Gardner, Gerald B(rousseau) (1884–1964)

Gerald Gardner (1884–1964) English Witch and founder of contemporary Witchcraft as a religion.

Hereditary Witches and practitioners of family tradition witchcraft object to Gardner being credited as the “founder” of the religion of Witchcraft, pointing out that family traditions have existed for centuries.

Nonetheless, there is no evidence that the organized religion of Witchcraft and not simply traditions of folk and ceremonial magic mixed with occultism and fragments of pagan traditions, existed prior to Gardner.

Gardner was born into a well-to-do family in Blundellsands, near Liverpool, in England, on Friday, June 13, eighteen eighty-four.

His father was a merchant and justice of the peace, a member of a family that had made money in the timber trade.

According to Gardner, the family’s roots could be traced to Grissell Gairdner, who was burned as a witch in 1610 in Newburgh.

Gardner’s grandfather married a woman reputed to be a witch, and some of Gardner’s distant relatives were purported to have psychic gifts.

Gardner’s ancestral family tree also included mayors of Liverpool and Alan Gardner, a naval commander and later vice admiral and peer, who distinguished himself as commander in chief of the Channel fleet and helped to deter the invasion of Napoleon in eighteen thousand and seven.

The middle of three sons, the young Gardner was raised primarily by the family’s nurse and governess, Josephine “Com” McCombie.

He suffered severely from asthma.

Com convinced his parents to let her take him traveling during the winters to help alleviate his condition.

Com roamed about Europe, leaving Gardner to spend much time by himself reading.

When Com married a man who lived in Ceylon, Gardner traveled there with her and worked on a tea plantation.

Later, he moved to Borneo and then Malaysia to work.

In the Far East, he became fascinated with the local religious and magical beliefs and was drawn to ritual daggers and knives, especially the Malaysian kris, a dagger with a wavy blade.

He later wrote a book, Kris and Other Malay Weapons, published in Singapore in nineteen thirty-nine.

It was reprinted posthumously in England in nineteen seventy-three.

From 1923 to 1936, Gardner worked in the Far East as a civil servant for the British government as a rubber plantation inspector, customs official, and inspector of opium establishments.

He made a considerable sum of money in rubber, which enabled him to dabble in a field of great interest to him, archaeology.

He claimed to have found the site of the ancient city of Singapura.

In 1927 he married an Englishwoman, Donna.

The two returned to England upon his retirement from government work in nineteen thirty-six.

Gardner spent much time on various archaeological trips around Europe and Asia Minor.

In Cyprus, he found places he had dreamed about previously, which convinced him he had lived there in a previous life.

His second book, A Goddess Arrives, a novel set in Cyprus and concerning the worship of the Goddess as Aphrodite in the year 1450 b.c.e., was published in nineteen thirty-nine.

In England, Gardner became acquainted with the people who introduced him to the Craft.

The Gardners lived in the New Forest region, where Gardner became involved with the Fellowship of Crotona, an occult group of Co-Masons, a Masonic order established by Mrs Besant Scott, daughter of Theosophist Annie Besant.

The group had established “The First Rosicrucian Theater in England,” which put on plays with occult themes.

One of the members told Gardner they had been together in a previous life and described the site in Cyprus of which Gardner had dreamed.

Within the Fellowship of Crotona was another, secret group, which drew Gardner into its confidence.

The members claimed to be hereditary Witches who practiced a Craft passed down to them through the centuries, unbroken by the witchhunts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The group met in the New Forest.

Just days before World War II began in 1939, Gardner was initiated into the coven in the home of Old Dorothy Clutterbuck.

Gardner was intensely interested in magic and witchcraft and invested much time in extending his network of contacts in occultism.

He collected material on magical procedures, especially ceremonial magic, which he put together in an unpublished manuscript entitled Ye Bok of ye Art Magical.

In 1946, he met Cecil Williamson, the founder of the Witchcraft Research Centre and Museum of Witchcraft.

In 1947, he was introduced to Aleister Crowley by Arnold Crowther.

Gardner was especially interested in gleaning whatever he could from Crowley, who by then was in poor health and only months away from death.

Gardner obtained magical material from Crowley.

From this and other sources, he compiled his book of shadows, a collection of rituals and Craft laws.

Gardner claimed to have received a fragmentary book of shadows from his New Forest coven.

Crowley made Gardner an honorary member of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a Tantric sex magic order at one time under Crowley’s leadership, and granted Gardner a charter to operate an OTO lodge.

Gardner was prevented from being too public about Witchcraft because it was still against the law in England.

He disguised his book of shadows in a novel, High Magic’s Aid, published in 1949 under the pseudonym Scire.

The novel concerns worship of “the old gods” but is mentioned by name only Janicot.

The Goddess had yet to make a major appearance in Gardner’s Craft—although he said that his coven worshiped the Goddess by the name of Airdia or Areda.

The anti-witchcraft law was repealed in 1951. Gardner broke away from the New Forest coven and established his own.

He became involved in Williamson’s Museum of Witchcraft in Castletown on the Isle of Man, officiating at its opening and serving for a time as its “resident Witch.”

In 1952, he bought the museum buildings and display cases from Williamson and operated his own museum.

In 1953 Gardner initiated Doreen Valiente into his coven.

Valiente substantially reworked his book of shadows, taking out most of the Crowley material because of his “name stank” and giving more emphasis to the Goddess.

From 1954 to 1957 Gardner and Valiente collaborated on writing ritual and nonritual material, a body of work that became the authority for what became known as the Gardnerian tradition.

Gardner’s first nonfiction book on the Craft, Witchcraft Today, was published in nineteen fifty-four.

It supports anthropologist Margaret  Murray’s now meritless theory that modern Witchcraft is the surviving remnant of an organized Pagan religion that existed during the witch-hunts.

Murray wrote the introduction for Gardner’s book.

The immediate success of Witchcraft Today led to new covens springing up all over England and vaulted Gardner into the public arena.

He made numerous media appearances, and the press dubbed him “Britain’s Chief Witch.”

He loved being in a media spotlight, which cast him in the curious position of initiating people into a “secret” tradition that was then spread all over the tabloids.

The publicity, much of it negative, led to a split in his coven in 1957, with Valiente and others going separate ways.

In 1959 Gardner published his last book, The Meaning of Witchcraft.

In 1960 he was invited to a garden party at Buckingham Palace in recognition of his distinguished civil service work in the Far East.

The same year, his wife (who never joined the Craft or participated in any of its activities) died, and he began to suffer again from asthma.

In 1963, shortly before he left for Lebanon for the winter, he met Raymond Buckland, an Englishman who had moved to America and who would introduce the Gardnerian tradition to the United States.

Gardner’s high priestess, Monique Wilson (Lady Olwen), initiated Buckland into the Craft.

On Gardner’s return home from Lebanon by boat in 1964, he suffered heart failure and died at the breakfast table on board the ship on February 12th.

He was buried ashore in Tunis on February the thirteenth.

Wilson and her husband operated the museum for a short time and held weekly coven meetings in Gardner’s cottage.

They then closed the museum and sold much of the contents to the Ripley organization, which dispersed the objects to its various museums.

Some of the items have since been resold to private collections.

Valiente describes Gardner as a man “utterly without malice,” who was generous to a fault and who possessed some real, but not exceptional, magical powers.

His motives were basically good and he sincerely wanted to see “the Old Religion” survive.

Others, such as Williamson, saw him as manipulative and deceitful, not above fabrication in order to accomplish his objectives: to establish an acceptable venue for his personal interests in naturism and voyeuristic sex.

Gardner was a nudist, and the ritual nudity in the Craft is likely to have been one of his inventions; hereditary Witches say they have worked robed.

Unfortunately, Gardner’s personal papers prior to 1957 no longer exist.

He destroyed them at Valiente’s urging during the aforementioned period of unfavorable publicity.

From the 1960s onward, Witchcraft, the religion, continued to grow and spread around the world.

Initially, new Witches accepted Gardner’s assertion of an old and unbroken heritage, but that was soon exposed as unfounded.

The Gardnerian tradition has inspired other traditions, and Witchcraft has taken on a life of its own as a predominantly Goddess-centered mystery religion, part of a larger reconstruction and revival of Paganism.

Dafo

The pseudonym or magical name of the woman who initiated Gerald Gardner into witchcraft around 1939–40.The identity of Dafo remains uncertain. She is sometimes confused with Old Dorothy Clutterbuck, who was Gardner’s first high priestess.

He described her as his teacher and an authority on witchcraft.

Little is known about Dafo’s life. She lived in Christchurch, Hampshire, and was a member of the New Forest coven, which Gardner always claimed was a line of hereditary witches practicing the Old Religion.

Dafo was the leading lady and stage director of the Rosicrucian theatre of the Fellowship of Crotona, a Mason group founded by Mabel Besant-Scott, the daughter of theosophist Annie Besant and actor G. A. Sullivan.

Dafo was probably a woman of considerable social repute who needed a pseudonym to conceal her involvement in what was, until 1951, an illegal practice under British law.

From 1944 on, she was a frequent companion of Gardner’s.

In 1947, they became partners in Ancient Crafts Ltd., a company that bought a plot of land and built a replica of a 16th-century witch’s cottage.

Dafo and Gardner led their coven rites there until 1952, when Dafo withdrew, partly due to poor health, but also out of concern that Gardner’s increasing publicity would jeopardize her secrecy.

Gardner introduced Doreen Valiente to Dafo in 1952. Valiente described her as “an elegant graceful lady with dark hair.”

By 1958, Dafo was living with a niece who was a devout Christian.

She turned down requests from three witch groups to validate Gardner’s story of the New Forest coven.

She would neither confirm nor deny Gardner’s claims in her answers to two groups.

To the third, she said she had only a theoretical interest in the occult.

Crowley, Aleister (1875–1947)

The most controversial and perhaps least understood magician and occultist of his time, Aleister Crowley has been both vilified and idolized.

He was a man of both low excesses and high brilliance.

He considered himself to be the reincarnation of other great occultists: Pope Alexander VI, renowned for his love of physical pleasures; Edward Kelly, the notorious assistant to occultist John Dee in Elizabethan England; Cagliostro; and occultist Eliphas Levi, who died on the day Crowley was born.

Crowley also believed he had been Ankh-f-n-Khonsu, an Egyptian priest of the XXVIth dynasty.

Crowley was born in Warwickshire, England.

His father was a brewer and a preacher of Plymouthism, the beliefs of a sect founded of the Plymouth Brethren in 1830 that considered itself the only true Christian order.

As a child, Crowley participated in the preaching with his parents, then rebelled against it.

His behavior inspired his mother to call him “the Beast” after the Antichrist.

Later, he called her “a brainless bigot of the most narrow, logical and inhuman type.”

His father died when he was 11.

As Crowley grew older, he became interested in the occult.

He also discovered he was excited by descriptions of torture and blood, and he liked to fantasize about being degraded by a Scarlet Woman who was both wicked and independent.

He entered Trinity College at Cambridge, where he wrote poetry and pursued, on his own, his occult studies.

He loved to climb rocks and mountains and attempted some of the highest peaks in the Himalayas.

In 1898 he published his first book of poetry, Aceldama, A Place to Bury Strangers in.

A Philosophical Poem.

By a Gentleman of the University of Cambridge, 1898.

In the preface, he described how God and Satan had fought for his soul: “God conquered—now I have only one doubt left—which of the twain was God?”

After reading Arthur Edward Waite’s The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts, which hints of a secret brotherhood of adepts who dispense occult wisdom to certain initiates.

Intrigued, Crowley wrote to Waite for more information and was referred to The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, by Carl von Eckartshausen, which tells of the Great White Brotherhood.

Crowley determined he wanted to join this brotherhood and advance to the highest degree.

On November 18, 1898, Crowley joined the London chapter of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which was the First or Outer Order of the Great White Brotherhood.

He discovered he had a natural aptitude for magic and rose quickly through the hierarchy.

He began practicing yoga, in the course of which he discovered his earlier incarnations.

He left Trinity College without earning a degree, took a flat in Chancery Lane, named himself Count Vladimir and pursued his occult studies on a full-time basis.

He advanced through the First Order and sought entry into the Second Order of the Great White Brotherhood, a Rosicrucian order also called the Order of the Red Rose and the Golden Cross.

Beyond this was the top order, the Silver Star or A∴A∴ (Argentum Astrum), which had three grades: Master of the Temple, Magus, and Ipissimus.

The latter could be achieved only by crossing an unknown and uncharted Abyss.

Crowley was intensely competitive with S. L. MacGregor Mathers, the chief of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and a ceremonial magician.

Mathers taught Crowley Abra-Melin magic but had not attained any of three grades in the A∴A∴.

The two quarreled, and Mathers supposedly dispatched an army of elementals to attack Crowley.

Crowley also argued with other members of the Golden Dawn as well and as a result, was expelled from the order.

He pursued the attainment of Ipissimus on his own.

Crowley traveled widely. He studied Eastern mysticism, including Buddhism, Tantric Yoga and the I Ching.

For a time he lived in Scotland, in an isolated setting near Loch Ness.

In 1903 he married Rose Kelly, who bore him one child.

Rose began to receive communications from the astral plane, and in 1904 she told Crowley that he was to receive an extremely important message.

It came from Aiwass, a spirit, and Crowley’s Holy Guardian Angel, or True Self.

Crowley also later identified Aiwass as a magical current or solar-phallic energy worshiped by the Sumerians as Shaitan, a “devil-god,” and by the Egyptians as Set.

On three consecutive days in April 1904, from noon until 1 p.m., Aiwass reportedly manifested as a voice and dictated to Crowley The Book of the Law, the most significant work of his magical career.

It contains the Law of Thelema: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

Though some have interpreted it to mean doing as one pleases, it actually means that one must do what one must and nothing else.

Admirers of Crowley say the Law of Thelema distinguishes him as one of the greatest magicians of history.

Aiwass also heralded the coming of a new Aeon of Horus, the third great age of humanity.

The three ages were characterized as Paganism/Christianity/Thelema, represented, respectively, by Isis/Osiris/Horus. Crowley considered himself the prophet of the New Aeon.

From 1909 to 1913, Crowley published the secret rituals of the Golden Dawn in his periodical, The Equinox, which also served as a vehicle for his poetry.

Mathers tried but failed to get an injunction to stop him.

By 1912 Crowley had become involved with the Ordo Templi Orientis, a German occult order practicing magic.

In 1909 Crowley explored levels of the astral plane with his assistant, poet Victor Neuberg, using Enochian magic.

He believed he crossed the Abyss and united his consciousness with the universal consciousness, thus becoming Master of the Temple.

He described the astral journeys in The Vision and the Voice, published first in The Equinox and posthumously in 1949.

Crowley kept with him a series of “scarlet women.”

The best known of these was Leah Hirsig, the “Ape of Thoth,” who indulged with him in drinking, drugs, and sexual magic and who could sometimes contact Aiwass.

Crowley apparently made several attempts with various scarlet women to beget a “magical child,” none of which was successful.

He later fictionalized these efforts in his novel, Moonchild, published in 1929.

From 1915 to 1919 Crowley lived in the United States.

In 1920 he went to Sicily and founded the Abbey of Thelema, which he envisioned as a magical colony.

In 1921, when Crowley was 45, he and Hirsig conducted a ritual in which Crowley achieved Ipissimus and became, according to his cryptic description, a god (“As a God goes, I go”).

He did not reveal attaining Ipissimus to anyone, only hinting at it in his privately published Magical Record much later, in 1929.

After the transformation, however, Hirsig found him intolerable.

Crowley later discarded her and acquired a new scarlet woman, Dorothy Olsen.

In 1922 Crowley accepted an invitation to head the Ordo Templi Orientis.

In 1923 the bad press that he routinely received led to his expulsion from Sicily, and he had to abandon his abbey.

After some wandering through France (where he suffered from a heroin addiction), Tunisia and Germany, he returned to England.

In 1929 he married his second wife, Maria Ferrari de Miramar, in Leipzig.

In his later years he was plagued with poor health, drug addiction and financial trouble.

He kept himself financially afloat by publishing nonfiction and fiction.

In 1945 he moved to a boardinghouse in Hastings, where he lived the last two years of his life, a dissipated shadow of his former vigorous self.

During these last years, he was introduced to Gerald B. Gardner by Arnold Crowther.

According to Gardner, Crowley told him he had been initiated into the Craft as a young man.

This claim is unlikely, as there is nothing in Crowley’s published or unpublished writings referring to involvement in witchcraft.

Crowley seemed disinterested in the Craft because of the authority of women; according to Patricia Crowther, he said he “refused to be bossed around by any damn woman.”

Crowley died in a private hotel in Hastings in 1947.

His remains were cremated and sent to his followers in the United States.

Crowley’s other published books include The Diary of a Drug Fiend;

Magick in Theory and Practice, still considered one of the best books on ceremonial magic;

The Strategem, a collection of fiction stories;

The Equinox of the Gods, which sets forth The Book of the Law as mankind’s new religion;

and The Book of Thoth, his interpretation of the Tarot Confessions originally was intended to be a six-volume autohagiography, but only the first two volumes were published.

He argued with the publishing company, which was taken over by his friends, and then went out of business.

The remaining galleys and manuscripts—he had dictated the copy to Hirsig while under the influence of heroin—were lost or scattered about.

They were collected and edited by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant and published in a single volume in 1969.

Crowley referred to himself in some of his writings as “the Master Therion” and “Frater Perdurabo.”

He spelled magic as magick to “distinguish the science of the Magi from all its counterfeits.”

Some modern occultists continue to follow suit.

Abramelin the Mage (1362–1460)

A Jew from Würzburg, Germany, Abraham, or Abramelin, created a body of magical works that for centuries influenced magicians, including Aleister Crowley.

An expert on the Kabbalah, Abramelin said he learned his magical knowledge from angels, who told him how to conjure and tame demons into personal servants and workers, and how to raise storms.

He said that all things in the world were created by demons, who worked under the direction of angels, and that each individual had an angel and a demon as familiars.

The basis for his system of magic, he said, may be found in the Kabbalah.

According to lore, Abramelin created 2,000 spirit cavalrymen for Frederick, elector of Saxony.

He also is said to have aided an earl of Warwick in his escape from jail and helped save the antipope John XXIII (1410–15) from the Council of Constance.

The magic of Abramelin allegedly is contained in a manuscript,

The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, actually a collection of three books.

The manuscript was written in French in the 18th century but claims to be a translation of Abramelin’s original manuscript in Hebrew,dated 1458.

It was translated into English around the turn of the 20th century by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, one of the early and most influential members of the Hermetic

Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley borrowed from the book for his own rituals to master demons, and Gerald B. Gardner used it as a source for his book of shadows.

Abramelin magic is similar to that found in The Key of Solomon, considered the leading magical grimoire.

It is based on the power of numbers and sacred names and involves the construction of numerous magical squares for such purposes as invisibility, flying, commanding spirits, necromancy, shape-shifting and scores of other feats.

Rituals for conjuring spirits, creating magic squares and making seals and sigils are elaborate and must be followed exactly in accordance with astrological observances.

Fortune, Dion (1891–1946)

The magical name of Violet Mary Firth, British occultist and author whose books continue to have an impact on modern witchcraft and Paganism.

Considered one of the leading occultists of her time, Dion Fortune was an adept in ceremonial magic and was perhaps one of the first occult writers to approach magic and hermetic concepts from the psychology of Jung and Freud .

Some contemporary Witches and Pagans consider her fiction more important than her non fiction, for her novels contain Pagan themes and are a rich source for rituals.

Fortune was born into a family of Christian Scientists and displayed mediumistic abilities in her teen years.

In her early twenties, she worked as a law analyst at the Medico-Psychological Clinic in London.

Her interest in exploring the human psyche resulted from an unpleasant episode in 1911, when, at age 29, she went to work in a school for a principal who took a great personal dislike to her.

When Fortune went to see the woman to announce she was leaving her job, she was subjected to invective that she had no self-confidence and was incompetent.

Fortune said later that the principal also conveyed this by psychic attack, using yogic techniques and hypnotism that left Fortune a “mental and physical wreck” for three years.

As a result, she studied psychology, delving into the works of both Freud and Jung.

She preferred the ideas of Jung but eventually concluded that neither Freud nor Jung adequately addressed the subtleties and complexities of the mind.

The answers, Fortune felt, lay in occultist. In 1919 Fortune joined the Alpha and Omega Lodge of the Stella Matutina, an outer order of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and studied under J. W. Brodie-Innes.

She experienced clashes with the wife of S. L. MacGregor-Mathers, one of the founders of the Golden Dawn, which she again felt were forms of psychic attack.

She left Stella Matutina in 1924 and founded her own order, the Community (later Fraternity) of the Inner Light. The order initially was part of the Golden Dawn but later separated from it.

Fortune worked as a psychiatrist, which brought her into contact with other cases of psychic attack.

She was a prolific writer, pouring her occult knowledge into both novels and nonfiction.

Her pen name was derived from the magical motto she adopted upon joining the Stella Matutina, “Deo Non Fortuna,” (“by God, not chance”), which became shortened to Dion Fortune.

Her books are considered classics and continue to enjoy wide readership.

For a time she lived in Glastonbury and became deeply interested in the Arthurian legends and magical-mystical lore centered there.

She wrote about Glastonbury in Avalon of the Heart.

Fortune used her experiences with psychic attack to conclude that hostile psychic energy can emanate both deliberately and unwittingly from certain people and that one can mentally fend off such energy.

Her book PsychicSelf-Defense (1930) remains the best guide to detection and defence against psychic attack.

One of her most famous books is The Mystical Qabbalah (1936), in which she discusses the Western esoteric tradition and how the Qabbalah is used by modern students of the Mysteries.

The true nature of the gods, she said, is that of magical images shaped out of the astral plane by mankind’s thought, and is influenced by the mind.

Her other major nonfiction works include Sane Occultism (1929);

The Training and Work of an Initiate (1930);

Through the Gates of Death (1932);

Applied Magic; Aspects of Occultism; and Spiritualism in the Light of Occult Science. Machinery of the Mind (1922) was published under her given name.

But it is her novels that have captured the most interest among modern Witches and Pagans. In particular, The Goat-Foot God (1936) concerns the powers of Pan, a Horned God, and offers a wealth of details on leys;

The Sea-Priestess (1938) concerns the power of Isis, the moon goddess, and has been used by modern witches as an inspiration for creating rituals and invocations.

Her other novels are The Secrets of Dr. Taverner (1926), aboutan adept who runs an occult nursing home;

The Demon Lover (1927); and The Winged Bull (1936). Fortune was married to Dr. Thomas Penry Evans.

She died in January 1946.

The Fraternity of the Inner Light remains based in London and now is known as the Society of the Inner Light.

It offers techniques in the Western esoteric tradition.

The Society stresses that Fortune was not a Witch and was not involved with any coven and that the Society is not connected with Witchcraft in any way

Cornelius Agrippa

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, 1486-1535, German mystic and alchemist.

Agrippa of Nettesheim was born of a once-noble family near Cologne and studied both medicine and law there, apparently without taking a degree.

In 1503, he assumed the name, Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, adopting the von to suggest a noble background; three years later, he established a secret society in Paris devoted to astrology, magic, and Kabbalah.

His career is diverse: secret agent, soldier, physician, orator, and law professor, in Cologne, Paris, Dôle, London, Italy, Pavia, and Metz.

In 1509, he set up a laboratory in Dôle in the hopes of synthesizing gold, and for the next decade or so traveled Europe, making a living as an alchemist, and conversing with such important early humanist scholars as Colet and Reuchlin.

In 1520, he set up a medical practice in Geneva, and in 1524 became a personal physician to the queen mother at the court of King Francis I in Lyons.

When the queen mother abandoned him, he began practicing medicine in Antwerp, but was later banned for practicing without a license, and became a historiographer at the court of Charles V.

After several stays in prison, variously for debt and criminal offenses, he died in 1535.

Agrippa’s wrote on a great many topics, including marriage and military engineering, but his most important work is the three-volume De occulta philosophiae (written c. 1510, published 1531), a defense of “hidden philosophy” or magic, which draws on diverse mystical traditions — alchemy, astrology, Kabbalah.

A later work, De incertitude et validate Scientiarum (Of the Uncertainty and Vanity of the Sciences), attacks contemporary scientific theory and practice.

Many of his opinions were controversial.

His early lectures on theology angered the Church, and his defense of a woman accused of witchcraft in 1520 led to his being hounded out of Cologne Cologne by the Inquisition.

In his own day, Agrippa was widely attacked as a charlatan.

After his death, legends about him were plentiful. Some believed him to be not only an alchemist but a demonic magician, even a vampire. In one account, he traveled to the New World.

In 1799, Robert Southey published an amusing ballad on this man, suggestive of his later reputation as a master of black magic, as well as of his susceptibility to gothic trappings.

Percy Bysshe Shelley listed Agrippa and Paracelsus among his favorite writers in a discussion with Godwin in 1812.

Eleanor Bone

English Witch, one of the original high priestesses initiated by Gerald B. Gardner.

Eleanor “Ray” Bone followed Gardner’s footsteps in the media attention and was sometimes called the Matriarch of British Witchcraft.

Bone was born in London; her mother was a school headmistress.

As a child, she saw the ghost of a pet, which stimulated her interest in reincarnation, folklore, magic, and the occult.

During World War II, Bone served in the military and was sent to Cumbria, where she met a couple who revealed themselves to be hereditary witches.

They initiated her into their tradition in 1941, and she practiced with them for four years before returning to London.

After the war, Bone married a man named Bill and took a job running a home for the elderly.

She was introduced to Gardner and was initiated into his coven.

She became acquainted with Doreen Valiente, Patricia Crowther and others and became a close friend of Dafo.

Bone established a flourishing coven in South London and was an active public proponent of the Craft.

She made numerous public appearances and posed skyclad (nude) for the media.

She went to the United States on a media tour.

On one television show, where she appeared with a testy Sybil Leek, she was asked to turn Leek into a toad.

She retorted, “Why should I improve on nature?”

In 1966, Bone and Crowther joined forces to publicly denounce Alex Sanders as an imposter.

They and others were incensed that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Hollywood had hired Sanders to consult on a film about witchcraft.

In 1968 Bone went to Tunis to visit the grave of Gardner.

She learned that the government planned to turn the cemetery into a park.

Bone took up a collection among Witches and had the remains of Gardner moved to Carthage, Tunisia.

Over time, Bone preferred to practice the folk magic– an oriented tradition she learned from the Cumbrian couple rather than the Gardnerian tradition.

In 1972, Bone retired to Alston, a village in Cumbria.

In 2001, the Pagan Federation (PF) invited Bone to be an honorary member, but she declined, saying that she did not recognize several of the traditions with the PF, believing them to be spurious.

Her final public appearance was in the summer of 2001, when she gave an address over the telephone to the Occulture Festival, speaking about the Craft revival and divulging personal information about the New Forest.

In August 2001, in failing health, she announced that she would soon be “called back to the Old Gods,” and she got her affairs in order.
She died on September 21, 2001.