Doreen Valiente (1922-1999)
Why she’s on this list: To put it simply Valiente is the most important liturgist in the history of Modern Pagandom. Sure not everyone recites her Charge of the Goddess but it’s familiar to just about everyone. Valiente took some of the rather rudimentary rituals of early Witchcraft and turned them into poetry. Her influence on how we speak the language of Paganism will still be felt in a hundred years, and that’s an amazing achievement.
Valiente is not on this list just because of her early work with Gerald Gardner, she’s here because she’s one of the unifying threads of Modern Paganism. She researched the beginnings of Modern Witchcraft with Stewart and Janet Farrar, and worked with Robert Cochrane. She was one of our first historians, when it comes to Pagan History Books Valiente’s The Rebirth of Witchcraft is an essential text (and a book I treasure and have re-read at least a dozen times). She was also a leading light in the attempt to build Pagan Community in Great Britain. When Valiente is called “The Mother of Modern Witchcraft” it’s not an exaggeration.
Why she’s not ranked higher: I don’t have a good answer for that, if anything Valiente is the soul of Modern Paganism; she’s what many of us aspire to. I have no doubt that Valiente would have been fully capable of creating her own Witchcraft Tradition had she chosen to do so, but she seemed to mainly refine and polish the Paganisms she encountered. I don’t mean that as an insult, because it takes real genius to make what was already good into something truly great.
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