IN 1939 AN ENGLISH CIVIL SERVANT named Gerald Gardner claimed to have discovered a coven of witches led by “Old Dorothy”, who initiated him into the group’s rituals and showed him its sacred books. The coven, and others like it, had supposedly maintained a clandestine existence during centuries of persecution; but with Gardner’s assistance and the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951, its teachings were made available to new generations of earth-worshipping “witches”. Gardner’s foundation myth is wholly implausible, not least because there is no evidence that a witch cult ever existed in early modern England or Europe (Simpson, 11). As Diane Purkiss argues here, the improbability of such claims has not discouraged modern witches from fashioning their own histories from a blend of esoteric and fictional texts, as well as themes borrowed from academic writing. For Purkiss, the appropriation of the past by modern witches presents a radical challenge to the conventions of historical scholarship, but also one that is potentially liberating.
