner: Witch. Beside a reference in the text to Old Dorothy and the local New Forest people Valiente had written the two words “Mother Sabine.” Philip Heselton claims to have identified this person as Rosamund Isabella Charlotte Sabine, who coincidentally lived in the same road in Highcliffe as Edith Woodford-Grimes. Her husband was also a member of the local Home Guard unit during World War II, and would have known Gardner, who was also a leading member. Heselton says that in 1905 Rosamund Sabine applied to join a surviving offshoot of the magical group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This was the Order of the Red Rose and the Cross of Gold run by Arthur Edward Waite (Heselton, November 2002). The name of the Order is a clear reference to Rosicrucian symbolism (Ibid.).
In a letter, Gerald Gardner wrote to his then business partner Cecil Williamson in December 1953, he told him that Old Mother Sabine had recently died. He says she left a “nice little cabinet full of draws [sic]” that contained dried herbs and a 1684 copy of Nicholas Culpeper’s famous herbal. The evidence is that, like Katherine Old-meadow, Sabine had a serious interest in herbalism. Her involvement with a Rosicrucian Order associated with the Golden Dawn would also suggest she may have been a member of George Sullivan’s Order of Twelve and/or the Crotona Fellowship (Heselton, 2003: 78).
While he was living in London, Gardner had volunteered to be an air-raid warden and had helped to dig trenches for bomb shelters in Hyde Park. From his past experiences in the Planters’ Rifle Corp in Malaya and later in a private militia in Liverpool during World War I, Gardner became convinced that an armed civilian organization was needed to defend the country from a German invasion. In early 1940 he wrote to the Daily Mail newspaper, saying that in such an event the civilian population should be trained to use delaying tactics. He claimed that, under the terms of the Magna Carta, every freeborn Englishman had the right to take up arms and defend himself and his household from attack.
This patriotic letter aimed at his fellow countrymen and politicians was answered in May 1940 when the secretary of state for war, Anthony Eden, made a radio broadcast asking for volunteers who knew how to use firearms to report to their local police station. Thousands eagerly answered the call to arms and the Local Defence Volunteers, later called the Home Guard and known popularly and affectionately as “Dad’s Army,” was formed. The background to its formation was the widespread public panic about fifth columnists, spies, and saboteurs, and rumors of enemy paratroopers, some allegedly disguised as nuns, landing in the English countryside at night. With France about to fall to the Nazis, the British government knew that Britain could be next.
The job of the LDV, or Home Guard, was to support the police by setting up road blocks, checking identity cards, and guarding important installations such as power stations that might be a target for sabotage. In the event of a German invasion they would have fought street by street with regular Army units in a rearguard action. A special elite force was also recruited from Home Guard members with past military experience. Their task was to form an underground resistance movement if Britain had been occupied by the Nazis. Caches of weapons were hidden at secret locations in the countryside, and underground bunkers stocked with food and ammunition were built to accommodate the resistance fighters.
Gerald Gardner was an ideal recruit to the Home Guard because of his past experience in private militias and his expertise with weapons. He applied to join the local Highcliffe unit, not without some difficulty as he was already an air-raid warden and was told civil defence personnel could not join. In its early days as the LDV, the Home Guards had no uniforms and wore ordinary civilian clothes with just armbands to identify themselves. Firearms were also scarce, so they had to arm themselves with privately owned shotguns, old pistols, and rifles owned as souvenirs left over from World War I, and improvised weapons such as bayonets or kitchen knives tied to broom handles.
Gardner decided he would arm his air-raid wardens with coshes, swords, and pikes from his private collection of medieval weapons. He took to carrying, ironically, a German Luger machine-pistol and a revolver owned by his wife, Donna. When a new commander took over the Highcliffe Home Guard unit, Gardner persuaded him that he could take on technical staff without headquarters’ permission. He was duly enrolled as the unit’s armourer, with the rank of lance-corporal, and the other wardens were also allowed to join if they wanted to. They did their usual job during German bombing raids and then became Home Guards in the periods of “all clear” (Bracelin 1960: 145–148).
After the fall of France in June 1940, it was widely believed that within a few weeks the Germans would launch Operation Sealion—the invasion of Britain. In fact, invasion barges full of Nazi stormtroopers were ready at French ports to be sent across the Channel to the beaches of southern England. The only obstacle in the way of a full-scale invasion during the summer of 1940 was the Royal Air Force. Plans were ready for the Luftwaffe to destroy British planes on the ground by bombing airfields and shooting them out of the sky over southeastern England. This campaign culminated in the famous Battle of Britain in early September, which was a turning point in the war. When the Luftwaffe was defeated by “the Few,” Hitler decided to abandon his invasion plans and turn eastward to the Soviet Union instead.
Evidently the New Forest Coven decided that something had to be done on a magical level to stop the expected German invasion. Philip Heselton has claimed that the Mason family instigated this action. As alleged hereditary witches, they had a strong family tradition that their ancestors had carried out magical rituals to stop the proposed French invasion in Napoleonic times, and even earlier had worked against the Spanish Armada in 1588. (Heselton 2000). Certainly the Mason family had ancestors who lived in the ports of Southampton and Portsmouth in the nineteenth century.
Heselton says that Gardner told his friend Ross Nichols that, in August 1805, witches in Sussex had worked weather magic to stop Napoleon’s fleet from leaving the French port of Bologne. They had allegedly called up a southwesterly wind that had prevented the invasion being launched. Gardner also said that members of the New Forest Coven had told him their great-grandparents had projected the idea into Napoleon’s mind that he could not invade England. It is true that the invasion force was prepared to sail, but a combination of bad weather and poor communications resulted in its cancellation. A similar ritual was supposed to have been performed by the witches to stop the Spanish Armada by sending the thought: “You cannot land. Go on, go on.” Again the invasion was foiled by a combination of a great storm that wrecked the fleet and the bravery of Sir Francis Drake’s sailors with their secret weapon of fire-ships (August 2000).
A description of the 1940 ritual, called “Operation Cone of Power,” is given in the Bracelin biography (1960). It allegedly took place at Lammas (August 1) or possibly as early as May Eve. Gardner told Doreen Valiente that in fact several rituals were performed over the summer. She speculated that these were held at the full moons in May, June, and July, and at Lammas (1989: 45). Gardner told one of his other initiates, Patricia Crowther, that the ritual took place on Lammas Eve because the moon was in its last days, or waning, and the purpose of the ritual was a banishing. He told Bracelin that several covens were involved and that Old Dorothy had called up “covens right and left, although by witch law they should not be known to each other” (Bracelin 1960: 152). It is not clear if these other covens were also located in the New Forest or came from farther afield. If this is true, however, then it does indicate that the New Forest witches were not the only witches in southern England at the time.
There were seventeen people present at the ritual, including air-raid wardens and members of the Home Guard. Gardner said, “We were taken at night to a place in the forest where the Great Circle was erected.” Heselton has speculated that this may have been near the Rufus Stone, a memorial erected to King William II, who was killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest in 1100 CE. Dr. Margaret Murray claimed William Rufus was secretly the leader of the witch cult. His death was allegedly a ritual sacrifice as he took the role of the divine king who dies so his blood can fertilize the land. An alternative site for the ritual could have been The Naked Man, the withered remains of an old oak tree at Wilverley Post, near Lyndhurst. Local folklore said it was a witches’ meeting place and Gardner told Doreen Valiente it was used as an assembly point by the New Forest Coven where the members met up before going to their working site deeper in the forest.
Gardner also told Valiente that the circle had been marked out with brushwood and the witches were stationed around it to “whip up the dancers.” A fire was lit in the circle with candles in lanterns positioned in the direction where the object of the rite (i.e., Hitler) was supposed to be. The witches then danced around the circle until they felt enough power had been raised. Dancing began in a deosil (clockwise) direction and ended in a widdershins (anti-clockwise) direction to banish the power. The witches formed a line, linked hands, and rushed inward towards the fire, shouting or chanting what they wanted to achieve. The Great Cone of Power was directed in the general direction of Germany, Hitler, and the German High Command. The command was projected telepathically: “You cannot cross the sea. You cannot cross the sea. You cannot come. You cannot come.”
Gardner said that the witches kept this up until they were exhausted, or somebody blacked out from the exertion. This was seen as a sign that the spell had worked and only then was the ritual brought to its traditional close. He added that during the rite, “Mighty forces were used, of which I may not speak,” but it is known that the life force of the participants was utilized. This apparently caused lethal effects as Gardner reported that his asthma (which had been cured since he had returned from the Far East) returned and was to remain with him for the rest of his life. He also said, “Many of us died a few days after we did this.” He quotes the Elders of the coven, saying, “We feel we have stopped him [Hitler]. We must not kill too many of our people. Keep them until we need them” (Bracelin 1960: 52). This may have been an exaggeration on Gardner’s part as he always had a flair for the melodramatic.
Philip Heselton has speculated that the editor of the local newspaper, who coincidentally died in August 1940, may have been one of these sacrifices. He was interested in witchcraft, was supportive of the Rosicrucian Theatre, favorably reviewed Gardner’s novel A Goddess Arrives, and lived just around the corner from him. The blacksmith in Highcliffe died in August, as well, and Heselton believes he may have also been one of the participants in the ritual (August 2000). Traditionally blacksmiths were often regarded in folklore as wizards and magicians.
Nobody will ever know if the Lammas ritual prevented the Germans invading Britain, but not everyone accepted the story as factual. One of Gardner’s later initiates and the High Priestess of the Brickett Wood after his death, Lois Bourne (Pearson) dismissed it to me as “just one of Gerald’s fairy tales” (pers. comm.). However Eleanor Bone claimed that Edith Woodford-Grimes had told her that she had been present at the Lammas ritual in the New Forest with both Gardner and Dorothy Clutterbuck (Rabinovitch and Lewis 2002: 24).
The witches of the New Forest were not the only ones working magic against the Nazi threat. Many occultists in London gathered together during the war on a regular basis to prevent a German victory. They included Dion Fortune and her magical group, the Fraternity of the Inner Light, who performed weekly rituals invoking the angelic guardians of the British Isles for their protection. Phillip Heselton has referred to other anti-Nazi rituals performed by groups in Kent, on the Sussex Downs, and at Alderley Edge in Cheshire (August 2000). Another ritual was allegedly performed in the winter of 1940 by a coven in the Chiltern Hills. Its purpose was to call on Holda, the Germanic goddess of winter, darkness, and death, and petition her to stop the German bombing during the Blitz (letter to Cecil Williamson from Geoffrey Stuart Dearne dated February 15, 1982, in the MOW archive doc. 18/ref 20).
Cecil Williamson, Gardner’s business partner in the 1950s, claimed that he had based his story of the Lammas ritual on a wartime military exercise called “Operation Mistletoe” performed in Ashdown Forest in Sussex by the British Security Service. MI5. A ritual was organized by Williamson on a private estate in the forest between Surrey and Sussex. He did not talk about this in public until 1992, because he had signed the Official Secrets Act during his wartime work with MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service), PWE (the Political Warfare Executive), and the SOE (Special Operations Executive). Williamson told me he had been recruited into MI6 in 1938 by a family friend, Major Edward “Ted” Maltby, who belonged to a magical lodge run by Christine Hartley and her magical partner Colonel Charles Seymour, who also worked for MI6 and became head of the Dutch section of SOE.
Major Maltby recruited Williamson because of his occult knowledge to travel to Germany as an undercover agent posing as a folklorist to gather information on the occult interests of Nazi Party members and investigate possible links with British magical groups. When war broke out Williamson was employed by the PWE to run secret radio stations broadcasting black propaganda and disinformation to the German U-boats operating in the Atlantic and the North Sea. Several static and mobile radio transmitters, secretly supplied by the Americans, were established across southern England and were under his command. He also worked as an undercover agent behind the lines in occupied France for the SOE.
Originally Williamson was sent to Ashdown Forest, which was under the control of a Canadian Army unit, to locate a site for a radio transmitter. Shortly after he arrived, a message came from a brigadier in MI5, informing him they were “getting together a whole group of people to have a sort of pantomime set-up whereby the wizards of England [sic] were going to curse Hitler and the Nazi regime” (Williamson, Winter 1992). It had to be near the south coast of England because at the time two high-ranking officials from the Vatican were visiting the Duke of Norfolk at his family home at Arundel Castle in Hampshire. MI5 knew these officials had contacts with the German High Command and they would be leaked details of the ritual. It was believed that those in the Nazi leadership who were interested in the occult would be intimidated by the idea that powerful magicians were working against them.
Williamson persuaded the owner of a private estate in Ashdown Forest to let him use the land for the operation. About forty Canadian soldiers were recruited and were dressed up in robes made from gray army blankets decorated with magical symbols from the Key of Solomon. Occultists and witches from the south coast were also invited to attend and a phony cursing ritual was then performed at a church on the estate. A dummy representing Hitler was raised in a cradle to the top of its tower, set on fire and then lowered to the ground on a rope. Unfortunately when it hit the ground the blazing image set fire to some bushes and the local fire brigade had to be called to extinguish the flames. Williamson said that he told Gerald Gardner about this ritual and he then invented the story of a similar one performed by the New Forest Coven.
Apart from Edith Woodford-Grime’s comments to Eleanor Bone, independent evidence for the Lammas ritual was provided by the novelist Louis Umfraville Wilkinson (aka Louis Marlow). He had been a friend of Aleister Crowley, contributed articles to his magazine The Equinox, was one of his executors, and officiated at his funeral service in December 1947. In 1953, Wilkinson met the occult writer and historian Francis King, and the subject of the survival of witchcraft into modern times was raised. Wilkinson said that in the late 1930s and early 1940s he had become friendly with the members of a witch coven in the New Forest (King 1970: 141–142).
Wilkinson said that the membership of the coven was composed of “a peculiar amalgam of middle-class intellectuals with the local peasantry” (King 1970: 141). From his description it sounds like the same coven that Gardner had encountered in 1939. Although he personally believed that the group’s foundation only dated from the publication of Dr. Margaret Murray’s book The Witch Cult in Western Europe in 1921, Wilkinson was reasonably convinced that it was a genuine fusion of a surviving folk tradition with a more intellectual form of occultism. The proof of this was that the coven used a flying ointment made of bear’s fat, very similar to the type of grease used by cross-Channel swimmers to keep warm. Its purpose was to protect their naked bodies from the cold during outdoor rituals. They also used the hallucinogenic toadstool fly agaric or amanita muscaria in their rituals. This red-capped, white spotted fungi has always had magical significance and is frequently found illustrating books of fairy tales.
Louis Wilkinson added that “on one occasion the Hampshire witches indulged in human sacrifice—but done in such a way there could not possibly be any legal unpleasantness” (Ibid.). He told Francis King that this happened in May 1940, when a German invasion was expected at any time. The witches decided to perform a ritual to deter the Germans and its central point was the voluntary death of a sacrificial victim. According to Wilkinson’s account, the oldest and frailest member of the coven volunteered to take this role. He left off his protective covering of flying ointment so that he would die of hypothermia and exposure. Unfortunately the plan went wrong, as it turned out to be the coldest night in May for many years. As a result, apart from the original volunteer, several other elderly participants involved in the ritual also died within a fortnight of its performance (Ibid., 142).