HIS papal bull of 1484, Pope Innocent VIII called for severe measures against witches. In England, it was made a felony in 1542. By 1563, it carried the death penalty.
Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder, had hundreds of women hanged or burned, but in 1647 he, too, was cast into a river where he floated. Thus, he was hanged as a wizard.
An acquaintance of Gardner was the infamous Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). "Not a very nice person who used his friends very badly," says the author Philip Heselton.
In 1941, Crowley and his crowd also held some sort of ceremony against the Germans in Ashdown Forest, Sussex. Gardner, buried in Tunis, was generally regarded as a benign figure. But Crowley, the black magician and self-billed "wickedest man in the world", was thrilled when his few friends called him the "the great beast".
At one point he had to flee Italy amid reports that babies had been sacrificed in black rituals.
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