Modern Wicca

by Michael Howard

  In 1935, Ward severed his connection completely with the Anglican Church and instead he and his wife were ordained in the Orthodox Catholic Church or the Orthodox Keltic Church, a heterodoxical anti-papal Christian sect. The Bracelin biography also says that Ward approached a friend of his who was the patriarch of Antioch and became a priest and a bishop in the Greek Orthodox Church. At first Gardner was dismissive of these pseudo-clerical activities by the Wards and rather ironically said: “I do not doubt for a moment their sincerity but it did seem to me that they fancied themselves as the Abbot and Lady Abbess. Ward wanted a secret society, and liked to indulge his hobbies” (Bracelin 1960: 143).

  Despite his opinion of the Wards, in 1946 Gardner himself was ordained into the Ancient British Church. Philip Heselton refers to a diploma found among the books in Gardner’s library after his death that says he was made a priest of the Church, which was also known as the Fellowship of the Holy Grail (2003: 140–141). There is a story that Gardner was a regular visitor to Ward’s Abbey, and frequently appeared wearing a clerical collar. When Gardner legally registered his covenstead at Brickett Wood as a place for worship, he used the name of the Ancient British Church as a cover to give it some respectability. Heselton thinks that Gardner was only ordained as a status symbol, perhaps compensating for his lack of academic qualifications. He does not believe he ever took an active part in either Ward’s Orthodox Catholic Church or the Ancient British Church.

  Dr. Joanne Pearson believes that Gardner’s membership in these heretical Christian sects was in keeping with his “predilections for joining little-known secret societies.” Gardner was also a member of the Ancient Druid Order and as there were links between the Ancient British Church and neo-druidism this may have been part of its attraction (2007: 55). Like many occultists of his generation, even professed pagan ones, Gardner always made a distinction between Celtic Christianity, as promoted by the Ancient British Church, and Roman Catholicism. He even suggested that the historical witches had been sympathetic to the Celtic Christians, who allegedly had adopted Celtic pagan beliefs and practices, but disliked the Roman Church introduced into Anglo-Saxon England by the missionary St. Augustine in the early seventh century CE. Unlike most modern Wiccans, Gardner had a liberal view of Christianity and, while a narrow-minded Christian could not belong to the Craft, he believed a person could be a witch and also follow any other religion. This was because the mystical nature of Wicca transcended the superficialities of ordinary religious worship.

  When Gardner referred to Ward liking “to indulge his hobbies,” he was talking about the extension of the religious community in the New Forest into the Abbey Folk Park. Gardner said that when Ward heard “that the local council was going to tear down some nice old building he would rush up with motor-lorries and a gang of monks. They had rescued some marvelous examples of ancient buildings for the Folk Park” (Bracelin 1960: 143). In fact, Ward had built up “an extensive collection of remarkable objects illustrating the history of this country for countless generations” (Ibid.).

  Ward created the Abbey Folk Park as an educational open-air museum, to show the everyday life of ordinary people through the ages, and in that respect it was far ahead of its time. It included many historic buildings that had been rescued from demolition, dismantled and then re-erected on the New Barnet site. Unfortunately, in 1945 Ward was accused of enticing a young girl away from her family to join his community at the Abbey. Her father took Ward to court and he was found guilty. The judge issued an injunction against Ward and his wife, forbidding them to contact the girl. He was also fined five hundred pounds sterling in damages that had to be paid to the family. As a result of the case, Ward was declared bankrupt and the Abbey and its contents had to be sold to pay the fine.

  Disillusioned and penniless, Ward wanted to leave England and emigrate to Canada, but the current immigration restrictions prevented him from taking this action. He then decided that as a member of the Greek Orthodox Church he would instead try to go to Cyprus. Gardner decided to help him achieve this aim by gifting the piece of land he owned there to his friend. This gave him the legal right to live on the island, as he owned property there (Bracelin 1960: 144). Ward died in 1949, and his wife, calling herself the Reverend Mother Ward, kept the community going until the Cypriot government began to cause problems for it. Eventually the community re-located to Queensland in Australia where its elderly survivors still lived until the 1970s. Items from the Abbey Folk Park had been retained by the Australian community, and in 1986 the Abbey Museum of Art and Archeology was opened as an educational center (Heselton 2003: 152).

  Chapter Two

  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.