Doreen Valiente

Their life

A Surrey engineer’s daughter who left her convent school at fifteen and refused to go back, worked as a wartime translator for the Foreign Office, and in 1953 was initiated into Gerald Gardner’s coven — then quietly rewrote much of what she found there. She saw that a good deal of Gardner’s supposedly ancient Book of Shadows was lifted from Aleister Crowley, cut it, and wrote in its place the ritual poetry that modern witchcraft still uses, above all the prose Charge of the Goddess. She broke with Gardner in 1957 when his appetite for newspaper publicity outran her patience, walked out on Robert Cochrane when his feuding turned malicious, and spent the rest of her life writing plain, readable books from a cramped Brighton flat full of them. She was also, for about eighteen months in the early 1970s, a member of the National Front — something she let lapse, objecting to its stance on women’s liberation and gay rights, and which her admirers do not hide.

Known for

• Writing the prose Charge of the Goddess
• Rewriting Gardner's Book of Shadows
• First public record of the Wiccan Rede
• Witchcraft for Tomorrow and self-initiation
• The Rebirth of Witchcraft
• Where Witchcraft Lives

The road they walked

Doreen Valiente was born Doreen Edith Dominy on 4 January 1922 in Mitcham, Surrey, the daughter of a civil engineer. She grew up in the south of England between the wars, had what she later described as a spiritual experience while staring at the Moon as a child, and was trying her hand at magic by thirteen. She was sent to a convent school, left at fifteen and refused to return. During the Second World War she worked for the Foreign Office, including as a translator, and she took the surname Valiente through her 1944 marriage to Casimiro Valiente, a refugee from the Spanish Civil War.

Her turning point came in the early 1950s. Britain's last Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1951, and in the autumn of 1952 a magazine article on witchcraft in Britain led her to write to the museum owner Cecil Williamson, who passed her letter to Gerald Gardner. Gardner initiated her at midsummer 1953 at the Highcliffe home of his friend Edith Woodford-Grimes, and she soon became High Priestess of his coven. Her ear for language mattered as much as her devotion. She recognised that much of Gardner's supposedly ancient Book of Shadows was borrowed from Aleister Crowley and other written sources, and rewrote much of it. In its place she wrote new liturgy, including the prose Charge of the Goddess, which kept passages from Charles Leland's Aradia, and the Witches' Rune, written with Gardner. Much of what is spoken at modern Wiccan rites still traces back to that work.

She left Gardner's circle in 1957, after a dispute over his appetite for press attention. In the 1960s she joined Robert Cochrane's Clan of Tubal Cain, then walked away when his feuding turned malicious. From then on she was an independent figure, living in Brighton and writing the books that made her one of the movement's most widely read authors: Where Witchcraft Lives (1962), An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present (1973), Natural Magic (1975), Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978) and The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989). Her record is not spotless. For about eighteen months in the early 1970s she belonged to the National Front, then let her membership lapse, objecting to its positions on women's liberation and gay rights. Her admirers acknowledge it openly.

How their story ended

Doreen Valiente died of pancreatic cancer on 1 September 1999, at the age of seventy-seven, in a nursing home in Sussex, with her friend John Belham-Payne at her side. Her ashes were scattered in Sussex woodland. She left her papers and ritual objects to Belham-Payne, who later placed them with the Doreen Valiente Foundation, and her poems were collected in a posthumous volume, Charge of the Goddess, in 2000.

In their words

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Tables where Doreen sits

The Mystics’ Table

For trusting what you have found within when no authority will vouch for it.

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