Every Gardnerian initiate has sworn an oath, and this website is written inside it. It is fair to tell you what that means for what you will and will not find here.
The oath is taken at the first initiation and renewed at each degree. Its words are not given here. Its substance has been public since 1949, when Gerald Gardner printed a form of it in his novel: the new witch swears to keep the secrets of the Art, and to reveal them only to those who are entitled to receive them.
What is kept
Different covens draw the line in slightly different places, but the following are treated as oathbound by nearly all Gardnerians.
- The text of the rites. The words and actions of the initiations and of the other rites in the Book of Shadows.
- The names of the gods. The Goddess and the God are invoked in a Gardnerian circle by particular names, which are given at initiation.
- The names of initiates. No witch reveals that another person is a witch. Each of us decides for ourselves who is to know.
- The place of meeting. The covenstead is somebody's home.
- What passes in the circle. What a member says or does or undergoes in a rite belongs to the coven and goes no further.
What has never been secret
A great deal. That the Craft exists. What it believes about the gods, the world, death and right conduct. The names and dates and meaning of its festivals. How a coven is organised. The names and general use of the working tools. Its history, so far as that is known. How a person may come to be initiated. Gardner published all of this in the 1950s with the knowledge of his coven, and Doreen Valiente, who was stricter than he was about the oath, published a great deal more.
The rule we have followed in writing this website is a simple one. We describe nothing of the rites beyond what Gardner and Valiente themselves put into print or helped others to publish, and for the rest we speak only of our own coven's customs, which are ours to share.
Why keep an oath at all?
Because a mystery has to be met
The first reason is the one that would still hold if there had never been a persecution. The rites of initiation are designed to be undergone by someone who does not know what is coming. Their effect depends on it. To publish them would be like telling the ending of a story to somebody who is halfway through it, except that the story is their own.
Because people can still be hurt
The second reason is practical. It is no longer against the law to be a witch in Britain, and discrimination on grounds of religion is unlawful. Nonetheless, witches have within living memory lost their jobs, their tenancies and the custody of their children when their religion became known, and the word still frightens people. Most of our members are not open about the Craft at work. A few are not open about it to their own families. Their privacy is not ours to spend.
Because trust is the substance of a coven
The third reason is the least obvious and perhaps the most important. A coven is a small group of people who stand before each other without defences. That is only possible among people who are certain of one another's discretion. The oath is the form which that certainty takes. Keeping it, in small things as well as great, is the daily practice by which a coven becomes worth belonging to.
Secrecy and its critics
Not everyone in the wider Wiccan world thinks the oath is a good thing. It has been argued that secrecy breeds elitism, that it shelters bad leaders from scrutiny, and that since so much has been published already the oath protects nothing. Raymond Buckland, a Gardnerian High Priest, founded a whole new tradition in 1973 partly in order to be rid of it.
These are fair points, and we have tried to answer them in the way we behave. We do not think ourselves better than those who practise openly. We have put everything we are free to say on this website. And on the matter of bad leaders, we would draw attention to the next paragraph.
What the oath never covers
The oath protects the mysteries of the Craft. It does not protect wrongdoing. No oath taken in any circle obliges anyone to keep silent about a crime, about abuse, or about pressure put on them for money or sex. If someone ever tells you that your oath forbids you to speak about harm done to you or to another person, they are lying, and you should speak.
Living with the oath
In practice the oath is not a burden. It means that there is a part of one's life that is not for display, in an age when nearly everything is. It means that when a new initiate hears certain words for the first time, they are hearing something that has been kept for them. And it means that a person may sit beside you on a train, reading a paperback, who has stood in a circle at the full moon for forty years, and you will never know.
We rather like that.