Gerald Gardner: Book of Shadows

About the Author

Gerald Gardner was born on June 13, 1884, in Liverpool, to a rich family. After traveling widely throughout his youth, he settled in the Far East and worked as a tea and rubber plantation manager and government opium inspector. He was always fascinated by magic, and he joined many esoteric societies—from the Freemasons (whom he joined in 1910), to whose meetings he traveled through the jungle carrying his uniform in a box, to the Dyak tribe headhunters of Borneo, who allowed him to attend their rites at a time when few colonial white men would have been invited. Despite having had little formal education, he became an amateur anthropologist and a successful author, and he published a book on Malaysian ritual daggers that remains the definitive work today.

He retired to England in 1936 and continued to mix in a diverse magical milieu. He joined the Folklore Society and the Society for Psychical Research. He was friendly with Ross Nicholls, who founded the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids, and was even appointed the head of the magical order the Ordo Templi Orientis by the notorious magician Aleister Crowley. However, his most important and enduring influence came after he moved to the borough of Christchurch, near the New Forest in the south of England. There he discovered the Crotona Fellowship, a thriving community of people who were exploring alternative lifestyle practices such as vegetarianism, naturism, and biodynamics and were actively interested in reincarnation, herbs, divination, fairies, magic, and witchcraft. Within the Crotona Fellowship he met a group of people who were members of a coven of witches. He was welcomed into their coven at the Mill House, in the village of Highcliffe, in September 1939. “Then I knew that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived,” he later said. Gardner dedicated the rest of his life to publicizing witchcraft, including living as the resident witch in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic on the Isle of Man.

He was keen to publish books about his new faith. With the blessing of his coven, he started with two novels, A Goddess Arrives (1939) and High Magic’s Aid (1949). In 1951 the centuries-old Witchcraft Act was repealed as part of the modernization of British law; witchcraft was no longer illegal, and Gardner was free to publish the first factual books about living as a modern witch. These were Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), in which Gardner used his anthropological skills to describe Wicca from the hitherto unique position of someone who had been brought into a coven and had attended the witches’ rites. Gardner died while on a voyage at sea on February 12, 1964, and was buried in Tunisia.

Doreen Valiente was born Doreen Dominy on January 4, 1922, in South London. To squelch her growing interest in magic and sorcery, her parents sent her to a convent school, but she left at age fifteen and refused to return. In 1941 she married a sailor who went missing in action during World War II. In 1944 she married Casimiro Valiente, who never shared her interest in magic and occultism. In 1952 the couple moved to southern England, where she struck up a correspondence with Gerald Gardner, who in 1953 invited her to join his Bricket Wood coven, where she rose to the position of high priestess. Valiente was concerned that much of the material in the Book of Shadows came not from ancient sources but from the writings of Aleister Crowley. With Gardner’s permission, she rewrote much of the book, deleting sections that came from Crowley’s works.

By 1957, she and Gardner were in conflict—Valiente believed that Gardner was too interested in publicity—and she broke away to form her own coven. Later, in 1964, she joined a coven, the Clan of Tubal Cain, run by Robert Cochrane, a charismatic leader of traditional witchcraft who combined shamanism and Wicca. She left that coven because she disapproved of Cochrane’s use of hallucinogenic drugs. She published her first book, Where Witchcraft Lives, in 1962, and in the years that followed she wrote numerous others: An ABC of Witchcraft (1972), Natural Magic (1975), and Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978). She died on September 1, 1999.