Doreen Valiente
Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente was an English Wiccan who was responsible for writing much of the early religious liturgy within the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca. An author and poet, she also published five books dealing with Wicca and related esoteric subjects.
Born to a middle-class family in Surrey, Valiente began practising magic while a teenager. Working as a translator at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, she also married twice in this period. Developing her interest in occultism after the war, she began practising ceremonial magic with a friend while living in Bournemouth. Learning of Wicca, in 1953 she was initiated into the Gardnerian tradition by its founder, Gerald Gardner. Soon becoming the High Priestess of Gardner's Bricket Wood coven, she helped him to produce or adapt many important scriptural texts for Wicca, such as The Witches Rune and the Charge of the Goddess, which were incorporated into the early Gardnerian Book of Shadows. In 1957, a schism resulted in Valiente and her followers leaving Gardner in order to form their own short-lived coven. After investigating the Wiccan tradition of Charles Cardell, she was initiated into Raymond Howard's Coven of Atho in 1963. She went on the following year to work with Robert Cochrane in his coven, the Clan of Tubal Cain, although she later broke from this group.
Eager to promote and defend her religion, she played a leading role in both the Witchcraft Research Association and then the Pagan Front during the 1960s and 1970s. That latter decade also saw her briefly involve herself in far right politics as well as becoming a keen ley hunter and proponent of Earth mysteries. As well as regularly writing articles on esoteric topics for various magazines, from the 1960s onward she authored a number of books on the subject of Wicca, as well as contributing to the publication of works by Wiccan friends Stewart Farrar, Janet Farrar, and Evan John Jones. In these works also she became an early advocate of the idea that anyone could practise Wicca without requiring initiation by a pre-existing Wiccan, while also contributing to and encouraging research into the religion's early history. Living in Brighton during these years, she was a member of the Silver Malkin coven and worked with Ron Cook, who was both her partner and initiate. In her final years she served as patron of the Sussex-based Centre for Pagan Studies prior to her death from pancreatic cancer.
Valiente's magical artefacts and papers were bequeathed to her last High Priest, John Belham-Payne, who donated them to a charitable trust, the Doreen Valiente Foundation, in 2011. Having had a significant influence in the history of Wicca, she is widely revered in the Wiccan community as "the Mother of Modern Witchcraft", and has been the subject of two biographies.
Biography
Early life: 1922–1952
Valiente was born Doreen Edith Dominy on 4 January 1922 in the London outer suburb of Colliers Wood, Mitcham, Surrey. Her father, Harry Dominy, was a civil engineer, and he lived with her mother Edith in Colliers Wood. Harry came from a Methodist background and Edith from a Congregationalist one, however Doreen was never baptised, as was the custom of the time, due to an argument that Edith had had with the local vicar. Doreen later claimed that she had not had a close or affectionate relationship with her parents, whom she characterised as highly conventional and heavily focused on social climbing. During her childhood they moved to Horley in Surrey, and it was there, according to her later account, that she had an early spiritual experience while staring at the Moon. From there her family moved to the West Country and then to the New Forest. In either late 1934 or 1935, Doreen's mother left her father and took her to live with maternal relatives in Southampton. Valiente first began practising magic at age 13, performing a spell to prevent her mother being harassed by a co-worker; she came to believe that it had worked. Her early knowledge of magical practices may have derived from books that she found in the local library. Her parents were concerned by this behaviour and sent her to a convent school. She despised the school and left it at the age of 15, refusing to return. She had wanted to go to art school, but instead gained employment in a factory, before moving on to work as a clerk and typist at the Unemployment Assistance Board.During the Second World War, she became a Foreign Office Civilian Temporary Senior Assistant Officer, in this capacity working as a translator at Bletchley Park. In relation to this work, she was also sent to South Wales, and it was there, in the town of Barry, that she met Joanis Vlachopolous, a Greek seaman in the Merchant Navy. Entering a relationship, they were married in East Glamorgan on 31 January 1941. However, in June 1941 he was serving aboard the Pandias when it was sunk by a U-boat off of the West African coast; he was declared missing in action and presumed deceased. Widowed, during 1942 and 1943 Valiente had a number of short-term jobs in Wales, which were possibly a cover for intelligence work.
After October 1943 she was transferred to the intelligence service's offices in Berkeley Street in the Mayfair area of London, where she was involved in message decryption. In London she met and entered into a relationship with Casimiro Valiente, a Spaniard who had fled from the Spanish Civil War, where he had fought on the side of the Spanish Republican Army before later joining the French Foreign Legion, where he was wounded at the Battle of Narvik and evacuated to England. They were married on 29 May 1944 at St Pancras Registry Office. The couple moved to Bournemouth – where Doreen's mother was then living – and here Casimiro worked as a chef. Valiente would later say that both she and her husband suffered racism after the war because of their foreign associations.
Developing an interest in occultism, she began practising ceremonial magic with a friend, "Zerki", at his flat. She had obtained the magical regalia and notebooks of a recently deceased doctor, who had been a member of the Alpha et Omega, a splinter group of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and attempted to learn Hebrew, a language with uses in various forms of ceremonial magic. It was at this point that she selected "Ameth" as her magical name. She was particularly interested by John Symonds' book The Great Beast, which was a biography of the occultist Aleister Crowley, who had founded the religion of Thelema in 1904, and following this she avidly read a copy of Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice which she found in a local library. Alongside these, she also had some practical experience with the esoteric religions of Spiritualism and Theosophy, having attended the services of a local Christian Spiritualist church in Charminster.
Gerald Gardner and the Bricket Wood Coven: 1952–1957
She had also become familiar with the idea of a pre-Christian witch-cult surviving into the modern period through the works of Charles Godfrey Leland, Margaret Murray, and Robert Graves, although believed that the religion was extinct. It was in autumn 1952 that she read an article by the reporter Allen Andrews in Illustrated magazine titled "Witchcraft in Britain". Discussing the recent opening of the Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft in Castletown on the Isle of Man, it mentioned the museum's director, Cecil Williamson, and its "resident witch", Gerald Gardner.Intrigued by the article, Valiente wrote a letter to Williamson in 1952, who in turn put her in contact with Gardner. Valiente and Gardner wrote several letters back-and-forth, with the latter eventually suggesting that she meet him at the home of his friend and fellow Wiccan Edith Woodford-Grimes, who lived not far from Bournemouth, in the Christchurch area. Before she left the meeting, Gardner gave her a copy of his 1949 novel, High Magic's Aid, in which he describes a fictionalised account of Wiccan initiates in the Middle Ages; he allegedly did so in order to gauge her opinion on ritual nudity and scourging, both of which were present in his tradition of Gardnerian Wicca.
Gardner invited Valiente again to Woodford-Grimes's house on Midsummer 1953, and it was here that he initiated her into Wicca in a ritual during which they stood before an altar and he read from his Book of Shadows. The three of them then set off to the prehistoric monument of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, where they witnessed the Druids performing a ritual there. Gardner had lent a ritual sword which he owned to the Druids, who placed it within the monument's Heel Stone during their rite. Valiente told her husband and mother about the visit to Stonehenge, but not about her initiation, of which, she feared, they would not have approved.
Later in the year, Gardner invited Valiente to visit him at his flat in Shepherd's Bush, West London, and it was there that she met the eight to ten members of his Bricket Wood coven, which met near St. Albans, north of London. She soon rose to become the coven's High Priestess. The historian Ronald Hutton later commented that in doing so, she formed "the second great creative partnership of life" after that with Woodford-Grimes. Valiente recognised how much of the material in Gardner's Book of Shadows was taken not from ancient sources as Gardner had initially claimed, but from the works of Crowley. She confronted Gardner with this; he claimed that the text he had received from the New Forest coven had been fragmentary, and he had had to fill much of it using various sources. She took the Book of Shadows, and with Gardner's permission, rewrote much of it, cutting out a lot of sections that had come from Crowley, fearing that his infamous reputation would sully Wicca. In 1953 she wrote "Queen of the Moon, Queen of the Stars", an invocation for use in a Yule ritual which was inspired by a Hebridean song found in the Carmina Gadelica. With Gardner she also wrote "The Witches Rune", a chant for use while dancing in a circle. She rewrote much of the Charge of the Goddess, with Hutton characterising this act as "her greatest single contribution to Wicca", for her version of the Charge became "the principle expression of Wiccan spirituality" in coming years.
Gardner spent his summers at the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft on the Isle of Man, and thus often relied on Valiente to deal with his affairs in Southern England. He sent her to meet the occult artist Austin Osman Spare when he wanted some talismans produced by the latter. Spare subsequently described Valiente as "a myopic stalky nymph... harmless and a little tiresome" in a letter that he wrote to Kenneth Grant. At Gardner's prompting, she also met with the occultist Gerald Yorke, who was interested in learning about Wicca; Gardner insisted that she lie to Yorke by informing him that she was from a longstanding family of hereditary Wiccan practitioners. She also aided him in preparing his second non-fiction book about Wicca, The Meaning of Witchcraft, focusing in particular on those sections refuting the sensationalist accusations of the tabloid press.
However Gardner's increasing desire for publicity, much of it ending up negative, caused conflict with Valiente and other members of his coven like Ned Grove and Derek Boothby. She felt that in repeatedly communicating with the press, he was compromising the coven's security. She was also not enthusiastic about two young people whom Gardner brought into the coven, Jack L. Bracelin and his girlfriend 'Dayonis', stating that "a more qualid pair of spivs it would be hard to find indeed". Two factions emerged within the coven; Valiente led a broadly anti-publicity group, while Gardner led a pro-publicity one. In 1957, Valiente and Grove drew up a list of "Proposed Rules of the Craft" which were partly designed to curtail Gardner's publicity-seeking. From his home in the Isle of Man, he responded that this was not necessary for a series of rules already existed—at which point he produced the Wiccan Laws. These laws limited the control of the High Priestess, which angered Valiente, who later realised that Gardner had simply made them up in response to her own Proposed Laws. In summer 1957, the coven split. According to Valiente, she and her followers "had had enough of the Gospel according to St. Gerald; but we still believed that the real traditional witchcraft lived". According to Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White, "Wicca had experienced its first great schism".