Doreen Valiente

Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente
File:Doreen Valiente.JPG Valiente at a Wiccan altar at Brighton in 1962
Born	January 4 1922 Mitcham, South London, England
Died	September 1, 1999(1999-09-01) (aged 77) Brighton, England
Occupation(s)	Wiccan Priestess, Writer

Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente (4 January, 1922, Mitcham, South London, England – 1 September, 1999, Brighton, England), who used the craft name Ameth, was a highly influential figure in the neopagan religion of Wicca, being a High Priestess of Gardnerian Wicca and an initiate of Cochrane's Craft. She was initiated into the craft through the early Bricket Wood coven, led by Gerald Gardner.

Valiente produced many important scriptural texts for Wicca, such as The Witches Rune and the Charge of the Goddess, which were incorporated into the first Book of Shadows. Valiente also published five books about Wicca in her lifetime. She has been referred to as "the mother of modern Witchcraft".

Biography

Early Life, 1922-1940

Born Doreen Dominy in southern London, she was the daughter of Christian parents named Harry and Edith. However they soon moved near to Horley in Surrey. The young Doreen was convinced by the age of 13 that she possessed the power to use magic, and used it to help protect her mother from a bullying co-worker. When she informed her parents of her actions, they objected to her use of sorcery and sent her to a convent school. By the age of 15 she had left the school and refused to ever go back.

Marriages, 1941-1945

In 1941, whilst working as a secretary in Barry, sputhern Wales, Doreen married a seaman called Joanis Vlachopoulos. He was a part of the Navy and during World War II was declared missing and presumed dead.

In 1944 she married Casimiro Valiente, a Spaniard living in exile from the Spanish civil war, where he had fought on the side of the Free French Forces.

Wicca

Gardner and initiation, 1952-1953

The Valientes moved to Bournemouth after the war. Here, in 1952, Dorothy read an article about witchcraft by Cecil Williamson which mentioned the New Forest Coven. Valiente wrote to Williamson, who passed her letter on to Gerald Gardner.

Doreen and Gardner corresponded for some time before she asked to join his coven. He initially denied the request, but agreed to meet her at the house of a woman known only as Dafo near the New Forest, where he gave her a copy of his novel High Magic's Aid, allegedly to gauge her opinion on ritual nudity and scourging.

On Midsummer 1953 Gardner invited Doreen again to Dafo's house, and it was here that he initiated her into Wicca. That day he had been on his way from the Isle of Man to Stonehenge, to lend his ritual sword to the Druids performing a ritual there.

Bricket Wood Coven, 1953-1957

Valiente joined Gardner's Bricket Wood coven, and soon rose to become its High Priestess. She noticed how much of the material in his Book of Shadows was taken not from ancient sources as Gardner had initially claimed, but from the works of the occultist Aleister Crowley. She confronted Gardner with this, who admitted that the text he had recieved from the New Forest coven had been fragmentary and he had had to fill much of it using various sources. She took the Book of Shadows, and, with Gardner's permission, rewrote much of it, cutting out a lot of sections that had come from Crowley (whose negative reputation Valiente feared). Valiente dramatically rewrote sections such as the Charge of the Goddess and also wrote several poems for the book, such as The Witches Rune. She also helped to create a poem to include the Wiccan Rede within it.

However Gardner's increasing desire for publicity caused conflict with Valiente and other members of his coven. As she would later say:

that as the coven's High Priestess, I felt that by speaking to the press, Gardner was compromising the security of the group and the sincerity of his own teachings

When she, and other coven members, in 1957, confronted him saying that some rules had to be developed, he claimed it was not needed as some already existed, at which point he produced the Wiccan Laws in 1957. These laws limited the control of the High Priestess, which angered Valiente, who, with several other members, left the coven.

Valiente's Coven, 1957-1964

After breaking from Gardner's Bricket Wood coven, she formed her own coven with Ned Grove as High Priest, still following the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca, albeit without the Wiccan laws, which she believed to be entirely an invention of Gardner's.

Clan of Tubal Cain, 1964-1966

After both her mother and Gardner's death in 1964, Valiente joined Robert Cochrane's coven - the Clan of Tubal Cain. However, she soon became dissatisfied with Cochrane, who constantly insulted Gardnerians, and also often took what he called "witches' potions", but which were halluconegenic drugs. She left his coven in 1966, shortly before he comitted ritual suicide at Midsummer.

Writing, 1966-1999

File:Elderly Doreen Valiente WEB.gif

An elderly Doreen Valiente.

In the 1970s and 1980s Valiente gradually became one of the most well respected and influential leaders of Wicca, meriting an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

She wrote five books on the subject, three of which were 'how-to' books designed to teach solitary Wiccans - An ABC of Witchcraft (1972), Natural Magic (1975) and Witchcraft for Tommorrow (1978), and an autobiography entitled The Rebirth of Witchcraft in 1989.

Meanwhile she continued to write poetry, much of which has been published in the book Charge of the Goddess: The Mother of Modern Witchcraft, an example of which is:

There was a young lady called Freeman
Who had an affair with a demon
She said that his cock
was as cold as a rock
Now, what in the Hell could it be, man?
"An Unsolved Problem of Psychic Research", a poem by Valiente.

She was active in her promotion of modern witchcraft and neo-paganism, being particularly keen to emphasise that the movement was not related to Satanism and did not seek publicity for its own sake. She was a notable figure in supporting the development of the Pagan Federation.

Faced with challenges from sceptics Valiente attempted, with some success, to provide evidence for Gardner's claims concerning his initiation, notably by identifying the woman Gardner called 'Old Dorothy' as Dorothy Clutterbuck in 1980, the woman who was supposed to have performed Gardner's initiation, in an essay published in The Witches' Way by Janet and Stewart Farrar.

Death, 1999

Valiente suffered from cancer of the head of pancreas towards the end of her life. In the last few days of her life she was moved to a nursing home, and she died at 6.55am on 1st September 1999, with John Belham-Payne at her side. John Belham-Payne inherited all of Valiente's artefacts, including her Book of Shadows.

Posthomously

Dr Leo Ruickbie examines her life and contribution to Wicca in his Witchcraft Out of the Shadows. According to Dr Ruickbie, Valiente was the 'Mother of Modern Witchcraft', playing a crucial role in re-writing much of Gardner's original ritual material, an assessment supported by Ronald Hutton.

Bibliography

• 1962: Where Witchcraft Lives
• 1973: An ABC of Witchcraft
• 1975: Natural Magic
• 1978: Witchcraft for Tomorrow
• 1989: The Rebirth of Witchcraft
• 2000: Charge of the Goddess, a collection of poems, published posthumously

External links

• Doreen Valiente website
• The Wica - Information on Doreen Valiente and other Craft Elders.
• Doreen Valiente biography

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