My friend Patricia Crowther, who has died aged 97, was one of the elders of Wicca, a movement that grew, during her lifetime, from an underground witchcraft cult into a global religion known to its adherents as “the Craft”.
Born in Sheffield to Clare and Alfred Dawson, local tobacconists, Patricia attended Eastbank high school and Whiteley’s secretarial college, and also studied at the Constance Grant school of dance. A keen dancer and accordionist, she made her career in the theatre playing in revue, variety, pantomime and the summer season across Britain.
In 1956 she met the stage magician Arnold Crowther, and they performed together in an act combining puppetry and magic. Arnold introduced Patricia to his friend Gerald Gardner, known as the “father of modern witchcraft”. Gardner had discovered the “New Forest coven”, which he believed to be the last remnants of an ancient pagan witch cult, and set about recruiting new members. He initiated Patricia and Arnold into the Craft in 1960, and later that year he conducted their pagan wedding ceremony, known as “handfasting”, on the eve of their civil marriage.
With Gardner’s help, Patricia and Arnold established the Sheffield coven in 1961, and it is estimated that several thousand initiates across the world now trace their lineage back to this “mother” coven.
By the time of Gardner’s death in 1964, Wicca probably had no more than 100 initiates. During the 1960s worldwide interest grew (alongside the growth of the so-called New Age), and advocacy groups such as the Pagan Federation helped establish a wider pagan community.
The Crowthers became prominent representatives of the Craft in public life, giving media interviews and lectures, and publishing books about Wicca. These include The Witches Speak (1965), Witchcraft in Yorkshire (1973), Witch Blood! (1974) and The Secrets of Ancient Witchcraft (1974). In 1971 they wrote and presented a BBC radio series, A Spell of Witchcraft.
Arnold died in 1974. In 1978, Patricia met Ian Lilleyman, also a Wiccan, and they were handfasted in 1981 – one of Patricia’s best known books, Lid Off the Cauldron: A Wicca Handbook, was published in the same year. She also designed cards for Sylvia Gainsford’s Tarot of the Old Path (1990) and wrote Witches Were for Hanging, a novel, in 1992, as well as two autobiographies, One Witch’s World (1998) and From Stagecraft to Witchcraft (2002).
The Craft has carried on growing, and now has about a thousand initiates in the UK, and hundreds of thousands more initiates, adherents and followers around the world, especially in the US.
In 2014 the Centre for Pagan Studies hosted a day of celebration of Patricia’s life and contribution to witchcraft and paganism, at which she took to the stage, aged 87, to deliver an impromptu poetry performance.
Ian survives her.
