Maria Blyth

Doreen Valiente: Mother of Modern Witchcraft

Illustration © Kaitlynn Copithorne

Illustration © Kaitlynn Copithorne

In October 1964, around fifty witches gathered at a dinner held by the newly-formed Witchcraft Research Association. Although its life span would prove short, the Association aimed to serve as a unifying force in the increasingly fractious and factional world of Wicca. The organisation’s president at this time—Doreen Valiente—hoped that the Association might eventually become the “United Nations of the Craft”:

‘What we need now, more than anything, is for people of spiritual vision to combine together... if only people in the occult world devoted as much time and energy to positive constructive work as they do to denouncing and denigrating each other, their spiritual contribution to the world would be enormous!’

This speech, in all of its rousing clarity, summarised so much of Valiente’s approach to witchcraft and magic. Often lauded as the “mother of modern witchcraft”, Valiente’s attitude was one of inclusivity, but also discernment. As a writer of books, poetry and Wiccan liturgy, she ensured her words and offerings were accessible to all. Yet behind her warm tone of guidance, there was a sharp, shrewd researcher and fierce believer in authenticity, integrity, and social justice. 

Born in Surrey, 1922, to parents who were, in her own words, “brought up Chapel”, Valiente would later laugh off claims that she was in fact the illegitimate child of the Great Beast, occultist Aleister Crowley. Whilst the reality—being the daughter of a land surveyor and architect—might seem less interesting, young Valiente’s experiences were far from ordinary. As an adult, she reminisced about her mystical experiences and encounters with the uncanny as a child, and according to her biographer Philip Heselton, she was making poppets and had grown into an accomplished herbalist by her teens.

Valiente’s work during the Second World War is thought to have been of a sensitive nature, as she was most likely based at Bletchley Park—the code-breaking centre of the Allied Forces. After a brief marriage which ended in her husband’s loss at sea, she moved to Bournemouth with her second husband, Casimiro Valiente. It is on that stretch of England’s southern coast that her interest in the occult spiralled. Trawling local public libraries for esoteric texts, Doreen Valiente began her studies in earnest; from Spiritualism to Theosophy, she gobbled up everything she could lay her hands on. Never one to forego the practical aspects of learning, Valiente attended a Spiritualist church (at which she read aloud a Crowley text she had discovered), as well as joining a local parlour group that discussed esoteric matters. Around this time she also began practising ceremonial magic with an artist friend who went by the magical name “Zerki”, and together they would work rituals in his flat which were influenced by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Valiente chose her own, John Dee-inspired magical name at this time too—she would go by “Ameth”.

After years of intensive magical study and research, Valiente entered into a correspondence that would lay the foundations for her later renown as a witch. A keen collector of newspaper articles about occult matters of all sorts, in 1952 she came across a piece in Illustrated magazine titled Witchcraft in Britain, which mentioned a coven of British witches who had performed a ritual in the New Forest during 1940, attempting to prevent Hitler from invading Britain. In 1951 the last vestiges of the Witchcraft Act, outlawing such occult actions, had been repealed, and Gerald Gardner—the “resident witch” of a museum of magic on the Isle of Man—had started courting media coverage, including via the article discovered by Valiente. In her book The Rebirth of Witchcraft, she recalls feeling incredibly excited by Gardner’s references to witchcraft as being “fun”, which seemed a very novel idea at the time. Writing to the museum’s founder, Cecil Williamson, Valiente’s letter was answered by Gardner, and their correspondence began. Gardner had been initiated into the New Forest coven by a witch known as “Dafo”, and it was at Dafo’s house that Valiente met with him for the first time. She describes this significant event in one of her books:

“We seemed to take an immediate liking to each other...One felt that he had seen for horizons and encountered strange things; and yet there was a sense of humour about him, and a youthfulness, in spite of his silver hair.”

Valiente as initiated into Gardner’’s Bricket Wood coven a year later at Stonehenge (without the knowledge of her husband, who remained a lifelong sceptic). Notably, hinting at the import she gave to magical provenance, Valiente recognised that many of Gardner’s words and actions at her initiation bore a resemblance to those of Crowley and the folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland. Over time, Valiente grew increasingly sceptical with regards to Gardner’s “ancient” sources, criticising his overuse of Crowley’s texts. Eventually, according to Valiente, Gardner’s response to her criticisms was along the lines of “if you think you can do better, get on with it!” Never one to shy away from a challenge, she did, and went on to rewrite many of Gardner’s rituals to great effect. Indeed, Professor Ronald Hutton notes that Valiente’s words for the White Moon Charge “gave Wicca a theology as well as its finest piece of liturgy”.

Gardner’s hunger for publicity grew, and with increasing press coverage came more coven members, but also greater media sensationalism and public ire. Valiente, by now the coven’s High Priestess, disapproved—preferring Wicca to make itself known through its books rather than being filtered through the lenses of journalists keen for a throwaway headline. Valiente broke with Gerald’s coven, founding a new one with her allies which would practice Gardnerian Wicca without being beholden to its namesake. She believed there was work to be done in finding the real “Old Ways”; the pre-Christian pagan rites that promised to be more authentic than Gardner’s patchwork versions. 

During her lifetime, along with publishing numerous books, Valiente was initiated into four covens in total. There was a pattern to her dances with covens—that of becoming involved, doubting provenance and patriarchal coven leadership, doing research to confirm any suspicions, then moving on. Her political alliances followed a similar structure, including a brief foray into right-wing politics during the early 1970s. Heselton suggests that during her 18-month stint with the National Front she might have in fact been undercover, spying for the state. She herself claimed disillusionment as the reason for her separation from the Front; a firm believer in women’s rights, gay rights, and civil liberties, we might wonder why she joined such an organisation at all.

In her book The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989), Valiente was more explicit about her feminism and distaste for so many covens, stating that “we were allowed to call ourselves High Priestesses, Witch Queens and similar fancy titles; but we were still in the position of having men running things”. Valiente valued collaboration over domination, and held out hopes for a “constructive” spirituality that emphasised the environment, civil liberties and social justice rather than petty squabbles and battles over authority. More than this, she wanted to promote a witchcraft that was open to all. 

In 1971, Valiente appeared in a BBC documentary about Wicca alongside Alex Sanders, founder of Alexandrian Wicca. Despite her increasing celebrity, however, she remained incredibly down to earth. An enthusiastic football fan, Valiente enjoyed betting on horses and throughout her life worked in a surprising array of jobs—including stints in factories, for a furniture company, and in the Brighton branch of Boots pharmacy. Following the death of Casimiro, she never remarried but spent her remaining 20 years with the “love of her life”, Ron Cooke, who she initiated into the Craft, with him becoming her High Priest. And so, the pair’s life came to revolve around holidays in Glastonbury, football matches on the TV, Valiente’s writing and public engagements, and the practice and study of magic.

Valiente died in 1999, two years after Ron had passed away, and her ashes were scattered around the roots of her favourite oak tree near the South Downs in East Sussex. Two of those present picked an acorn from the tree, cast it in silver, and gifted acorn pendants to those at the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall. This museum, founded by Cecil Williamson, was the successor to Williamson’s earlier iteration on the Isle of Man which Valiente had read about in 1952, and which had played such a vital role in her early life as a Wiccan. A perfectly full circle narrative for an avidly full circle witch.

Pamela Colman Smith: Tarot’s High Priestess

Photograph of Pamela Colman Smith from the October 1912 issue of The Craftsman magazine

Photograph of Pamela Colman Smith from the October 1912 issue of The Craftsman magazine

In his 1907 volume Bohemia in London, author Arthur Ransome describes meeting Pamela Colman Smith (known to her friends as “Pixie”) at one of her tipsy artist’s salons:

She was dressed in an orange-coloured coat that hung loose over a green skirt, 

with black tassels sewn all over the orange silk […]. She welcomed us with a little 

shriek […]. It was obviously an affectation, and yet seemed just the right 

manner of welcome from the strange little creature, “goddaughter of a witch 

and sister to a fairy,” who uttered it. 

Encounters with Colman Smith typically described her exoticism, her childlike ethereality, yet also a healthy vigour. Throughout her life, such descriptions were peppered with bewilderment regarding her age, ethnicity, and even sexuality. Colman Smith’s vast body of work is similarly confounding. She made herself at home in the varied roles of artist, occultist, poet, designer, suffragist, folklorist, editor, publisher, and miniature-theatre maker. Most notably, she is famed as the illustrator of the Rider Waite Smith tarot deck―the most widely used and easily recognisable deck in the world today.

Born in 1878 to Brooklynite parents living in London, Pamela travelled widely throughout her youth, including stints in Jamaica which would inspire her later career as a performer of Jamaican folklore (under the mysteriously far-flung pseudonym ‘Gelukiezanger’). Art and writing were in her maternal blood, and aged fifteen she went to study at New York’s Pratt Institute where, according to Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, she was “widely regarded as a child prodigy”. Indeed, she was prodigious in all senses of the word―both eerily impressive and otherworldly. 

A move to London in 1900 was precipitated by her close friendship with the actress Ellen Terry. In a letter to her cousin with news of the move, Pamela practically yells “I am going home with Miss Terry?!!!!! Isant [sic] it lovely!!!!???!!!” Ellen ensured that Pamela quickly became embedded in London’s rambunctiously colourful bohemian scene. Surrounded by artists, writers, actors and musicians, much of her initial work was in the theatre. She gamely performed in crowd scenes during one of the Lyceum Theatre’s tours of the UK as well as adding costume and stage design to her oeuvre. W.B. Yeats was a welcome mentor and collaborator, offering advice and content when she launched The Green Sheaf in 1903―a magazine dedicated, somewhat characteristically, “to pleasure”. 

Like many―if not most―of Pamela’s multifarious projects, the magazine was no commercial success. It seems that Pamela was a persistently enterprising but not entirely successful hustler. To supply The Green Sheaf with a stream of hand-colourists, she had set up a school for the purpose; it remains unknown as to whether any students actually enrolled. A sceptic might say that Pamela’s enigmatically engineered persona was the product of a mind scheming after finances and fashions. She certainly made a habit of playing around with ambiguities surrounding her identity and ethnicity―perhaps even exploiting notions that she might be, for example, Japanese, during a time when the East was very much in vogue. Those more attuned to the art world might instead recognise Pamela as a cannily theatrical polymath, resourcefully scrabbling around to make an independent living. 

Pamela’s friendship with Yeats ultimately led towards her future renown as Arthur Waite’s collaborator on the Rider Waite Smith deck. In 1901, guided by Yeats, 23-year-old Pamela joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society dedicated to the pursuit of metaphysical knowledge through ritual and scholarship. The Order was filled to the brim with experimental thinkers and creatives such as Florence Farr, and Pamela’s friend from the Lyceum, Bram Stoker (“Bramy Joker”). Never advancing beyond the second level of the Golden Dawn’s many initiatory stages, Pamela skirted the fringes. Nonetheless, her artistic skills caught the attention of Waite:

It seemed to some of us in the circle that there was a draughtswoman amongst 

us who, under proper guidance, could produce a tarot with an appeal to the world

of art and a suggestion of the significance behind the Symbols.

In 1903 the Order splintered, with Waite’s Rectified Order of the Golden Dawn seeking to explore a purely Christian mysticism, described by academic Helen Farley as “torturous”. Pamela followed Waite (rather than Yeats, who also formed a new society), which is perhaps unsurprising given her later conversion to Catholicism. It was within this new configuration that Waite proposed the creation of a tarot deck. He credits Pamela with a certain naivety regarding occult symbolism, claiming that “the one thing she lacked was an interest in the meaning of it!” This dismissiveness of Pamela’s scholarly capacities is perhaps predictable given the place in society that female artists occupied at the time. Nevertheless, it’s possible that she enjoyed the Order for its pomp and ritual, not to mention the social aspect of the group―what could be more enticing to a young artist than a secret society comprising artists? 

Famously stating that Waite’s tarot project was “a big job for very little cash!” (she adored an exclamation mark), Pamela’s turnaround was swift. She completed all 78 illustrations in just a few months for a flat fee, a sum sadly in keeping with her historically unacknowledged contribution to the deck. Whilst Waite focused his prescriptiveness on the symbolism of the tarot’s Major Arcana (the “trump” cards), it’s possible that he left the illustration of the Minor Arcana (the “pip” cards) to Pamela’s uninhibited imagination. Secrecy was paramount within the Golden Dawn, and it is perhaps for this reason that Pamela never publicly discussed the meanings behind her tarot illustrations. Nonetheless, in a 1908 article titled “Should the Art Student Think?”, she instructs budding artists in the way of creating and viewing art that applies equally well to tarot reading: “Use your wits, use your eyes. Perhaps you use your physical eyes too much and only see the mask. Find your eyes within, look for the door in the unknown country.” 

We might, upon closer examination, note that the figures in Pamela’s tarot are often gender-ambiguous, reflecting the trend for short hair and masculine clothing common amongst her female friends at the time. Indeed, Pamela’s friends often served as informal models on whom she based her illustrations―we can recognise the face of a young, boldly sociable Ellen Terry in the outwardly oriented Queen of Wands. The androgynous figures of her tarot add a dose of heft to suggestions of Pamela’s queerness―she never married, had no children, and latterly spent 30 years with her companion Nora Lake. More than this, and regardless of her sexual orientation, the representation of gender neutrality points towards Pamela’s future involvement with the pre-war suffragist movement, for which she designed propaganda posters as part of the artists’ collective Suffrage Atelier. Her work for the movement is both astute and deeply witty―thoroughly undermining Waite’s sense of her as largely surface-oriented.

Nature, too, is always close at hand in the Rider Waite Smith deck―from the Empress’ lush garden and the robe of pomegranates, to the wild seas, mountains and creatures (both real and mythical) featured throughout the deck. Waite was fascinated by the Grail tradition, including Arthurian lore. This was a passion shared by Pamela. In youthful letters to her cousin she describes working on whimsical drawings of Merlin and Guinevere, and in 1899 visited Tintagel, the supposed site of Arthur’s conception. 

Waite’s obsession with Christian mysticism is also widely apparent in the deck―from the Judgement card’s overt references to the Resurrection to The World card’s Four Living Creatures of Ezekiel. Enthralled as she was by ritual, representation, and ceremony, Pamela converted to Roman Catholicism in 1911. Whilst conversion to or from Christianity was not uncommon within occult circles, some of her more bohemian friends treated her fresh piousness with disdain, and many ties were weakened or severed due to the perceived loss of Pamela’s much lauded playfulness and verve. Following a stay with Pamela in 1913, Lily Yeats scathingly wrote that “she now has the dullest of friends, selected entirely because they are R.C., converts most of them, half-educated people, who want to see both eyes in a profile drawing.”

Pamela eventually used a familial bequest to sign a lease on a property at the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. There she and Nora would become caretakers for a chapel, whilst also providing retreat space for the clergy. Her later years were ones of quiet service and creativity―perhaps the end of the journey for an avid spiritual seeker, someone who championed communal inspiration above the patriarchal traditions of marriage and family. Despite ongoing attempts to revive her artistic career, Pamela died without funds in 1951. Pilgrims, fellow seekers, and tarot enthusiasts from across the globe continue to search for her unmarked pauper’s grave; as notoriously problematic to pin down in death as she was in life. 

Out Of The Shadows

“Come out, come out,

wherever you are,

come meet the young lady

who fell from a star!”

- The Wizard of Oz

Image © Kaitlynn Copithorne

Image © Kaitlynn Copithorne

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” This phrase can either tickle our ears or chill us to the bone. Are we being summoned to play, or are we being sniffed out by demons on the hunt? The witch’s (broom) closet is a dark place—simultaneously cosy and lonely. “I am a witch” is something we might struggle to affirm to ourselves, let alone others. I know I fall into both camps. What’s worse, the coveted life on the other side of the closet door can be contrary to say the least.

Coming out is a question that has threaded throughout my entire post-pubertal life. As a person living with a severe mental illness, I’ve often felt alone, and am always primed for the judgements of others. Coming out as a mentally ill person (or mad, as I often gleefully refer to myself) feels simultaneously like a responsibility, a right, a risk, and a chore. I can count on my fingers the number of friends who know the shape of my experience, in tens the people who know the facts but not the form, and in hundreds the acquaintances who are none the wiser. Often any frankness is met with “oh but you seem so normal!”, as if there is nothing normal about me now that my nasty truth has been revealed. Coming out of the crazy closet is akin to stumbling out of the shadows and into the fire.

We might ask whether keeping aspects of our life secret (be it witchery, insanity, or otherwise) is tantamount to complicity with our closed minded oppressors. Are we duty bound, politically, to take the leap for the sake of others? For me, the simple answer is no - that is no-one’s personal responsibility. An example from the world of mental health is the UK’s Time to Talk Day. On this day we are encouraged to talk with others about our mental health. For those of us who struggle to live under the banner of a highly stigmatised diagnosis such as schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, the invitation to just talk about it—largely for the benefit of the normies - is yet another demand in our already treacherous lives. Why should we be liable for removing others’ biases? And how can we guarantee that our talking about it won’t provoke a hostile response?

A decade ago, I performed my first solo public ritual. Certain Muggle friends in attendance expressed concern regarding my shift to the dark side, as if I’d forced them to stand at the Hellmouth for half an hour whilst my red eyes burned holes into their souls. “Be careful!” they whispered at the sight of such creepy witchery. I guess the ritual was a bit scary—it did, after all, attempt to summon Lilith for the sexual liberation of all women. I’m sure, however, that it wasn’t the content that struck fear into their pretty little hearts. It was the display of something not normal, something definitively outside of their experience.

Other times, responses can be pleasantly surprising. I once found a moment of honest connection with my mother, as we compared manifestation practices with her own Christian belief in prayer and miracles. Even now I wonder whether she was in fact secretly horrified by my ideas. When you’re afraid of others’ judgements it’s sometimes hard to trust that they really do get where you’re coming from, regardless of what they might say.

Through admitting our witchiness, we might also find ourselves shouldering the burden of others’ ignorance and fear. We might be asked to define, for example, our relationship with Satan, or to attest as to the accuracy of The Craft. Another classic is “so do you actually believe in magic?” Sometimes these conversations can feel joyful, but for the most part they’re a burden some of us could live without. I like to ask in return, “well do you believe in magic?” Now there’s a question.

Divination is another case in point - millions find the notion of the tarot, runes, or I-Ching truly spine-chilling. Their pupils dilate at the mere thought of such devilishly occult activities. A moment later, intrigued about their fate, they’re positively desperate for you to read their fortune. (Next, perhaps, they’ll start learning a divination tool for themselves, as, you know, an art practice thing.)

The rapid increase in witches using social media reveals the vast numbers of crafters looking for connection—over three million have used the hashtag #witchesofinstagram. Both solitary witches and covens alike are connecting with one another, often under pseudonyms, and creating online communities where they can find kinship and even magical services. Podcasts such as The Witch Wave garner listeners from across the world who seek affirmation for their interests and identities. There is safety in numbers, especially under the cloak of the digital sphere.

There are many reasons why we come to identify as witches—personal, religious, political. For many of us, coming out is a choice, and to many more of us, a minefield. Sometimes I choose to out myself as a person who is mentally ill. Occasionally I choose to make public my witchy practices. You are allowed to pick and choose what you say, and to whom you say it. Explain yourself? No thanks.

I find wondrous solace and solidarity in the coven that is my weekly therapy group, and the spaces I share with like-minded witchy friends. Much like the language of both magic and the mind, I trace circles with my fingertips—circles within circles. My eyes dance between these borders and spaces, my words follow. To some people I’m mad, to some I’m ‘normal’, but most importantly, to those who truly know me, I am just their friend. I am a weird nutcase, a normal-crazy-normal witch, and I’m beginning to be cool with that.