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Gerald Gardner
A retired colonial customs officer and nudist who probably believed the religion he was inventing, and founded one that now has hundreds of thousands of adherents.
Who they were
Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884–1964) publicised, and in substantial part created, Wicca — the first modern pagan religion to achieve significant international spread, and now the largest.
Where they came from
He came from a Liverpool timber-merchant family, was asthmatic, and was educated almost not at all — his nurse took him abroad for his health for much of his childhood, and he was largely self-taught.
He spent his working life in the East: a tea and rubber planter in Ceylon and Borneo, then a customs officer in Malaya, retiring in 1936. He was a serious amateur, publishing Keris and Other Malay Weapons in 1936, which remains cited by specialists — a real if modest scholarly contribution.
Back in England he settled near Highcliffe, joined the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, and there — he later said — met a group who in 1939 initiated him into a surviving witch cult: the New Forest coven.
He was also a committed naturist, which is not incidental. Ritual nudity in Gardnerian practice appears to owe as much to his enthusiasm for the naturist movement as to anything else.
In 1947 he met Aleister Crowley, who was near the end of his life, and received an OTO charter from him. Substantial portions of the earliest Wiccan liturgy are Crowley's writing.
Because the Witchcraft Act 1735 was still in force, he first published his material as fiction — High Magic's Aid (1949). After the Act's repeal in 1951 he published openly: Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959). He ran a museum of magic and witchcraft on the Isle of Man.
He died at sea off Tunisia in 1964 and is buried in Tunis.
What they taught
The religion described under Wicca: a Goddess and a God, initiatory covens with three degrees, seasonal observance, and ritual magic.
His central historical claim — that this was a surviving pre-Christian religion, persecuted in the witch trials and preserved in secret — came from Margaret Murray, who wrote the introduction to Witchcraft Today and lent him her academic standing.
The eight-fold Wheel of the Year came out of his conversations with Ross Nichols, later founder of OBOD, in the 1950s. Between them they produced the ritual calendar now used by most of the modern pagan world.
What we can and cannot say
We can say the New Forest coven is unevidenced. No independent trace of it has been found despite serious searching, including by Doreen Valiente, his own High Priestess, who investigated the question and identified a plausible candidate for one member while being unable to establish the coven itself.
We can say Hutton's assessment is the fair one: Gardner probably believed it. He appears to have encountered fragments of folk practice and occult enthusiasm in a milieu that contained plenty of both, combined them with ceremonial magic he knew well, and genuinely thought he was recovering something ancient rather than assembling something new.
That makes him neither a fraud nor a prophet, but something more ordinary and more interesting — a man who founded a religion partly by mistake, and whose mistake worked.
We can say Doreen Valiente deserves at least equal billing and rarely gets it. She identified the Crowley material, told him it had to go, rewrote the liturgy, and produced the Charge of the Goddess in the form the tradition now uses. Wicca's voice is substantially hers. She also later published her own doubts about the origin story, which is more than most founders' successors manage.
We can say the religion outgrew him completely. Solitary and eclectic practice, mainstreamed by Scott Cunningham in 1988, now vastly outnumbers the initiatory lineages Gardner established, and a majority of practising Wiccans have no connection to the coven structure he built.
We cannot say what happened in the New Forest in 1939, and probably never will.
Further reading
- Witchcraft Today (1954) — read as a historical document.
- Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (1999).
- Philip Heselton, Witchfather (2012) — the detailed biography, sympathetic and thorough.