Doreen Valiente: Witch

[haptalaon]

Finally got to read this - by Philip Heselton - I can't tell you how moved I always feel whenever I think of Valiente's generation of the craft. I got to see items from her collection once - I had been a pagan for many years though somewhat less seriously, and I was surprised by how reverent it made me feel. I have the same chalice as her. I picked it up at a folk festival from the junk table, I guess it must be some kind of mass-produced 1960s tat,

So it's a great book & she's a fascinating person - no-nonsense and unusual for her time in many ways - it's filled with anecdotes and, on the whole less interesting than her own book The Rebirth of Witchcraft, but I'm so charmed by my vision of her now, in this cramped flat with more books than floorspace. Given her association with Gardener, it's also marked how much learning she did before she met him (incredible given the resources available to the average library in the 1960s!) and how much of her life was spent developing beyond and above that; it was really a very slender period in a full life.

There is apparently some evidence she might have done secret code stuff during the war; but I don't think the author quite has the facts to land this one, it feels like a romantic surmise (without wishing to stamp on learners without institutional backing, but I struggled to match up 'left school at 15' with 'so good at languages she was a spy in WW2', as the languages in question are never named and frankly, Britain does not give a damn about other languages so where and how she learned them is unclear.

That said - this is the first time I'm hearing that she was a member of the National Front for a year in the 70s, & I feel like her biographer is too generous about this. He sees a pattern throughout her life of being a bit of an occult Miss Marple, a tenacious researcher and one with a sense of responsibility over neopaganism as a whole given her role in it. He thinks she had joined to have a snoop, either to find out their occult credentials and stop them infiltrating pagan spaces, or still working as a spy. I think that's a dodge. He quotes her resignation letter in full, where she names their stance on abortion and gay rights as her reasons for parting ways, but the NF was best known for beating up Black & Asian Britains, and there's no mention of disenchantement with nationalist politics. She was also a member of the Northern league: The stated purpose of the League was to save the "Nordic race" from "annihilation of our kind" and to "fight for survival against forces which would mongrelise our race and civilisation". This is really very grim, and it's to the biographer's credit that he includes it.