59 Facts About Doreen Valiente

Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente was an English Wiccan who was responsible for writing much of the early religious liturgy within the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca.

Doreen Valiente went on the following year to work with Robert Cochrane in his coven, the Clan of Tubal Cain, although she later broke from this group.

Doreen Valiente's father, Harry Dominy, was a civil engineer, and he lived with her mother Edith in Colliers Wood.

Harry came from a Methodist background and Edith from a Congregationalist one, however Doreen Valiente was never baptised, as was the custom of the time, due to an argument that Edith had had with the local vicar.

Doreen Valiente later claimed that she had not had a close or affectionate relationship with her parents, whom she characterised as highly conventional and heavily focused on social climbing.

In either late 1934 or 1935, Doreen Valiente's mother left her father and took her to live with maternal relatives in Southampton.

Doreen Valiente first began practising magic at age 13, performing a spell to prevent her mother being harassed by a co-worker; she came to believe that it had worked.

Doreen Valiente's parents were concerned by this behaviour and sent her to a convent school.

Doreen Valiente despised the school and left it at the age of 15, refusing to return.

Doreen Valiente had wanted to go to art school, but instead gained employment in a factory, before moving on to work as a clerk and typist at the Unemployment Assistance Board.

Widowed, during 1942 and 1943 Doreen Valiente had a number of short-term jobs in Wales, which were possibly a cover for intelligence work.

Doreen Valiente had obtained the magical regalia and notebooks of a recently deceased doctor, who had been a member of the Alpha et Omega, a splinter group of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and attempted to learn Hebrew, a language with uses in various forms of ceremonial magic.

Doreen Valiente was particularly interested by John Symonds' book The Great Beast, which was a biography of the occultist Aleister Crowley, who had founded the religion of Thelema in 1904, and following this she avidly read a copy of Crowley's Magick in Theory and Practice which she found in a local library.

Doreen Valiente was something different from the kind of people I had met in esoteric gatherings before.

Doreen Valiente had become familiar with the idea of a pre-Christian witch-cult surviving into the modern period through the works of Charles Godfrey Leland, Margaret Murray, and Robert Graves, although believed that the religion was extinct.

Doreen Valiente told her husband and mother about the visit to Stonehenge, but not about her initiation, of which, she feared, they would not have approved.

Later in the year, Gardner invited Doreen Valiente to visit him at his flat in Shepherd's Bush, West London, and it was there that she met the eight to ten members of his Bricket Wood coven, which met near St Albans, north of London.

Doreen Valiente soon rose to become the coven's High Priestess.

Doreen Valiente recognised how much of the material in Gardner's Book of Shadows was taken not from ancient sources as Gardner initially claimed, but from the works of Crowley.

Doreen Valiente confronted Gardner with this; he claimed that the text he had received from the New Forest coven had been fragmentary, and he had had to fill much of it using various sources.

Doreen Valiente 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, fearing that his infamous reputation would sully Wicca.

Doreen Valiente rewrote much of the Charge of the Goddess, with Hutton characterising this act as "her greatest single contribution to Wicca", for her version of the Charge became "the principle expression of Wiccan spirituality" in coming years.

Doreen Valiente sent her to meet the occult artist Austin Osman Spare when he wanted some talismans produced by the latter.

Doreen Valiente aided him in preparing his second non-fiction book about Wicca, The Meaning of Witchcraft, focusing in particular on those sections refuting the sensationalist accusations of the tabloid press.

Doreen Valiente felt that in repeatedly communicating with the press, he was compromising the coven's security.

Two factions emerged within the coven; Doreen Valiente led a broadly anti-publicity group, while Gardner led a pro-publicity one.

Doreen Valiente befriended another Kemptown resident, the journalist Leslie Roberts, who shared her interest in the supernatural.

Doreen Valiente attracted much attention to himself in the local press through his claims that practitioners of black magic were operating in the area.

Doreen Valiente remained a good friend to Roberts until his death from heart disease in 1966.

Doreen Valiente involved herself in the newly formed Witchcraft Research Association, becoming its second President after the resignation of Sybil Leek.

Doreen Valiente began visiting local libraries and archives in order to investigate the history of witchcraft in Sussex.

Just as Gardner had done in his book Witchcraft Today, here Doreen Valiente did not identify as a practising Wiccan, but as an interested scholar of witchcraft.

Doreen Valiente learned of the non-Gardnerian Wiccan Charles Cardell from a 1958 article, and subsequently struck up a correspondence with him.

Cardell suggested that they pool their respective traditions together, but Doreen Valiente declined the offer, expressing some scepticism regarding Cardell's motives and conduct.

In 1962, Doreen Valiente began a correspondence course run by Raymond Howard, a former associate of Cardell's; this course instructed her in a Wiccan tradition known as the Coven of Atho.

In 1964, Valiente was introduced to the Pagan witch Robert Cochrane by a mutual friend, the ceremonial magician William G Gray, who had met him at a gathering at Glastonbury Tor held by the Brotherhood of the Essenes.

Doreen Valiente was invited to join Cochrane's coven, the Clan of Tubal Cain, becoming its sixth member.

However, she became dissatisfied with Cochrane, who was openly committing adultery and constantly insulting Gardnerians, even at one point calling for "a Night of the Long Knives of the Gardnerians", at which point Doreen Valiente openly criticised him and then left his Clan.

Doreen Valiente remained in contact with his widow and other members of the Clan, as well as with Gray, and proceeded to work on occasion with The Regency, a group founded by former members of the Clan.

Doreen Valiente's flat was described by visitors as cramped, being filled with thousands of books.

Doreen Valiente joined a coven that was operating in the local area, Silver Malkin, after it was established by the Wiccan High Priestess Sally Griffyn.

Doreen Valiente began subscribing to The Ley Hunter magazine, for which she authored several articles and book reviews.

Doreen Valiente came to see the public emergence of Wicca as a sign of the Age of Aquarius, arguing that the religion should ally with the feminist and environmentalist movements in order to establish a better future for the planet.

In 1978 Hale then published Witchcraft for Tomorrow, in which Doreen Valiente proclaimed her belief that Wicca was ideal for the dawning Age of Aquarius and espoused James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis.

In 1978, Doreen Valiente struck up a friendship with the Alexandrian Wiccans Stewart Farrar and Janet Farrar, who were then living in Ireland.

Doreen Valiente sought to disprove this, discovering that "Old Dorothy" was a real person: Dorothy Clutterbuck.

Doreen Valiente provided a foreword for Witchcraft: A Tradition Renewed, a book published in 1990 by Hale.

Heselton has expressed the view that Doreen Valiente likely did more than this, and that she wrote a number of the chapters herself.

Doreen Valiente communicated with the American Wiccan and scholar of Pagan studies Aidan A Kelly during his investigations into the early Gardnerian liturgies.

Doreen Valiente disagreed with Kelly that there had been no New Forest coven and that Gardner had therefore invented Wicca, instead insisting that Gardner had stumbled on a coven of the Murrayite witch-cult.

In 1997 Doreen Valiente discovered the Centre for Pagan Studies, a Pagan organisation based in the Sussex hamlet of Maresfield that had been established in 1995.

Doreen Valiente's health was deteriorating as she was diagnosed first with diabetes and then terminal pancreatic cancer; increasingly debilitated, John Belham-Payne and two of her friends became her primary carers.

Doreen Valiente died on 1 September 1999, with Belham-Payne at her side.

Doreen Valiente had a strong dislike of unexpected visitors, and would often refuse to answer the door to those who knocked unannounced.

Doreen Valiente was an avid fan of football, and closely followed the World Cup, refusing to open the door to any visitors while she was watching the competition on television.

In 2016, Heselton expressed the view that Doreen Valiente was best known for her books, which are "still some of the most readable on the subject" of Wicca, further highlighting that they often appeared on Wiccan reading lists.

The ritual liturgies that Doreen Valiente composed proved highly influential within the Wiccan religion and constitute a core element of her legacy.

Kelly asserted that Doreen Valiente "deserves credit for having helped transform the Craft from being the hobby of a handful of eccentric Brits into being an international religious movement".

Heselton's 2016 biography of Doreen Valiente includes a bibliography of her published work, as well as her contributions to other books.