page_title: Doreen Valiente
section_title: The Pagan Front, National Front, and further publications: 1970–84
hierarchical_section_title: Doreen Valiente / Biography / The Pagan Front, National Front, and further publications: 1970–84
caption_attribution_description: English: National Front march in Yorkshire, Great Britain. 1970s.
context_page_description: 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. 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 practicing 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 practicing 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.
context_section_description: Living in Brighton, Valiente took up employment in a branch of the Boots pharmacist. In 1971 she appeared on the BBC documentary, Power of the Witch, which was devoted to Wicca and also featured the prominent Wiccan Alex Sanders. That same year, she was involved in the founding of the Pagan Front, a British pressure group that campaigned for the religious rights of Wiccans and other Pagans. In November 1970 she developed a full moon inauguration ritual for local branches of the Front to use and on May Day 1971 she chaired its first national meeting, held at Chiswick, West London. It was she who developed the three principles that came to be central to the Pagan Front's interpretation of their religion: adherence to the Wiccan Rede, a belief in reincarnation, and a sense of kinship with nature.
  In April 1972 her husband Casimiro died; he had never taken an interest in Wicca or esotericism and Valiente later claimed that theirs had been an unhappy relationship. Newly widowed, she soon had to move as the local council decided that her home was unfit for human habitation; she was relocated into council accommodation in the mid-1960s tower block of Tyson Place in Grosvenor Square, Brighton. Her flat was described by visitors as cramped, being filled with thousands of books. It was there that she met Ronald Cooke, a member of the apartment block's residents' committee; they entered into a relationship and she initiated him into Wicca, where he became her working partner. Together they regularly explored the Sussex countryside, and went on several holidays to Glastonbury, further considering moving there. She also joined a coven that was operating in the local area, Silver Malkin, after it was established by the Wiccan High Priestess Sally Griffyn.
  During the early 1970s, Valiente became a member of a far right white nationalist political party, the National Front, for about eighteen months, during which she designed a banner for her local branch. Valiente's biographer Philip Heselton suggested that the party's nationalistic outlook may have appealed to her strongly patriotic values and that she might have hoped that the Front would serve as a political equivalent to the Pagan movement. At the same time she also became a member of another, more extreme far right group, the Northern League. However, she allowed her membership of the National Front to lapse, sending a letter to her local branch stating that although she respected its leader John Tyndall and had made friends within the group, she was critical of the party's opposition to women's liberation, gay rights, and sex education, all of which she lauded as progressive causes. Heselton has also suggested that Valiente may have joined these groups in order to investigate them before reporting back to Britain's intelligence agencies.
  It was also in the early 1970s that she read John Michell's The View Over Atlantis and was heavily influenced by it, embracing Michell's view that there were ley lines across the British landscape that channelled earth energies. Inspired, she began searching for ley lines in the area around Brighton. She also began subscribing to The Ley Hunter magazine, for which she authored several articles and book reviews. 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 1973, the publishing company Robert Hale brought out Valiente's second book, An ABC of Witchcraft, in which she provided an encyclopaedic overview of various topics related to Wicca and esotericism. In 1975, Hale published Valiente's Natural Magic, a discussion of what she believed to be the magical usages and associations of the weather, stones, plants, and other elements of the natural world. In 1978 Hale then published Witchcraft for Tomorrow, in which Valiente proclaimed her belief that Wicca was ideal for the dawning Age of Aquarius and espoused James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis. It also explained to the reader
caption: Valiente involved herself in a regional branch of the National Front (National Front demonstration pictured)
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