Gerald Gardner: Book of Shadows

Context

Gardner is not the sole author of the Book of Shadows, but he is the person who brought it to the attention of the world. In publicizing Wicca and working for its growth, he is one of the founding fathers of contemporary pagan religion in the West, particularly modern pagan witchcraft. Having first written about Wicca as a means to preserve a small group he thought was about to die out—the coven at Highcliffe—he has become known as the founder of one of the world’s fastest-growing religions, the only religion Britain has given to the world.

Gardner’s research and writings about witchcraft were supported by such figures as Margaret Murray, a well-known Egyptologist who was the president of the Folklore Society in London when she wrote the foreword to Gardner’s Witchcraft Today in 1954. Murray’s own books, particularly The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931), had already helped to create and contribute greatly to the hypothesis that witches are not evil sorcerers but are, in fact, the persecuted keepers of the ancient wisdom of a long-hidden European paganism.

These books were published at a time when many people wanted to believe in an Old Religion, as Britain became increasingly secular and esoteric and Eastern-oriented religious models such as Spiritualism, Theosophy, Buddhism, and Anthroposophy were being experimented with as alternatives to traditional Christianity. Wicca had some philosophical elements in common with these spiritualities, such as a belief in reincarnation and karma—the view that the effects of a person’s actions in the present life determine his or her destiny in a subsequent incarnation. It also harked back to the magical and folk traditions of Europe and to the practices and philosophies of the magical societies that had dominated the esoteric milieu of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, societies such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Society of the Inner Light. The Book of Shadows itself is a survivor of the tradition of the grimoire, or a textbook of magic that is passed down among the magical community and copied from one mage (practitioner of witchcraft) to another.

Gardner’s Old Religion emerged from this creative cauldron as a repository of ancient wisdom, pagan religion, folk practices, and magical knowledge. In common with the other magical societies, it was concerned with the place of women in magical orders and in wider society. However, unlike the more formal societies, it wove the witch and the goddess into a mythos of the passionate resistance of the common people against oppressive patriarchal forces. This resistance was led by women who were magicians and healers. This was a very appealing mix at this time, when the place of women in society and, indeed, society itself was rapidly changing in the context of civil rights agitation, the end of colonialism, the loss of faith in more traditional, orthodox religions, world war, the proliferation of more sophisticated and destructive weapons, and the spread of Soviet-style Communist ideology—changes that gave rise to modern forms of anxiety. The time was ripe for Wicca to emerge, and thus the Book of Shadows came out of the shadows and into the public eye.