Gerald Gardner, a retired British colonial civil servant with long standing interests in folklore, magic and the occult, later described being initiated in September 1939 into a coven of witches operating in the New Forest area of Hampshire, England, by a woman he identified only by the name Old Dorothy. According to Gardner's account, this coven represented a surviving hereditary witchcraft tradition, and his initiation gave him access to rituals and teachings he would later develop, expand and eventually publish in modified form as the basis of what became Gardnerian Wicca.
Gardner connected his claimed initiation to a wider social circle he described frequenting in the area, including a group he associated with the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, a Hampshire based occult and theatrical society, which he suggested provided a milieu within which the New Forest coven operated. He presented the coven's practices as substantially older than his own involvement, consistent with Margaret Murray's witch-cult thesis, which held considerable scholarly credibility at the time and which Gardner drew on directly to interpret and frame what he said he had encountered.
Gardner did not publish a detailed account of the initiation itself until years afterward, first in a novel, High Magic's Aid, published under a pseudonym in 1949, and then more directly in Witchcraft Today in 1954, by which time the original coven he described was said to have dispersed.