Witches of History: Gerald Gardner

Gerald Gardner was an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist from Lancashire, England, born in the late 19th century. A curious spirit by nature, Gardner was always attracted to the paranormal. There are conflicting sources about which one of his ancestors was a witch, but the consensus seems to be that the Craft was in his lineage. After joining several military groups in England and abroad in his youth, Gardner became a Freemason, but his interest in advancing through the ranks waned quickly.

While working as a civil servant in Sri Lanka and Singapore, Gardner developed a fascination in occult practices and began writing papers about them from an anthropological perspective at first. When back in Britain, this fascination was further kindled by visiting spiritualist churches and séances, where he became convinced he’d had several encounters with dead family members. For a while, Gardner’s occult interests were channeled into writing fiction: his first published book was a novel titled A Goddess Arrives. But that was going to change soon.

In 1936, Gardner returned to Europe, where he quickly realized the British climate was making him ill. He visited a doctor who suggested nudism as a cure, and Gardner quickly embraced the practice. (This will be important later.) After a quick sojourn in Cyprus, which inspired his novel and rekindled his belief in reincarnation, Gardner moved near the New Forest area, where he came across Rosicrucianism.

Rosicrucianism was one of the prominent spiritual and cultural movements of the time, combining the premises of Kabbalah, Hermeticism, alchemy, and Christian mysticism. Much like his experience with Freemasonry, Gardner joined enthusiastically at first but quickly lost interest—as he became convinced that the movement did not hold any real wisdom or power. Through this movement and its proximity to the New Forest, Gardner made an acquaintance that would change his life.

One night, Gardner and the Fellowship of Rosicrucianism visited a local woman’s house where a ceremony took place. The ceremony felt like an initiation of sorts, and later Gardner claimed that this is where he first heard the word Wica (with one c) as an alternative to “witch.” He never revealed what actually took place during that ceremony and the ones that followed. Still, he spoke about one particular ceremony that took place in the New Forest woods, where the witches “formed a circle to raise a cone of power,” apparently to make it so England would never be occupied by the Nazis during WWII.

This experience was clearly transformational for Gardner, but it wasn’t the first time he came in contact with the idea of witchcraft as an ongoing, secret practice. The idea that some families of witches had escaped the burnings at the stake that took place during the Middle Ages and maintained their practice in secret was popular since Charles Godfrey Leland published Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, in 1899. And during Gardner’s time, archaeologist Margaret Murray published two seminal works, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and God of the Witches (1931), which hypothesized that an ancient Pagan religion devoted to a Horned God existed in different forms since antiquity and that the persecution of witches was an organized attempt to erase that religion.

The Horned God, according to Murray, was a god of fertility that Christians conflated with the devil—and it was this idea that made Gardner think that the coven he joined in the New Forest was part of the pre christian religion Murray talked about.

By 1951, Gardner was “out of the broom closet” as a witch in newspapers and the media, and by 1954, he even purchased a museum on the Isle of Man, which he named The Museum of Magic and Witchcraft. But one of the most important encounters of his life would take place in 1952 when he started exchanging correspondence with Doreen Valiente. Valiente soon became an essential member of Gardner’s coven ascending to the esteemed role of one of its high priestesses. it was with her assistance that he managed to compile his various notes and turn them into the seminal works of Wicca. His first book, Witchcraft Today, was published in 1954 with a preface by Margaret Murray—who basically legitimized Gardner’s claims of a secret coven in the New Forest and connected it to her own theories about the God of the Witches. His next book, The Meaning of Witchcraft, was published in 1959.

During the late ‘50s, Gardner established his coven in London, and his influence grew. He often invited the press to write about his “New Old Religion,” but the results were often defamatory. It wasn’t until the ‘60s after Gardner met the poet Robert Graves, whose book The White Goddess helped change people’s perception of magick and the Divine Feminine, that Wicca would start generating positive reactions from people.

Gerald Gardner died in 1964 from a heart attack while on a ship, traveling back from a vacation in Lebanon. After his death, some of his coven members carried on his tradition, which was renamed “Gardnerian Wicca.” In contrast, others, particularly those who moved to the States, started their own branches of Wicca. Gardner’s texts are considered the closest thing we have to “sacred texts,” but today, it is understood that some of the rituals described in them are more a product of Gardner’s own mystical and personal preferences. For example, the focus on nudity during rituals is now considered unnecessary by many—and we understand that Gardner insisted on it because of his own views on nudity as a health regimen. Similarly, although Doreen Valiente rewrote a significant part of Gardner’s texts to “remove Crowley’s influence,” there are still many similarities between Crowley’s and Gardner’s teachings, as they both draw from earlier ceremonial magick texts.

In the end, Gerald Gardner was a complicated, imperfect man who looked for meaning in many different places without much success. He took his eclectic tastes and various influences and used them to forge his own path and become the usher of a much-needed Neo-Pagan movement. Although today, historians have disputed both Murray’s and Gardner’s own claims about a continued line of witch covens that escaped the burnings, one thing is certain: humans will always have a need for witchcraft, something the Father of Wicca succeeded in was reminding them—and us—of that fact.