If Gerald Gardner gave the Craft its shape, Doreen Valiente gave it its voice. Most of the words that witches around the world know by heart are hers.
- Born
- 4 January 1922, in south London
- Died
- 1 September 1999, in Brighton
- Craft name
- Ameth
- Initiated
- Midsummer 1953, by Gerald Gardner
- Principal books
- Where Witchcraft Lives (1962), An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present (1973), Natural Magic (1975), Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978), The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989)
Early life
She was born Doreen Edith Dominy in the southern suburbs of London and grew up partly in the West Country. By her own account she had her first experience of the uncanny as a child, looking at the moon from her garden, and was working simple magic in her teens. Her parents, alarmed, sent her to a convent school. She walked out of it at fifteen and did not go back.
During the Second World War she worked as a translator in the government's code-breaking service. She was married and widowed within the first years of the war, and in 1944 she married Casimiro Valiente, a Spanish veteran, whose name she kept. Through the 1940s she read everything she could find on the occult, and she knew the work of Aleister Crowley thoroughly, which was soon to matter.
Finding the witches
In 1952 she read a magazine article about the new museum of witchcraft on the Isle of Man, and wrote to ask whether the witches it mentioned were real. Her letter was passed to Gerald Gardner. They met that autumn at the house of Gardner's old friend Dafo, near the New Forest, and at Midsummer 1953 he initiated her there. She took the name Ameth.
Within a short time she was High Priestess of his Hertfordshire coven.
Rewriting the Book
When Gardner gave her his Book of Shadows to copy, Valiente recognised long passages in it at once. They were Crowley's. She told Gardner that this would not do: Crowley's reputation was notorious, and material so easily traced would discredit the Craft. Gardner replied, in effect, that if she thought she could do better she was welcome to try.
She could, and she did. Over the next four years she went through the Book, cutting much of the borrowed matter and writing new text in its place. Her greatest single achievement was the Charge of the Goddess, which she recast first in verse and then in the prose version that is now recited by witches all over the world. She wrote, or wrote with Gardner, the chant known as the Witches' Rune, and a number of the invocations used at the Sabbats. It is no exaggeration to say that the Gardnerian liturgy, as a piece of English, is largely hers.
She took a patchwork and left a poem.
Hesper, founding High Priestess of the Coven of Cythrawl
The break with Gardner
Valiente was a private woman, and Gardner's appetite for publicity dismayed her. Matters came to a head in 1957. She and others in the coven drew up a set of proposed rules intended, among other things, to keep members from talking to the press. Gardner answered by producing a document of ancient Craft laws that none of them had seen before, and which among its provisions required a High Priestess to retire gracefully when she was no longer young. Valiente did not believe the laws were ancient, and said so. She left, taking part of the coven with her.
The two were reconciled before Gardner died, and she always spoke of him afterwards with affection and with a clear eye.
A life of inquiry
Valiente never treated the Craft as finished or its history as closed. In the 1960s she worked for a time with Robert Cochrane, whose witchcraft was of a very different stamp, and parted from him when he turned to abusing the Gardnerians. She studied the folklore of Sussex, where she had lived since 1956. She wrote five books, plain in style and generous in what they shared, and in Witchcraft for Tomorrow she published a complete set of rites for people who had no coven to go to, because she thought it wrong that they should be shut out.
She also did what Gardner's critics had said could not be done. They had long maintained that Dorothy Clutterbuck, the woman in whose house Gardner said he was initiated, was a figment. In the early 1980s Valiente went to the public records, searched for months, and produced her birth and death certificates. Old Dorothy had been real.
In her last book, The Rebirth of Witchcraft, she set down her own memories of the Craft's first decades, frankly and without malice. It remains the best account by anyone who was there.
Legacy
Doreen Valiente died in Brighton on 1 September 1999, at the age of seventy-seven. A volume of her poems was published the following year. In 2013 a blue commemorative plaque was unveiled on the block of flats where she had lived, the first in Britain to honour a witch.
She is often called the mother of modern witchcraft, a title she would have thought a little much. But there are very few witches anywhere, of any tradition, who do not use words that she wrote, and most of them do so without knowing her name. She would not have minded that. She did mind about honesty, about scholarship and about kindness, and the Craft is better in all three for her having been in it.