Modern Wicca

by Michael Howard

  In October 1977, a few days before Hallowe’en, I decided to visit Canewdon in the hope of finding out more about Pickingill and paying my respect at his graveside. When I arrived and made inquires in the village I was told that the wizard’s home had been demolished many years ago. Attempts to find his burial place in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, now protected by CCTV due to unruly scenes each Hallowe’en, were also fruitless. I called at the vicarage and asked the aged minister if he could help me in my quest. He had been the incumbent for many years and said he had never come across Pickingill’s grave, which if it were in unconsecrated ground would have been unmarked anyway. However, he kindly suggested that an elderly lady called Granny Garner might be able to help me, and he directed me to her cottage in the lane leading up to the church. Apparently she had been Eric Maple’s chief informant in the village and he had described her as the last white witch in Canewdon.

  Lillian Garner was eighty-seven years old when I met her, but her mind was, as they say, “as bright as a button.” She invited me in for tea, and told me that she remembered George Pickingill from her childhood as a village character and eccentric old gentleman. She recollected when the first car came to the village that he had his photograph taken beside it. She also revealed that her own mother had told her that Mr. Pickingill was the leader of a local coven of witches. Apparently her mother was actually a member of the coven and said that the witch master had “many visitors” from outside the village who came seeking his occult knowledge. Before I left, Lillian gave me the original of the photograph of George Pickingill that was published in Eric Maple’s book Dark World of the Witches. A photograph of Granny Garner herself standing at the door of her cottage was reproduced with Maple’s article on the Canewdon witches published in the encyclopedic work Man, Myth and Magic in the 1970s.

  One of the problems, as far as academics are concerned, is the lack of documentary evidence or independent testimony to back up the claims made by Bill Liddell and his Elders. Liddell has told me that there are still at least two Pickingill covens operating in East Anglia today. When I asked him for proof of this claim and inquired as to the possibility of being put in contact with them there was no response. There may have been good reasons for his reluctance to expose them, even though I gave assurances that I would not publicly reveal any-thing about them. In the 1970s, I met a man of Romany descent named George Wells. He also claimed to know practitioners of the Pickingill Craft. He told me they still convened on the outskirts of the New Forest and at Brandon on the border between Suffolk and Essex. I mentioned this to Liddell, but he said he knew nothing about these alleged covens.

  In 2005, Ralph Harvey, the owner of a theatrical company providing replica weapons to film and television companies and the founder of the Order of Artemis in 1959, announced publicly that he had been initiated into a coven that had links with George Pickingill. Harvey says that after the old Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1951 (The Last Bastion, 2005: 31–39), he was desperate to preserve the traditional ways of the Craft that “with the upsurge of Gardnerianism” were dying. At that time he knew of only five hereditary witch families left, and a handful of solitary witches. However, as time passed he found out there were more witches in existence than he had realized, especially in Devon, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man.

  Harvey says that attempts were made to try to trace the surviving remnants of Pickingill’s Nine Covens. This search was concentrated on Sussex as allegedly, “It had been the last bastion in resisting the witch-finders, [and the] last county in Britain outwardly to accept Xtianity [sic].” One day Harvey saw an advertisement in the personal column of a local newspaper that said, “Witch wanted to remove family curse.” When he answered it, he found that, by coincidence, it had been placed by an old family friend and distant relative of his, the Duke of Leinster. The duke told Harvey a local witch had responded and within weeks contact was made with this person who was living in the Sussex village of Storrington. This is not far from the Iron Age hill-fort of Chanctonbury Ring that has an ancient connection with witchcraft. It was believed to have been used for many years as a meeting place by an old coven that exists in the area.

  Subsequent enquiries revealed that there were two covens allegedly descended from Pickingill’s Nine operating in Sussex with different names, but in reality they were one and the same groups working at two sites. Ralph Harvey says all the members of the Storrington Coven were elderly. When he later made contact with another group called the Willingdon Coven, he discovered they were also elderly—their High Priestess was seventy-two years old. He said that the covens had not initiated anyone since before World War II, and were in danger of literally dying out. Harvey says they decided to take him in so that the tradition would survive. After the traditional “year and a day” probationary period, Harvey was duly inducted into the Storrington Coven.

  The two covens combined to help the Duke of Leinster with his family problems, although they were unable to assist with the legal matters relating to his estate. Harvey said that the High Priestess of the Storrington Coven died in her nineties in 1977, and left her magical artifacts to his Order of Artemis, a group that combined traditional witchcraft with modern Wicca. Harvey claims he was told that the coven that Gardner was initiated into in the New Forest was one of the surviving remnants of the Nine founded by George Pickingill in the nineteenth century. He also mentions Rosamund (Sabine), who died in 1948, and was either the High Priestess or Maiden of the coven. He added, “By all accounts she had a position of some authority within the coven, and was certainly an Elder” (2005: 33).

  Harvey further claimed that the High Priestess and High Priest of the Storrington Coven had actually met Pickingill. He says from his own research that he is confident that the Essex cunning man “never, ever founded a single coven in his life,” but he was the mentor of at least seven covens, including the one in the New Forest. Harvey says that the High Priestess of the Willingdon Coven was in contact with a coven in the New Forest during World War II, and presumes this was the same one Gardner belonged to. She is also supposed to have known two other independent groups in the West Country that Pickingill had been associated with.

  Chapter Four

  Gerald Gardner

  and the Great Beast

  The Bracelin biography of Gerald Gardner is strangely silent about the period from 1940 to 1946, when it says he met the so-called Great Beast 666, Aleister Crowley. In fact, this date is wrong—the two men met in the spring of 1947. It is possible that as it was wartime Gardner kept a low profile during these years. A fellow member of the Folklore Society, Ralph Merrifield, once deputy-director of the Museum of London and author of the classic book The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic, asked Gardner how he became interested in witchcraft. He received the odd reply that Gardner, as an air-raid warden, had fallen in love with a witch while fire-watching during the war.

  Philip Heselton has identified this witch as Dafo, or Edith Woodford-Grimes. We have seen that Gardner attended her daughter’s wedding in 1940 and gave the bride away. Woodford-Grime’s husband did not attend the wedding, and the suggestion is that her marriage had broken down and they had separated (Heselton 2000: 266). It has also been suggested that Gardner and Dafo had an extra-marital affair. The theory is that the New Forest Coven never existed and that Gardner invented it and created Wicca so he would have an excuse for the affair if his wife ever found out! An alternative version put forward by Philip Heselton is that Gardner first met Dafo when they were both working as volunteers filling sandbags to protect Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament from possible bomb damage. They began chatting and discovered they were both naturists. Woodford-Grimes in fact belonged to the New Forest Naturist Club and that is why Gardner and his wife moved to Hampshire (Ibid., 263).

  Cecil Williamson told me that Gardner had met several other witches apart from those who belonged to the New Forest Coven. He claimed Gardner had spoken
to him about an encounter with the High Priestess of a coven in Epsom in Surrey. They had met while Gardner was an air-raid warden in London and he was filling sandbags in Parliament Square (letter dated May 22, 1984, in MOW archive doc.398.ref 419). Gardner is also supposed to have told Williamson that he knew of other covens in the New Forest and others in Highgate, North London, and Leeds in Yorkshire.

  If one account is to be believed, wartime London was teeming with witches. Rollo Nordic, a tarot card designer and occultist claimed that “During the war there were two hundred of us [witches] and we met every Tuesday in a certain place in London and always sat in the same place, and we sent out rays to where was the worst fighting. And we could see by the newspapers it would slacken off” (Enchante magazine 1992). It is very hard to believe there were actually two hundred witches in London and they all met once a week together without attracting some attention to their activities.

  Rollo Nordic also said she was a student of the taromancer, astrologer, and magician, Madeline Montalban (1910–1982). As we have already seen, Bill Liddell has claimed that she sponsored Gardner’s entry into a Co-Masonic lodge in 1945. Gardner told Doreen Valiente that he first met Montalban during the war and “she had been wearing the uniform of an officer in the WRNS [Wrens or Women’s Royal Navy Service].” This, however, was just a cover—she was secretly working for Lord Louis Mountbatten, the great-uncle of Prince Charles, Admiral of the Fleet, and, after the war, the last vice-royal in India before its independence from the British Empire. Lord Mountbatten, who, it is rumored, was interested in occult matters, had allegedly retained her as his personal clairvoyant and psychic advisor (Valiente 1989: 49–50). However, Madeline Montalban could not have been a member of the New Forest Coven in 1939 as claimed by Aidan Kelly, as Gardner did not meet her until later in the war.

  I first met Madeline Montalban during the famous hippie “summer of love” in August 1967. I had read one of the many articles she contributed to the monthly magazine Prediction, and wrote to her. We met at her large apartment in a Gothic-style building at 3 Grape Street, St. Giles, London WC1, which is just behind the Shaftesbury Theatre. At the time the theatre was showing the controversial hippie musical Hair with its scenes of full-frontal nudity. Grape Street was only a few hundred yards from the British Museum and the Atlantis occult bookshop, and only a short walk from the Watkins occult bookshop in Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, St. Giles had been the site of a notorious slum called “The Rookeries” that was the haunt of prostitutes, thieves, beggars, astrologers, herbalists, quack-doctors, and fortunetellers. It is also adjacent to the Bloomsbury district with its historical associations with the Theosophical Society and the Order of the Golden Dawn.

  With its turrets, balconies, and bow windows with leaded windowpanes, Madeline’s apartment seemed totally out of place in modern London. It perched over the street like a fairytale tower or a sorcerer’s eyrie, which is, in fact, what it was. Inside, this otherworldly effect was heightened by the apartment’s antique furnishings and glass-fronted cabinets full of occult curios and first editions of arcane books such as Cornelius Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy and the Key of Solomon. Candles, votary lamps, and incense were continually burning to add to the atmosphere, and it was the most haunted place I have ever known. This was because Madeline refused to banish any of the spirits she conjured up during her magical rituals.

  On our first meeting, Madeline cast my horoscope, casually mentioned we had known each other in a past life as priests in ancient Egypt, and told me that I bore the Mark of Cain. As a callow youth, I was suitably impressed, even though it took another thirty years before I fully understood her last remark. She invited me to become a student of her magical group, the Order of the Morning Star, founded in the 1950s with her partner Nicholas Heron (aka Nicholas Breach), who had been a reporter on a local newspaper in Brighton, Sussex, and was a skilled talisman maker. The OMS was based on a mixture of astrology, tarot, angelic magic, and Luciferianism. Madeline ran a correspondence course on these subjects that acted as an outer court for the Order.

  Madeline told me a romantic story of how she became involved in the occult world. As a child she had been difficult and rebellious, and her father decided to put her on a train to London from their home town of Blackpool in Lancashire. He gave her a large cheque and the address of the magician Aleister Crowley. The money was supposed to induce the Great Beast to take her on as his sorcerer’s apprentice. She later told me she arrived at Crowley’s lodgings in Half Moon Street and was greeted at the door by his latest vampire-like Scarlet Woman, or magical partner. She was told Crowley was upstairs having an asthma attack in the bath. As either Madeline or one of her relatives suffered from the complaint, she was able to help him recover and he was eternally grateful for her help.

  Madeline also claimed that she attended Crowley’s infamous Abbey of Thelema on Sicily in 1922, when she would have been only twelve years old. In fact Madeline met Crowley in the 1930s while she was working as a journalist for the Daily Express national newspaper and was sent to interview him. He was living in Half Moon Street at that time, and invited her for lunch at the Café Royal restaurant in Regent Street. At the end of the meal, Crowley suddenly discovered he had no money to pay for it and Madeline had to foot the bill. She told me that Crowley used her as his “Moonchild,” and she acted as a seer during his magical ceremonies. A fellow member of the OMS told me that she had a full set of magical robes from the AA, or Order of the Silver Star, Crowley’s magical group, in a chest in her apartment. During World War II, Madeline enlisted in the Royal Navy and she confirmed the story Gardner had told Doreen Valiente that she had served on Lord Mountbatten’s personal staff. She also said her rank in the Wrens was a cover to hide the fact from outsiders that she was really his seer. In her apartment I saw a silver-framed photograph of Mountbatten that he had signed for her.

  Before 1951 and the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, in common with her contemporaries, Madeline Montalban kept a low profile. They disguised their studies as research into folklore, as that was regarded as a respectable and acceptable hobby. Despite this, Madeline seems to have been active in the esoteric scene in London, and knew people like Gerald Gardner, the Jewish-German refugee Michael Juste (aka Michael Houghton), who had founded the Atlantis bookshop in 1922, and Kenneth Grant, a disciple of Crowley and founder of the Tyhonian OTO (Ordo Templis Orientis or Order of the Temple of the East) and the Nu-Isis Lodge. Grant had met Crowley in the autumn of 1944 and subsequently moved into a cottage on the grounds of the Netherwood Hotel in Hastings, Sussex, where the Great Beast was living. He became Crowley’s secretary-personal assistant and worked without pay in exchange for magical instruction. However the relationship was short-lived, and Grant left Crowley’s employment only a year later in June 1945, as he needed to take up paid work to support his family. When he first met Gardner, Grant said that he “could not understand his remarks, he knows little and talks much” (letter to Cecil Williamson dated April 29, 1951, in the MOW archive).

  In the late 1940s, Madeline Montalban was living in an apartment house on the present site of the Centre Point office block at St. Giles Circus. One of her stories was that she had cursed the building because her home had been demolished to make way for it. That is why, she claimed, it was empty for so long after it had been constructed and the company who owned it could not get any tenants to occupy it. Madeline also worked at the Atlantis bookshop for a time. Both she and Gardner applied to join Michael Juste’s occult group, the Order of Hidden Masters, which met in a temple in the shop’s basement, but he rejected their applications. Actual members of the Order included Gerard Yorke, a friend of Crowley, and John Symonds, who was later the Great Beast’s literary executer and first biographer. According to an entry in Doreen Valiente’s personal notebooks, the OHM practiced Golden Dawn-type rituals, and worshipped a dog-headed Sumerian god (MOW archive). Another source descri
bed the Order’s members as “sinister occultists,” who used magical rituals to get power over people in high places (Heselton 2003: 244).

  Kenneth Grant has claimed that Madeline Montalban and Gerald Gardner worked magical rituals together at this time. In fact, Gardner was living in an apartment in Ridgemount Gardens, just off Tottenham Court Road and near Madeline’s apartment at what is now Centre Point. Grant told me that Gardner introduced him to “Mrs. North” in the late 1940s after he challenged him to show him a real witch (letter dated December 20, 1993). In Grant’s book Nightshade of Eden (1977), there is a curiously inaccurate account of a ritual performed by Gardner and Montalban, who is called “Mrs. South.” Grant says that she was a procuress and whore [sic] who spiced her activities with an “occult flavour calculated to appeal to a certain type of clientele” (122).

  The ritual had been instigated by Gardner and its purpose was to demonstrate, presumably to Grant and his wife Steffi, who were also present, his ability to “bring down the power.” The intention was to raise a current of magical energy and contact “certain extraterrestrial intelligences” that Grant was in almost constant rapport with at the time. This was at a period when Grant was in the formative stage of creating his own OTO lodge. The rite consisted of the five participants (Gardner, Montalban, Kenneth and Steffi Grant, and a “young lady who was ‘well-versed’ in the deeper aspects of witchcraft” [Ibid., 123]), circling around a sigil inscribed on a consecrated piece of parchment.

  Grant had asked his friend and fellow magical practitioner Austin Osman Spare to design the sigil as he was engaged in similar spirit contact work. At the climax of the ritual the parchment would be consumed in the flame of a candle standing on the altar in the north quadrant of Madeline Montalban’s apartment. Grant says that, apart from the magical equipment, the room contained only two or three shelves of books on witchcraft and the occult. These, he claimed, were merely props to add a little authenticity to her “more usual pursuits.”