Gerald Gardner's earliest working manuscripts already contained a text spoken in the Goddess's own voice, and it leaned heavily on other people's words. Long passages were lifted from the Gnostic Mass and other ceremonial writings of Aleister Crowley, whom Gardner had known and corresponded with, and further phrases were drawn from Charles Godfrey Leland's Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, an 1899 collection of Italian folk material that Gardner treated as if it recorded a genuine surviving cult.
Doreen Valiente, who joined Gardner's coven in 1953 and became his high priestess, objected to how much of the text was Crowley's rather than the coven's own, and by 1957 she had rewritten it, stripping out most of the borrowed ceremonial magic and replacing it with new verse and prose that kept some of Leland's imagery of the Goddess as the beauty of the earth and the driver of the moon and stars. It is Valiente's version, not Gardner's, that spread once Wicca went public, copied by hand from Book of Shadows to Book of Shadows in the oath-bound manner of Gardnerian and Alexandrian initiation, and later printed, in whole or in adapted form, in dozens of books once the tradition's early secrecy loosened in the 1960s and 1970s. It is now recited, paraphrased or freely rewritten across most of modern Wicca and much of eclectic neopaganism, regardless of lineage, making it arguably the single most influential piece of liturgy the twentieth century's new religions produced. Because Valiente's phrasing remains in copyright, held by her estate, the atlas records this history rather than the words themselves.