Raymond Howard (Wiccan)

By the latter part of that decade he was running an antiques shop in Field Dalling, Norfolk, where he stored a wooden carving of the Wiccan Horned God, known as the "Head of Atho".

They were known to prominent British Wiccans like Gerald Gardner and Doreen Valiente, and they had placed an advertisement in the esoteric magazine Light encouraging fellow practitioners of the "Craft of the Wiccens" to contact them.

[1] She copied down all of the information provided in the course into a notebook, highlighting that most of it appeared to derive from Dion Fortune's novel The Sea Priestess and Rudolf Koch's The Book of Signs.

[1] Other possible sources include Gardner's Witchcraft Today, Charles Leland's Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, and Lewis Spence's books on Atlantis.

[7] A journalist from the Eastern Daily Press reported on the head in March 1967, stating that it had undergone laboratory tests which had established it to be made out of 2200-year-old English oak.

[7] Howard told the reporter that when living in Norwood Hill, Surrey, the race car driver Donald Campbell rubbed the head of Atho for luck before making his attempts to break the world land speed record.

[7] Valiente saw the head on her meeting with Howard, describing it as "a very impressive carving, having a crude strength and power which make it a remarkable work of primitive art.

Franch allegedly first came across Howard when he was playing by a roadside pond on the summer solstice, and she took an interest in him, instructing him in her witchcraft tradition and leaving him a number of artefacts in her will, including the Head of Atho.

[13] In a newspaper interview with the Eastern Evening News he identified Swaffham as the location in which this had happened, adding that the old lady had left him a deed box containing "teeth, nail parings and old parchments.