Doreen Edith Dominy Valiente (4 January 1922 – 1 September 1999) was an English Wiccan who was responsible for writing much of the early religious liturgy within the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca.

Soon becoming the High Priestess of Gardner's Bricket Wood coven, she helped him to produce or adapt many important scriptural texts for Wicca, such as The Witches Rune and the Charge of the Goddess, which were incorporated into the early Gardnerian Book of Shadows.

[14] However, in June 1941 he was serving aboard the Pandias when it was sunk by a U-boat off of the West African coast; he was declared missing in action and presumed deceased.

She had also become familiar with the idea of a pre-Christian witch-cult surviving into the modern period through the works of Charles Godfrey Leland, Margaret Murray, and Robert Graves, although believed that the religion was extinct.

Discussing the recent opening of the Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft in Castletown on the Isle of Man, it mentioned the museum's director, Cecil Williamson, and its "resident witch", Gerald Gardner.

[29] Valiente and Gardner wrote several letters back-and-forth, with the latter eventually suggesting that she meet him at the home of his friend and fellow Wiccan Edith Woodford-Grimes ("Dafo"), who lived not far from Bournemouth, in the Christchurch area.

[30] Before she left the meeting, Gardner gave her a copy of his 1949 novel, High Magic's Aid, in which he describes a fictionalised account of Wiccan initiates in the Middle Ages; he allegedly did so in order to gauge her opinion on ritual nudity and scourging, both of which were present in his tradition of Gardnerian Wicca.

She took the Book of Shadows, and with Gardner's permission, rewrote much of it, cutting out a lot of sections that had come from Crowley, fearing that his infamous reputation would sully Wicca.

[44] However Gardner's increasing desire for publicity, much of it ending up negative, caused conflict with Valiente and other members of his coven like Ned Grove and Derek Boothby.

[45] She was also not enthusiastic about two young people whom Gardner brought into the coven, Jack L. Bracelin and his girlfriend 'Dayonis', stating that "a more qualid pair of spivs it would be hard to find indeed".

It interpreted this evidence in light of the discredited theories of Margaret Murray, which claimed that a pre-Christian religious movement had survived to the present, when it had emerged as Wicca.

[75] In 1964, Valiente was introduced to the Pagan witch Robert Cochrane by a mutual friend, the ceremonial magician William G. Gray, who had met him at a gathering at Glastonbury Tor held by the Brotherhood of the Essenes.

[76] Although sceptical of Cochrane's claims to have come from a hereditary family of witches,[77] she was impressed by his charisma, his desire to avoid publicity, and his emphasis on working outdoors.

[88] In November 1970 she developed a full moon inauguration ritual for local branches of the Front to use and on May Day 1971 she chaired its first national meeting, held at Chiswick, West London.

[89] It was she who developed the three principles that came to be central to the Pagan Front's interpretation of their religion: adherence to the Wiccan Rede, a belief in reincarnation, and a sense of kinship with nature.

[97] During the early 1970s, Valiente became a member of a far right white nationalist political party, the National Front, for about eighteen months, during which she designed a banner for her local branch.

[98] Valiente's biographer Philip Heselton suggested that the party's nationalistic outlook may have appealed to her strongly patriotic values and that she might have hoped that the Front would serve as a political equivalent to the Pagan movement.

[100] However, she allowed her membership of the National Front to lapse, sending a letter to her local branch stating that although she respected its leader John Tyndall and had made friends within the group, she was critical of the party's opposition to women's liberation, gay rights, and sex education, all of which she lauded as progressive causes.

[105] Valiente came to see the public emergence of Wicca as a sign of the Age of Aquarius, arguing that the religion should ally with the feminist and environmentalist movements in order to establish a better future for the planet.

[106] In 1973, the publishing company Robert Hale brought out Valiente's second book, An ABC of Witchcraft, in which she provided an encyclopaedic overview of various topics related to Wicca and esotericism.

[108] In 1978 Hale then published Witchcraft for Tomorrow, in which Valiente proclaimed her belief that Wicca was ideal for the dawning Age of Aquarius and espoused James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis.

[112] With the Farrars, she agreed to publish the original contents of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows, in order to combat the garbled variants that had been released by Cardell and Lady Sheba.

[114] Hutton believed that later scholars such as himself had to be "profoundly grateful" to the trio for undertaking this task,[115] while Doyle White opined that these publications, alongside Witchcraft for Tomorrow, helped contribute to "the democratisation of Wicca" by enabling any reader to set themselves up as a Wiccan practitioner.

[119] In this work she did not dismiss the Murrayite witch-cult theory, but she did undermine the belief that Wicca was the survival of it by highlighting the various false claims made by Gardner, Cochrane, and Sanders, instead emphasising what she perceived as the religion's value for the modern era.

[129] Her final public speech was at the Pagan Federation's annual conference, held at Croydon's Fairfield Halls in November 1997; here she praised the work of early twentieth-century occultist Dion Fortune and urged the Wiccan community to accept homosexuals.

[130] Valiente's health was deteriorating as she was diagnosed first with diabetes and then terminal pancreatic cancer; increasingly debilitated, John Belham-Payne and two of her friends became her primary carers.

After this Pagan rite was completed, her coffin was cremated at Brighton's Woodvale crematorium, in an intentionally low-key service with John Belham-Payne, Doreen's last High priest as celebrant for the funeral.

[136] Hutton characterised Valiente as "a handsome woman of striking, dark-haired, aquiline looks, possessed of a strong, enquiring, candid, and independent personality, and a gift for poetry and ritual".

[148] Kelly asserted that Valiente "deserves credit for having helped transform the Craft from being the hobby of a handful of eccentric Brits into being an international religious movement".

[153] Following Valiente's death, John Belham-Payne received offers of substantial amounts of money from buyers seeking to purchase parts of her collection.