Generation Witch
A short introduction to the birth of modern witchcraft
Only in 1951 did Britain lift its last law against witches. The Witchcraft Act of 1735, dating in its earliest form to the mid-sixteenth century, was finally repealed due to lobbying efforts by English Spiritualists who, although organized into ecclesiastic churches, were sometimes harassed under its strictures.
Through this opening stepped iconic writer-seeker Gerald Gardner (1884–1964). Freed from fear of legal reprisals, Gardner fostered a revival, or reinvention, of witchcraft in England and soon other parts of the world.
An adventurous and well-to-do customs agent who spent most of his life in Borneo, British Malaya, Singapore, and other trading posts of the Empire, Gardner retired to the southern English coast in the late 1930s. He used retirement to deepen his study of folklore and tribal rites he encountered in the Far East.
Back home, Gardner was touched by the work of Egyptologist Margaret A. Murray (1863–1963), who postulated the survival of an ancient “witch cult” in England and Western Europe in her influential 1921 study The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which, in the…
