Although Robert Cochrane claimed to belong to a long line of hereditary witches, he also received a second-degree initiation into Gardnerian Wicca from a couple living in West London. The wife took Cochrane and his wife to Brickett Wood to see Jack Bracelin. While Bracelin liked Cochrane’s wife, he thought the young man was a “weirdie.” Subsequently Cochrane wrote several letters to Bracelin, who dismissed them as “a load of drivel.” Doreen Valiente said that Bracelin was not “impressed favourably” by Cochrane, so “they drifted out” (DV notebook entry dated February 23, 1966, in MOW archive). Cochrane is also said to have met Lois Bourne when she was the High Priestess of the Brickett Wood Coven.
When the third issue of Pentagram was published in August 1965, it contained an article from a second claimant to an Old Craft tradition. He used the Welsh pen name of “Taliesin,” and said he belonged to a group in the West Country owing allegiance to “The Lady.” They used the “sacred mushroom” fly agaric in their rites and had an initiation in which the candidate spent a nocturnal vigil in a wood after partaking of a ritual potion. Taliesin was, in fact, the son of a well-known Greek-born composer and bandleader who worked for the BBC in the 1940s and 1950s. He was also a friend of Robert Cochrane and was initiated into the Brickett Wood Coven by Lois Bourne (DV notebook, Ibid.).
The articles written by Cochrane and Taliesin attacking Wicca were not well received by those members of the WRA who were Gardnerians—a term actually coined by Robert Cochrane as a term of abuse. To her credit, Doreen Valiente kept out of the debate that followed in the December 1965 issue of the newsletter. One of the reasons was that she had effectively divorced herself from the Wiccan movement when she left Brickett Wood in 1957, even though she kept in touch with Gerald Gardner and Edith Woodford-Grimes. However, the most important reason was that she had left Charles Cardell’s Coven of Atho and joined Robert Cochrane’s traditional coven known as the Clan of Tubal Cain.
By her own account, Doreen Valiente was told about Robert Cochrane by some mutual acquaintances. They had met him at a midnight ceremony held at midsummer on Glastonbury Tor by an esoteric group called the Brotherhood of the Essenes. For some reason, occultists of various types always attended this event, possibly because there was a free buffet in the town hall afterwards, and in 1964 they included Robert Cochrane. As a result, a meeting was arranged in London, and subsequently Valiente was invited to join his group’s rituals. At first she was impressed with this charismatic young man, but eventually became disillusioned and, as with Brickett Wood, left his clan. One of the reasons was Cochrane’s wild talk about what he called having a “Night of the Long Knives” with the Gardnerians, and Valiente did not approve (Valiente 1989: 117 and 129).
Things came to a head as far as the WRA was concerned with the December 1965 issue of Pentagram. It contained a letter defending Gerald Gardner, written by a pseudonymous correspondent claiming to be a hereditary witch and signing himself “Monsieur.” He said he was a “humble, consecrated anointed Priest of Wicca” and complained about the use of the term “Gardnerian” in a “somewhat slighting manner” in the newsletter. He said it was unkind and unfair to Gardner, who “opened the door to many by his writings, radio interviews, etc.” and the publicity they engendered. Monsieur claimed that as a result of his efforts, Gardner attracted many “who felt the inborn urge to return to the Faith of their forebears.”
Monsieur went on to say that the cord, scourge, and knife used by Wiccans were not “mere Gardnerian theatricalisms, [but] the parts of the Faith and were ever with us and ever will be.” He added that Gardner had spent his life collecting information on the Craft “in its many fragmentary facets in widely scattered places.” He claimed to have handled the “large black-bound book containing hundreds of pages of notes in his [Gardner’s] own hand, fragmentary data collected from dozens of sources in Britain and overseas.” This mysterious book, it was claimed, was now in the hands of the “learned High Priestess” who helped Gardner collate, tabulate, and sequence the “magnificent wealth of knowledge he had so patiently amassed over the years.” From his own experience as a witch from two family lines in Ireland and Suffolk, Monsieur had found from studying Gardner’s notes and writings that his own hereditary tradition, allegedly three hundred years old, was “closely similar and sometimes exactly so.”
In the same issue, Taliesin responded to Monsieur’s claims by saying Gardner created his own version of witchcraft by starting with Dr. Margaret Murray’s ideas that the medieval witch cult contained traces of an ancient fertility religion that worshipped the Great Mother Goddess. Taliesin said she glossed over the fact that the witches’ Horned God had unmistakable Middle Eastern characteristics and that they worshipped him exclusively. This idea that historical witchcraft was influenced by Middle Eastern concepts, possibly introduced by crusader knights returning from the Holy Land, had already been put forward by the occultist Rollo Ahmed in the 1930s, and by the Sufi master Idries Shah. It also features in the legends of the Pickingill Craft passed to Bill Liddell by his Elders (see Liddell 1994).
In his reply, Taliesin said that Gardner had taken Dr. Murray’s theories as his starting point and then used his “far-from-small intelligence and great imagination” and the works of Aleister Crowley and Charles Godfrey Leland to create modern witchcraft. Taliesin concluded that Gardner demoted the role of the Horned God in historical and traditional witchcraft to second place and replaced him with a European moon goddess. He had borrowed her name, Aridia or Aradia from Leland and used the name of a “Scandinavian antlered god” [sic], Cernnunos, for the Horned God. He concluded by saying that none of the Gardnerians he had met who knew his connection with hereditary witchcraft had expressed any desire for knowledge. This was because they “feel cosy and safe in the little-house-that-GBG-built.”
The newsletter also contained a letter from Arnold Crowther, the High Priest of the Sheffield Coven. Since the initiation of Alex Sanders and the publication of the Book of Shadows by Charles Cardell, the Gardnerians had been feeling as if they were under attack. In fact, some covens had even changed the Goddess name given to initiates in the third-degree ritual. Patricia Crowther had, rather unconvincingly, announced that the secret rituals of Wicca had not been revealed in Cardell’s book. She hinted there was a fourth-degree ritual of initiation that was only revealed to a chosen few. In these circumstances it was predictable that the Crowthers reacted adversely to the attacks on Wicca by Cochrane and Taliesin.
In his letter, Arnold Crowther said it was about time professed witches stopped criticizing each other in an attempt to prove they were the “chosen ones.” Referring to Taliesin’s article in the previous issue, he said he was sick and tired of those who talk about the “Gardnerites” with their cloak-and-dagger initiations and then describe one staged in a wood at night. He reminded those who claimed to be hereditary witches that most Britishers [sic] had “witch blood” inherited from their ancestors. He concluded by attacking people who hid behind pseudonyms, and said he thought the idea behind Pentagram was to bring covens together on friendly terms. Instead he claimed it was “whipping up hatred between different groups by publishing petty insults from nonentities.”
The editor of Pentagram, John Math, decided in the interests of fair play and the right-of-reply to invite Taliesin to respond to Arnold Crowther’s diatribe. His first comment was that he knew all the rites and rituals of the covens like the one led by the Crowthers, as he had gone through the “three theatrical performances” of the Gardnerian initiation on the orders of his traditional witchcraft clan. He also said Crowther had poured scorn on the traditional witches because they would not “dance gaily into the light of publicity that he and his minions enjoy so much.” As examples he gave those of Patricia Crowther writing articles for women’s magazines, and having rituals filmed showing her coven “prancing rather self-consciously around to the beating of a drum.”
John Math evidently already s
hared Taliesin’s views of the Crowthers and other media witches. In a letter to Cecil Williamson, he said: “… there is a small band of ‘Gardnerians’ who seem to revel in any publicity which they can obtain for themselves. I am, personally, rather worried that these activities on their part are giving a completely false impression of witchcraft as a whole” (letter dated October 12, 1964, doc. 229/ref. 250 in MOW archive).
It was pretty obvious the WRA could not survive this schism in its ranks and the ongoing bickering between the traditional witches and the Gardnerian Wiccans. Like other similar organizations that followed it, the Witchcraft Research Association was the first casualty of a witch war that simmered on for many years, and still has its skirmishes today. After it ceased to be the official newsletter of the WRA, Pentagram survived for a couple more issues as a glossy magazine featuring articles on a wide range of esoteric topics before finally ceasing publication. Problems with its publication had been going on for some time. In another letter to Cecil Williamson, its editor said he was attempting to continue to publish the magazine despite the personal expense it was incurring. He also said there were attempts to blackmail him and get him fired from his job because he was publishing a witchcraft newsletter (letter dated December 13, 1964, doc. 232/ref. 253 in MOW archive).
When I met John Math at the apartment of my Gardnerian initiator in Ealing, West London, in 1969, he lamented that it was impossible to produce a proper witchcraft magazine. This was allegedly because there was not enough material available to fill its pages. This did not stop other people from trying, and five years later John Score launched the Pagan Front with its official newsletter The Wiccan, later the Pagan Dawn. In 1976 I started my own witchcraft newsletter The Cauldron and both it and PD are still being published.
The fallout from the witch war between the Wiccans and the traditionalists led to an interesting development in 1966 that, temporarily at least, brought both sides together under the umbrella of a neopagan organization. At midsummer 1966, Robert Cochrane committed suicide after the messy break-up of his marriage following his affair with a woman in his coven. The Clan of Tubal Cain effectively broke up and at Hallowe’en 1966 two of its ex-members, Ronald “Chalky” White and George “Bang-Bang” Stannard Winter, decided to form a neopagan group to continue Cochrane’s legacy. It was also a pioneering attempt to create a new tribal religion based on pagan principles, with open rituals enabling ordinary people to participate in a mystical experience.
The Regency, which survived until the late 1970s and still exists as a private closed group today, organized celebrations of the pagan seasonal festivals of the year that were open to the general public. Outdoor ceremonies were held at Queens Wood in Highgate, North London, the Rollright Stones prehistoric circle in Oxfordshire, Runton Woods in Norfolk, and the Stiperstones in Shropshire. Permission to use Queens Wood in Highgate had been granted by the old LCC (London County Council). Interestingly, many of the Regency’s outdoor celebrations and the private rituals of its inner circle were attended by many prominent Gardnerian Wiccans. In fact, according to the American writer, paranormal researcher, and ghost-hunter Dr. Hans Holzer, as well as being a member of Robert Cochrane’s traditional group, George Stannard Winter was also a Gardnerian initiate.
Chapter Eleven
The King of the Witches
While the media in the 1950s had dubbed Gerald Gardner the “Witch King of Britain” in their stories about Wicca, it was Alex Sanders who was destined to make this nonexistent title a reality. In 1965, Sanders hit the headlines when he and eighteen-year-old Maxine Morris went through a handfasting ceremony. Maxine had quickly advanced from neophyte to the rank of High Priestess in the emerging Alexandrian Craft, and she presided over the rituals at Alderley Edge in Cheshire. However, one of the members of the coven was in contact with journalists working for the local newspapers in Manchester and they paid him for details of the location of the meetings (Maxine Sanders 2008: 79).
Subsequently, a reporter turned up at an open evening held by the coven for new enquirers and asked a lot of questions about devil worship and sex orgies. Unbeknown to Maxine Sanders, her husband guessed he was a journalist and agreed that he and a photographer should secretly witness the coven’s next full moon ceremony at Alderley. Neither Maxine nor the rest of the group were aware of this arrangement, and during the “Drawing Down the Moon” rite she saw a glimpse of lights out of the corner of her eye and heard a clicking sound. The young girl naively believed this was some kind of paranormal manifestation and the sign of an impending spiritual experience.
Two days later Maxine was sadly disillusioned when a banner headline in the local Comet newspaper read “Ex-Convent Girl in Witchcraft Rites.” Accompanying the article was a photograph of a naked young woman, whose modesty was only covered by her long blonde hair, and Maxine recognized herself. She has said this was the first of many newspaper stories containing “sensationalised versions of the religious ceremonies I considered sacred” (Ibid., 80). Many years later the editor of the News of the World told her the “Sanders witches were a godsend when news was thin on the ground.” In the 1960s and 1970s, stories about witchcraft always provided a sales boost for the tabloid papers and increased their circulation when they were published.
Maxine felt betrayed by the trick Alex Sanders had played on her and the rest of the coven. As a result of the publicity, her mother nearly had a nervous breakdown and tried to have Maxine exorcised by a Catholic priest, her landlady threatened to evict her, she was questioned by the police, and she lost her job. When she confronted Sanders about the situation, he justified his actions by saying if the Craft was to grow, the public should know it was not an evil cult. It was a religion that did not practice devil worship, but worshipped the Old Gods of Britain. He said there were many people seeking initiation who had no way to find a teacher or a coven. It was therefore essential witchcraft got publicity in the media so it could reach these seekers. Maxine says she was so in love with this charismatic older man at the time she would have forgiven him anything, so she willingly accepted this explanation. Doreen Valiente in fact criticized Sanders for preferring initiates who were young and inexperienced and would believe anything he told them. He often recruited teenagers and departed from the strict rule laid down by Gerald Gardner, who Valiente claimed would not accept anyone into the Craft who was under twenty-one years old.
The rituals practiced in the Sanders coven mixed Gardnerian Wicca from the Book of Shadows he had obtained with Cabbalistic material (largely drawn from the books of the Hermetic occultist and magician Franz Bardon and the Key of Solomon), and ancient Egyptian rituals from The Book of the Dead. Doreen Valiente suggested that Alexandrian Wicca had this eclectic approach because Sanders possessed a limited knowledge of witchcraft (1989: 170). In fact it is more likely it was because he had practiced as a ceremonial magician before he was initiated into Wicca (see Johns 1969 and Maxine Sanders 2008).
In later years, Sanders added to this exotic mix angelic magic derived from the correspondence course issued by Madeline Montalban and her Order of the Morning Star. It is unclear how he obtained this, although Maxine Sanders says he was sent copies through the mail (2008: 237). An alternative version says Sanders was walking down a street in London one day when a stranger thrust a parcel into his hands and rushed off. When he opened the package he found copies of the OMS angelic magic course in it. Maxine says that in the 1970s she finally visited Madeline Montalban, and belatedly asked her permission to use the courses in the training of her initiates.
The June Johns biography of Alex Sanders claims that in 1965 he received an invitation to a party from one of the 1,623 witches who belonged to his covens. It is very doubtful that this large number was correct, and traditionally there has always been a tendency among media witches and self-styled leaders of the Craft to exaggerate the number of covens they command. On arrival at the house where the party was to be held, Sanders was
led into the drawing room where the members of five covens, totaling sixty-five people, were waiting to greet him. Draped over a chair was a robe of dark blue velvet and Sanders was told it had been made especially for him. When he said he had no need for a new robe, Sanders was told it had been made following a special conference of all the other covens. As a result the “elders” had come to the conclusion that, since he was their founder and the only hereditary witch among their number, they wanted to crown him as the King of the Witches. This would, he was told, be a formal acknowledgment of his position as the foremost authority in the country on witchcraft (Johns 1969: 101).
Apparently, Sanders was not keen to accept the honor being bestowed on him by his own initiates. He saw no reason because in matters of ritual and dogma his authority had never been questioned by his covens. Usually the High Priest of a coven solved most of the problems that might arise and it was only the ones he could not deal with that were passed to Sanders for judgment. It was pointed out that his authority had been challenged. A disgruntled coven member had sent him a written curse because she objected to his references to witchcraft in public and his claim it was compatible with other religions. Only Sanders’ confidence in his ability to banish the curse and protect his wife and followers had prevented widespread panic among the covens.
In the end, Johns said, Sanders was reluctantly persuaded to become the king of the covens he had founded. He put on the new robe made for him to wear during the crowning ceremony, which was based on the coronation of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. The coven elders placed a crown made from brass, copper, silver, and velvet cloth on the witch king’s head. They then anointed his bare feet with perfumed oil and sat him on a throne before the altar as the living representative of the Horned God. At the end of the ceremony the crown was thrown into a cauldron containing a fire so the oath of allegiance Sanders had taken as the King of the Witches would be binding for all of eternity (Ibid., 103).
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