Modern Wicca

by Michael Howard

  As all new initiates into Wicca had to do, Valiente dutifully copied out the BoS from her initiator’s copy. In doing this she soon realized from her earlier reading of occult books that a lot of the material in it originated in Crowley’s writings, the Key of Solomon, and Freemasonry. In the ritual for celebrating May Eve she even recognized a verse from a poem by Rudyard Kipling that she had read as a child. When she queried this with Gardner he told her about the OTO charter given to him by Crowley and said this meant he was entitled to use his writings in the rituals. He also said that the original rites he had been given by the old coven were not complete and he had to add other material. He had used a lot of Crowley’s writings because they represented “the very spirit of paganism …” (Ibid., 57). She accepted this explanation and firmly believed that the “ancient rituals” had been in the hands of the elderly members of the coven. Gardner, with his wide knowledge of the occult and magic, had managed to piece these together and then added other material to make them workable.

  Valiente specifically noticed that the Great Rite ceremony forming the third-degree initiation was based on the sixth-degree ritual of the OTO. In this, a female cup-bearer represents the “Lady Babalon” mentioned in Revelations, and a male officer takes the role of Baphomet, the goat-headed god worshipped by the heretical Knights Templar. In fact, Bill Liddell’s Elders claimed this was one of the rituals adopted by Crowley from the rites of the Pickingill coven in Norfolk, which he had joined in the 1880s (1994).

  However, Valiente was not so “be-glamoured” by Crowley as Gardner seemed to have been and did her “best to sling his stuff out again …” (letter to Dr. Allen Greenfield dated August 8, 1986, in MOW archive). Although she admired Crowley as a brilliant writer and poet, as a person she regarded him as “a nasty piece of work.” His great importance, in her opinion, was that he had opened up the “treasure chest in which the Order of the Golden Dawn had locked up the secret knowledge of the Western Mystery Tradition, and had invited all to share the treasure” (1989: 61).

  Unconsciously echoing and anticipating the belief of Bill Liddell’s Old Craft brethren, she told Gardner that she did not believe the witch cult would ever be publicly accepted, which was his primary desire, if it was so closely associated with Crowley. This was because of his popular image as a black magician and Satanist. Gardner saw the wisdom of this statement and agreed. He gave Valiente the go-ahead to revise the existing Book of Shadows and remove as much of the Crowley material as was practical. Her first task was to create a new version of “The Charge of the Goddess,” and she used Leland’s more acceptable material as the template. Valiente said that in the original Charge there was “a little out of Aradia and the rest was purely Crowley” (letter to Michael Howard dated August 26, 1998).

  However, in her analysis of the rituals passed on to her by Gardner, Doreen had also concluded there was a basic structure that was not derived from Crowley, Leland, or the Golden Dawn. She said that the oldest and purest form of the BoS rituals had been published in High Magic’s Aid. She noted that the novel was published while Old Dorothy was still alive and Gardner told her it was only published with her permission. Valiente said that there was no material derived from Crowley in it except for the ritual password “Perfect Love and Perfect Trust.” This was taken from an essay Crowley had written in the German magazine The International during World War I, when he was working undercover for the British Secret Service. There are also references to the Lords of the Watchtowers taken from the magical work of Dr. John Dee and the rituals of the Golden Dawn published by Crowley in The Equinox, except they are given the unique title of the “Dread Lords of the Outer Spaces” (Ibid., 63–64).

  An interesting sidelight was cast on Gardner’s comments about only inheriting fragmentary rites from his parent coven by an article written by Bill Love and published in Prediction magazine in 1988. Love first came across witchcraft as a university student in Scotland at the beginning of World War II. A friendship with a fellow student led him to the discovery that the Craft was still being practiced in the 1940s. After he left the RAF at the end of the war, Love was initiated into a coven in Essex that had been practicing since the early 1930s. Subsequently he met a woman who belonged to another old coven in a village near Rye in East Sussex. Although there was no contact between the two covens, Love says they shared the same organization and similar rites.

  In 1955, Bill Love met Gerald Gardner, and they naturally discussed their respective Craft backgrounds. Love was surprised to find out that the type of witchcraft Gardner was practicing in the 1950s was very different from that of the two covens he knew in Essex and Sussex. However, Love said, “Gardner certainly appeared to have knowledge of the rites and practices of the coven to which I belonged and, from the information I gleaned from him, I formed the opinion that the New Forest coven into which he had been initiated was more akin to my own in its rites than to the system he was now practicing” (Prediction, n.d.).

  Chapter Seven

  Witchcraft Today

  After Doreen Valiente’s private initiation in June 1953 at Dafo’s house in Christchurch, later that year Gerald Gardner invited her to his London apartment to meet the other members of his coven. There were about eight or ten of them, most belonging to the Five Acres Naturist Club at Brickett Wood. The next meeting she attended was a celebration at midwinter and the coven had lunch together before the ritual in the evening. After the meal had finished, Gardner suddenly announced that he wanted Valiente to write an invocation for the forthcoming Yule ceremony. She searched through his books in the apartment and found a copy of a book of Gaelic Christian prayers from the Hebrides called Carmina Gadelica by Alexander Carmichael. She took from it part of one of the prayers to St. Brigid and produced a suitable invocation of the witch goddess as the “Queen of the Moon, Queen of Stars.” Later she also used her poetic skills to add material to some of the short seasonal rites used by the coven, including the summer solstice and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Valiente and Gardner also cooperated to write a circle chant for raising power, and between them they created the famous “Witches’ Rune” (Hutton 1999: 246–247).

  In September 1954, Kenneth Grant introduced Gardner to the psychic artist, medium, and magician Austin Osman Spare (1888–1956). The son of a London policeman, Spare was a talented artist, and as a young man he had several private exhibitions at leading London art galleries. He was also employed as a war artist during World War I. Many of Spare’s drawings and paintings had an explicit sexual content that shocked and offended the art establishment. Galleries refused to stage any more exhibitions of these erotic works, and Spare, a maverick who despised convention, responded by turning his back on fame. After his apartment in the slums of South London was bombed during the Blitz in 1940, and he lost all his possessions and most of his artwork, Spare became a recluse. He lived in poverty, making a meager living from drawing portraits in public houses of local characters, and making and selling talismans to fellow occult practitioners.

  Austin Spare’s unique artwork illustrated the twilight world that he knew existed beyond the normal range of the physical senses. His inspiration was an elderly lady called Mrs. Paterson, whom he called his “witch mother.” She claimed to be a hereditary witch, descended from a family lineage in Salem, Massachusetts. She earned a living by using playing cards to tell fortunes and, like George Pickingill, had the ability to summon up spirits and elementals and materialize thought forms into physical form. She would tell her clients to think about their desires, and they would see symbolic images of them appear in a shadowy corner of the room as conjured up by the old witch. Inspired by his initiator into the witch cult, Spare evoked with pen and pencil the weird denizens of the elemental realm and the grotesque participants, human and nonhuman, of the Witches’ Sabbath. Strange entities, half-human and half-animal, writhed across the pages of his drawing book, and demons and devils danced in wild abandonment with naked
hags at forbidden nocturnal rites. These crones were then transformed into beautiful young sirens as the magical glamour of ancient witch magic blurred the edges of reality.

  Spare was a skilled psychic artist and he used automatic writing to receive messages from his spirit guide, Black Eagle, a Native American. Spare was highly regarded in the Spiritualist movement for his skill. One of his friends was the late Hannan Swaffer, a well-known Fleet Street newspaper reporter, medium, and editor of the Spiritualist newspaper Psychic News. A few years ago, when an exhibition of Spare’s original paintings and drawings were put on show in a West London art gallery, Psychic News devoted several pages to a review of his artwork and life.

  As a young man, Spare had known Aleister Crowley and for a short time belonged to his magical group, the A.A., or Order of the Silver Star. The two occultists parted company on bad terms when Crowley, perhaps a little ironically, accused the artist of being a “Black Brother” or “black magician.” It has been speculated that the real reason for the disagreement was that Spare had resisted the bisexual Crowley’s advances (Beskin and Bonner 1999). Despite their differences, Crowley exerted a tremendous influence on the developing psyche of Spare as both a magus and an occult artist. Both men shared the belief that sexual energy was fundamental to any real and potent form of magical practice. In his book The Focus of Life, Spare said: “There is only one sense and that is sexual.” Because he was heterosexual, unlike Crowley, Spare did not indulge in homosexual magical acts. However, like his former guru, Spare associated with prostitutes and neurotic women, but claimed he channeled the orgasms from these brief encounters as ways to communicate with the spirit world, obtain psychic visions, or raise magical energy.

  After he left Crowley’s order, Spare began to work on his own magical system known as “the alphabet of desire.” He based this on symbols or sigils that had arisen from his subconscious mind. They were either interlaced letters signifying the capital letters of a phrase such as “I wish to be rich and famous” or an abstract symbol of his own creation representing either a psychic force or his inner desires. Spare made a pack of cards painted with some of these sigils and carried them in his pocket at all times. His theory was that the magician could visualize the symbol on the card and concentrate on it to awaken his subconscious. He could then attract his desires (sex, wealth, power, etc.) and bring them into manifestation in the material world. He called this magical technique “atavistic resurgence,” and claimed that, like Mrs. Paterson, an advanced practitioner could externalize the image of his or her desires as a projected thought form that could be seen by others and even impregnated into the mind of another receptive person.

  His “witch mother” had also taught Spare to summon elemental spirits into physical form. One day two dabblers in the occult turned up at the artist’s basement apartment in a Victorian terraced house in South London. They insisted that Spare prove his magical powers to them by calling up an elemental. He was reluctant to do so, knowing such actions could have unpleasant consequences for all concerned. At first he refused, but they were so persistent in their desire to see a spirit that he finally conceded to their request. Spare used one of his special sigils to evoke the entity, and after a few minutes a pungent fishy smell permeated the room and it began to fill up with a greenish mist. As the two men watched, paralyzed with fear, a long pointed face with demonic features began to form from the swirling mist. Eyes like pinpoints of fire glowed from slanted slits in the face, and the terrified occult dabblers began to plead with Spare to banish the terrifying elemental. The magus complied with their request and the face began to fade away, leaving behind an odor of rotting fish. Within a few days one of Spare’s visitors died suddenly, and the other was committed to a mental hospital.

  Spare made an additional living in the early 1950s by manufacturing talismans and amulets and doing spells for other practitioners of the magical arts. This was how he met Gerald Gardner. Kenneth and Steffi Grant had met Spare in 1949 after buying a copy of one of his books from Michael Houghton at the Atlantis bookshop and writing to him. Before Gardner and Spare actually met, Spare was already making overtures to him using an emissary. In a letter dated August 25, 1954, Spare wrote to Kenneth Grant, saying: “Dr. Gardner of the Isle of Man sent along his deputy, a myopic stalky nymph [Diana Walden who at the time was the High Priestess of the Brickett Wood Coven] … with two magical [sic] knives that she insisted on showing me. Harmless and a little tiresome … what she was really interested in I don’t think she herself knew. She believed the Witches’ Sabbath was a sort of folk dance of pretty young things … I agreed that a Maypole may have symbolism” (The Grants 1998: 86).

  In September 1954, Kenneth Grant took Spare to see Gardner at the apartment he had in Shepherd’s Bush, West London. At first they did not get on and argued over the meaning of the Witches’ Sabbath, a gathering Spare said he had attended many times on the astral plane while in a trance state. Obviously attempting to play a game of one-up-manship, Gardner showed Spare his athames, including his ritual black-handled knife with the witch symbols carved on the hilt. Spare was not impressed and told Gardner he knew “all the symbols and more.” He told Gardner it was possible to kill somebody just using the power of suggestion. Despite their disagreements on almost everything they discussed, Gardner purchased one of Spare’s famous talismans, jokingly known as flying saucers, because they were made from an ordinary dinner plate that had been painted with magical sigils. (I once saw Madeline Montalban make and use one of these for a cursing ritual that involved her smashing it to pieces with a ceremonial sword.) After the meeting Spare told Grant that he did not think Gardner had ever met a real witch. Grant has described the encounter between the two men as a “screamingly funny interview” (Ibid., 95 and 215).

  A few days after their meeting, however, Spare seems to have changed his mind about Gardner. He sent Kenneth Grant a gift to pass on to “the Old Boy,” as he called Gardner. It was a magical stele that had been charged to repel evil and return it to the sender threefold. One wonders if this is where Gardner got the idea for his “Wiccan Rede” and the “Law of Threefold Return”? Spare, who like many occultists was a fanatical cat lover, said that the stele needed a token sacrifice. He therefore suggested that in return for the stele, Gardner send a check for ten shillings to the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) (Ibid., 98).

  In 1955, one of the female members of Gardner’s coven whose witch name was “Clanda” decided to leave and join Grant’s Nu-Isis Lodge. Grant described her as a “tall woman … with a squameous appearance … with long wavy hair that clung to her like seaweed,” and made her resemble a mermaid. Because of the way she looked in the lodge, Clanda took the role of the “priestess of the sea and moon.” Gardner was not very happy that she had deserted him and directed a baleful current against the group and its leader. He also consulted Austin Spare in an attempt to get her back. Spare was totally ignorant of the situation and the real reason why he was being consulted by Gardner. He had just been asked to provide a talisman that would “restore that which has been taken from its rightful place.” He dutifully completed the commission and made a talisman using sigils from his magical alphabet to bind the spell (Man, Myth and Magic 1970).

  A few days later a ritual was held in the Nu-Isis Lodge to invoke the goddess Black Isis to possess the body of a priestess and speak through her. Clanda was selected as the priestess and in the candlelit temple she lay on an altar surrounded by a circle of violet-robed and hooded lodge members. The air was thick with a specially made incense composed of galbanum, storax, olibanum, and “moon juice” (i.e., menstrual blood). Each of the windows in the room had been covered in black-out curtains left over from the air raids during the war.

  The ritual commenced and, in the middle of the invocation to the Egyptian goddess, the young woman lying on the altar suddenly sat upright, her skin glistening with sweat and her eyes staring wildly at th
e window. A cold wind swept through the temple, and afterward Clanda told the others she had seen a vision of a monstrous, bird-like creature flying through the closed window into the room. It seemed to seize her in its huge webbed claws and carry her out of the window and up above the snow-covered roofs of the houses in the street. Eventually the giant bird entity returned to the room, released her from its taloned grip, and she dropped back onto the altar.

  Examination of the window after the ritual ended showed that etched in one of the frost-covered panes was the unmistakable print of a very large bird’s claws. On the windowsill below it was a lump of gelatinous slime. This substance slowly dissolved away in the warmth of the room, leaving behind a strong smell of seawater. Grant said that shortly after this event Clanda decided to emigrate to New Zealand. On the way, the ship she was traveling on sank at sea, and she was drowned.

  Kenneth Grant heard that Gardner had commissioned Spare and asked the magus if he had made a talisman for the witch and, as was his usual practice, bound an elemental spirit into it? Spare replied that he had been consulted by Gardner and had conjured up a spirit force to charge the talisman. When pressed for a description of the entity, Spare replied; “It was a sort of amphibious owl with bat wings and the talons of an eagle.” This was an almost identical description of the strange creature that had psychically attacked Clanda during the Isis rite (article in the occult encyclopedic part-work Man, Myth and Magic [c. 1970s] by Kenneth Grant 2003: 31–33).