Doreen Valiente

Valiente was initiated by Gardner in 1953 and read his ritual material with an eye he did not expect. She recognised large stretches of it, and told him so, as lifted from Aleister Crowley, notably from Liber AL and Liber LXV, and from Leland's Aradia of 1899.

Her objection was partly literary and mostly practical: Crowley's public reputation in 1950s Britain was poisonous, and a new religion could not afford to be read as his front. Gardner, to his credit, told her to do better if she could. She rewrote the Charge of the Goddess, first in verse and then, when initiates stumbled over the goddess-names, in the prose version now used across the Craft. It removed nearly all the borrowed material and replaced it with something in her own voice, and it is the single best-known devotional text modern Paganism has.

She spent the rest of her life as the tradition's conscience on exactly this question. The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989) is her own account, written from inside, and it is unusually candid for a founder-generation memoir: it was Valiente who established that Clutterbuck was a real person, and Valiente who was blunt in print about how much of the Book of Shadows had been assembled from printed sources. She declined to treat the tradition's recency as a scandal to be managed.

Valiente spent her last decades doing something rare in any religious movement: auditing its founding story. Sceptics had long suggested that Dorothy Clutterbuck, the wealthy woman Gardner named in connection with his 1939 initiation, was an invention, a name without a person. Valiente went to the record offices. Working through registers of births, deaths, wills and parish documents, she established that Dorothy Clutterbuck Fordham had lived precisely where the story required, near Highcliffe on the edge of the New Forest, a colonial officer's daughter of conventional public piety who died in 1951 leaving a large estate; she published the findings as an appendix to the Farrars' The Witches' Way in 1984.

The research could not prove the initiation, and Dorothy's surviving diaries, examined later by others, show a woman writing garden verse rather than rituals, but it demolished the claim that she was fictitious, and it modelled a posture: that the Craft was strong enough to be investigated by its own priestesses. She applied the same honesty to her own part in the liturgy, stating plainly which passages were hers, which were Gardner's and which were Crowley's, when silence would have served her reputation better. Her notebooks, library and papers, preserved after her death in 1999 and now held in trust, have become a primary archive for historians of Wicca, which is exactly what she intended them to be.