Photo Gallery

Lighting the West candle: Temple decorations can emphasize the elemental character of the Watchtowers

Altar with Goddess and God figures by Bel Bucca, and Gerald Gardner’s own Book of Shadows open at the First Degree Oath

Doreen Valiente by ‘The Naked Man', a traditional witches’ meeting place in the New Forest

Gerald Gardner in his home on the Isle of Man

The house on the edge of the New Forest where Dorothy Clutterbuck initiated Gerald Gardner

Drawing Down the Sun, in our Garden Temple

In blessing the wine, the woman holds the active symbol, the athame, because hers is the positive polarity on the inner planes

The earliest written text of the ‘Bagahi’ incantation (see Appendix B), from the thirteenth-century French troubadour Rutebeuf’s manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

American witches Oz (left) and Wolf (right) visiting the Lia Fáil (Stone of Destiny), said to be one of the Four Treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann, on Tara Hill, Co. Meath. With them are Janet and our coven Maiden, Virginia Russell

Stone carving identified by archaeologists as a Cernunnos figure, in the churchyard on Tara Hill

Candle and needle spell (see Section xxii, ‘Spells’)