Doreen Valiente

Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente (4 January 1922 – 1 September 1999) was an English Wiccan who was responsible for writing much of the early religious liturgy within the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca. An author and poet, she also published five books dealing with Wicca and related esoteric subjects.

Born to a middle-class family in Surrey, Valiente began practising magic while a teenager. Working as a translator at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, she also married twice in this period. Developing her interest in occultism after the war, she began practising ceremonial magic with a friend while living in Bournemouth. Learning of Wicca, in 1953 she was initiated into the Gardnerian tradition by its founder, Gerald Gardner. Soon becoming the High Priestess of Gardner's Bricket Wood coven, she helped him to produce or adapt many important scriptural texts for Wicca, such as The Witches Rune and the Charge of the Goddess, which were incorporated into the early Gardnerian Book of Shadows. In 1957, a schism resulted in Valiente and her followers leaving Gardner in order to form their own short-lived coven. After investigating the Wiccan tradition of Charles Cardell, she was initiated into Raymond Howard's Coven of Atho in 1963. She 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.

Eager to promote and defend her religion, she played a leading role in both the Witchcraft Research Association and then the Pagan Front during the 1960s and 1970s. That latter decade also saw her briefly involve herself in far right politics as well as becoming a keen ley hunter and proponent of Earth mysteries. As well as regularly writing articles on esoteric topics for various magazines, from the 1960s onward she authored a number of books on the subject of Wicca, as well as contributing to the publication of works by Wiccan friends Stewart Farrar, Janet Farrar, and Evan John Jones. In these works also she became an early advocate of the idea that anyone could practice Wicca without requiring initiation by a pre-existing Wiccan, while also contributing to and encouraging research into the religion's early history. Living in Brighton during these years, she was a member of the Silver Malkin coven and worked with Ron Cook, who was both her partner and initiate. In her final years she served as patron of the Sussex-based Centre for Pagan Studies prior to her death from pancreatic cancer.

Valiente's magical artefacts and papers were bequeathed to her last High Priest, John Belham-Payne, who donated them to a charitable trust, the Doreen Valiente Foundation, in 2011. Having had a significant influence in the history of Wicca, she is widely revered in the Wiccan community as "the Mother of Modern Witchcraft", and has been the subject of two biographies.

Biography

Early life: 1922–1952

Valiente was born Doreen Edith Dominy on 4 January 1922 in the London outer suburb of Colliers Wood, Mitcham, Surrey. Her 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 was never baptised, as was the custom of the time, due to an argument that Edith had had with the local vicar. Doreen 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. During her childhood they moved to Horley in Surrey, and it was there, according to her later account, that she had an early spiritual experience while staring at the Moon. From there her family moved to the West Country and then to the New Forest. In either late 1934 or 1935, Doreen's mother left her father and took her to live with maternal relatives in Southampton. 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. Her early knowledge of magical practices may have derived from books that she found in the local library. Her parents were concerned by this behaviour and sent her to a convent school. She despised the school and left it at the age of 15, refusing to return. She 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.

During the Second World War, she became a Foreign Office Civilian Temporary Senior Assistant Officer, in this capacity working as a translator at Bletchley Park. In relation to this work, she was also sent to South Wales, and it was there, in the town of Barry, that she met Joanis Vlachopolous, a Greek seaman in the Merchant Navy. Entering a relationship, they were married in East Glamorgan on 31 January 1941. However, in June 1941 he was serving aboard the Pandias when it was sunk by a U-boat off of the West African coast; he was declared missing in action and presumed deceased. Widowed, during 1942 and 1943 Valiente had a number of short-term jobs in Wales, which were possibly a cover for intelligence work.

After October 1943 she was transferred to the intelligence service's offices in Berkeley Street in the Mayfair area of London, where she was involved in message decryption. In London she met and entered into a relationship with Casimiro Valiente, a Spaniard who had fled from the Spanish Civil War, where he had fought on the side of the Spanish Republican Army before later joining the French Foreign Legion, where he was wounded at the Battle of Narvik and evacuated to England. They were married on 29 May 1944 at St Pancras Registry Office. The couple moved to Bournemouth – where Doreen's mother was then living – and here Casimiro worked as a chef. Valiente would later say that both she and her husband suffered racism after the war because of their foreign associations.