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Taking Crowley Out of the Liturgy

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Taking Crowley Out of the Liturgy

Valiente was initiated by Gardner in 1953 and read his ritual material with an eye he did not expect. She recognised large stretches of it, and told him so, as lifted from Aleister Crowley, notably from Liber AL and Liber LXV, and from Leland's Aradia of 1899.

Her objection was partly literary and mostly practical: Crowley's public reputation in 1950s Britain was poisonous, and a new religion could not afford to be read as his front. Gardner, to his credit, told her to do better if she could. She rewrote the Charge of the Goddess, first in verse and then, when initiates stumbled over the goddess-names, in the prose version now used across the Craft. It removed nearly all the borrowed material and replaced it with something in her own voice, and it is the single best-known devotional text modern Paganism has.

She spent the rest of her life as the tradition's conscience on exactly this question. The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989) is her own account, written from inside, and it is unusually candid for a founder-generation memoir: it was Valiente who established that Clutterbuck was a real person, and Valiente who was blunt in print about how much of the Book of Shadows had been assembled from printed sources. She declined to treat the tradition's recency as a scandal to be managed.

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