Gerald Brosseau Gardner spent his working life in the rubber and customs services of the Far East, retired to the south coast of England, and in his last fifteen years gave the modern world a religion.
- Born
- 13 June 1884, at Blundellsands, near Liverpool
- Died
- 12 February 1964, at sea off the coast of North Africa
- Buried
- Tunis
- Craft name
- Scire
- Principal books
- High Magic's Aid (1949), Witchcraft Today (1954), The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959)
A childhood abroad
Gardner was born into a prosperous family of Lancashire timber merchants. He was a sickly child, troubled all his life by asthma, and from the age of four he was sent abroad each winter in the charge of a nursemaid, Josephine McCombie, whom he called Com. He spent much of his boyhood in Madeira and the Canary Islands and had almost no formal schooling. He taught himself to read, and never stopped.
In 1900 Com married a tea planter in Ceylon, and the sixteen-year-old Gardner went with her. He was to live in the East for the next thirty-six years.
Planter, customs officer, antiquary
He worked first on tea and rubber estates in Ceylon, then from 1908 in Borneo, and from 1911 in Malaya. In 1923 he entered government service in Malaya, where he worked as an inspector of rubber plantations and later as a customs officer and inspector of the licensed opium shops.
What interested him was not rubber. He got to know the peoples among whom he lived, attended their ceremonies and collected their beliefs about magic. He became an authority on the Malay dagger, the keris, and in 1936 published a monograph on Malay weapons that is still cited. He took part in archaeological digs. He was, in short, a self-taught anthropologist of the old amateur kind, with a collector's eye and a relish for anything curious.
In 1927, on leave in England, he married Dorothea Rosedale, a nurse, always known as Donna. She never took any part in his witchcraft and never stood in its way, and they were married for thirty-three years.
Retirement and the New Forest
Gardner retired in 1936 at the age of fifty-one and came home to a country he hardly knew. He joined a naturist club for the sake of his health, travelled, and wrote a novel set in ancient Cyprus, A Goddess Arrives, which appeared in 1939. In 1938 he and Donna settled at Highcliffe, on the south coast at the edge of the New Forest.
What happened there is the founding story of the Craft. Through a Rosicrucian theatre company at Christchurch he met a group of people who, he said, revealed themselves to be witches, and in September 1939 they initiated him. He was fifty-five. He said that he was halfway through the rite when he heard the word Wica and realised that the old religion, which he had read about in the works of Margaret Murray, was still alive. How that story should be understood is discussed on the page about the history of Wicca. What is beyond doubt is that from this time witchcraft became the ruling interest of his life.
Writer and founder
In 1947 Gardner called several times on the aged Aleister Crowley, a few months before Crowley's death, and Crowley's ritual writing left its mark on Gardner's early drafts. In 1949, under his Craft name Scire, he published High Magic's Aid, a historical novel in which the rites of the witches were described as fiction, since the witches would not yet allow them to be described as fact.
By then he had bought a plot of woodland beside a naturist club in Hertfordshire and put up a small half-timbered cottage on it. There he gathered a coven of his own. In 1951, the year the Witchcraft Act was repealed, a museum of magic and witchcraft opened at Castletown on the Isle of Man, with Gardner as its resident witch. He bought it in 1954, filled it with his collections, and made the island his home.
Witchcraft Today came out in 1954. It was the first book in which a practising witch described the Craft from the inside, and letters began to arrive from readers who wanted to join. The Meaning of Witchcraft followed in 1959.
The publicist
Gardner believed that the Craft was dying of old age and secrecy, and that only new blood could save it. He therefore talked to journalists, posed for photographs and appeared on television, with results that were sometimes useful and sometimes lurid. His High Priestess, Doreen Valiente, thought he was endangering everyone, and in 1957 she and part of the coven broke with him.
He carried on. In his last years he initiated and trained several remarkable High Priestesses, who founded covens in the north of England, in London and in Scotland, and through one of them the Craft reached the United States in 1963. Almost every Gardnerian line now in existence passes through one or another of those women.
Death at sea
Donna died in 1960, and Gardner's own health was failing. He took to spending the winters in warmer countries. On the morning of 12 February 1964, returning by ship from Lebanon, he died of a heart attack at the breakfast table. He was seventy-nine. He was buried the next day at Tunis, the ship's next port of call, with only the captain at the graveside. A few years later one of his High Priestesses, Eleanor Bone, learned that the cemetery was to be cleared, and raised the money to have him moved to another, where he lies still.
The man and his legacy
Those who knew Gardner describe a tall, white-haired, sunburned man with a pointed beard, tattooed forearms and a bronze bracelet, who was kindly, generous, inquisitive and funny, and who loved to tease. He was also vain. He liked to be addressed as Doctor on the strength of degrees that no university has been able to confirm, and he was capable of improving a story.
How much of Wicca he found and how much he made will never be settled to everyone's satisfaction. It may not matter as much as it once seemed to. Whatever he was given in the New Forest, he worked on it for twenty-five years with scholarship, imagination and stubbornness. He had the sense to recruit people more gifted than himself, and the grace, mostly, to let them improve what he had done. When he died, the Craft consisted of a few dozen people in a handful of covens. It has not stopped growing since.