The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle holds more of Gerald Gardner than most visitors expect from a single collection. Alongside the 2002 portrait by Lisa Berkshire, the museum's catalogue lists a separate group of objects, numbered consecutively in its records, that once belonged to Gardner personally and were exhibited during his lifetime at the Witches Mill, his own museum on the Isle of Man. Among them is a boar's tooth amulet, mounted in silver, that Gardner's own accompanying documentation described as a strong talisman for protection.
The distinction between that group of objects and the 2002 portrait is worth holding onto. The amulet and its companions are personal magical items Gardner actually owned and used, donated to the museum later by a collector rather than by Gardner himself. The portrait is a likeness commissioned for an exhibition, made by someone who never knew him, decades after his death in 1964.
Both kinds of object end up in the same museum for the same underlying reason: Gardner was a public figure whose founding of a religious movement is a matter of documented history, open to painters, collectors and museum curators the way any notable founder's public life is open to them. What none of it includes, and what the museum's own catalogue makes no claim to hold, is the oathbound material that actually constitutes Gardnerian initiation. A museum can collect a founder. It cannot collect what he swore his initiates to keep.