It was at this stage that Doreen Valiente and her supporters in the anti-publicity faction decided to take action to save the coven from splitting in two. They drew up what they called “Proposed Rules for the Craft,” and their purpose was to ensure the oath of secrecy taken at initiations was kept. They presented these rules to Gardner, but he astonished them by responding they were not needed, as an archaic set of “Craft Laws” already existed. He sent Valiente a copy of these from the Isle of Man, and they were “full of obscure and archaic stylishes presumably to lend a sense of authenticity and dignity … ” (Rabinovich and Lewis 2002: 197). Valiente said the Laws were “couched in mock archaic language and ornamented with awesome threats … and invocations of ‘the Curse of the Goddess’ upon anyone who dared transgress them” (1989: 70).
Valiente seems to have objected strongly to several of these so-called “Laws of the Craft” because she regarded them as sexist. One stated: “The Gods love the brethren of the Wicca as a man loveth a woman, by mastering her.” Another claimed that the High Priestess received all her power from the Horned God and was only lent it by him. The third, and most significant, ruled that the High Priestess must be a young woman and should “gracefully retire in favour of a younger woman should the coven so decide in council.” Doreen Valiente objected to this because Old Dorothy, allegedly the High Priestess of the New Forest Coven, had remained in that position when she was an elderly woman. Also, no similar demand was made of the High Priest that he should stand aside for a younger man when he got old. Reading between the lines, one can surmise Valiente thought this law undermined and threatened her own position within the coven.
Ned Grove had been responsible with Valiente for drawing up the original “Proposed Rules” and he wrote back to Gardner accusing him of inventing his “Craft Laws.” The anti-publicity faction actually believed Jack Bracelin had helped write them. There followed, said Valiente, a heated exchange of correspondence between Grove and Gardner. At the end of it, nothing had been resolved. As a result of this lack of agreement, and Gardner’s continued love of self-publicity, Valiente, Grove, and several others made the reluctant decision to go their own way. In the frequent absence of Gardner on the Isle of Man, Jack Bracelin and Amanda were left to take over the remainder of the Brickett Wood Coven as its new High Priest and High Priestess.
If the split in the Brickett Wood Coven was a blow to Gardner and his authority, another threat emerged from within the Craft itself. The Bracelin biography says that this was a “certain self-styled witch who claimed to have inherited certain witch relics, and who wanted to gain control of the Museum.” He approached Gardner and tried to get him to agree to moving the museum collection from Castletown to London. He even offered the use of a building so the collection could be displayed to a larger public audience. Gardner was reluctant to have anything to do with this person, regarding him as a newcomer who wanted to become the leader of the witch cult (1960: 176). In another reference to the same person, the biography said the imposter had tried to find out from his initiates about the rituals practiced by Gardner. He did this by claiming they had already been published in a book and that was where Gardner had copied them from. However, he also said Gardner owned only part of the book—the rituals were therefore incomplete and only he had the complete copy (Ibid., 162).
This rival to Gardner was Charles “Charlie” Cardell (aka Major Charles Maynard) who lived with his “sister” Mary Cardell (aka Mary Edwards) in a London apartment and on a large forty-acre country estate called Dumbledene in the village of Charlwood in Surrey (now near Gatwick Airport). Mary Cardell was the daughter of a Cornish preacher and had inherited money from wealthy relatives. Charles Cardell had served in the British Army in India, and on his return to England earned a living as a stage magician. Sometime in the 1950s he set himself up as a psychologist operating from consulting rooms in Queens Gate, Central London. From their estate in Surrey, the Cardells, posing as brother and sister, also ran a company called Dumblecott Magick Productions, offering for sale such cosmetic products as “Moon Magick Beauty Balm.”
Charles Cardell came to public notice in 1958 when he wrote an article for the Spiritualist magazine Light. In it he announced that he and his sister were “Wiccens,” and they invited any genuine witches to contact them. Cardell was heavily involved with the College of Psychic Science (later the College for Psychic Studies), which published the magazine, and with the Spiritualist movement in general. In December 1959, he gave a talk on “Magic” to the Marylebone Spiritualist Association. Unfortunately some members of the college were unhappy about an article promoting witchcraft being published in Light. One of its leading members, Brigadier General Firebrace, said privately that he believed Cardell was “crazy” (Doreen Valiente’s notebooks; entry dated July 20, 1983 in MOW archive).
Despite saying he was a witch, as a practicing psychologist, Charles Cardell said he worked to expose the many charlatans in the occult world preying on the gullible, and in public he presented himself as a skeptic in such matters. He offered £5,000 to any witch, magician, or occultist who could publicly prove they had magical or psychic powers. One occultist, Charles Montague Pace, accepted the challenge. Pace was an old friend of Gerald Gardner, a self-styled “Setanist,” Luciferian, and “Priest of Anubis” who worked as a mortuary attendant. He later became Eleanor Bone’s lodger and the High Priest of her Streatham coven. Pace was also an accomplished artist. In the 1970s, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin employed him to paint occult murals on the walls of Boleskine House, Crowley’s former home in Scotland, which the rock star had bought. Charles Pace was also involved as an informant in several major newspaper exposés of witchcraft and Satanism.
Pace wrote to Charles Cardell, challenging him to a meeting at Stonehenge on Walpurgis Night, April 30, 1965. There he would allegedly witness “the dreaded fire ritual of the Black Peacock Angel [Lucifer]” The Setanist invited Life magazine to report on the event, and told Cecil Williamson they were interested. He had also invited members of the press and a television crew, but the demonstration seems not to have happened. Cardell must have been interested as he had apparently offered to donate the £5,000 to charity, and Charles Pace nominated the Institute for Deaf and Blind Children (letter from Pace to Cecil Williamson dated May 30, 1964, doc. 156/ref. 176 in MOW archive).
Charles Cardell claimed he had inherited his form of witchcraft from his mother, Lilla Maynard, a circus artiste and tightrope walker. Allegedly she had passed on to her son her personal arthame [sic] and “witch bracelet.” Gardner however was convinced that Cardell was not genuine and only wanted to take over the Isle of Man museum and entice away members of his coven. Certainly, according to a letter in the archives of the Church of Wicca in Toronto, those members of Brickett Wood who had broken away were interested in Cardell’s article in Light. In July 1958, Doreen Valiente wrote to Dafo, enclosing a copy of the magazine, and said that she and Ned Grove had met Cardell and had “long talks with him.” This letter is interesting in itself because it shows that despite Valiente’s break with Gardner and the Brickett Wood Coven, she was still in contact with Edith Woodford-Grimes. Valiente concluded her letter by telling Dafo the “rebels [had] a good meeting place” and their plan was “to get together with Cardell and pool our respective traditions.” Despite Gardner’s skepticism, from his own experience in the occult, Ned Groves believed Cardell was the genuine article (Kelly 2007: 87–89).
In fact, Doreen Valiente subsequently did join Cardell’s group, the Coven of Atho, but it is not known if any of the other ex-members of Brickett Wood followed her example. The coven took its name from a large wooden head depicting Atho, “the horned god of witchcraft,” owned by the Cardells’ handyman, Ray Howard. He claimed that when he was a young boy in Norfolk in the 1930s it been left to him in the will of an old Romany woman named Alicia French. She had also taught him a version of traditional witchcraft. Doreen Valiente believed the word “Atho�
� was an English corruption of the Welsh “Arddu” or “Dark One,” and was somehow linked to Charles Cardell’s family roots in Wales. The coven also worshipped the goddess Andraste, the name engraved on the “witch bracelet” Cardell inherited from his mother, and Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon and hunting. In her book Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978) Valiente published a copy of the Runes of Andred (Andraste) that she said had been given to her by a coven in Sussex. She claimed the Celts and Saxons worshipped this goddess in an ancient forest called Coed Andred (“the wood of Andred” in Welsh) that once covered southern England. The worship of Diana by the Coven of Atho she thought had been derived directly from Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches (entry in DV notebooks dated July 20, 1983, in MOW archive).
The head of Atho was carved from a solid piece of dark-colored oak that was allegedly over two thousand years old. It was adorned with two bull’s horns and inset with silver and jewels. The horns were decorated with the signs of the zodiac and on the forehead were what Doreen Valiente described as “the five rings of witchcraft.” The nose was in the form of a crescent-shaped chalice or wine cup and had a pentagram or five-pointed star on it. The mouth was shaped like a bird, the messenger of the elemental power of air, and the chin was in the form of the triangle of magical art (Valiente 1973: 25–26). When a small crucible of water with a lighted candle under it was placed in the back of the head its red glass eyes lit up and steam came out of the ends of the horns (Seims November 2007).
The meetings of the Coven of Atho were held at Dumbledene—it was rumored in a secret underground temple on the grounds converted from a wartime air-raid shelter (Ibid.). Most of the rituals, however, were performed in a woodland glade where an altar was set near an ancient tree. One ritual that was held indoors was known as the “Man, Maid, and Pupil” ceremony. This involved a magical circle being drawn on the floor around a chair and a small table. Pots containing earth, fire and water were placed around the circle. The pupil sat on the chair while the man directed the rite and the maid gave her “power” to it. Then the pupil went into a light trance and concentrated on healing or whatever the purpose of the rite was (entry dated 1970 in DV notebook in MOW archive).
Doreen Valiente claimed the Coven of Atho had members who included several well-known occultists. These she named as Margaret Bruce, a renowned herbalist, student of Madeline Montalban, and transsexual whose previous gender identity was a Merchant Navy seaman called Maurice Bruce; Jacqueline Murray, co-founder of the Atlantean Society; and Stella Truman, a witch who wrote for Prediction magazine. More controversially, Valiente said that the water and land speed racer Donald Campbell and his wife were members. It was alleged he used to touch the Head of Atho “for luck” before attempting his speed records. Ray Howard acted as the coven’s seer or clairvoyant, and it is possible Madeline Montalban was also involved. It is said that she and her magical partner and lover, Nicholas Heron, visited Cardell’s consulting rooms in London and took part in rituals in his temple (Ibid.).
Although Charles Cardell taught his initiates that the teachings of the Coven of Atho originated in the “Water City” (Atlantis) thousands of years before, in Doreen Valiente’s opinion they were derived from several modern esoteric sources. These included Dion Fortune’s occult novel The Sea Priestess, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Lewis Spence’s books on Atlantis, the American occultist Manly Palmer Hall’s Secret Teachings of All Ages (1962), the writings of the Ancient Mystical Order of Rosicrucians (AMORC) in the United States, to which Charles Cardell may have belonged, and Charles Godfrey Leland’s Aradia. In fact, Cardell had reprinted Leland’s book, and it is said Gerald Gardner went around buying up as many copies as he could find and burning them (DV notebooks dated February 27, 1968, in MOW archive).
Charles Cardell was Gerald Gardner’s greatest rival and it is even said he informed the newspapers of the location of the Brickett Wood Coven. In a policy of “divide and conquer,” he then told Gardner it was Doreen Valiente who was responsible for leaking the information. When one exposé was printed, Cardell sent Gardner a telegram saying: “Remember Ameth [Doreen Valiente’s witch name] tonight.” Although Cardell told people he was a hereditary witch and the “guardian of an ancient Celtic tradition,” he was still desperate to find out what rituals the Gardnerians practiced. He told Doreen Valiente that Gardner’s “star pupil,” a young woman named Olive Greene, was in fact working as a spy for him (DV notebook March 1959, in MOW archive).
Olive Greene (aka Olwen Armstrong Maddocks) was the wife of the chairman of the Brazilian Chamber of Commerce in the UK. In 1959, she became friendly with Gardner and persuaded him, without much effort, to privately initiate her into Wicca at his apartment in London. The Brickett Wood Coven had already rejected her because she was well educated and had a “superior attitude.” She was described as “young, pretty, well spoken, and had connections in the medical world” (Bourne 1998: 98). Gardner had decided to initiate her anyway despite the coven’s objections.
The coven’s rejection of her was justified, even if their reasons were not, as it turned out she was working secretly for Charles Cardell. When Greene became disillusioned with Gardner and turned against him, she went over to the other side and joined the Cardells. After Gardner fell ill and was taken into hospital, she obtained the key to his apartment and had access to his private papers. Greene copied and passed these on to Charles Cardell together with secretly taped recordings of Wiccan rituals and her own personal copy of the Book of Shadows. At first Cardell planned to send a copy of the BoS to the newspapers, but in the end he only published it after Gardner’s death in 1964. This was under the title Witch and using the symbolic pen name of “Rex Nemorensis” or “King of the Woods,” his title as the High Priest of the Coven of Atho.
Unfortunately for the Cardells, in 1960 they fell out with their handy-man and initiate, Ray Howard. He left his wife shortly afterwards and Mary Cardell gave evidence in court against Howard during the divorce case. In March 1961, Ray Howard took his revenge by taking a reporter from the London Evening News to spy on one of the rituals held on the Dumblecott estate. Two articles were published headlined “Witchcraft in Wood” and “Devil Worshipper by Night in Surrey Wood.” They described a two-hour ritual featuring “Beth, the Witch Maiden” (Mary Cardell) wearing a red cloak, and “Rex Nemorensis” wearing a black cloak decorated with a silver pentagram.
The reporter described seeing a group of people wearing hooded cloaks gather in a clearing in a wood. One was carrying a lantern on a pole, and its leader (Charles Cardell) drew a circle on the ground around a fire with a sword. On an altar were some bones (human or animal), a toy spider, a crystal ball, a bowl of water, and a shrunken head. As the group chanted, the High Priest took up a hunting horn and blew four blasts in the four directions of the compass around the circle. Mary Cardell, sitting in the fork of a tree, went into a trance to “communicate with the spirits of the dead.” At the end of the ritual, Cardell closed the circle by firing an arrow from a longbow into the trees near where Ray Howard and the reporter were hiding (London Evening News March 7, 1961).
Charles Cardell reacted badly to this betrayal by his former initiate and employee, as he believed it had adversely affected his status as a psychologist. He invited various journalists to Dumblecott for a press conference as a damage limitation exercise. Only the reporter who had written the articles and one from a local newspaper bothered to show up. Afterwards, the Evening News man told his colleagues that Cardell had tried to hypnotize him. A few weeks later Cardell appeared in court charged with threatening Ray Howard by sending him an effigy pierced with a needle (Seims November 2007, quoting unknown newspaper report dated May 4, 1961). After the court case, Ray Howard decided to move from Surrey and opened an antique shop in Norfolk. He took the Head of Atho with him and for a while displayed it in the shop. A photograph of Howard standing by it was published in a local newspaper. He later sa
id it had been stolen during a burglary, although it is also claimed this was only a copy and the original still exists somewhere in Devon.
Ray Howard also owned an old mill in Cornwall for a time, and Lois Bourne visited it on a holiday in the 1960s. She described it as semi-derelict with walls decorated with “semi-occult” pictures of the Horned God and the Moon Goddess, and many implements and symbols of witchcraft (1979: 33). She also said it contained a “large carved wooden head, decorated … with semi-precious stones” (1998: 29). However, Doreen Valiente recorded in one of her personal notebooks that Eleanor Bone, who knew Ray Howard, had talked to the owner of the garage in Charlwood where the Cardells lived. A friend of his had told him Howard’s son had seen his father making the Head of Atho (entry dated February 27, 1968). Gary Nottingham, editor of the magazine Verdelet and organizer of the Esoteric Conference and Occult Fair at Ludlow in Shropshire, also told me that somebody who knew Ray Howard’s son today had told him the same story. It does not really matter if the Head of Atho was thousands of years old or had been made sixty years ago. It was obviously a powerful magical object and was revered as such by the Coven of Atho—esoterically that is all that matters.
Mary Cardell decided, in hindsight unwisely, to sue the London Evening News for libel because of their article about the alleged ritual at Dumbledene. The case finally came to court in 1967 and when giving evidence she denied ever taking part in any witchcraft rituals. Under oath, she said their company, Dumblecott Magick Productions, was set up as a front to attract members of Gardner’s Wicca movement and gain information about their activities. They could then publicly reveal what Gardner and his followers were doing, as they regarded him as a threat to vulnerable young people. Her “brother” also used his professional skills as a psychologist to treat people suffering from mental problems after becoming involved in witchcraft and the occult, and expose bogus clairvoyants preying on the bereaved.
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