Young Gerald was a voracious reader, but he never attended school and thus had problems writing for the rest of his life.Īs a young man, he traveled to South Asia, working on tea and rubber plantations in Ceylon, Borneo, and Malaya as well as in the British civil service. He spent time in Nice, the Canary Islands, and Ghana before spending nine years in the Madeira Islands where he developed an intellectual interest in Spiritualism. An asthmatic, Gardner left England as a boy for warmer climates. He came from an upper middle-class family involved in the hardwood timber business. A brief summary of his life and the influences on his thinking will demonstrate why his approach to Paganism is best described as eclectic.įrom an early age, Gardner showed an interest in esoterica. Although it has in the past and occasionally still claims to be an ancient religion - some even claim it to be the religion of the Stone Age - Wicca actually originated in the 20th century in the work of English esoteric thinker Gerald Gardner (1884-1964). Not surprisingly, given its eclectic character, Wicca is a non-dogmatic religion with a wide variety of forms. The most common and best-known form of Neo-Paganism today is Wicca.
