Doreen Valiente: The Woman Who Wrote Wicca's Scripture

Wicca has no bible, but it has a text that functions like one. It is called the Charge of the Goddess, it is spoken at Wiccan initiations and at full-moon rites from Cornwall to California, and for most of the twentieth century nobody could say for certain who wrote it. The answer turned out to be a civil servant from south London who joined a coven in 1953, found its central liturgy embarrassing, and rewrote it. Her name was Doreen Valiente, and the story of that rewriting is more interesting than the legend that grew around it.

The documented life

She was born Doreen Edith Dominy on 4 January 1922 in Colliers Wood, then in Surrey, now part of south London. She married three times: Joanis Vlachopoulos, a merchant seaman, in 1941, who was lost at sea within the year; Casimiro Valiente, a Spanish refugee of the Civil War, in 1944, whose name she kept for the rest of her life; and Ron Cooke in 1975. She lived most of her later life in Brighton, in a flat in a council tower block called Tyson Place. She died there on 1 September 1999 of pancreatic cancer.

Between those dates she wrote five books that are still in print — Where Witchcraft Lives (1962), An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present (1973), Natural Magic (1975), Witchcraft for Tomorrow (1978) and The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989) — and a body of ritual verse that is recited by people who have never heard her name. The historian Ronald Hutton, whose The Triumph of the Moon (1999) remains the standard academic history of modern pagan witchcraft, called her rewriting of the Charge "her greatest single contribution to Wicca."

That is the skeleton. Almost everything interesting about her sits in the gap between what she actually did and what has since been said about her, and she would have appreciated the distinction: her own best work was exactly that kind of checking.

Midsummer 1953: what she found in the Book of Shadows

Valiente wrote to Gerald Gardner after reading a newspaper piece about him, and was initiated at Midsummer 1953 at the house of Edith Woodford-Grimes near Christchurch, Dorset. Within a year she was High Priestess of his coven. She was thirty-one, well read, and — this matters for everything that follows — a competent poet with an ear for cadence.

Gardner had told the world that his rituals descended from a surviving pre-Christian religion. Valiente read the Book of Shadows and recognised large parts of it. She recognised them because she had read the sources. In The Rebirth of Witchcraft she describes confronting Gardner with the fact that his central liturgy drew heavily on Aleister Crowley, and being told that the text as received was fragmentary and had needed filling out. Her response was to offer to fill it out better.

The disagreement was not academic. Crowley had died in 1947 as Britain's most notorious occultist, trailing tabloid headlines about drugs and "the wickedest man in the world." A new religion trying to present itself as an ancient nature faith did not want its holiest text to sound like him. Valiente said so plainly, and set about removing him.

The Charge of the Goddess, and where its words came from

A "charge" is a Masonic term: the address read to a candidate at an initiation. Gardner, a Freemason, used the word in that sense. His version — titled Leviter Veslis, "the lifting of the veil" — is preserved in the earliest layer of the Book of Shadows and was first published in part in Witchcraft Today (1954, p. 42), where Gardner suggested it "came from the time when Romans or strangers came in."

It did not. It came from two books he owned. The first is Charles Godfrey Leland's Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), a collection of Tuscan folk material that Leland presented as the scripture of a surviving Italian witch-cult. The second is The Blue Equinox — The Equinox vol. III no. 1, Crowley's 1919 omnibus, which contains the essay "The Law of Liberty," Liber LXV, "Khabs Am Pekht" and the Gnostic Mass, all four of which leave traces in Gardner's rituals.

Leland is out of copyright and freely readable, so anyone can check this in about ten minutes. In chapter one of Aradia, the goddess Aradia instructs her followers:

A few lines later the same passage promises that the hearers "shall all be freed from slavery, / And so ye shall be free in everything," and that "as the sign that ye are truly free, / Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men / And women also." Anyone who has heard the Charge read aloud will recognise all of it. The opening instruction of Wicca's central text is Leland, lightly reworded.

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The count: who actually wrote the Charge

The most useful thing ever done to this text was done by the American writer Ceisiwr Serith, who took the standard version, set it beside every identified source, and counted the words. His analysis builds on earlier work by Stewart Farrar (1971), Janet and Stewart Farrar (1981) and Aidan Kelly (1991), and it is worth reproducing because it converts an argument into an arithmetic.

Of the 498 words in the version Kelly prints, the attribution comes out as follows:

Two things follow from that table. The first is that Valiente wrote a plurality of the Charge but not a majority: a third of it is hers, and it is the third that does the theological work — the goddess who is the beauty of the earth and the moon among the stars, the promise of reunion with the dead, the line about the cup and the cauldron. That material has no identified source. It is simply good writing, and it is why the text survived.

The second is stranger, and is the subject of the next section.

She edited Crowley out, and Crowley is still second

Valiente rewrote the Charge specifically because there was too much Crowley in it. After the rewrite, Crowley is still the second-largest contributor — ahead of Leland, ahead of Gardner, behind only Valiente herself.

The clearest case is the line most often quoted as the ethical heart of Wiccan practice. In Crowley's essay "The Law of Liberty," published in The Blue Equinox in 1919, the sentence reads:

It survives in the Charge almost word for word. So does "nor do I demand aught in sacrifice," so does "I give unimaginable joys," so does the address to the Star Goddess, so does "beauty and strength." Serith's tally credits 83 words as direct Crowley quotation and a further 40 as Crowley edited by Gardner or Valiente. Crowley is out of copyright now — he died in 1947 — so these lines can be set side by side and checked by anyone.

This is not a gotcha, and it should not be read as one. It is what happens to any liturgy: the phrases that work survive the editor's intentions. Valiente removed the material she found theologically objectionable — the Thelemic law, the explicitly Crowleyan self-identification — and kept the cadences that sounded right in a circle at night. Every tradition with a prayer book has done the same thing. What is unusual about Wicca is that the process happened recently enough to be documented, by people who are still checking.

1957 and 1964: the break, and the Rede

The partnership lasted four years. Gardner wanted press coverage; Valiente thought the coverage was cheapening the thing it advertised. In 1957 she and a coven member named Ned Grove drafted a set of "Proposed Rules for the Craft" that would, among other effects, have limited Gardner's dealings with newspapers. Gardner responded by producing a body of "Wiccan Laws" which he presented as traditional and which had the convenient effect of subordinating a High Priestess to her High Priest. Valiente did not believe the Laws were old. The coven split that summer. Her own summary, in The Rebirth of Witchcraft, was that she had had enough of "the Gospel according to St. Gerald."

She did not leave the movement. In 1964 she became the second president of the Witchcraft Research Association after Sybil Leek resigned, and her welcome letter opened the first issue of its newsletter Pentagram in August of that year. That October, at the association's Halloween dinner, she gave the speech in which the Wiccan Rede — the couplet beginning "Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill" — makes its first recorded public appearance.

Whether she composed it is genuinely disputed. Ethan Doyle White has argued that she both created and named it; Don Frew has argued that she was restating something Gardner had already alluded to. The honest position is that 1964 is the first documented public statement and the rest is reconstruction. It is also worth noticing what the Rede is structurally: a restriction placed on Crowley's "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law." The harm clause is the difference, and it is the difference on which a great deal of modern pagan ethics rests.

Between 1964 and 1966 she also worked with Robert Cochrane, who ran a rival tradition and claimed hereditary descent. She did not believe the claim, and left after he spoke of a "Night of the Long Knives" against Gardnerians. Cochrane died at Midsummer 1966. She wrote him an elegy anyway.

Looking for Old Dorothy: the research that cut both ways

Gardner said he had been initiated in 1939 by a New Forest witch he called "Old Dorothy." By the 1970s scholars had begun to treat her as an invention; Jeffrey Burton Russell said so in print. Valiente, who was by then in her sixties, decided to find out.

She went to the records — birth, marriage and death certificates, wills, local registers — and established that Dorothy Clutterbuck was a real woman who had lived where Gardner said she had. She published the outline of the life as "Looking for Old Dorothy," an appendix to Janet and Stewart Farrar's The Witches' Way (1984). It is the single best piece of documentary research anyone in the movement had done up to that point, and it was done by an amateur with a correspondence habit and a reader's ticket.

Here is the part that does her most credit. Her research proved the woman existed. It did not prove the woman was a witch, and the historians who followed her into the archive concluded that she probably was not: Hutton and Leo Ruickbie both read Clutterbuck's surviving diaries and found a conventional Anglican country gentlewoman, in mourning for her husband in the year Gardner claimed to have been initiated. Philip Heselton read the same diaries and disagreed. The argument is still open.

What is not open is the method. Valiente set out to defend her tradition and produced evidence that settled one question and reopened a larger one. That is what real research does, and she published it anyway.

How the Charge became American — and what is still not proven

The Charge reached the United States by being printed, repeatedly and without much permission. Lady Sheba — Jessie Wicker Bell, of Michigan — published a Book of Shadows with Llewellyn in 1971 that included it, to considerable anger from practitioners who regarded the material as oathbound. Stewart Farrar had already printed a version in What Witches Do in 1971. By 1979, when Starhawk included it in The Spiral Dance, the text had been through an editorial pass of its own: Serith notes that her version removes every phrase containing the word "man." American Wicca took an English liturgy assembled from a Victorian folklorist and an Edwardian magician, and edited it again. That is how living liturgy behaves.

One claim about Valiente should be handled with more care than it usually gets. It is frequently written that she worked at Bletchley Park during the war, in Hut 18, as a Foreign Office translator intercepting German agent traffic. The claim traces to Philip Heselton's 2016 biography, and the supporting material is circumstantial: a friend's memory that she disappeared for long stretches, her later familiarity with Colossus, an inference about how she met her first husband. No archival document has been published in support of it. It may well be true. It is not, at present, demonstrated, and a woman who spent her sixties checking certificates in a records office deserves to have her own legend held to the standard she used.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Charles Godfrey Leland, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (London, 1899) — full text consulted directly; public domain.
• Aleister Crowley, "The Law of Liberty," The Equinox vol. III no. 1 ("The Blue Equinox"), 1919; Liber LXV; "Khabs Am Pekht" — same volume.
• Ceisiwr Serith, "The Sources of the Charge of the Goddess" — line-by-line comparison and word count of the standard version.
• Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Witchcraft (Robert Hale, 1989), esp. pp. 60–62 on the rewriting of the Charge.
• Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford University Press, 1999).
• Philip Heselton, Doreen Valiente: Witch (Doreen Valiente Foundation / Centre for Pagan Studies, 2016).
• Jonathan Tapsell, Ameth: The Life and Times of Doreen Valiente (Avalonia, 2013).
• Aidan Kelly, Crafting the Art of Magic (Llewellyn, 1991), pp. 52–54 and 114–115 — the printed text of both prose versions.
• Janet and Stewart Farrar, The Witches' Way (Robert Hale, 1984), Appendix A: Doreen Valiente, "Looking for Old Dorothy."
• Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today (Rider, 1954), p. 42 — first partial publication of the Charge.
• World Religions and Spirituality Project, profile "Doreen Valiente."
• The Doreen Valiente Foundation, "Our Collection."