In addition, Gardner left the sum of £1,000 to Jack Bracelin, £1,500 to Mrs. Edith Woodford Grimes, £1,500 to Monique Wilson, £200 to Doreen Valiente, £3,000 to “Mrs. Arnold Crowther,” and similar amounts to his housekeeper and sister-in-law. His shares and interest in the company Ancient Crafts Ltd and the Five Acres Naturist Club were left to Mrs. Lois Pearson (Bourne). To his American sister-in-law, Gardner bequeathed his grandfather’s dirk, skign dhoo (stocking knife), his own kilt and plaid with brooch, and his grandfather’s sword with its cross belt.
When the will was published the newspapers reported that Monique Wilson had been left the title of Queen of the Witches, together with the bulk of Gardner’s estate worth £25,800. She was described in one article in the Daily Mirror (March 6, 1964) as a “young black-haired mother” with a seven-year-old daughter, and she had inherited all of Gardner’s “magical equipment,” including his broomstick. The newspaper said that after a short holiday, Mrs. Wilson planned to move into the witches cottage [sic] in Malew Street. She would then act as a guide at the witchcraft museum during the coming summer season. She was quoted as saying that she and her husband Scotty would carry on Dr. Gardner’s work by building up the museum and countering the popular image of witchcraft as an evil cult.
The newspaper story saying Monique Wilson inherited the title of Queen of the Witches was greeted with outrage and derision by Gardner’s other High Priestesses. According to Doreen Valiente, shortly after Gardner’s death Jack Bracelin and Ray Bone traveled to the Isle of Man. They found Monique Wilson in full possession of the museum and “went away empty-handed” (DV notebook entry dated June 13, 1964, in MOW archive). Cecil Williamson also tried to get back some “bits and pieces” in the museum collection from the Wilsons. He said these belonged to him and he had only loaned them to Gardner. It is not known if he was successful in his attempt. Ray Bone told the Daily Mirror rather ambiguously, “There is no such [person] as the Queen of the Witches. If there were, we other witches would have to approve the person appointed.” There is no evidence that Monique Wilson ever regarded herself in this way and the confusion may have arisen over the use of the term “witch queen” to describe a High Priestess with authority over several covens.
Shortly after Gardner died, several other self-proclaimed and self-styled witches began to make their presence known in public, claiming their traditions predated Wicca. Among the most prominent of these new media witches was an antique dealer and shop-owner living in the New Forest village of Burley. For a brief period in the 1960s, this picturesque tourist trap became the focus for intensive media attention as the haunt of witches and covens. Sybil Leek (1917–1983) owned an antique shop in the village and told reporters she followed an “ancient family tradition of Celtic witchcraft.” Allegedly on her mother’s side she could trace her family roots back to twelfth-century Ireland and her father came from a line of Russian occultists associated with the pre-Revolutionary royal court. In addition Leek claimed one of her ancestors was a Staffordshire witch named Molly Leigh, who had died (of natural causes) in 1663.
In one version of her life story, Sybil Leek said she had been born into a wealthy middle-class family in Staffordshire. She was educated by a Russian governess, who had previously been an opera singer, and then she attended a private boarding school (not Hogwarts!). As a child her father taught her yoga and Eastern religions, while her grandmother baked pies decorated with astrological symbols on their crusts. Famous people such as the science-fiction writer H. G. Wells and Aleister Crowley were also regular house guests of her family.
After leaving school, Leek worked part-time as a cub reporter on a local newspaper and also at an art gallery and in a museum. During this period she was receiving instruction from her grandmother in the arts of witchcraft, astrology, herbalism, and healing. She was briefly married to a music teacher until he died suddenly, leaving her a widow at the young age of eighteen. Eventually one of her Russian aunts, who was the High Priestess of a witch coven in France, died, and she was chosen to replace her. Leek said she was initiated at a place called Gorge de Loupe (Valley of the Wolf) near Nice in southern France. The ritual was presided over by a Chinese antique dealer who was the High Priest of the coven.
Shortly after her initiation into the Craft, Leek moved with her new husband to Lyndhurst in the New Forest. This would have been in the late 1940s (Leek 1964), although in another account she served as a nurse during World War II at the Queen Victoria Military Hospital at Netley in Hampshire. She said she had many friends and relatives already living in the New Forest (Leek 1975: 65), so she must have known the area previous to her move. Her second husband had been badly wounded during the war and as a result suffered ill health. Leek also claimed she had lost several foreign relatives during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s and the Nazi occupation of Europe. At first she and her husband lived in poverty conditions on a small holding until Leek decided to branch out into buying and selling antiques, opening her first shop in the High Street of the New Forest town of Ringwood. In 1962, she and her family moved to a cottage in Burley and opened a new antique shop in the center of the village.
According to Sybil Leek, she joined the Horsa Coven in the New Forest in the 1940s and was appointed as its High Priestess in 1950. Its name was taken from the semi-mythical chieftain who led the first Saxon settlers to southern England in the early Middle Ages, and the coven was supposed to date back to that period of history. She was also the High Priestess of another New Forest coven called the Three Acres Coven. Leek claimed that in the 1960s there were at least four covens active in the area around Lymington, Lyndhurst, and Brook (Heselton 2000: 299). These covens had their full complement of thirteen members, with each person specializing in a different magical art such as healing, charms, and potions. Leek claimed the locals openly consulted the witches, and wealthy Persian (Iranian) ladies doing their shopping in London came to the New Forest to consult the Witch of Burley about their love affairs. She also had visitors to her cottage who were witches from Brittany in France, Poland, Sicily, and Australia (Leek 1964: 1–4, 105).
Ironically, it was her desire for fame that finally drove Sybil Leek out of her home in the New Forest. Hounded by reporters who were desperate to find the meeting place in the forest of the Horsa Coven, Leek left England and settled in the United States where the press was more sympathetic. Initially she had been invited over for a promotional visit by the American publishing house that had acquired the US rights to her book about the antiques trade, A Shop in the High Street. After living in New York for a while, she relocated to Los Angeles at the height of the hippie “flower-power” period. In later years she commuted between Houston, Texas, and Florida. In the United States, Sybil Leek began a new and successful career as an astrologer and psychic. She had her own syndicated television show, wrote a column for the Ladies Home Journal, and designed dresses for a chain of fashion stores. She also wrote several best-selling books on witchcraft, astrology, reincarnation, and the paranormal before her death in the early 1980s.
As with the life stories and back history of so many of the public figures in the modern witchcraft revival, there are many discrepancies in Sybil Leek’s colorful childhood and the period when she first came to public notice in 1964. Professor Ronald Hutton has pointed out that there are no references in Aleister Crowley’s extensive diaries to any visits to an eccentric family of occultists in Staffordshire. He also noted that even Doreen Valiente, who knew Leek, had remarked that her “hereditary Celtic witchcraft” was suspiciously similar to Gardnerian Wicca (Hutton 1999: 300–301).
In fact, I remember hearing Sybil Leek being interviewed on the radio program Women’s Hour on the BBC Home Service in 1964. She told the interviewer she was a hereditary witch and then proceeded to recite the “Charge of the Goddess” from the Gardnerian Book of Shadows as written by Doreen Valiente in the 1950s. Professor Hutton also remarked on the strange fact that while Leek claimed
to have been running two covens in the New Forest for over twenty years she had managed to escape media attention and only emerged into public view after Gerald Gardner’s death in 1964.
Sybil Leek’s claims to have been a hereditary witch born into a family of occultists is not backed up by her own autobiography A Fool and a Tree. This was written in 1962 or 1963, and published in 1964, just before she came out of the broom closet as a witch. Her book describes her childhood, early life, and experiences among the Romany people who lived in the New Forest. In it there is no mention of an exotic family background or unusual childhood, no Russian governesses or aunts, or grandmothers who taught her witchcraft. Instead her childhood seems to have been very ordinary, as she lived in Staffordshire in a cottage near a canal and attended a local church school.
The book does have a chapter discussing witchcraft, but Leek does not mention the Chinese high priest of a French coven and omits the fact she was the High Priestess of a local coven. Instead she coyly says: “If there ever was a place most suited for witches to carry on their practices of the Old Religion surely it is the forest.” It is always possible that, like Doreen Valiente, who described herself as merely a student of the subject in her 1962 book Where Witchcraft Lives, Leek did not want to reveal her involvement in the Craft. However, this does not explain why she was so eager to court publicity after the book was published in 1964.
A Fool and a Tree gives an account of Sybil Leek’s move to the New Forest with her sick husband and her wartime service as a military nurse. She met her new husband while working for a canine publication and was sent to report on a dog show. Her prospective husband attended the event with his prize bull terrier, and she interviewed him. However, in her later biography, published in 1975, Leek said when she first moved to Hampshire she stayed at a mansion near Lyndhurst while her mother and grandmother decided which house they would buy in the area. The owner of the mansion was allegedly the daughter of an ex-governor general of Canada and bred pedigree dogs and polo ponies. Leek resisted her attempts to turn her into a socialite and ran off into the New Forest to live with the gypsies. Eventually she returned to the new house her family had finally purchased. They greeted her “as if I had been away for a long weekend with friends instead of spending nearly a year with the gypsies” (1975: 67, 89).
This romantic tale of running off with the gypsies does not appear in A Fool and a Tree. Instead, Leek says she first made contact with some of the Romany folk who lived in the forest after her husband was taken into hospital. She found herself temporarily homeless, having sent her children back to Staffordshire to stay with her mother, and spent some time “living rough.” After a few weeks of this existence her parents bought an old Victorian house in the New Forest where she and her children could live (1964: 27–33). Obviously there is something very wrong about these two differing and conflicting accounts.
It is interesting that Philip Heselton, quoting Deric James, the editor of the now defunct occult magazine Insight who knew Sybil Leek in the 1960s, says the rituals of the Horsa Coven were largely based on Crowley’s writings (Heselton 2000: 300). When she moved from New York to Los Angeles, Sybil Leek made contact with the late Dr. Israel Regardie, and she says they swapped anecdotes about the Great Beast. “One night we got out all the regalia which had been used at the Crowley rituals. For the first time in twenty-nine years we performed one of the old Golden Dawn rituals.” It is not clear from this story if the GD regalia belonged to Dr. Regardie—it probably did, but it is an interesting postscript to the life of the Witch of Burley, whose published life story seems to be a mixture of fact and fantasy (pers. comm.).
Cecil Williamson’s family lived at one period at Newlands Manor near Lyminton in the New Forest. He was also stationed in the area during the war, probably at first at the Special Operations Executive (SOE) training school and later running one of the secret radio stations broadcasting “black” propaganda to German U-boats. Williamson told me that Sybil Leek did know some genuine witches in the New Forest who lived at Beaulieu, Sway, and Stoney Cross. These, however, were not members of covens but solitary “wise women” (pers. comm.). It is therefore possible that Leek had some contact with genuine survivors of traditional witchcraft in the forest. However, the discrepancies in her different versions of her life story and her sudden public exposure following Gerald Gardner’s death cast serious doubts on her own authenticity as a hereditary witch.
While Sybil Leek was establishing her career as a media witch, another group of witches was busy forming a new organization to represent the modern Craft in public. This group was the Witchcraft Research Association (WRA), founded by a public relations officer from London using the pseudonym of “John Math.” In reality, he was the son of the Earl of Gainsborough, had trained as a young man for the Roman Catholic priesthood, and served as a captain in the Royal Marine Commandos during World War II.
The WRA was officially launched in October 1964 at a Hallowe’en dinner held in a London hotel, which was described by the Cabbalistic magician William Gordon “Bill” Gray, who attended it as a “Witches’ Banquet.” About fifty people attended from places as far away as Derby, Wolverhampton, and Harwich. Doreen Valiente was the guest of honor and star attraction, and she gave a keynote speech after the dinner had finished. Bill Gray claimed that if Gerald Gardner had still been alive, he would have also attended.
Bill Gray said that all the Gardnerian witches sat at one large table and what he called the “independent” or “opposition lot” of (non-Gardnerian) witches were seated at another. Gray had written a special prayer for “grace” before the meal. When this was reported in the WRA official newsletter Pentagram, to Gray’s amusement it was falsely described as “a translation of a twelfth-century document of unknown origin.” Gray said that the occasion was remarkable for the fact it was one of the worst meals he had ever eaten. “There was a thin soup made from beef stock cubes, a small lump of suspicious substance, which might have been from an unknown animal, flanked by two scoops of reconstituted potato powder and a single heap of boiled dried peas.” The pudding was “a thin wedge of cardboard-tasting tart … drowned by watery custard.” Gray added that “you could have got better food in prison” (Richardson and Claridge 2003).
In her keynote talk, Doreen Valiente paid a generous tribute to her initiator Gerald Gardner “for the great contribution he made to the renewal of interest in the survival of the Old Craft of the Wise.” She added that while she had not agreed with everything he had said or done, she did recognize his “great equalities of heart and mind, as did all who knew him. He was a personality and a character, and we shall remember him with affection.” This tribute reflected that, despite the fact she left the Brickett Wood Coven under acrimonious circumstances, Valiente had remained in contact with Gardner, and over the years until his death they maintained a friendly relationship.
In her talk Doreen Valiente also predicted an aspect of witchcraft that in the next decade would begin to dominate the emerging neo-pagan movement. She said that what witches seek when they celebrate the seasonal festivals is a “sense of oneness with Nature.” This reflected the modern tendency for people to disconnect themselves from “their kinship with the world of living nature [until they felt] just like another cog in a huge, senseless machine.” She claimed that it was the reaction against this feeling that was now attracting newcomers to the Craft, as they wanted to get “back to nature, and be human beings again, as she intended them to be.”
Valiente said that in modern times the concept of the witch cult as a cult of fertility was not always relevant. Instead witches should be working for the “fertility of the mind, and fertility of the soul.” Also, introducing a controversial political element that up to then was missing from Wicca, she evoked the image of millions of people starving all over the world. Valiente recommended that witches invoke the “Ancient Powers” for the fertility of the earth so that people should no longer
die of starvation in Third World countries. She told her audience that a ritual for this purpose was regularly performed at witchcraft meetings in Sussex where she now lived.
Later on in the talk, Doreen Valiente expressed her personal hopes for the new organization. She said the WRA was contacting surviving witch traditions and covens that were not in any way connected with Gerald Gardner. It had become clear from these contacts that the Old Craft (i.e., pre-Gardnerian witchcraft) had survived in fragmented form all over the British Isles. These different groups had lost contact during the years of persecution and each had its own version of the tradition, rituals, and practices. She believed the WRA could help to bring together these different groups and traditions in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance and respect. In fact, as it was to turn out, the differences between the older groups and the Wiccan newcomers were to explode into open conflict in the pages of the WRA’s newsletter Pentagram.
The second issue of the newsletter was published in December 1964 and featured a transcript of Doreen Valiente’s talk at the Witches’ Banquet, a review of a book on historical witchcraft by a Spanish writer, and an article by a young man using the pen name Robert Cochrane, who claimed to be the descendant of a hereditary witch family. He controversially queried the common Wiccan idea that the Craft was “a simple pagan belief” based upon “an exceedingly simplified concept of the works of Nature,” as it seemed to be described in Valiente’s talk. He condemned modern witchcraft (i.e., Wicca) as an attempt by people living in the twentieth century to deny modern living. Instead he presented an alternative and mystical version of the witch as a student of the ancient Mysteries found concealed in folklore, myth, and legend. He claimed the Mysteries went underground with the coming of Christianity and joined forces with the aboriginal beliefs of the masses to create traditional witchcraft.
Modern Wicca Page 20
