A Book Written to Be Read Two Ways

The book is presented as anthropology. Gardner writes as an interested outsider reporting on a group he has been permitted to observe, describes their practices at a distance, and repeatedly says that he is not free to give details. That posture is doing several things at once: it protects the material he had undertaken not to publish, it lends the account the authority of fieldwork, and it lets him make a large claim about survival without appearing to advocate anything.

The claim itself is the substance. He asserts that a religion older than Christianity had continued in England in secret and that he had met it, which places his group inside a scholarly thesis about a surviving pagan cult that had wide currency at the time and was endorsed in the book's introduction by one of its best known proponents. Read now, the double posture is the most interesting thing about it. A founder writing as an observer of his own tradition produces a text that is simultaneously a report and a charter, describing a religion in the third person while establishing it in the first, and the atlas records it in both capacities: as the first public description of Wiccan practice and as the document by which that practice announced itself to a readership that had never heard of it.