Robert Cochrane (witch)

Robert Cochrane, who was born as Roy Bowers, was an English occultist who founded the tradition of Witchcraft known as The Clan of Tubal Cain.
Born in a working-class family in West London, he became interested in occultism after attending a Society for Psychical Research lecture, taking a particular interest in witchcraft. He founded one coven, but it soon collapsed.
He began to claim to have been born to a hereditary family of witches whose practices stretched back to at least the 17th century; these statements have later been dismissed. He subsequently went on to found a tradition known as The Clan of Tubal Cain, through which he propagated his Craft. In 1966, he died by suicide.
Cochrane continues to be seen as a key inspirational figure in the traditional witchcraft movement.
Ever since his death, a number of Neopagan and magical groups have continued to adhere to his teachings.

Early life

As noted by Michael Howard, "factual details about Cochrane's early life are scant". He was born in an area between Hammersmith and Shepherd's Bush in West London into a family of eight children. He later described it as a "slum", though this has been refuted by family members, who considered it a "respectable working class area". There, he lived through the Blitz. Some of his family emigrated to Australia, while he went to art school, living a bohemian lifestyle. His aunt would later claim that he first took an interest in occultism after attending a talk of the Society for Psychical Research in Kensington.
During the early 1950s, he joined the army as a part of his national service, but went absent without leave; as punishment, he was sentenced to 90 days imprisonment in a military prison in Colchester. He admitted to having a violent temper in his youth, but calmed after meeting Jane, whom he would later marry. For a time he worked for London Transport as a blacksmith in a foundry; one potential reason why he adopted the blacksmith Tubal Cain as a part of the mythos for his tradition. He and Jane later worked as bargees transporting coal around the English Midlands, taking an interest in the folklore of the Bargee community, later believing that it contained traces of the "Old Faith". By the start of the 1960s, he was living with Jane and their son on a London County Council-run council estate near to Slough, Berkshire; he did not like the neighbours, considering them "the biggest load of monkeys there have been trained since the Ark." He worked as a typographical draughtsman in an office, but disliked his job. He founded a witches' coven, but it soon broke up as one member died and he fell out with another.
Later, in the 1960s, he claimed that members of his family had been practitioners of an ancient pagan witch-cult since at least the 17th century, and that two of them had been executed for it. Claiming that his great-grandfather had been "the last Grand Master of the Staffordshire witches", he said that his grandparents had abandoned the Craft and converted to Methodism, for which his great-grandfather had cursed them. He said that his father had practised witchcraft, but that he kept it a secret, and made his wife promise to not tell his son, Robert. Despite her oath, according to Cochrane, after his father's death, her mother did in fact tell him, at which he embraced his heritage. He asserted that his Aunt Lucy actually taught him all about the faith. However, these claims would later be denounced by members of his own family. His nephew, Martin Lloyd, has refuted that the family were ever Witches, insisting that they were Methodists, while his wife Jane also later asserted that Cochrane's claims to have come from a hereditary Witch-Cult were bogus.

Founding the Clan of Tubal Cain

Cochrane formed his second coven, which provided the basis for the Clan of Tubal Cain, in the early 1960s. Searching for members, he placed an advert in the Manchester Guardian requesting that anyone interested in Graves' The White Goddess contact him; he received a response from the schoolteacher Ronald Milland White, known to his friends as "Chalky". White then introduced him to George Arthur Stannard, who ran a betting shop near Kings Cross in Central London. White and Stannard joined this nascent coven, the latter taking up the position of Summoner. Describing his creation of his Witchcraft tradition, later Maid of the Clan Shani Oates remarked that "Like any true craftsman, he was able to mold raw material into a magical synthesis, creating a marvelous working system, at once instinctively true and intrinsically beautiful."
The group performed their rituals either at Cochrane's house, or, more often, at Burnham Beeches, though they also performed rituals at the South Downs, after which they would stay the night at Doreen Valiente's flat in Brighton.

Cochrane's Craft

The Clan of Tubal Cain revere a Horned God and Fate, expressed as the Pale Faced Goddess, named Hekate. The Goddess was viewed as "the White Goddess", a term taken from Robert Graves' book of the same name. The God was associated with fire, the underworld and time, and was described as "the goat-god of fire, craft, lower magics, fertility and death". The God was known by several names, most notable Tubal Cain, Bran, Wayland and Herne. Cochrane's tradition held that these two deities had a son, the Horn Child, who was a young sun god.
While there were some similarities to this and early Wicca, differences between the two also existed, for instance, Gardnerians always worked skyclad, or naked, whereas Cochrane's followers wore black hooded robes. Similarly, Cochrane's coven did not practice scourging, as Gardner's did. Cochrane himself disliked Gardner and the Gardnerians and often ridiculed them, even coining the term "Gardnerian" himself.
Whilst they used ritual tools, they differed somewhat from those used by Gardner's coven. The main five tools in Cochrane's Craft were a ritual knife, a staff known as a stang, a cup, a stone, and a ritual cord worn by the coven members. Cochrane never made use of a Book of Shadows or similar such books, but worked from a "traditional way of doing things", which was both "spontaneous and shamanistic". Valiente notes that this spontaneity was partly because the Cochrane coven did not use a Book of Shadows in which structured rituals were pre-recorded, leading to more creativity.

Cochrane's later years

Cochrane arose to public prominence in November 1963, when he published an article titled "Genuine Witchcraft is Defended" in Psychic News, a weekly Spiritualist publication. In it, he outlined his beliefs regarding Witchcraft, and first publicly made the claim that he came from a hereditary line of Witches.
In 1964, further individuals joined the Clan. Among these was Evan John Jones, who would later become the Magister of The Clan of Tubal Caine, and an accomplished author upon the subject of witchcraft. Jones had met Cochrane through his wife Jane, as they both worked at the same company.

Witchcraft Research Association and Gardnerianism

His friend and correspondent, the Qabbalist and ceremonial magician William G. Gray introduced him to John Math, a practising Witch and the son of the Earl of Gainsborough. Math joined the Clan, and invited Cochrane to publish some of his articles in Pentagram, the newsletter of the Witchcraft Research Association, which Math had recently co-founded along with Sybil Leek.
Cochrane took a particularly hostile attitude toward the Gardnerian tradition of Wicca, deeming its founder, Gerald Gardner, to be a con man and sexual deviant. He referred to the tradition as "Gardnerism" and its adherents as "Gardnerians", the latter of which would become the standard term for such practitioners. Upon examining Cochrane's writings, Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White has identified four possible reasons for this animosity. First, Cochrane disliked the publicity seeking that a variety of prominent Gardnerians, had embarked on; they appeared on television and in tabloid newspapers to present their tradition as the face of Wicca in Britain, which angered Cochrane, whose own tradition differed from Gardnerism in focus. Second, Cochrane disliked Gardnerism's focus on ritual liturgy and magic, instead of emphasising a mystical search for gnosis, while third, Cochrane appeared jealous of the success that Gardnerism had achieved, which was far in advance of that achieved by his own tradition. The fourth point purported by Doyle White was that Cochrane might have been hostile to Gardnerism as a result of a poor experience with it in the past.

Doreen Valiente and the Clan's break-up

In 1964 Cochrane met Doreen Valiente, who had formerly been a High Priestess of the Gardnerian Bricket Wood coven, through mutual friends which he had met at a gathering at Glastonbury Tor held by the Brotherhood of the Essenes. The two became friends, and Valiente joined the Clan of Tubal Cain. She later remarked that there were certain things in this coven that were better than those in Gardner's, for instance she thought that " believed in getting close to nature as few Gardnerian witches at that time seemed to do". She also commented on how Cochrane did not seem to want much publicity, as Gardner had, something she admired. However, she eventually became dissatisfied with Cochrane over some of his practices.
Cochrane often insulted and mocked Gardnerian witches, which annoyed Valiente. This reached such an extreme that at one point in 1966 he called for "a Night of the Long Knives of the Gardnerians", at which point Valiente in her own words, "rose up and challenged him in the presence of the rest of the coven. I told him that I was fed up with listening to all this senseless malice, and that, if a 'Night of the Long Knives' was what his sick little soul craved, he could get on with it, but he could get on with it alone, because I had better things to do." She left the coven and never came back.
After Doreen's departure, Cochrane committed adultery with a new woman who had joined the coven, and, according to other coven members, did not care that his wife Jane knew. In May 1966, Jane left Cochrane, initiating divorce proceedings and considering performing a death rite against her husband involving the sacrifice of a black cockerel. Without her, the coven collapsed.
Cochrane was also aware of Charles Cardell, who ran his own coven in Suffolk, but disliked him.