However, over half a century earlier a man named Charles Godfrey Leland wrote on many of the same topics later popularized by Gerald Gardner. For example, the theme of witches meeting at the time of the full moon, being nude, calling their ways The Old Religion, celebrating with ritual cakes and wine, and worshipping a god and goddess all appear in Leland's writings on Italian Witchcraft circa 1896.
Charles Godfrey Leland (1824 – 1903) was an American humorist and folklorist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was educated at Princeton University and in Europe.Leland worked in journalism, travelled extensively, and became interested in folklore and folk linguistics, publishing books and articles on American and European languages and folk traditions. Leland worked in a wide variety of trades, achieved recognition as the author of the comic Hans Breitmann’s Ballads, fought in two conflicts, and wrote what was to become a primary source text for Neopaganism half a century later, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches , reportedly containing the traditional beliefs of Italian witchcraft as conveyed him in a manuscript provided by a woman named Maddalena Taluti[2], whom he refers to as his "witch informant.".
Leland's early education was in the United States, and he attended college at Princeton University. After college, Leland went to Europe to continue his studies, first in Germany, at Heidelberg and Munich, and in 1848 at the Sorbonne in Paris. He got involved in the revolution that year, fighting at constructed barricades against the King's soldiers as a captain in the revolution.
In recent times his writings on pagan and Aryan traditions have eclipsed the now largely forgotten Breitmann ballads, influencing the development of Wicca and modern Neo-paganism. In his travels, he made a study of the Gypsies, on whom he wrote more than one book. Leland began to publish a number of books on ethnography, folklore and language. His writings on Algonquian and gypsy culture were part of the contemporary interest in pagan and Aryan traditions.
"Man has within him, if he would but know it, tremendous powers or transcendental faculties of which he has never had any conception."
Leland fabricated a story that shortly after his birth his nurse took him to the family attic and performed a ritual involving a Bible, a key, a knife, lighted candles, money and salt to ensure a long life as a "scholar and a wizard", a fact which his biographers have commented upon as foreshadowing his interest in folk traditions and magic.
In chapter four of his book Gypsy Sorcery & Fortune Telling, published in 1891, Leland makes the earliest connection between Wicca and modern Witchcraft:
"as for the English word witch, Anglo-Saxon Wicca, comes from a root implying wisdom..." Leland's footnote here reads: "Witch. Mediaeval English wicche, both masculine and feminine, a wizard, a witch. Anglo-Saxon wicca, masculine, wicce feminine. Wicca is a corruption of witga, commonly used as a short form of witega, a prophet, seer, magician, or sorcerer. Anglo-Saxon witan, to see, allied to witan, to know..."
[1] Gerald Brousseau Gardner (1884 – 1964), who sometimes used the craft name Scire, was an influential English Wiccan, as well as an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist, writer, weaponry expert and occultist. He was instrumental in bringing the Neopagan religion of Wicca to public attention in Britain and wrote some of its definitive religious texts. He himself typically referred to the faith as "witchcraft" or "the witch-cult", its adherents "the Wica", and he claimed that it was the survival of a pre-Christian pagan Witch cult that he had been initiated into by a New Forest coven in 1939.He published two books on the subject of Wicca, Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), along with a couple of novels, and ran the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft on the Isle of Man, which was devoted to the subject. For this, he has left an enduring legacy on the modern Wiccan and Neopagan movement, and is frequently referred to as "the Father of Wicca".
In 1946, with the end of the Second World War, Gardner and his wife Donna left the New Forest and returned to London. However, Gardner did not want to abandon his new faith, and fearing that it would die out, founded his own coven, the Bricket Wood Coven, with himself as High Priest and Edith Woodford-Grimes[3] as High Priestess. The new group met on the grounds of the Fiveacres Nudist Club, Bricket Wood, outside St Albans, which Gardner, being a keen nudist, had purchased the previous year. They celebrated their rites and rituals for the esbats and sabbats in a building known as the Witches' Cottage, which Gardner had assembled in the centre of the Club's woodland; the cottage itself had been purchased off of his friend, J.S.M Ward, who was a pioneer of the restoration of historical buildings.Alongside his work with the Craft in his coven, Gardner became interested in many other forms of esotericism and the occult around this time. He joined the Ancient Druid Order, an organisation that promoted the Neopagan religion of Druidry, as well as a mystical Christian group, the Ancient British Church, who ordained him as a priest.
With all his faults (and who among us is faultless?), Gerald was a great person, and he did great work in bringing back the Old Religion to many people. I am glad to have known him.
~ Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente (1922 – 1999)~ the 'Mother of Modern Witchcraft'.
[2] Maddalena reportedly worked as a "card reader" telling fortunes in the back streets of Florence, and later married a man named Lorenzo Bruciatelli. Leland soon discovered that Maddalena was a Witch, and employed her to help gather material for his research on Italian Witchcraft.
"a young woman who would have been taken for a Gypsy in England, but in whose face, in Italy, I soon learned to know the antique Etruscan, with its strange mysteries, to which was added the indefinable glance of the Witch. She was from the Romagna Toscana, born in the heart of its unsurpassingly wild and romantic scenery, amid cliffs, headlong torrents, forests, and old legendary castles. I did not gather all the facts for a long time, but gradually found that she was of a Witch family, or one whose members had, from time to immemorial, told fortunes, repeated ancient legends, gathered incantations, and learned how to intone them, prepared enchanted medicines, philtres, or spells. As a girl, her Witch grandmother, aunt, and especially her stepmother brought her up to believe in her destiny as a sorceress, and taught her in the forests, afar from human ear, to chant in strange prescribed tones, incantations or evocations to the ancient gods of Italy, under names but little changed, who are now known as folletti, spiriti, fate, or lari - the Lares or household goblins of the ancient Etruscans."
[3]Edith Rose Woodford-Grimes (1887 – 1975) was an English Wiccan who achieved notoriety as one of the faith's earliest known adherents. She had been a member of the New Forest coven which met during the late 1930s and early 1940s, and through this became a friend and working partner of Gerald Gardner, who would go on to found the Gardnerian tradition with her help. Widely known under the nickname of Dafo, Woodford-Grimes' involvement in the Craft had largely been kept a secret until it was revealed in the late 1990s
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