The House of Secrets

Part five: The Walsingham principle

What is the purpose of a museum of witchcraft?

It is a house of secrets, a place of ghosts.

A witchcraft museum is a living collection, in that many of the objects are alive. Peter Redgrove, a frequent visitor to Boscastle, might have called them, ‘photographs of the wind, but in which the wind still blows.’

A museum obliquely tells the story of their curator; and in turn the objects can be made to tell of him when he has passed. He is present in the black mirror depths, he is in the twisted sticks and sleeping stroking stones. His words are stamped out in CAPITAL LETTERS on slightly grubby cards by the slightly shabby exhibits. He is the teller of tales.

It is my belief that the museum is built around a secret, and that secret is concealed behind the name ‘Walsingham,’ the paradigmatic spymaster who served beneath Good Queen Bess. Coincidentally, Walsingham reported to William Cecil, a mirroring of the man now under consideration, Cecil Williamson. The museum owner was an intelligencer in an organisation founded on the exact principles which Walsingham laid out. Here I will attempt to charm out his secret.

So I returned to visit our friends at the museum, to gain admittance to the trove of xeroxed and stapled zines where he gave his late interviews, the box files of photographs and correspondence. And of course, to address my questions to his mirror.

The Elizabethan spy network famously ran John Dee under the codename 007 as a magician in service to the queen. The sinking of the Armada with fire ships and storm is credited to Dee, as was the founding of Empire. States are required to fight shadow wars if they wish to exist. Thus, in the war against the Catholics and a hostile Europe, high imperial magic and the intelligence of angels played their part. But, according to Williamson, ‘Walsingham often used witches as spies.’¹

It is unknown whether these witches sent curses, utilised their psychic powers like the pendulum dowsers who hunted Nazi U-Boats in the Second World War, or performed rites to turn back an invasion force as in Operation Mistletoe. What we do know is that Walsingham had a run-in with witchcraft in 1583 when he was sent on an ill-fated diplomatic mission to Scotland. There, he and his entourage were soundly cursed by a witch in the pay of James VI. Walsingham’s health, never good, suffered as a result, leaving him wracked by fever, headaches and fits. The efficacy of the dark arts must have been impressed upon him, and was, no doubt, added to the arsenal of the state, if it had not already been employed. The witch, known only to history as Kate, was paid a princely £6 and a new plaid for her troubles. This was operative magic with payment for results, it cannot be relegated to a psyop. James VI would later grow apoplectic with witch panic from the poison of the continental demonologists poured into his youthful ear and his near shipwreck at the hands of the New Berwick coven. If even a character such as James could resort to witchcraft, it seems secure that the wyrd was (and remains) a tool of statecraft at the very highest levels.

When you read through Cecil Williamson’s notes and interviews you encounter again and again the imprint of his intelligence training. He is engaged in a game of spies, and exists in a world of invisible networks which only he is privy to. By his account, witches are bound by secrecy, they keep notebooks and maps of their area, they gather information and gossip for extortion and manipulation. It is what he first learned when he played the boy in white for Mayfair society medium Madame Delahaye; information is power over others. In his late letters, written on beehive-headed notepaper, he describes a structure like a honeycomb covering all of England, with each individual witchcraft cell isolated and tasked to gather intelligence. The whole collection of cells are interlocked and controlled by ‘master minds.’

Such a clandestine operation is a far cry from the Wicca of Gerald Gardner, the old boy whom Williamson employed as resident Mage at the Witches’ Mill on the Isle of Man. Though their arrangement ended in a storm of flying crockery, the two men, a showman and a spy, were instrumental in the formation of modern witchcraft.

Whilst Gerald Gardner courted publicity, Williamson kept quiet, brooded in his museums, and relied upon informants, from the wayside witches to connected individuals such as Doreen Valiente who brought back the pollen he would turn into honey.²

Williamson documented our native cunning traditions, interviewing over eighty ‘Aunty Mays,’ many of whom resided in the West Country. His personal magic was idiosyncratic, but drew on his experiences with the cunning folk and witches whilst eschewing high ceremonial. He wrote no books, leaving only notes and a handful of letters, whilst most of his research ended up on a bonfire. Williamson is almost entirely neglected in witchcraft history and spurned by the academy. But the museum endures. It is perhaps as he would have wanted.

A far darker vision than bucolic naturism, goddess worship and healing rites is evinced by the Boscastle museum displays. Dead birds in red shoes are drowned in wax, nails are driven into tongues and pierce pregnant bellies. At their worst, the witches Williamson encounters perform clandestine murders and make them look like accidents. Though we can count these as acts of personal spite, or at best, forms of social justice, writ large these are the kinds of malefic witchcraft that the State also requires. Reputational damage, blackmail through complicity and the elimination of those who cannot be turned is the nature of the game. If such actions are wrought by covert and deniable assets so much the better.

Williamson first spoke publicly about the ‘Walsingham principle’ in a 1976 interview with Michael Howard for issue four of his fledgling The Cauldron magazine. Howard was a sympathetic ear, as he too pursued the traditions distinct from Wicca, often blindly, as the debacle of the fraudulent Pickingill Papers aptly demonstrates.

Williamson writes,

Unlike the witchcraft world of ‘Wicca’ with its ever growing number of coven members and its groups, the silent world of the craft, modelled on the Walsingham principle, has on the other hand over the past 30 years reduced in membership. Reason – the shorter the chain the greater its strength.

Williamson is correct about the benefits of fewer links in the chain from an intelligence and secrecy perspective. However, these ear-to-mouth structures exhibit a significant weakness; the depredations of age and a lack of texts and transmissions from which to reconstitute themselves if the chain breaks. How many small cells were snuffed out in the transition to postmodernity is impossible to tell. The slaughter of the world wars, the changes to the rural economy and the rise of mass media all took their toll on the secret world that he is both indicating and inevitably, to some extent, imagining.

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Secrecy and silence are the hallmark of the witchcraft that Williamson is concerned with. His focus is on the pre 1940s groups, such as the New Forest Coven, into which both he and Gardner had been initiated, and whose existence has been confirmed only as recently as 2000.³ I initially wondered if that was where the two men first met, eyeing each other suspiciously across the circle, rather than the cover story of a coincidental encounter in the Atlantis Bookshop. However, reading through the sheaves of letters in their black box files, Cecil reveals that he grew up in the forest, his parents living in the Gothic surroundings of Newlands Manor. Indeed, he can be seen striding around those grounds, having returned to the haunts of his youth, in a 1962 interview with a young Alan Whicker.⁴ Furthermore, he met Woodford-Grimes (Dafo of the New Forest Coven and subsequently Gardner’s Bricket Wood Coven) in ‘various situations,’ a phrase behind which much is concealed, as well as other nameless witches whom Gardner never encountered.

In a letter to Michael Howard he allows himself a little taunting,

Yet I have to smile, old Gerald Gardner went to his grave without the slightest knowledge of the fact that I had such a deep Rooted interest in his chosen witchcraft area. The simple fact is that I am a shy person and not a Blabber mouth and he never asked about my family…

That secrecy, and pride in secrecy, typifies Williamson’s character, having learned early to mind his tongue, to quietly listen and observe. What Cecil characterises as ‘The Walsingham principle’ can be summarised as sworn secrecy.

Such secrecy was the hallmark of those,

who could produce results, manifestations and kindred end products to their craft workings.⁵

Williamson was interested in operative witchcraft rather that seasonal rites, as his taped interviews in the 1990s make abundantly clear,

Singing Hymns to the trees and the mother Goddess in the spring does not get results.

Williamson, in contrast, was a practicing animist with a focus on the spirit world. He posited the centrality of the familiar in English witchcraft. At first I assumed that he meant an animal that the witch kept, like the toad he inherited from the diminutive and spunky Rosa Woodman, the Royal Windsor Witch. But Cecil attributes a particular meaning to the word: the familiar describes the personal spirit who performs the magical work, what we may term the parhedros, daimon, or Holy Guardian Angel. He states,

My path is ‘THE CULT . OF . THE. DEAD’ I am what the grass root Witch always was, and will be, namely ‘A FRIEND. OF . THE . DEAD’ In short that means that one has dealing with the world of spirit forces. It is a path that each one of us has to tread on his own.

What Williamson describes here has been very much the focus of the latest magical revival. I cannot help but think of the late Jake Stratton-Kent as being such a practitioner.

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Williamson’s earliest use of ‘Walsingham’ is as an organisational principle of secrecy, a cloak that could be thrown over all the traditional covens and families, even if, with the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951, they had chosen to step into the light. But he leaves a final, extraordinary revelation. In conversation with the new owner of the museum Graham King, in the 1990s, he confides that there is only one traditional witch lineage he had ever encountered.

We know it cannot be Atho, or Plant Bran, or 1734, or any of Michael Howard’s contacts and informants eagerly spinning their tales in The Cauldron. He describes it as code-name Walsingham.

That chilled me to the bone. Graham King is a level-headed man, with no craft agenda to advance. As the new owner, he was perhaps the one person to whom Williamson would confide such a secret. Could it be true? It flies in the face of academic enquiry which has sought and failed to find any evidence of witchcraft survivals in England that date before the 1890s.

For the academic there are multiple strikes against Williamson; the lie about Operation Mistletoe which relied on the liar Amado, the lies about Crowley meeting Pickingill furnished to a credulous Michael Howard, lies about people, places, dates and events. Lies upon lies upon lies. Clearly witchcraft has been practiced on these shores since time immemorial, but for it to survive in an unbroken tradition seems highly implausible.

However, Williamson plotted out across punch cards, like those he used as exhibit labels, an English witchcraft encompassing ‘James I, Charles II, Charles I, Elizabeth, Mary and Henry VIII,’ with Shakespeare cited as further evidence. Aside from the conversation with Graham he explored the idea in a series of handwritten pages, aimed at eventual publication, but never completed. In them he asks the rhetorical question, did it die out or is it still alive today?

The answer is yes it is alive today. In this matter I was most fortunate in the fact that during the last war I worked in a special subsection of the foreign office [MI6] Naturally they knew of my interests and that I had my Data Bank on Witchcraft. So it was that one day I was given an assignment to do a run down of Witchcraft in the UK France Germany and Holland. From a sole act I suddenly found myself with the authority to call upon an undreamed of number of inform[?] sources. A New World was opened up to my inspection. The Barriers of Language – non-co-operation Travel distance and yes money were swept away. And then that amazing day when I found myself face to face with the Elizabethan Witchcraft Tradition. Code name WALSINGHAM. A system which had lived on down the years in perfect working order. There was the MAN-IN-BLACK. Yes, and some areas were controlled by A WOMAN IN BLACK. Actually in 1941 the Index Cards show that there were more women in Black than men!

Williamson is the only researcher who had the resources, contacts and inclination to make such a discovery of witchcraft. He lived at the time period when the last of the old witchcraft groups were active and not syncretised, swallowed or eclipsed by the Gardnerians. He had the compelling argument of the war effort and the credibility of his research to back him up. If Walsingham was, as he states, an Elizabethan tradition, his new employer MI6 was the authority structure to whom they should properly report.

An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. How did he know that the tradition was Elizabethan? Had he been shown a black book with the names of initiates? Did he have confirmation, or even introduction by State or Crown? We simply do not know. It is for us to take on faith that he even met with them in person, though his use of ‘face to face’ tells us that this was a personal encounter. If it is true, they are likely to have been upper class, an old family with royal connections positioned to act against Catholic plots.

Further difficulty is sown by his reference to the Index Cards (now lost) which suggest a distributed network of covens (the honeycomb). One survival, with the low numbers he spoke of previously, could be a black swan, but multiple groups remaining covert down the centuries is wildly improbable.

The proof he provides is not doctrinal or material, it is the barest account of how the group was structured: A man or woman in black as convener, absolute secrecy and compartmentalisation.

Michael Howard reports,

He claimed the concept of the ‘Man in Black’ was first adopted by the Walsingham Craft in the late sixteenth-century, [...] According to Williamson, the ‘Man in Black’ was the title of the local leader in the tradition who supervised several witch covens in the area.⁶

Returning to Williamson’s handwritten document, we find another detail,

The operation of this system of Witchcraft is somewhat different from that used by the well known groups and schools of thought today. In conception it is entirely Celtic and a product of this country and its islands.

The use of Celtic makes me think of Cornwall and TAN, his god of light. And yes, there is a whisper of the Tanat cult about it. With the mention of Islands, he conjures up the Isle of Man, the site of the Witches’ Mill. Here the truth begins to shine through, like the moon on a clear night. Williamson returns to the creation of English witchcraft, to the moment which proved to be one of division when it could have been a dialectic. The emergent Wicca could have been tempered through dialogue with the other traditions, and learned from the practices and perspectives of the wayside witches.

Earlier in this article I made reference to the opening up and the exchange of ideas and Ritual Knowledge between the various groups. Early in 1949 when Dr G B Gardner came to live with me at the Witchcraft Museum I founded at Castletown in the Isle of Man I was given permission to ask Gerald Gardner to join forces with this Branch of the tree of Witchcraft.

Poor Dr Gardner. At that time he was busy improving his own rituals and setting himself up to fill the then vacant space left in the Occult World by Aleister Crowley’s death.

Gerald was an extrovert he had to be the front man. He delighted in letting everyone know that he was a Five Star Witch. He was a delight to have at a cocktail party. Everyone loved him for he had a delightful old world charm with just a soupcon of naughtyness.

The Cloak, the Beard, the stick, he had every trick. You could not fail to like that man,

So to ask such an Occult Peacock to subside into the unseen unsung secretiveness of the Walsingham system was to ask the impossible.

Williamson had accepted the ascendancy of Gardner’s Wicca, and rued the missed opportunity to unite the two strands of witchcraft in the post-war moment due to their incompatible methods of acting in the world. In old age he will have returned again and again to that time and those events.

At the Witches’ Mill Williamson possessed a secret: one which he chose not to disclose. It is not unreasonable to suppose that his MI6 contact list was the most complete survey of witches practicing at that time. In that regard, we know who their master was, who warded the secret door into their world. One of those groups is distinct from all the others, code name Walsingham. He knows that it is the survival, not of a pagan religion in the manner of Margaret Murray, but of an operative, spirit-based and indigenous witchcraft dating to the Elizabethan Age. It is a name that does not pass his lips until a decade after Gardner’s death. Yet time makes liars of us all.

As the decades passed Williamson witnessed, dreamed and projected himself into a shadow world, not a what-might-have-been, but an ever-present. He pursued the methods of the Aunty Mays, low on formality, strong in intent, rude in expression. With a little discretion you can hear in his oft-repeated phrases, the echoes of these women and their wise saws. In the museum you can see the things that he made, just as they had shown him. He divines the secret lives of his friends and confidants, lives they are unaware that they are living; they are the honeycomb filled with gold. The door remains hidden, but the hive sings to itself of a witchcraft that cannot be told but which still goes on today. Ultimately, Walsingham is Williamson seen in the depths of his own black mirror.

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Postscript

The witchcraft that Cecil Williamson proposes remains potent. The privilege of reading through his notes and spending time with the exhibits in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic cannot be overstated. My thanks to the current curator Simon Costin, his partner Fergus, and of course Hannah Fox for granting me access to the archive at short notice.

I believe that the example of Williamson will have continued importance for the new witchcraft that is forming, and to which my own Apocalyptic Witchcraft owes a debt of gratitude. There are further avenues for me to explore here in future work. Here too are keys that can be applied to the riddle that began this series of essays, as the Cult of Tanat is finally able to manifest itself.

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1. Michael Howard, The Cauldron 126.

2. I firmly believe Doreen Valiente was indeed a spy, her wartime work as a translator at MI6 site Bletchley Park where the code breakers famously solved the German Enigma machine is strong circumstantial evidence.

3. See the work of Philip Heselton.

4. The interview can be seen here on Jack Daw’s excellent YouTube channel here.

5. The Cauldron 4.

6. Michael Howard, The Cauldron 146.