The Gardnerian Book Of Shadows
by Rick Johnson
What is the Gardnerian Book of Shadows?
Some people act as if this were the Ultimate and Secret Revelations of the Gods, the possession of which will bring power and enlightenment and god-like power.
It ain’t so.
The Gardnerian Book of Shadows (BoS) is simply a guidebook, no different from any guidebook you buy before you visit another country. It has a few suggestions, some thoughts and shows a Path that works for some people. But not everyone.
Look at it like this. A Guidebook to Paris will tell you what the currency rates were when the writer was there (they are different today), it tells which cathedrals and museums the writer enjoyed seeing (but they never seem to mention the Martial Arts studios that accept guests and few mention where I can rent a kayak to paddle the Serine or the canals) and they mention places the writer liked to eat. But the important thing is that they are out-of-date and specific to the writer and never complete.
Same the ANY Book of Shadows. They are specific to the Tradition of the writer and they are written for a specific situation that may be different from your own.
So why do so many people think ours is so valuable?
Insecurity mostly. The vast majority of the Traditions out there are derived from Gardnerianism by way of disgruntled Initiates or by way of reading and rewriting our BoS. Budapest did that with Sheba’s
Grimoire, Grimassi did that with Aradia and our published works, Kelly did that with the NROOGD (but Kelly was honest enough to admit it).
So there is something there of value. Something that inspires the soul to heights of spirituality. Something that is worthy of following.
Unfortunatly, the structure of Gardnerian Wicca (especially in America) is such that it actively discourages exactly the kind of people we want. It’s a flaw that we cannot seem to weed out and its name is “EGO”!
Some Gardnerians have a monumental EGO that drives them to exclude anyone who might not worship them as gods. These have created and support a system that is exclusionary and makes us the laughing stock of the Pagan community. Especially when they make blanket statements that anyone can prove are false.
Some Eclectics are so insecure that rather than admit “I made it up,” they take our BoS and rewrite it to create what they pretend is an ‘ancient tradition’. Both are wrong but I see no realistic way to change it. So we have to deal with the situation as it is.
Ok, so how can Gardnerians still claim that the Gardnerian BoS has never been published when anyone with access to the internet or a book store can buy a copy?
The truth is that the entire Gardnerian Book of Shadows has never been published. Some portions have obviously been published (Gardner, Valiente, Sanders and others have done so) but not the entire thing. Yet.
It will someday but so far it has not. We’ll cover that later.
How can I make this statement without proof? The only complete proof is to publish it myself to prove that what is out there is incomplete and inaccurate which would counter this paper. So I will offer only an idea.
The top in white is The Book of Shadows by Lady Sheba published around 1971-1972. The one below in black is
The Alexandrian and Gardnerian Book of Shadows by Helena Gardner recently published and the bottom work in Velo-bind is a photocopy of Gerald Gardner’s Book of Shadows.
(note: everything I am about to say is in dispute. Collect the facts and make up your own
mind)
Sheba was an Ozark Witch who had contacts with some Gardnerians in England. She combined her Ozark Tradition with Gardnerian Wicca then while speaking at one of the Gnosti-Cons (the original public pagan festival) in Minneapolis-St Paul, she claimed to have had a vision where The Goddess told her to publish the Book of Shadows. Her Gardnerian Coven cut her off and she published both this and
The Grimoire of Lady Sheba.
The pages are single sides (unlike most books that are double-sided) and the first impression one receives is that she duplicated the same material to increase her word count. There have been many comments about the mistakes and inaccuracies in her work which she later defended in
Witch.
Helena is an unknown person. Aiden Kelly collected every PUBLISHED version of Gardnerian Rituals and beliefs that he could find in the public library as background for his
Crafting the Art of Magic 1. Eventually these public documents were uploaded by an unknown person to the Internet on a number of sites as the ‘Gardnerian Book of Shadows’ and Helena simply touched the “PRINT” button on her computer and published the reference material intact. I understand that some legal action took place and her original ‘work’ was pulled for copyright infringement as she published it with Kelly’s footnotes intact. Stupid woman!
Well, if you quote one author it is plagerism but if you quote a dozen it becomes research and Helena copied entire texts from Sheba, Farrar and a number of other books, republished Kelly’s work in this version and avoided the copyright laws that she violated before.
The large work is a photocopy of Gerald Gardner’s Book of Shadows handwritten on A2 paper which is a European paper somewhere between 8 ½” by 11” and 8 ½” by 14”. The original was written into a ledger book as these were the only blank books found in England at the time. The first thing one notices is that Gardner had terrible handwriting. Entire chapters are almost illegible due to the speed of his writing and the small size of his handwriting. Other things of note are that Gardner describes a Theban Alphabet that is different from the one used by the Long Island Line. There are also dozens and dozens of pages that simply do not exist in any of the commonly used Gardnerian Texts. In other words, the commonly distributed and copied Books of Shadows are an edited version of Gardner’s works.
Here we see the three works stacked for size, and for thickness.
As you can see, the number of pages between what is claimed to be the Gardnerian Book of Shadows and what Gardner actually wrote is considerable. Obviously, something was left out. And just as obviously, not everything was published.
This alone shows that the Gardnerian Book of Shadows has never been published and what has been published is at best, a small fraction of the entire work. Of course, a closer examination of the published copies shows so many major mistakes that I cannot list them all. These not only range from minor things like ‘thee’ vs ‘you’ to entire rituals that have nothing in common with the original save they both were written in English. One sometimes wonders if Sheba or Helena needed an extra chapter to up their word-count and so invented a rite because they had a name but no body.
What we see here is my copy of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows. This was printed in a 3” binder on single side paper. It also includes such things as the original Text-A Initiation and the edited Text-C Initiation in use today. It also includes the Long Island Additions and additions used by other Witches like the
Rules of the Craft written by Doreen Valiente that pre-date The Laws and Valiente’s
Charge of the God that she wrote to compliment The Charge.
The Long Island Book of Shadows fills a 2” binder so is a bit thinner but still much larger than any published
version.
So, from this info alone, sparse as it is, you can see that the Gardnerian Book of Shadows has never been published and that those books that claim to be such are poorly edited and incorrect versions of some of the rituals that have been published by various authors over the years.
Now I will make one caviet to the above statement.
Although the Gardnerian Book of Shadows has never YET been published, that only means no one has done it yet. Someday it will because:
1. Some Gardnerian will have a ‘vision’ and publish it.
2. Some Gardnerian will get so pissed off with the Eclectic crap being published that he will publish the BoS just to get accurate info out there.
3. Some Gardnerian will get really pissed off with his High Priest or High Priestess because of their egos and publish it in revenge.
4. Someone will burgler the house of a Gardnerian and grab the book thinking it was valuable then sell it at a swap meet. This book will be purchased by someone and published as a curiosity.
5. Some Gardnerian will die unexpectedly and his family will find the Book and decide “He was writing a novel, what better way to honor his memory than to publish it posthumously?”
6. Some Gardnerian will convert to xianity and publish the book under pressure from his new church.
7. Some Gardnerian will publish the Book under a fake name to get someone else in trouble.
8. Fill in your own reason here.
We as Gardnerians are no more ethical or intelligent than the rest of the pagan community. All I am trying to do here is to counter one simple claim by non-Gardnerians with what limited evidence I am willing to present.
As for you, make up your own mind as to what evidence you will accept and examine with healthy sceptisism any claims to ‘ancient and secret Books of Shadows’.
I wish you all Good research.