To date, there is only one dedicated biography about Gardner, which was
Gerald Gardner: Witch, published in 1960, and written by his friend, Idries Shah (but attributed to Jack L. Bracelin) as one of the first titles of Shah's Octagon Press publishing house. Writers such as Ronald Hutton, Leo Ruickbie, Doreen Valiente, Lois BourneDancing with Witches, by Lois Bourne and Philip Heselton have also discussed Gardner's involvement with Wicca in their books.
Early life
Gardner was born at The Glen, The Serpentine, Blundellsands, near Liverpool in England to a well-off middle class family as one of four brothers, only two of which, Bob and Douglas, lived with Gerald at home. The family business was Joseph Gardner & Sons, the British Empire's oldest and largest importer of hardwood, and they were of Scottish ancestry.
The Gardners' had in their service an Irish nursemaid named Josephine "Com" McCombie, who was employed to take care of the young Gerald. Gardner had been suffering from asthma at the time, bearing the illness from a young age, and his nursemaid had offered to take him to warmer climates at his father's expense. This began in 1891, when the pair travelled to the Canary Islands, and they then went on to Accra, followed by Madeira. According to Gardner's official biographer, J.C. Bracelin, Com was very flirtatious and "clearly looked on these trips as mainly manhunts".
Life in Asia
Ceylon and Borneo, 1900-1911
In 1900, Com married David Elkington, a wealthy man in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), and it was agreed with the Gardners that Gerald would live with her on a tea plantation named Ladbroke Estate. In 1905, Gardner came back to Britain for a visit, during which he spent a lot of time with family relations known as the Surgensons. Gerald became very friendly with this side of his family, whom his mother and father avoided because they were Methodists. The Surgensons readily talked about the paranormal with Gardner. The patriarch of the family, Ted Surgenson, who believed that fairies were living in his garden, would say "I can often feel they're there, and sometimes I've seen them", though he readily admitted the possibility that it was all in his imagination. It was from the Surgensons that Gardner discovered a family rumour that his grandfather, Joseph, had been a practising witch, after being converted to the practice by his mistress. Another family belief was that a Scottish ancestor, Grissell Gairdner, had been burned as a witch in Newburgh in 1610.
In 1908, after a brief stint in Singapore, Gardner moved to Borneo where he became a rubber planter on the Mawo Estate at Membuket, where he did not get on well with the manager, Graham, who had wanted to cut down all the local forest to grow rubber. Instead Gardner became friendly with many of the locals, including the Dyaks, a tribe of local headhunters. Gardner, as an amateur anthropologist, was fascinated by their way of life, particularly their weaponry, but also their beliefs in polytheism and spiritualism.
Malaya, 1911-1936
In 1911, Gardner travelled to Malaya for a holiday, on his planned way back to Ceylon, however he was soon offered a job working on a rubber plantation and decided to stay. It was here that Gardner made friends with an American man known as Cornwall, who had converted to Islam, and married a local Malay woman. Through Cornwall, Gardner was introduced to many locals, whom he soon befriended. He went on to also befriend members of the Saki, a secretive jungle tribe of pygmies.
In 1916 Gardner once again returned to Britain. At the time, the country was fighting in the First World War, and so he attempted to join the British Navy, but was turned down due to ill health. Unable to fight on the front lines, he began working in a hospital treating injured soldiers from the western front. He soon had to give this up when he caught malaria, and so decided to return to Malaya. His mother died in 1920, though Gardner did not return home on this occasion. In 1923, he gave up his job as a rubber planter, and became a civil servant inspecting the various rubber plantations around the country. In this role he had to deal with a great deal of criminality, and was shot at on a number of occasions.
In 1927 his father became very ill and he returned to Britain. On this visit, he began to investigate spiritualism and mediumship. He soon had several encounters which he attributed to spirits of deceased family members. Continuing to visit Spiritualist churches and seances, he was highly critical of much of what he saw, but he encountered several mediums he considered genuine, some of which concerned obscure prophecies that later came true. That same year, Gardner married Dorothea Rosedale, who went by the name of Donna, and they honeymooned in Ryde, before both headed, via France, to Malaya. Gardner witnessed the magical practises performed by the Malay locals, and both he and Cornwall readily accepted a belief in magic. During his time in the country, Gardner became very interested in local customs, namely those involved in folk magic and weapons. In 1936, he published an authoritative text on the subject of the keris, a Malayan knife used for magical purposes:
Keris and other Malay Weapons. Gardner was not only interested in the anthropology of Malaya, but also in its archaeology. He began excavations at the city of Johore Lama, alone and in secret, as the local Sultan considered archaeologists little better than grave-robbers. Prior to Gardner's investigations, no serious archaeological excavation had occurred at the city, though he himself soon unearthed four miles of earthworks, and uncovered finds that included tombs, pottery, and porcelain dating from Ming China. He went on to begin further excavations at the royal cemetery of Kota Tinggi, and the jungle-city of Syong Penang. His finds were displayed as an exhibit on the "Early History of Johore", at the Museum of Singapore, and several beads that he had discovered helped to prove that trade went on between the Roman Empire and the Malays, presumably, Gardner thought, via India.
Return to Europe
In 1936, Gardner left Malaya, and on his way back to Britain, visited Palestine, where he became involved in the archaeological excavations at Lachish. Here he grew particularly interested in a temple containing statues to both the male deity Yahweh of Judeo-Christian theology and the pagan goddess Astaroth. From there he went on to Turkey, visiting several local museums, and to Greece, followed by Hungary and Germany (which at the time was under the Nazi regime). He eventually reached England, but soon went on a visit to Denmark to attend a conference on weaponry.
In 1938 he sailed to Cyprus. Gardner was a believer in reincarnation, and felt that he had lived on the island once before; he wrote his first novel,
A Goddess Arrives, partially based upon his supposed recollections of a past life on the island.
A Goddess Arrives which was set in ancient Cyprus and featured a queen, Dayonis, that practiced sorcery in an attempt to help her people defend themselves from invading Egyptians. In 1938, Gardner returned from Cyprus to Britain, where he and Donna settled down and remained for much of the rest of his life. Despite initially living in London, the pair soon moved to Highcliffe, just south of the New Forest, Hampshire. With the threat of war with Nazi Germany looming, Gardner joined the Air Raid Precautions as a warden, and he went on to arm, from his own personal collection of weapons, many of the members of his local A.R.P.
The Rosicrucian Order and the New Forest Coven
In 1939, Gardner took his wife to a theatrical performance on the life of Pythagoras held by a local dramatic society known as the Rosicrucian Theatre. Donna, herself an amateur thespian, hated it, thinking the quality of both actors and script terrible, and she refused to go again. Gardner was intrigued, however, and joined the group running the theatre - the Corona Fellowship of Rosicrucians, an occult society based upon Rosicrucianism. However, Gardner was quite critical of many of the group's practices; their leader, who went by the name of Aurelius, claimed to be the reincarnation of Pythagoras, Cornelius Agrippa and Francis Bacon. Gardner facetiously asked if he was also the Wandering Jew, much to the annoyance of Aurelius himself. Another belief held by the group that Gardner found amusing was that a lamp hanging from one of the ceilings was the disguised holy grail of Arthurian legend. Gardner's dissatisfaction with the group grew, particularly when in 1939, one of the group's leaders sent a letter out to all members in which she stated that war would not come. The very next day, Britain declared war on Germany, greatly unimpressing the increasingly cynical Gardner.
Prior to his encounter with Wicca, Gardner was already an accomplished writer on the topic of magic and witchcraft. For instance, he had become a member of the Folklore Society in 1939. His first contribution to its journal
Folklore, appeared in the June 1939 issue and described a box of witchcraft relics that he believed had belonged to the 17th century 'Witch-Finder General', Matthew Hopkins. In 1946 he became a member of the society's council, and anxious to achieve academic acceptance, claimed to have doctoral degrees from the Universities of Singapore and Toulouse. Doreen Valiente has shown these claims were untrue.
Meanwhile, Gardner became good friends with a group of people within the Rosicrucian Crotona Fellowship who the later researcher Philip Heselton speculated to be the siblings Ernest and Susie Mason. According to Gardner, "unlike many of the others, had to earn their livings, were cheerful and optimistic and had a real interest in the occult". Gardner later said of them:
One night in September 1939 they took him to a large house owned by "Old Dorothy" Clutterbuck, a wealthy local woman, where he was made to strip naked and taken through an initiation ceremony. Halfway through the ceremony, he heard the word "Wica", and he recognised it as an Old English word for witchcraft. He was already acquainted with Margaret Murray's theory of the Witch-cult, and "I then knew that that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived. How wonderful; to think that these things still survive." This group, he claimed, were the New Forest coven, and he believed them to be one of the few surviving covens of the ancient, pre-Christian Witch-Cult religion. Subsequent research by the likes of Hutton and Heselton has shown that in fact the New Forest coven was probably only formed in the early 20th century, based upon such sources as folk magic and the theories of Margaret Murray. It has also been speculated that the woman who initiated Gardner was an elocution teacher named Edith Woodford-Grimes, who went under the pseudonym of "Dafo" and the two would certainly remain friends for the rest of their lives.
Gardner only ever described one of their rituals in depth, and this was an event that he termed "Operation Cone of Power". According to his own account, it took place in 1940 in a part of the New Forest and was designed to ward off the Nazis from invading Britain by magical means. Gardner said of this:
Aleister Crowley and the Early Gardnerian Tradition, 1946-1950
In 1946, with the end of the Second World War, Gardner and his wife Donna left the New Forest and returned to London. However, Gardner did not want to abandon his new faith, and fearing that it would die out, founded his own coven, the Bricket Wood Coven, with himself as High Priest and Edith Woodford-Grimes as High Priestess. The new group met on the grounds of the Fiveacres Nudist Club, Bricket Wood, outside St Albans, which Gardner, being a keen nudist, had purchased the previous year. They celebrated their rites and rituals for the esbats and sabbats in a building known as the Witches' Cottage, which Gardner had assembled in the centre of the Club's woodland; the cottage itself had been purchased off of his friend, J.S.M Ward, who was a pioneer of the restoration of historical buildings.
Alongside his work with the Craft in his coven, Gardner became interested in many other forms of esotericism and the occult around this time. He joined the Ancient Druid Order, an organisation that promoted the Neopagan religion of Druidry, as well as a mystical Christian group, the Ancient British Church, who ordained him as a priest. The researcher Philip Heselton also speculated that Gardner may well have met Dion Byngham, the leader of the pagan wing of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry, whose beliefs and practices, termed Dionisianism after the Greco-Roman god Dionysus, bore many similarities with Gardnerian Wicca.
On May Day 1947, his friend, the stage magician Arnold Crowther, introduced Gardner to his friend, the Magus Aleister Crowley. Shortly before his death, Crowley elevated Gardner to the VII° of Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) and issued a charter decreeing that Gardner could perform its preliminary initiation rituals. The charter itself was written in Gardner's handwriting and only signed by Crowley. Crowley's friend and student, Gerald Yorke, was reported to have stated that Gardner had paid £300 for Crowley to sign the charter, though this story seems highly apocryphal. Despite owning it, and later displaying it in his Museum of Magic and Witchcraft, Gardner never made use of his O.T.O. charter or performed any of the rituals it allowed him to, claiming that he "had neither the money, energy or time". Crowley also sold Gardner some of his books, including
The Book of the Law and
The Blue Equinox which may have been the source of Crowley material later used within Gardner's witchcraft rites. This is consistent with Gardner's claims that the rituals he had received were fragmentary, and that he had incorporated other material to make a coherent system.
After Crowley's death on December 1, 1947, Gardner was considered the highest ranking O.T.O. member in Europe, and contacted another English member Lady Frieda Harris (painter of the Thoth tarot deck) about continuing the work of the Order in the U.K. Lady Harris wrote to Karl Germer, Crowley's successor as head of O.T.O., on January 2, 1948 that Gardner was now the "Head of the O.T.O. in Europe". Gardner later met with Germer in New York to formulate further plans for the O.T.O. However Gardner's continuing ill health during this period led to the abandonment of the plans, and in 1951 he was replaced by Frederic Mellinger as the O.T.O's European representative.
Dr Leo Ruickbie concluded that Aleister Crowley played a crucial role in inspiring Gardner to establish a new pagan religion. Ruickbie, Hutton, Rankine & d'Este, and Orpheus all argue that much of what has been published of Gardnerian Wicca, as Gardner's practice came to be known by, was derived from works by Aleister Crowley and also contains borrowings from other identifiable sources.?
Doreen Valiente and the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft, 1950-1957
In 1950, Gardner met the Witch Cecil Williamson in London's Atlantis Bookshop during a talk which Gardner was giving. Williamson later revealed that he was planning to open a museum devoted to witchcraft and magic, the Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft, in Castletown on the Isle of Man. The following year Gardner and his wife moved to the island, where Gardner became employed as the museum's "resident witch". On 29 July,
The Sunday Pictorial published an article about the museum in which Gardner declared "Of course I'm a witch. And I get great fun out of it." The museum was not a financial success, and the relationship between Gardner and Williamson deteriorated. In 1954, Gardner bought the museum off of Williamson, who returned to England to found the rival Museum of Witchcraft, eventually settling it in Boscastle, Cornwall. Gardner renamed his exhibition the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft and continued running it up until his death.
In 1952, Gardner had begun to correspond with a young woman named Doreen Valiente. She eventually requested initiation into the Craft, and though Gardner was hesitant at first, he agreed that they could meet during the winter at the home of Edith Woodford-Grimes. Valiente got on well with both Gardner and Woodford-Grimes, and having no objections to either ritual nudity or scourging (which she had read about in a copy of Gardner's novel
High Magic's Aid that he had given to her), she was initiated by Gardner into Wicca on Midsummer 1953. Valiente went on to join the Bricket Wood Coven. She soon rose to become the High Priestess of the coven, and helped Gardner to rewrite his Book of Shadows, cutting out Crowley's influence, which she feared was too shrouded in bad publicity.
In 1954, Gardner published a non-fiction book,
Witchcraft Today, containing a preface by Margaret Murray, who had published her theory of a surviving Witch-Cult in her 1921 book,
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. In his book, Gardner not only espoused the survival of the Witch-Cult, but also his theory that a belief in faeries in Europe was due to a secretive pygmy race that lived alongside other communities, and that the Knights Templar had been initiates of the Craft. Alongside this book, Gardner began to increasingly court publicity, going so far as to invite the press to write articles about the religion. Many of these turned out very negatively for the cult; one declared "Witches Devil-Worship in London!", and another accused him of whitewashing witchcraft in his luring of people into covens. Gardner continued courting publicity, despite the negative articles that many tabloids were producing, and believed that only through publicity could more people become interested in witchcraft, so preventing the "Old Religion", as he called it, from dying out.
Gardner's increasingly overt attempts at garnering media attention was one of the major reasons for rifts in his coven (and others). Many Witches felt he was threatening their traditional vows of secrecy and bringing about too much bad publicity, which in turn led to ostracism and job losses. Gardner introduced the Wiccan Laws to his coven, which drastically limited the powers of the High Priestess and even allowed the High Priest to call for the retirement of the High Priestess when he considered her too old. Valiente and other members of the coven were furious and left in disgust. Valiente herself said "we had had enough of the gospel according to Gerald, but we still believed that the ancient religion of Witchcraft had existed".
In 1959 Gardner published his final book, The Meaning of Witchcraft. It was a sequel to Witchcraft Today, and included his early witchcraft experiences with the New Forest Coven.
Later Life and Death
In 1960, Gardner's official biography, entitled
Gerald Gardner: Witch, was published. It was written by a friend of his, the Sufi mystic Idries Shah, but used the name of one of Gardner's High Priests, Jack L. Bracelin, because Shah was wary about being associated with Witchcraft. In May of that year, Gardner travelled to Buckingham Palace, where he enjoyed a garden party in recognition of his years of service to the Empire in the Far East. Soon after his trip, Gardner's wife Donna died, and Gardner himself once again began to suffer badly from asthma. The following year he, along with Shah and Lois Bourne, travelled to the island of Majorca to holiday with the poet Robert Graves, whose
The White Goddess would play a significant part in the burgeoning Wiccan religion. In 1963, Gardner decided to go to Lebanon over the winter. Whilst returning home on the ship,
The Scottish Prince on February 12, 1964, he suffered a fatal heart attack at the breakfast table. He was buried in Tunisia, the ship's next port of call, and his funeral was attended only by the ship's captain. He was 79 years old.
Though having bequeathed the museum, all his artifacts, and the copyright to his books in his will to one of his High Priestess', Monique Wilson, she and her husband sold off the artefact collection to the American Ripley’s, Believe It Or Not organisation several years later. Ripley's took the collection to America, where it was displayed in two museums before being sold off during the 1980s. Gardner had also left parts of his inheritance to Patricia Crowther, Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne and Jack Bracelin, the latter inheriting the Fiveacres Nudist Club and taking over as full-time High Priest of the Bricket Wood coven.
Several years after Gardner's death, the Wiccan High Priestess Eleanor Bone visited North Africa and went looking for Gardner's grave. She discovered that the cemetery he was interned in was to be redeveloped, and so she raised enough money for his body to be moved to another cemetery in Tunis, where it currently remains. In 2007, a new plaque was attached to his grave, describing him as being "Father of Modern Wicca. Beloved of the Great Goddess".
