Meet Doreen Valiente: The Witch Who Edited Her Own Religion

A magazine on the newsagent’s counter

Doreen Valiente left her convent school at fifteen and refused to go back. After wartime work for the Foreign Office, she was living in Bournemouth when, in the autumn of 1952, she bought a copy of Illustrated with an article on witchcraft in Britain. She wrote to the museum owner it quoted, he passed her letter to Gerald Gardner, and at midsummer 1953 Gardner initiated her.

The editor inside the coven

She soon rose to lead the coven's rituals — and soon recognised that a good deal of Gardner's supposedly ancient Book of Shadows had been lifted from Aleister Crowley. Rather than walk away, she rewrote it. Her prose Charge of the Goddess, which the historian Ronald Hutton called her greatest single contribution to the religion, is still read aloud in circles around the world.

Leaving, more than once

In 1957 she broke with Gardner over his appetite for newspaper publicity. Later she joined Robert Cochrane's Clan of Tubal Cain, and left after standing up to him in front of the coven when he talked of a "Night of the Long Knives" against the Gardnerians.

The record, unflattering parts included

In Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978) she told readers how to begin on their own, without anyone's permission. In The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989) she set down the false claims of the movement's founders — Gardner's included — as plainly as what she believed was true. She also held to Margaret Murray's theory of a surviving witch-cult long after historians had dropped it, and for about eighteen months in the early 1970s she was a member of the National Front, before letting it lapse over its opposition to women's liberation and gay rights. A blue plaque now marks the Brighton tower block where she lived.

Why she belongs at your table

Seat Valiente when you love a tradition and have found that parts of it are not true — when you need the nerve to keep what is real, cut what is not, and stop waiting for someone else's permission.