April 13

Sybil Leek Tells the Truth

On April 13, 1964, a woman in flowing robes appeared on American television and calmly told the nation she was a witch

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In the spring of 1964, an American publishing house invited a British author to come to New York to speak about her new book, A Shop in the High Street. The book was a memoir of running antique shops in the English countryside—charming, literary, the kind of thing that might generate a pleasant round of publicity before fading gracefully from attention. The author accepted the invitation. She flew to New York. She agreed to appear on To Tell the Truth, a popular CBS panel show in which celebrity panelists attempted to identify which of three contestants was the genuine article.

The genuine article, in this case, was Britain's most famous witch. And on April 13, 1964, Sybil Leek made her first appearance on American television—beginning one of the most consequential media careers in the history of the modern occult revival.

She was forty-seven years old and, wore flowing robes and, until recently, kept a jackdaw named "Mr. Hotfoot Jackson" on her left shoulder as her constant companion.

She was absolutely, serenely, uncompromisingly herself. America, it turned out, was entirely ready for her.

Britain’s Most Famous Witch

Sybil Leek was born on February 22, 1917, in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England, into a family she described as carrying an 800-year tradition of what she called our ancient Celtic form of Witchcraft. Whether the lineage was precisely as she described it has been debated by scholars ever since—Leek was a gifted storyteller who understood that biography and mythology are not always separable—but the broad shape of her early life is clear enough.

As a teenager she married her music teacher; he died two years later, and she returned to her grandmother's house. She made her way eventually to the New Forest in Hampshire—that ancient stretch of woodland in southern England that carries within it some of the deepest folklore roots in the British Isles, and which had been, through the work of Gerald Gardner and his circle in the preceding decades, the geographical heart of the modern Wiccan revival. There she joined the "Horsa Coven," a group that claimed to have existed for seven centuries, and eventually became its High Priestess.

(The New Forest had another significance that Leek would have known: it was where Gardner himself had claimed to have been initiated into the Craft in 1939 by Dorothy Clutterbuck's coven, the initiation that led directly to the codification of Gardnerian Wicca and the modern Wiccan tradition. Leek walked the same ancient ground, breathed the same forest air, and drew on the same deep current of practice that Gardner had channeled into the religion that was rapidly spreading through England and, via his books and influence, to the wider world.)

Leek ran three antique shops while living in the village of Burley in Hampshire, where she became a figure of local fame and local controversy in roughly equal measure. She wore her robes wherever she went and, once the BBC dubbed her “Britain's most famous witch,” tourists descended on Burley.

And then, in early 1964, her landlord declined to renew her lease unless she publicly renounced witchcraft. Leek refused. She closed her shop, packed her belongings, and left the New Forest—the only home the tradition had given her—for good. The invitation from the American publisher arrived at precisely the right moment.

To Tell the Truth

The timing of Sybil Leek's arrival in America was freighted with significance that she could not entirely have anticipated. Gerald Gardner—the man who had codified modern Wicca, published its foundational texts, and been its most prominent public face for a decade—had died on February 13, 1964, less than two months before Leek's American television debut. The vacuum his death created in the public representation of the Craft was considerable. And into that vacuum, in April 1964, stepped a woman in flowing robes who had no hesitation whatsoever about describing herself as a witch on national television.

To Tell the Truth was a straightforward format: a panel of four celebrities questioned three contestants, one of whom was the genuine subject—in this case, a self-described witch—while the other two were impostors. The genuine witch's task was to be convincing enough that the panelists couldn't identify her with certainty. The impostors' task was to be believable; Leek's task, beyond the game itself, was simply to be Sybil Leek in front of a national American audience for the first time. And, as expected by all who knew her, she was magnificent at it. She told the London's Daily Express that February: “I am a white witch and come from a line of white witches, who exist only to do good.”

That clear, simple declaration of identity—no apology, no defensiveness, no hedging—was characteristic of everything she brought to the American media encounter. Leek was not interested in persuading anyone of anything; rather, Leek was interested in being clearly and completely herself, and in letting America decide what to make of it.

America made quite a lot of it. The To Tell the Truth appearance opened a cascade of invitations: the Mike Douglas Show, the David Frost Show, and the Amazing World of Kreskin; Barbara Walters interviewed her twice on the Today Show in 1966, while Hans Holzer, the prolific parapsychologist, contacted her during that first New York visit and invited her to join him investigating hauntings and psychic phenomena—an invitation that led to numerous television and radio programs and made her name permanently familiar to American audiences with any interest in the paranormal. She moved to Los Angeles the following year, met Israel Regardie—Crowley's former secretary, the man who had published the Golden Dawn's complete magical system in defiance of his oath of secrecy and thereby given the tradition to the world—and spent considerable time in discussion with him about magic and Kabbalah.

Leek described astrology as “her first love,” and it was as an astrologer that she primarily presented herself to American audiences in the years that followed: writing prolifically, publishing a monthly magazine, producing books on every aspect of the esoteric arts. Over the course of her American career she wrote more than sixty books on astrology, witchcraft, psychic phenomena, herbs, numerology, reincarnation, and adjacent subjects. She was interviewed, profiled, argued with, admired, dismissed, and taken seriously by turns.

A Woman Who Could Not Be Ignored

What made Sybil Leek genuinely important—beyond the celebrity, beyond the television appearances, beyond the prolific bibliography—was the quality of her public presence and the specific historical moment she occupied. She appeared on American television in 1964, the year that the Witchcraft Act of 1735 had been off the British books for barely thirteen years, the year that the counterculture was just beginning to find its footing, and the year before the "Summer of Love" and the explosive interest in alternative spirituality that would define the late 1960s.

Leek brought to that moment an absolutely undefensive confidence. She talked about the Old Religion and discussed astrology as a serious discipline, standing by her position that what she practiced was ancient, real, and worthy of respect—and if you disagreed, that was your business. Her certainty was not arrogance but conviction, and audiences recognized the difference.

Likewise, Leek was also bracingly independent within the Wiccan tradition itself. She disapproved of nudity in ritual, which put her at odds with Gardnerian practice. She was strongly against drug use, and held that cursing was a legitimate part of the Craft, which set her against many of her contemporaries. She quarreled, sometimes publicly, with other witches who held different views. Her student, Christine Jones, said that Leek mixed truths with untruths liberally, which may be both a fair criticism and a description of an artist's relationship with her own mythology.

In the mid-1960s Leek founded a Craft line in Pennsylvania that became the North American arm of Horsa—the tradition she had practiced in the New Forest—and collaborated in establishing a new tradition called the Sacred Pentagraph. In 1967, as Modern Occultist readers will recall from our tribute to Dr. Frederick Santee two days ago, she traveled to the small Pennsylvania town of Wapwallopen and initiated Santee and his nursing staff into the New Forest lineage, giving birth to the Coven of the Catta. The tradition she carried in her body and her practice scattered itself across the American landscape like seeds from a New Forest tree.

Leek's Lasting Influence

Leek died of cancer on October 26, 1982, in Melbourne, Florida, at sixty-five. In the intervening years, she’d written dozens of books, initiated hundreds of practitioners, appeared on more television programs than any witch before or since, and watched the tradition she had helped bring to American consciousness become a recognized religion with millions of practitioners worldwide. What she brought to that CBS studio on April 13, 1964, was not a performance. It was a presence: the presence of someone who knew what she was, had always known what she was, and had no interest whatsoever in pretending to be anything else for the convenience of a panel show's panelists or a nation's assumptions.

That quality—that complete, unapologetic, self-possessed certainty about the nature of one's own practice and identity—is perhaps the most important thing she taught. Not a ritual technique or an astrological method, but a way of standing in the world while embracing the ancient truths of Wicca and feminist ideals.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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