Credited with “saving Wicca from total extinction”, founder of the “Gardnerian Tradition” of Wicca. According to Gardner and his cronies, Gardner, being an amateur folklorist, discovered a cult of goddess worshiping Pagans who were the witches of Margaret Murray’s “Dianic Witchcraft” thesis. These witches called their religion Wicca, and initiated him into the cult. The cult supposedly went back to the Stone Age, and had adapted the rituals over time. Gardner said the Wiccans went underground during the witch hunt era, for which he coined the phrase “The Burning Times”. Gardner revealed information about Wicca in a series of books, published in the 1950's. He appeared on the BBC, gave lectures and interviews to promote Wicca...all the while claiming “witches don’t proselytize”!

     Not everyone bought Gardner’s incredible story. Folklorists and anthropologists found it strange that somehow this Stone Age Pagan cult had remained secret for thousands of years in a small place like England. Historian Ronald Hutton has even noted secret societies in England aren’t very secret, and can easily be tracked [ref?]. The folklore society he belonged to rejected for publication in their journal an article detailing Wicca that Gardner wrote. Folkorists also noted the witchcraft described by Gardner was nothing like the known and well documented forms of witchcraft of the British Isles.

     Occultists wanted to believe, however. They were desperate for it. People who had grown dissatisfied with Satanism, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and Spiritualism could now indulge in the kinky nude rites of Gardnerian Wicca that involved being tied up, flogged, and of course “The Great Rite”, sex. The British press treated the whole thing as a joke at first. One article featured a cartoon of naked people dancing around a fire, with the men chasing the women. It certainly seemed Wicca was just another swinging sex club of the 60's to outsiders.

     Adian Kelly, the “Traditionhead” for a Wiccan “denomination” if you will, called the "New Reformed Orthodox Order of The Golden Dawn” did an expose of Gardner that was published very briefly in 1991. Kelly discovered things which forced many Wiccans to change their claims about Gardner. Kelly discovered Gardner was a sado-masochist and nudist, as well as a feminist who enjoyed being tied up and beaten, and  had penchants for knives and writing in archaic English. It seems a mighty strange coincidence that Gardner happened to find a cult...allegedly going back to the Stone Age...that practiced all of his fetishes!

     Being a disciple of Aleister Crowley, Gardner created Wicca primarily so he could fulfill his fetish of being beaten by strong willed women, according to Wiccan tradition head Aidan Kelly. Gardner stole rituals from Thelema, The Golden Dawn, Freemasonry, the book  The Greater Key of Solomon, poetry of Rudyard Kipling, and even legends of Gothic Satanism to create Wicca (although I should point out again Wicca and Satanism are not the same thing, as most people already know). After doing much investigation into Wicca which included reading Gardner’s original drafts for the Wiccan Book of Shadows, Kelly drew this conclusion;

” [M]any of the Book of Shadows rituals did not exist in 1954 (when Witchcraft Today was published) but instead were still being written...[T]he major sources from which the rituals had been constructed included: (a) Mather's edition of theGreater Key of Solomon; (b) Aleister Crowley's Magic in Theory and Practice; (c) Leland's Aradia (d) some Masonic rituals akin to those described by Duncan and those of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (aside from those transmitted by Crowley); and (e) Margaret Murray's The Witch Cult in Western Europe. There were also bits and pieces from other works by Leland, Jane E. Harrison, Gilbert Murray, James Frazier, and other great classicists from the 19th century. That accounted for EVERYTHING in the rituals…There was nothing left that differed in any important way from what you can find in those sources-but that is NOT at all what Gardner had claimed” (Crafting The Art of Magic by Adian Kelly, Page xvii)

     Gerald Garndner claimed he had been allowed to copy a Wicca coven’s Book of Shadows, which in reality, was his own creation. Kelly was allowed access to Gardner original manuscripts, and chronicled the various stages of development the book went through. In it’s earliest stage, it was said to have been “80% Crowley’s writings”. When Doreen Valiente was intitated into the cult, she recognized the Book of Shadows was lifted from Crowley. Gardner told her basically to write a better one if she thought she could. She continued with the hoax, and re-wrote the book, adding her own poetry. But elements of Crowley can stll be found in Wicca. The most obvious one is the initiation to the 2nd Degree.

      It’s blatantly obvious that the Wiccan Third Degree ritual mentioned on Wicca: The Old Religion?  page  is plagiarized from Crowley's Gnostic Mass word for word. Honestly, who could believe peasant farmers living in rural England could write things like

“...Marvel beyond imagination, soul of infinite space.....”?

    Apparently a lot of Wiccans do! The rituals of Crowley and Wicca have many similarities; such as the enthronement of the priestess upon the altar, and the consecration of cakes and wine, the eights Sabbats of Wicca, sex magick rituals, etc. Even the moto of Thelema “Do What Thou Will” sounds strikingly similar to the Wiccan Rede “An It Harm None, Do What Ye Wilt”. .

      Gardner rewrote things such as 'I am alone; there is no God where I am' to become 'I am alone, the Lord within ourselves' Crowley's 'peace unutterable, rest, ecstacy' became 'peace unutterable, rest, the ecstacy of the Goddess'. The public at large certainly knew nothing of what the Book of Shadows contained at the time, and likely didn’t read Crowley’s obscure books either. Knowing that his plagiarism would might be discovered eventually, Gardner attempted to create a cover story in his book Witchcraft Today:

“The only man I can think of who could have invented the rites was the late Aleister Crowley. When I met him he was most interested to hear that I was a member, and said he had been inside when he was very young, but would not say whether he had rewritten anything or not. But the witch practices are entirely different in method from any kind of magic he wrote about, and he described very many kinds. There are indeed certain expressions and certain words used which smack of Crowley; possibly he borrowed things from the cult writings, or more likely someone may have borrowed expressions from him.”

      Gardner was obviously lying through his teeth when he made this statement. He tries to make it sound like he had at best a passing friendship with Crowley, and fails to mention he was  in Crowley's O.T.O.! Gardner was a member of Crowley's organization, not the other way around. Since Gerald Gardner was not only a member, but a high ranking member of Crowley's organization no less, it means he was certainly well aware of Crowley's writings. In the “Minerval Initiation” of the O.T.O.:, Gardner would have stood bound hand and foot, blindfolded,, and then heard the words, 'I give unimaginable joys upon earth: certainty, not faith, etc, etc,...all this while standing at swordpoint, just like in Wiccan initiations. At the end of the ritual, the initiate is given a copy of Crowley’sBook of the Law, much like how a newly initiated Wiccan is given a copy of theBook of Shadows. Here we see two occult organizations with exactly the same words and similar initiation ritual. It is absolutely impossible this is a coincidence, or that Gardner could have somehow missed this!

      Wicca is compiled from many sources Aleister Crowley would have certainly been familiar with (such as Freemasonry and the Golden Dawn), so why would Wicca be “unlike any from of magick Crowley had ever seen”, as Gardner claims? Nor was it likely that Crowley ever was initiated into Wicca, because he wrote down every detail of his occult studies and practices. He never mentions Wicca in any of his voluminous writings, not even once. If Crowley was so dog gone interested in Wicca as Gardner claims, why did he not make some kind of mention of it? His diaries from the time he knew Gardner only mention him dropping by for visits, but no mention about Wicca or ever coming into contact with a cult of stone age goddess worshipers living in England. 

    That’s hardly something he would have omitted! Crowley would have been well aware what such a discovery would have meant, and he would have certainly have mentioned it somewhere in his writings.  He also doesn’t mention knowing Sybil Leek or her family as she later claimed, “babysitting” Alex Sanders or knowing his family as he later claimed, or ever knowing or meeting “Old George Pickingill”, and learning Wicca from him as Lugh later claimed.

    Gerald Garnder;  a perverted liar who created the Wiccan hoax.