In 1941, a coven of British witches met to cast a unique kind of spell that would stop Adolf Hitler and the Nazis invading Britain. These were dark days for the United Kingdom. Continental Europe was falling to the Third Reich by degrees. Paris had been taken by the German army that year. So, the witches of England “raised a cone of power” to repel the Nazis – rendering them powerless to cross the English Channel and take Britain.
And how do we know this? Because the man leading the coven later wrote about it. Gerald Brousseau Gardner (1884-1964) claimed that in 1941, hundreds of witches convened in a Great Coven in the New Forest and using their combined powers, called down mists and fog to obscure the English Channel, making a Nazi invasion impossible.
Gardner (pictured below) would claim that a similar ritual had stopped the Spanish Armada landing in England in 1588 as well as the forces of the Emperor Napoleon in the early 19th century.
Gardner revealed details of this anti-Nazi coven after the Second World War in a book titled Witchcraft Today. One review in 1957, in the Birmingham Evening Mail, sarcastically asked what would have happened if Nazi supporting witches had countered with their own “cone of power” favouring Hitler.
Gardner died in 1964 having popularised Wicca in Britain as a legitimate pagan religion. The assets of the Wicca community, including a witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man, passed to the Scottish witch, Monique Wilson, known among her adepts as Lady Olwen (pictured below). Her decision to sell these assets to the American entertainment operation Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! caused an uproar among Britain’s witches in 1973.
The idea of British witches using magic to defeat the Nazis underpinned the 1971 Disney movie, Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Given the amount of press coverage that Gardner and his successors generated in the 1950s and 1960s, the influence is obvious on the film’s plot.
During the Battle of Britain, a trainee witch – Eglantine Price – decides she will use her emerging supernatural powers to defeat the Nazis. Eglantine enlists the help of three children who have been evacuated from London, which is being pounded by German bombs. How she succeeds is one of the most amusing scenes in a Disney movie and I won’t spoilt it for you. Watch and see!
In 1972, a newspaper article estimated that one in 20 of Britain’s population was involved in some way with the occult. “And it’s no secret that the number of actual witches is constantly increasing”. By this time, Alex Sanders (1926-1988) had inherited Gardner’s mantle as the country’s leading witch. And the story of his predecessor’s coven to stop Hitler was still generating interest from journalists.
Today, witchcraft is becoming increasingly popular again – especially with younger people. Maybe they could harness their powers, through a great coven, to end some of today’s bloody conflicts around the world. Because nothing else seems to be working!
