{"id":150,"date":"2004-03-26T20:21:00","date_gmt":"2004-03-26T20:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=150"},"modified":"2004-03-26T20:21:00","modified_gmt":"2004-03-26T20:21:00","slug":"150","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Gerald Gardner in the 1940s<\/strong><\/p>\n

Capall Bann<\/a> have published Philip Heselton’s second volume exploring the origins of contemporary Wicca, Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration<\/em>. (Am I the only one who thinks that that title seems awfully Harry Potterish?) Capall Bann’s distribution is not great outside the UK, but North American readers can order it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Heselton continues to do a fine job ferreting out information on Gardner and his associates: letters, obscure publications, even Ordnance Survey maps from the 1930s showing whose house was located in relation to someone else’s house. He is an outstanding researcher. Read this book and you will learn about many interesting things tangential to Wiccan history, such as the beginnings of organized nudism in the UK. (Those “Moonella” people were a hoot!)<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Heselton is blinded by the myth: the hidden coven at the Rosicrucian Theatre, Gardner’s purported 1939 initiation in Dorothy Clutterbuck’s house, the alleged Lammas 1940 ritual to stop the planned German invasion–all of it. (And, at one time, so was I.)<\/p>\n

Instead, Ronald Hutton’s suggestion in The Triumph of the Moon<\/em>, that there was no Wicca as a consciously Pagan “Old Religion” until about 1950 or 1951, is more likely true. Heselton’s new evidence actually supports that conclusion even better than did Hutton’s, but Heselton, a “true believer”, will not admit it.<\/p>\n

Throughout the 1940s, when Gardner supposedly was already a Wiccan initiate, he was chasing after other religious credentials. He was ordained by an esoteric splinter of mystical Christians, the Ancient British Church, part of the maverick “Old Catholic” movement. He joined the Druid Order. He persuaded Aleister Crowley to give him credentials in his magical order, the OTO.<\/p>\n

Do these seem like the actions of a man who has already found what he was looking for?<\/p>\n

When Gardner does<\/em> does find — or co-create, with Edith Woodford-Grimes (Dafo) — what he is looking for, he commits himself totally to promoting it, which he does with Wicca in the 1950s.<\/p>\n

Heselton’s account of how Gardner financially backed and supplied exhibits for Cecil Williamson’s Witchcraft Museum on the Isle of Man leads me to speculate still further. In May 1951 Gardner writes to Williamson about how he can “fake up” this item or that for the displays, such as ritual swords. I begin to wonder how much of Wicca was created in a hurry in order to supply a “back story” for the museum exhibits. In order to have an exhibit about witches, we must have witches.<\/p>\n

The repeal in 1951 of the Witchcraft Act of 1735 after the Helen Duncan affair <\/a> during World War II was a wonderful “cosmic coincidence.”<\/p>\n

As Aidan Kelly pointed out in Crafting the Art of Magic<\/em>, his own study of Gardnerian origins (published by Llewellyn in 1991, now out of print), Gardner was always the only source of information about the “Southern Coven of British Witches.” I do not see Heselton really developing any alternative authoritative source, although he fills in many gaps in the narrative.
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gerald Gardner in the 1940s Capall Bann have published Philip Heselton’s second volume exploring the origins of contemporary Wicca, Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration. (Am I the only one who thinks that that title seems awfully Harry Potterish?) Capall Bann’s distribution is not great outside the UK, but North American readers can order […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-150","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5032,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5032","url_meta":{"origin":150,"position":0},"title":"Mouse’s Way: Philip Heselton’s Biographies of Gerald Gardner","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 12, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"A serious scholarly biography of Gerald Gardner, the effective founder of the Wiccan religion, remains to be written. Philip Heselton has now written four books on Gardner's life, but his vision is near-sighted and close to the ground, like a mouse seeking food in the grass, unaware that there are\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"England\"","block_context":{"text":"England","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=england"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":586,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=586","url_meta":{"origin":150,"position":1},"title":"1939 and All ThatJason Pitzl-Waters\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 31, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"1939 and All ThatJason Pitzl-Waters draws attention to a 2001 interview with Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone recently re-published in the online zine The Wiccan-Pagan Times.Janet Farrar, who came to the Craft in the late 1960s, seems to dancing around a more skeptical position as regarding Gerald Gardner's finding a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3547,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3547","url_meta":{"origin":150,"position":2},"title":"Mall Ninjas of Pagandom","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 23, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Vengeful Druids poisoned Gerald Gardner because he was an oath-breaker -- did you know that? Probably not, because it never happened. I got this particular b.s. tossed by a Facebook friend (as opposed to an actual friend), a Druid from Kansas. I suggested that he might check one of Ronald\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12980,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12980","url_meta":{"origin":150,"position":3},"title":"How about Museum of Witchcraft Version 4.0?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 6, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"You can buy the former mill (built 1828) in Castletown, Isle of Man, that once housed housed Cecil Williamson and Gerald Gardner's \"Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft,\" whose name went through various permutations, even as its little restaurant went from being \"The Folklore Restaurant\" to \"The Witches' Kitchen.\" All\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Gerald Gardner\"","block_context":{"text":"Gerald Gardner","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=gerald-gardner"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tindle-web-prod.brightsites.co.uk\/tindle-static\/image\/2022\/06\/28\/11\/newFile.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tindle-web-prod.brightsites.co.uk\/tindle-static\/image\/2022\/06\/28\/11\/newFile.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tindle-web-prod.brightsites.co.uk\/tindle-static\/image\/2022\/06\/28\/11\/newFile.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":5073,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5073","url_meta":{"origin":150,"position":4},"title":"Gerald Gardner and the Question of Polytheism.","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 14, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"I recently reviewed Philip Heselton's latest biography of Gerald Gardner, but I did not have time to discuss one of his final observations, written in a too-brief closing chapter, \"An Assessment of Gerald Gardner.\" Heselton writes, \"Indeed, he really didn't, I think, have any of what we might call 'spiritual'\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"nature religion\"","block_context":{"text":"nature religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=nature-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1776,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1776","url_meta":{"origin":150,"position":5},"title":"Elders Down the Memory Hole","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 25, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"All summer I have been editing and laying out a biography of the American Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944). I just sent the galleys to the writer, a professor in Arizona, and am working on my own corrections as well. There have been the usual hassles\u2014missing \"essential\" photos, notes\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}