The pioneers of the various Wiccan or Witchcraft traditions, such as Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente and Robert Cochrane, all claimed that their religion was a continuation of the pagan religion of the Witch-Cult following historians who had purported the Witch-Cult's existence, such as Jules Michelet and Margaret Murray.

Doreen Valiente, a former High Priestess of the Gardnerian tradition, claimed that Gerald Gardner's Bricket Wood coven referred to the god as Cernunnos, or Kernunno, which is a Latin word, discovered on a stone carving found in France, meaning " the Horned One ".

Doreen Valiente claimed that this was because at the time, Gardner had not yet conceived of the idea, and only invented it after writing his novel.

Gerald Gardner ( 1884 – 1964 ) who, with Doreen Valiente ( 1922 – 1999 ) founded Gardnerian Wicca in Britain, claimed to be initiated in the 1940s into a surviving coven of traditional witches, who worshipped both a male Horned God and a female Goddess.

Gardner responded with the sudden production of the Wiccan Laws which led to some of his members, including Valiente, leaving the coven.

The split with Valiente led to the Bricket Wood coven being led by Jack Bracelin and a new High Priestess, Dayonis.

Founding a Wiccan group known as the Bricket Wood coven, he introduced a string of High Priestesses into the religion, including Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone, through which the Gardnerian community spread throughout Britain and subsequently into Australia and the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1953, Doreen Valiente joined Gardner's Bricket Wood coven, and soon rose to become its High Priestess.

Gardner's statements were interpreted by his pupil Doreen Valiente as implying that Clutterbuck had personally initiated him into the coven, but later authors such as Philip Heselton and Eleanor Bone claim that his initiator was in fact Edith Woodford-Grimes.

Valiente joined Gardner's Bricket Wood coven, and soon rose to become its High Priestess.

However Gardner's increasing desire for publicity, much of it ending up negative, caused conflict with Valiente and other members of his coven.

These laws limited the control of the High Priestess, which angered Valiente, who, with several other members, left the coven.

Valiente, who was High Priestess at the time, as well as others in the coven, were highly suspicious of the Laws and their patriarchal language, and wondered why Gardner had not produced them before.

Their refusal to accept the Laws eventually led to Doreen Valiente and others leaving Gardner ’ s coven later that year.

There is also a poetic paraphrased version written by High Priestess Doreen Valiente in the mid 1950s, which is contained within the traditional Gardnerian Book of Shadows.

Doreen Valiente writes that the Horned God also carries the souls of the dead to the underworld.

Doreen Valiente has called the Horned God " the eldest of gods " in both The Witches Creed and also in her Invocation To The Horned God.

Mathiessen also takes the view that the last line was probably a Thompson addition derived from Valiente.

He also stated that " well, if you think you can do any better, go ahead ", and Valiente thought that she could, later stating that:

Valiente dramatically rewrote sections such as the Charge of the Goddess and also wrote several poems for the book, such as The Witches Rune.

Valiente also noticed that a chant in one ritual in the book was based upon the poem " A Tree Song " from Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling, which she had enjoyed as a child.

Although his own book had been put together with the help of Doreen Valiente and included material from a variety of modern sources, ( notably from Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches and the writings of Aleister Crowley ) it also included sections written in an antique ( or mock-antique ) style, including advice for witches brought to trial and tortured.

Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente ( 4 January 1922 – 1 September 1999 ), who also went under the craft name Ameth, was an influential English Wiccan who was involved in a number of different early traditions, including Gardnerianism, Cochrane's Craft and the Coven of Atho.

Valiente dramatically rewrote sections such as the Charge of the Goddess and also wrote several poems for the book, such as The Witches Rune.

Valiente also disapproved of the fact that Cochrane often took what he called " witches ' potions ", but which were, in reality, hallucinogenic drugs.

Valiente also edited and wrote the introduction to the 1990 book, Witchcraft: A Tradition Renewed by Evan John Jones, which was about forms of Witchcraft other than the Gardnerian and Alexandrian traditions, such as Cochrane's Craft.

Valiente also wrote both the Invocation to the Horned God and the Charge of the Goddess, the latter of which now exists in a number of variations, and is one of the most famous texts of the Neopagan movement.

Doreen Valiente, Witchcraft for Tomorrow, 1978, pages 41, 72-74 ( also as noted at The Wiccan Rede: A Historical Journey ); see also The Witches Creed at controverscial. com.

In recent years, UAM students have organised massively to protest against terrorism, after the assassination of Prof. Francisco Tomas y Valiente by ETA in 1995, against the Organic Law of Universities in 2001, to clean Spain's northern coast after the Prestige oil spill in 2002, against the War in Iraq in 2003, to assist to the II European Social Forum also in 2003, and in solidarity with the victims of the 11th March 2004 Madrid train bombings.

The Laws do not appear in earlier known Wiccan documents, including Gardner's Ye bok of Ye Art Magical, Text A or B, or in any of Doreen Valiente ’ s notebooks including one commonly referred to as Text C.

Valiente offers another explanation for the negative reaction of some neopagans ; that the identification of Lucifer as the god of the witches in Aradia was " too strong meat " for Wiccans who were used to the gentler, romantic paganism of Gerald Gardner and were especially quick to reject any relationship between witchcraft and Satanism.

Valiente rewrote much of it, cutting out a lot of sections that had come from Crowley ( whose negative reputation she feared ), though retaining parts that originated with Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, which she felt was genuine witchcraft practice.

In addition, there are puppets ( The Adventures of Peneque el Valiente ( Peneque the brave ) with Miguel Pino ), capeas and the Festival of Music, Dance and Theater in the Castle.

The three of them then set off to Stonehenge ( a place where Valiente had never before been ), where they watched the Druids performing a ritual there.

* Francisco Tomas Y Valiente, chief justice of the Constitutional Court of Spain ( 1986 – 1992 ), murdered by ETA

The initial verse version by Doreen Valiente consisted of eight verses, the second of which was:

Valiente was unhappy with this version, saying that " people seemed to have some difficulty with this, because of the various goddess-names which they found hard to pronounce ", and so she rewrote it as a prose version, much of which differs from her initial version, and is more akin to Gardner's version.

Valiente's identification was based on references Gardner made to a woman he called " Old Dorothy " which Valiente remembered.

In forms of British Traditional Wicca, which include Gardnerian Wicca, Alexandrian Wicca and Algard Wicca, the Book of Shadows used by adherents is based upon that written by Gardner and Valiente.

Valiente only told her husband and mother about the visit to Stonehenge, but not about her initiation, of which they would not have approved.

In the early 1960s, Valiente begun a course on the Coven of Atho, which was run by Raymond Howard, and partially based upon the teachings of Charles Cardell.

Valiente copied everything she was taught into notebooks, which have provided some of the most important information on the practices of the group.

In 1962, Valiente saw her first book published: entitled Where Witchcraft Lives, it dealt with her own research into folklore and the Early Modern witch trials that occurred in her county of Sussex, things which she incorrectly associated with the origins of Wicca.

In March 2011 John Belham-Payne along with his wife, Julie and friends Brian and Patricia Botham and Ashley Mortimer formed The Doreen Valiente Foundation which they established as a charitable trust dedicated to protecting the artefacts, books and writings ( published and unpublished ) that Doreen had bequeathed to John.

") Another controversial law which irked Valiente was that: " And the greatest virtue of a High Priestess be that she recognize that youth is necessary to the representative of the Goddess.