Gerald Brosseau Gardner
Great BritainBiography of Gerald Brosseau Gardner
Gerald Brosseau Gardner was an English civil servant, amateur anthropologist, writer, and occultist. He was one of the main ideologists of contemporary Wicca and published several texts on the subject. Gardner was born in Glen, Serpentine, Blundellsands, near Liverpool, England, into a wealthy family. His ancestry can be traced back to Grissell Gardner, who was burned as a witch in 1610 in Newburgh. Gardner's grandfather married a woman who had a reputation as a witch. Some distant relatives of Gardner were believed to possess psychic abilities.
Gardner was the middle of three sons and was raised by his Irish nanny, Josephine "Com" McCombie. The Gardner family business was "Joseph Gardner & Sons," one of the oldest timber supply companies in the UK. From a young age, Gardner suffered from asthma. Com convinced Gardner's parents of the need to take the boy to a continent with a warmer climate. Initially, Com traveled around Europe, and then she married a man living in Ceylon. Eventually, they settled in Asia, where Gardner spent most of his young years. He later moved to Borneo and then to Malaysia, where he cultivated rubber. There, he became acquainted with the local population and studied their religious beliefs, which made a great impression on him.
After 1923, Gardner held a position as a civil servant, serving as a government inspector in Malaya. In 1927, he married an Englishwoman named Donna, with whom he lived in marriage for over 33 years. In 1936, at the age of 52, Gardner retired and returned to England. He published an essay titled "Kris and Other Malay Weapons" (1936), based on his field research on Southeast Asian weapons and magical practices. In the same year, Gerald and Donna moved from London to Highcliffe, located south of the New Forest in Hampshire. Here, he became passionately interested in occultism and nudism. Gardner became a member of the Folklore Society in 1939. His first contribution to the journal "Folklore," released in June 1939, was a description of a box containing witchcraft relics. Later, in 1946, he became a member of the society's committee. Gardner aspired to obtain various titles and at one point claimed to have a doctoral degree from Singapore and Toulouse universities.
Gardner published two literary works, "The Coming of the Goddess" (1939) and "High Magic's Aid" (1949), under the pseudonym Scire. He then published two more books, "Witchcraft Today" (1954) and "The Meaning of Witchcraft" (1959), in which he described the tradition of witchcraft to which he was initiated. He claimed that "High Magic's Aid" was an attempt to describe the tradition under the guise of a literary work without revealing its secrets. Bound by a vow of silence, he was only allowed to disclose the "true essence of witchcraft" after the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951. In 1960, Gardner's wife, Donna, passed away, which had a negative impact on his health as his asthma attacks returned. In 1964, Gardner died of a heart attack on a ship while returning from a trip to Lebanon. He was buried on the coast of Tunisia, the next stop of the ship. Only the captain of the ship, The Scottish Prince, attended his funeral.
