Good Afternoon. My name is Francis Cameron. I am a Wiccan priest.
My subject today is .. ..
GERALD GARDNER : Witchcraft Wicca and the Pagan revival
But first, a few words about myself to establish where I am coming from.
Late in 1968, I moved to Sydney, New South Wales, to take up a new position at the State Conservatorium of Music.
When the academic year 1971 ended, I took part in an ethnomusicological expedition to the New Hebrides - and there I had a deeply disturbing epiphany. The Melanesians I met were very sophisticated people. Very different from the ‘poor benighted natives’ described by the missionaries. We young children had been seriously mislead. The ‘benefits’ of the Great and Glorious British Empire, extolled throughout my schooldays, had existed only as phantoms in the dreams of our teachers.
I began to study with the anthropologists at Sydney University.
We had been through the Who? and What? of social activities and gone on to consider theories of Why?
I had 46 years of life experience to put aside. In my mind I was being scraped bare and empty. A veritable tabula rasa. The process which had begun on that island in the South Pacific now intensified and reached a climax. We turned to the study of religion. I read Durkheim, Cohn on the pursuit of the millennium, and the three books of Margaret Murray on the survival and persecution of preChristian religion.
Then it happened.
I was visiting a friend in Rozelle, one of the older parts of Sydney. The man from next door came in to join us. He introduced himself as a witch, one of those whose distant ancestors had been transported in the First Fleet to build the prison colony in New South Wales. As he went on talking, I recognised some of material I had just come across in Margaret Murray. And as he went on it became clear he was not talking about the malicious old women of fairy stories and the Boxing Day pantomime. He was talking about the Old Religions which are there before Saul set foot on the road to Damascus.
As I drove home across the Harbour Bridge my mind went back to the Spiritualist meetings which were part of our family’s private life from the late 1930s onwards. Our engagement with the spirit world was very real. I’d put all that aside when I prepared to become a Roman Catholic.
Perhaps it was time to unlock the brass bound door and open up the shutters. Time to re-engage with the spirit world. Time to reconnect with Demeter and Dionysos. Time to plunge into this Old Religion of Witchcraft.
And so to .. ..
GERALD GARDNER
He is the man credited with doing for Wicca what Paul of Tarsus did for Christianity.
I never met Gerald Gardner. Never heard him speak. Never talked with anyone who actually met him. So .. .. for this part of my presentation I adopt the etic approach, the approach common to academics whose field of enquiry is the Western Esoteric Tradition.
I sit in a library - and I read a book.
The book in question was first published in 1960. It has the simple title : Gerald Gardner Witch. The author is named as J. L. BRACELIN. He was one of Gardner’s friends and business partners.
Gerald Brosseau Gardner was born on 13 June 1884 at Blundellsands on Merseyside.
The men of his family were prosperous Victorian Merchants. They lived in a grand Victorian mansion which displayed their status.
Young Gerald was asthmatic. He never went to school. He wintered abroad. There was a governess charged with looking after him. She often left him to his own devices. He made friends with some of his fellow passengers. He persuaded them to help him learn to read. He read many of the books and magazines discarded by other travellers.
When he was 16 - that would have been in the year 1900 - he was sent to the British Crown Colony of Ceylon to learn how to manage a tea plantation. He enjoyed the solitariness of the jungle and, unlike most British Expats, he made friends with the local people. He was interested in their customs, their relationships with the spirit world, and their views on life after death.
When he was old enough he was initiated into a Masonic Lodge and took all three degrees.
From Ceylon he moved on to Borneo. The story goes that he was at ease among the head-hunting Dyaks - and that he took part in shamanistic ceremonies involving a witch doctor and a girl who channelled the spirits of the ancestors.
In 1911 he began working on a rubber plantation in Malaya. In 1923 he joined the government service as an inspector of rubber plantations. Later he became an Inspector - some say a Chief Inspector - of Customs.
His duties, his abundant sense of curiosity, and his private reading made him a very competent gentleman anthropologist and archeologist. He went on with his fieldwork among the natives and got outstanding results from his archeological digs.
He contributed to the Journals of learned societies. His book on the ‘Keris and Other Malay Weapons’ was published in Singapore in 1936. It remains a leading authority on the subject.
==
In 1927 he sailed home on compassionate leave. His father was dying. His mother had died in 1920. He desperately wanted to contact her. He set out to put Spiritualism to the test. He went to London. Booked into an hotel under an assumed name. Quite at random went into the building which housed the London Spiritualist Alliance. He had three sittings - at fifteen shillings each. The first was conventional clairvoyance. The second was automatic writing. In the third, the spirit communicated by direct voice. It was a long lost friend, identified simply by the letter ‘G’. When he recognised her, she told him ‘something nice’ was going to happen to him very soon - and he would not get back to work until Christmas.
That very evening he met a distant relative and one of her stepdaughters. The next day the three of them took tea together in Kew Gardens. The stepdaughter’s name was Donna. Gerald knew straight away - this was the woman he was going to marry. They went on honeymoon to the Isle of Wight - where he taught her how to shoot with a revolver. Their ship sailed into Singapore harbour on Christmas Eve. Just as the spirit had foretold.
In 1936 Gerald Gardner took early retirement from the Customs Service. He and Donna sailed home together. On the way he dropped off to take part in an archeological dig. Donna went on ahead to arrange their accommodation in London.
And as the first part of my story comes to an end, so the second part begins .. ..
* * *
And I must modify my approach. Parts of the Bracelin biography metamorphose into the Foundation Myth of The Wicca. One person in particular is written out of the story - at her own explicit request. As a direct consequence of that exclusion, some links are fictionalised. Others are completely redacted.
My friend Philip Heselton has been researching the history of Gerald Gardner for the better part of 20 years. I have known Philip since we shared a platform together at an annual general meeting of The Friends of the Witchcraft Museum in Boscastle. In the years that followed, we met now and again at Pagan gatherings. We talked about our latest discoveries. Exchanged ideas and reminiscences. Philip Heselton is a splendid researcher and very informative writer. I thoroughly recommend his book ‘Witchfather, a Life of Gerald Gardner.’ It was published in 2012.
When I speak or write as an historian - a lover of naked facts and sequenced chronology - I switch into etic mode. I am an outsider looking in, surveying people, their words and their deeds.
When I speak or write of the Wicca, I switch into emic mode. I am an insider, reliving my own experiences - for Wicca is something we do, a freedom we enjoy to manipulate the present and create the future, a craft where we take full personal responsibility for each and every one of our thoughts and actions.
As for Philip and myself .. ..
Our reconstructions lead us off in different directions. What follows is my guide to a crowded and significant series of events .. ..
1935 is the year when - at seven years old - I consciously began to be aware of events in the outside world. It was the year of the Silver Jubilee of King George V and Queen Mary. We went down to Hyde Park to watch the colourful procession parade past.
In the January of 1936, the old king died. He was succeeded by Edward, by the Grace of God the 8th of that name. And in December I stood among the crowd at a Christmas Fair while we listened to his voice on the wireless telling us that he had abdicated in order to be with the woman he loved.
And in that same month, we little boys of the 3rd St Marylebone Wolf Cub pack stood outside the posh houses in Bryanston Square and gave voice to a carol. “Hark, the herald angels sing / Mrs Simpson’s pinched our king!” Arkela was not amused.
==
The Gardners had moved into a flat in the Charing Cross Road area of London’s Theatreland. Gerald was uncomfortable with the weather and the city’s dirty air. He caught a cold. It would not go away. He consulted a Medical Doctor who confessed there was no cure - but it could be worthwhile joining a naturist club and benefitting from the effects of the sun on the fully exposed naked body. Gardner followed his advice - and thereby hangs a tale.
In later years, in answer to a question, Gardner replied : “I met a young witch and fell in love.”
The Bracelin biography has nothing to say about this young witch - but other fragments of information lead me to identify her as the woman we know as Dafo. She was a witch. She was also a nudist. She was not all that much younger than Gardner himself. We read no more about Gardner’s incurable cold.
He continues to contribute to academic periodicals and to make his mark at international conferences.
In the museum at Nicosia he was invited to tackle the problem of how the ancient Cypriots hafted their swords. His first attempts were unsuccessful - but when he relaxed and allowed his inner senses to guide his fingers, the joint was firm and strong. Gardner felt he was drawing on the experience of a previous life on the island.
He began to compose a novel set in the Cyprus of a distant past. An enemy has invaded. After a skirmish, handsome young warrior rescues beautiful young maiden in distress. She is naked, as is the custom of her people when they go into battle. They become lovers. They marry. She is kidnapped by pirates. She escapes by diving overboard. She is naked, of course. As she reaches the shore, the assembled people on the beach welcome her as the Goddess Aphrodite emerging from the waves. “A Goddess arrives” was published in the December of 1939.
In 1938 we prepared for war. We boys were assembled in the school hall. Told to prepare to be evacuated from London if a State of Emergency were declared.
This was the year of the Munich Agreement. We still see the old grainy black-and-white newsreel pictures of Prime Minister Nevill Chamberlain stepping out of that tiny aeroplane, waving aloft that little scrap of white paper. He had been to Munich. Herr Hitler had promised he had no further territorial claims in Europe.
1938 was the year Gerald and Donna moved to Highcliffe, on the South Coast, not far from Chichester and the New Forest. The Bracelin biography tells us that Gardner was riding his bicycle round his new neighbourhood. He chanced upon a building proclaiming itself The First Rosicrucian Theatre in England. Curious, he joined the theatre and took part in one of the productions.
So is history rewritten to disguise the facts.
One of the leading lights of the theatre company was Edith Woodford-Grimes, a qualified teacher of elocution in local private practice.
It is no surprise to find Gardner already knew her. She was his young witch. We know her as Dafo. Probably the real reason for Gardner’s move to Highcliffe.
In 1939 Gardner had been elected to membership of the Folk Lore Society. The Society’s Journal has a photograph of a small collection of witchcraft artefacts he displayed at one of their meetings.
At 11 o’clock on the morning of September 3rd, 1939, my brother and I listened to the wireless as Prime Minister Chamberlain mournfully told us our country was once more at war with Germany.
It was one evening, round about this time, that Dafo and her circle of special friends told Gardner they had been together in a previous life. They took him off to a building called the Mill House. Blindfolded him. Stripped him naked. And initiatied him into their coven. He wrote later that when he heard the word ‘Wicca’ he knew that the Old Witchcraft Religion still survived and was being practised by these friends.
So, what exactly is this Wicca? The spelling is Anglo-Saxon. In the Old English language the pronunciation is very similar to our current word ‘witch’. Today we say the word Wicca as a two-sylllable sound. Rather like ‘wicker’.
First and foremost, Wicca is a religion. A Pagan Goddess religion. Our ceremonies - in this part of the world - follow the Seasons of the Sun and the Cycles of the Moon. They reflect connections they have with the Fertility Religions of the people who grew their own crops and raised their own domesticated animals. Finally - for those who wish to proceed so far - Wicca is a Pagan Fertility Mystery Religion. Part of the Western Mystery Tradition.
For those who live in other parts of the world, Wicca adapts itself to local circumstances - as I discovered in the mid-1970s in Sydney, New South Wales, where the sun at noon stands in the North, and there are but two seasons of the year. One is hot and wet. The other is ‘cool’ and dry. Our ceremonial magic is altered to fit.
In the tradition that I follow, beneficent witchcraft and divination are part of our Wicca. In other parts of the world, some Wiccans continue similar practices. Others do not.
In England I’ve usually found Wiccans meeting in small groups called covens. Such covens are completely autonomous. There is no overall government or regulation. No Supreme High Priestess ruling over all. No Bible or Holy Book to regulate or constrain our lives.
We learn to become completely responsible for the freedom we each enjoy as Wiccans.
I have met many witches whose practices are close to that of the Wicca. Many of them practise magic in its various forms, though perhaps without Wicca’s masonic overtones.
I have also met individual witches whose Craft has nothing to do with religion. These are they who apply knowledge of local herb remedies to cure minor ailments. They read the cards to give advice to those who enquire. They weave spells - especially spells at the behest of lovesick adolescents.
==
In the autumn of 1940, this country prepared to be imminently invaded by German forces. Dafo’s coven, with others in the New Forest, held a joint ritual to raise Cones of Power to turn the Germans away. They stripped naked, covered themselves in Bear’s Greese, Formed a Great Circle. Sang, danced, chanted all night - until some of the older ones collapsed from exhaustion.
I have met witches from other parts of the country who carried out similar rituals.
The enemy did turn away. East. Against Russia. Where extreme winter took its toll.
==
In the March of 1944 there occurred an event which I have never found included in the retellings of the Wiccan Myth of Origin. Yet it should be. It was, as I well remember, headline news in the daily papers. Helen Duncan, a much respected Spiritualist medium was tried and convicted of offences contrary to the Witchcraft Act of 1735.
Apparently she had unwittingly become a security risk. The High Command needed to take her out of circulation to prevent further breaches.
==
In 1945, with the war over, Dafo and Gardner left Highcliffe and set up their own coven on land they owned adjacent to a nudist camp at Bricket Wood.
When I last noticed, the coven was alive and well. Over the years other covens have hived off into recognised lineages of Dafo and Gardner’s original.
Gardner very much wanted to publicise the attractions and benefits of the Wicca, but Dafo cautioned against it. There would be too many penalties, public ostracism, and loss of employment for anyone identified as a practising witch.
Once again, Gardner turned to the form of the novel. Within its covers he could describe, as though fiction, details which otherwise were kept secret from outsiders. “High Magic’s Aid” was published in 1949. It is a story set in an imaginary Middle Ages with a young naked witch helping an equally naked young man regain his Saxon heritage from Norman oppressors.
It has the full text of the initiation ritual - and of the five-fold kiss - I have witnessed so many times in Wiccan circles. It also mentions, though without details, the threefold kiss used in a preliminary initiation. But this has not passed into common use.
==
The final act of the postwar Labour government was the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951. This was as a direct consequence of Helen Duncan’s trial and imprisonment. Spiritualists were jubilant. At last their religion was legal and recognised.
The first clause of the Act, provided for the Repeal of the 1735 Witchcraft Act. That repeal provoked unintended and completely unexpected consequences.
Gardner saw it as a green light to go public with his well-loved and cherished Wicca. He wrote two books. Witchcraft Today was published in 1954. The Meaning of Witchcraft in 1959.
Gerald Gardner had to pay the price. Dafo left him. Publicity would make Edith Woodford-Grimes persona non grata among her everyday friends and, especially, her pupils. Family circumstances made all this abundantly clear. Her final act was to assist in the Wiccan initiation of Doreen Valiente.
I have yet to come across any mention of Helen Duncan in connection with the publicising of Wicca. Yet it remains true. No Helen Duncan. No Witchcraft Trial. No repeal of the 1735 Act. No legalising of witchcraft. No unslipping of the leash for Gerald Gardner.
It is much the same for Dafo. Yes, she asked to be taken out of the story but she does not deserve to be forgotten. No Dafo. No young witch at the sun club. No Wicca for Gardner.
And so much began with Gerald Gardner. The great outburst of The Old Religion of Witchcraft, its evolution into The Wicca, and the spread of multivaried Paganism, which is often described as ‘the fastest growing religion of our times.’
==
As the 1950s drew near to their spectacular close, members of the Bricket Wood coven realised that Gerald Gardner was getting older. His biography must be written while he is still alive. He provided the original copious notes. Others took part in the editorial process. The book was published in 1960 with the name J L Bracelin on the front cover.
In 1964, on February 12th, Gerald Gardner died while on a Mediterranean cruise. His body was buried in Tunis.
==
In my student days in London, I sometimes went to The Pictures. Those were the days of black-and-white films. Once the afternoon showing had begun, the programme cycled round until closing time. We paid our pennies at the kiosk and went in. When the film arrived at the point of ‘this is where we came in’, we got up and left.
In 1936 Gerald Gardner, Officer in the Colonial Service (retired), met a young witch and they fell in love ..
In 1974 I met a man who introduced himself as a witch, a follower of the Old Religion of Witchcraft ..
This is where I came in .. this is where I end my tale of Gerald Gardner, Dafo, and the Old Religion also called Witchcraft.
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fc topdeck 2017 april 05
/3415 words/
reading time ±34 minutes
