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Gerald Gardner

Gerald Brosseau Gardner (13 June 1884 – 12 February 1964), also known by the craft name Scire, was an English Wiccan, author, and amateur anthropologist and archaeologist. He was instrumental in bringing the modern pagan religion of Wicca to public attention, writing some of its definitive religious texts and founding the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca.

Born into an upper-middle-class family in Blundellsands, Lancashire, Gardner spent much of his childhood abroad in Madeira. In 1900, he moved to colonial Ceylon. In 1911, he relocated to Malaya, where he worked as a civil servant. Independently, he developed an interest in the native peoples, writing papers, and even a book about their magical practices.

After his retirement in 1936, he travelled to Cyprus and penned the novel A Goddess Arrives before returning to England. Settling down near the New Forest, he joined an occult group, the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship. Through this group, he claimed to have encountered the New Forest coven into which he was initiated in 1939. Gardner portrayed the coven as a survival of the theoretical "witch-cult" discussed in the works of Margaret Murray—a theory that is now discredited.

He claimed to be reviving a pagan faith by supplementing the coven's rituals with ideas borrowed from Freemasonry, ceremonial magic, and the writings of Aleister Crowley to form the Gardnerian tradition of Wicca.

Moving to London in 1945, he became intent on propagating this religion, attracting media attention and writing about it in High Magic's Aid (1949), Witchcraft Today (1954), and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959). Founding a Wiccan group known as the Bricket Wood coven, he introduced a string of High Priestesses into the religion, including Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne, Patricia Crowther and Eleanor Bone, through which the Gardnerian community spread throughout Britain and subsequently into Australia and the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Involved for a time with Cecil Williamson, Gardner also became director of the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft on the Isle of Man, which he ran until his death.

Gardner role in the development of neo-pagan and occult communities was such that a plaque on his gravestone describes him "The Father of Wicca". His claims regarding the New Forest coven have been widely scrutinised, with Gardner being the subject of investigation for historians and biographers Aidan Kelly, Ronald Hutton and Philip Heselton.

Childhood: 1884–1899
Gardner's family was wealthy and upper middle class, running a family firm, Joseph Gardner and Sons, which described itself as "the oldest private company in the timber trade within the British Empire." Specialising in the import of hardwood, the company had been founded in the mid-18th century by Edmund Gardner (b. 1721), an entrepreneur who would subsequently become a Freeman of Liverpool.

Gerald's father, William Robert Gardner (1844–1935) had been the youngest son of Joseph Gardner (b. 1791), after whom the firm had been renamed, and who with his wife Maria had had five sons and three daughters. In 1867, William had been sent to New York City to further the interests of the family firm. Here, he had met an American, Louise Burguelew Ennis, the daughter of a wholesale stationer; entering a relationship, they were married in Manhattan on 25 November 1868.

After a visit to England, the couple returned to the US, where they settled in Mott Haven, Morrisania in New York State. It was here that their first child, Harold Ennis Gardner, was born in 1870. At some point in the next two years they moved back to England, by 1873 settling into The Glen, a large Victorian house in Blundellsands in Lancashire, north-west England, which was developing into a wealthy suburb of Liverpool. It was here that their second child, Robert "Bob" Marshall Gardner, was born in 1874.

In 1876 the family moved into one of the neighbouring houses, Ingle Lodge, and it was here that the couple's third son, Gerald Brosseau Gardner, was born on Friday 13 June 1884. A fourth child, Francis Douglas Gardner, was then born in 1886. Gerald would rarely see Harold, who went on to study law at the University of Oxford, but saw more of Bob, who drew pictures for him, and Douglas, with whom he shared his nursery.

The Gardners employed an Irish nursemaid named Josephine "Com" McCombie, who was entrusted with taking care of the young Gerald; she would subsequently become the dominant figure of his childhood, spending far more time with him than his parents. Gardner suffered with asthma from a young age, having particular difficulty in the cold Lancashire winters. His nursemaid offered to take him to warmer climates abroad at his father's expense in the hope that this condition would not be so badly affected.

Subsequently, in summer 1888, Gerald and Com travelled via London to Nice in the south of France. After several more years spent in the Mediterranean, in 1891 they went to the Canary Islands, and it was here that Gardner first developed his lifelong interest in weaponry. From there, they then went on to Accra in the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). Accra was followed by a visit to Funchal on the Portuguese island of Madeira; they would spend most of the next nine years on the island, only returning to England for three or four months in the summer.

According to Gardner's first biographer, Jack Bracelin, Com was very flirtatious and "clearly looked on these trips as mainly manhunts", viewing Gardner as a nuisance. As a result, he was largely left to his own devices, which he spent going out, meeting new people and learning about foreign cultures. In Madeira, he also began collecting weapons, many of which were remnants from the Napoleonic Wars, displaying them on the wall of his hotel room.

As a result of his illness and these foreign trips, Gardner ultimately never attended school, or gained any formal education. He taught himself to read by looking at copies of The Strand Magazine but his writing betrayed his poor education all his life, with highly eccentric spelling and grammar. A voracious reader, one of the books that most influenced him at the time was Florence Marryat's There Is No Death (1891), a discussion of spiritualism, and from which he gained a firm belief in the existence of an afterlife.

Ceylon and Borneo: 1900–1911
In 1900, Com married David Elkington, one of her many suitors who owned a tea plantation in the British colony of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka). It was agreed with the Gardners that Gerald would live with her on a tea plantation named Ladbroke Estate in the town of Maskeliya, where he could learn the tea trade. In 1901 Gardner and the Elkingtons lived briefly in a bungalow in Kandy, where a neighbouring bungalow had just been vacated by the occultists Aleister Crowley and Charles Henry Allan Bennett.

At his father's expense, Gardner trained as a "creeper", or trainee planter, learning all about the growing of tea; although he disliked the "dreary endlessness" of the work, he enjoyed being outdoors and near to the forests. He lived with the Elkingtons until 1904, when he moved into his own bungalow and began earning a living working on the Non Pareil tea estate below the Horton Plains. He spent much of his spare time hunting deer and trekking through the local forests, becoming acquainted with the Singhalese natives and taking a great interest in their Buddhist beliefs.

In December 1904, his parents and younger brother visited, with his father asking him to invest in a pioneering rubber plantation which Gardner was to manage; located near the village of Belihuloya, it was known as the Atlanta Estate, but allowed him a great deal of leisure time. Exploring his interest in weaponry, in 1907 Gardner joined the Ceylon Planters Rifle Corps, a local volunteer force composed of European tea and rubber planters intent on protecting their interests from foreign aggression or domestic insurrection.

In 1907 Gardner returned to Britain for several months' leave, spending time with his family and joining the Legion of Frontiersmen, a militia founded to repel the threat of German invasion. During his visit, Gardner spent a lot of time with family relations known as the Sergenesons. Gardner became very friendly with this side of his family, whom his Anglican parents avoided because they were Methodists.

According to Gardner, the Surgenesons talked about the paranormal with him; the patriarch of the family, Ted Surgeneson, believed that fairies were living in his garden and would say "I can often feel they're there, and sometimes I've seen them", though he readily admitted the possibility that it was all in his imagination. It was from the Sergenesons that Gardner claimed to have discovered a family rumour that his grandfather, Joseph, had been a practising witch, after being converted to the practice by his mistress. Another unconfirmed family belief repeated by Gardner was that a Scottish ancestor, Grissell Gairdner, had been burned as a witch in Newburgh in 1610.

Gardner returned to Ceylon in late 1907 and settled down to the routine of managing the rubber plantation. In 1910 he was initiated as an Apprentice Freemason into the Sphinx Lodge No. 107 in Colombo, affiliated with the Irish Grand Lodge. Gardner placed great importance on this new activity; In order to attend masonic meetings, he had to arrange a weekend's leave, walk 15 miles to the nearest railway station in Haputale, and then catch a train to the city.

He entered into the second and third degrees of Freemasonry within the next month, but this enthusiasm seems also to have waned, and he resigned the next year, probably because he intended to leave Ceylon. The experiment with rubber growing at the Atlanta Estate had proved relatively unsuccessful, and Gardner's father decided to sell the property in 1911, leaving Gerald unemployed.

That year, Gardner moved to British North Borneo, gaining employment as a rubber planter at the Mawo Estate at Membuket. However, he did not get on well with the plantation's manager, a racist named R. J. Graham who had wanted to deforest the entire local area. Instead, Gardner became friendly with many of the locals, including the Dayak and Dusun people.

An amateur anthropologist, Gardner was fascinated by the indigenous way of life, particularly the local forms of weaponry such as the sumpitan. He was intrigued by the tattoos of the Dayaks and pictures of him in later life show large snake or dragon tattoos on his forearms, presumably obtained at this time. Taking a great interest in indigenous religious beliefs, Gardner told his first biographer that he had attended Dusun séances or healing rituals.

He was unhappy with the working conditions and the racist attitudes of his colleagues, and when he developed malaria he felt that this was the last straw; he left Borneo and moved to Singapore, in what was then known as the Straits Settlements, part of British Malaya.

Malaya and World War I: 1911–1926
Arriving in Singapore, he initially planned to return to Ceylon, but was offered a job working as an assistant on a rubber plantation in Perak, northern Malaya, and decided to take it, working for the Borneo Company. Arriving in the area, he decided to supplement this income by purchasing his own estate, Bukit Katho, on which he could grow rubber; initially sized at 450 acres, Gardner purchased various pieces of adjacent land until it covered 600 acres.

Here, Gardner made friends with an American man known as Cornwall, who had converted to Islam and married a local Malay woman. Through Cornwall, Gardner was introduced to many locals, whom he soon befriended, including members of the Senoi and Malay peoples. Cornwall invited Gardner to make the Shahada, the Muslim confession of faith, which he did; it allowed him to gain the trust of locals, although he would never become a practising Muslim. Cornwall was however an unorthodox Muslim, and his interest in local peoples included their magical and spiritual beliefs, to which he also introduced Gardner, who took a particular interest in the kris, a ritual knife with magical uses.

In 1915, Gardner again joined a local volunteer militia, the Malay States Volunteer Rifles. Although between 1914 and 1918 World War I was raging in Europe, its effects were little felt in Malaya, apart from the 1915 Singapore Mutiny. Gardner was keen to do more towards the war effort and in 1916 once again returned to Britain. He attempted to join the British Navy but was turned down due to ill health. Unable to fight on the front lines, he began working as an orderly in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) in the First Western General Hospital, Fazakerley, located on the outskirts of Liverpool.

He was working in the VAD when casualties came back from the Battle of the Somme and he was engaged in looking after patients and assisting in changing wound dressings. He soon had to give this up when his malaria returned, and so decided to return to Malaya in October 1916 because of the warmer climate.

He continued to manage the rubber plantation but after the end of the war, commodity prices dropped and by 1921 it was difficult to make a profit. He returned again to Britain, in what later biographer Philip Heselton speculated might have been an unsuccessful attempt to ask his father for money. Returning to Malaya, Gardner found that the Borneo Company had sacked him, and he was forced to find work with the Public Works Department. In September 1923 he successfully applied to the Office of Customs to become a government-inspector of rubber plantations, a job that involved a great amount of travelling around the country, something he enjoyed.

After a brief but serious illness, the Johore government reassigned Gardner to an office in the Lands Office while he recovered, eventually being promoted to Principal Officer of Customs. In this capacity, he was made an Inspector of Rubber Shops, overseeing the regulation and sale of rubber in the country. In 1926 he was placed in charge of monitoring shops selling opium, noting regular irregularities and a thriving illegal trade in the controlled substance; believing opium to be essentially harmless, there is evidence indicating that Gardner probably took many bribes in this position, earning himself a small fortune.

Marriage and archaeology: 1927–1936
Gardner's mother had died in 1920, but he had not returned to Britain on that occasion. However, in 1927 his father became very ill with dementia, and Gardner decided to visit him. On his return to Britain, Gardner began to investigate spiritualism and mediumship. He soon had several encounters which he attributed to spirits of deceased family members.

Continuing to visit Spiritualist churches and séances, he was highly critical of much of what he saw, although he encountered several mediums he considered genuine. One medium apparently made contact with a deceased cousin of Gardner's, an event which impressed him greatly. His first biographer Jack Bracelin reports that this was a watershed in Gardner's life, and that a previous academic interest in spiritualism and life after death thereafter became a matter of firm personal belief for him.

The very same evening (28 July 1927) after Gardner had met this medium, he met the woman he was to marry; Dorothea Frances Rosedale, known as Donna, a relation of his sister-in-law Edith. He asked her to marry him the next day and she agreed. Because his leave was coming to an end very soon, they married quickly on 16 August at St Jude's Church, Kensington, and then honeymooned in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, before heading via France to Malaya.

Arriving in the country, the couple settled into a bungalow at Bukit Japon in Johor Bahru. Here, he once more became involved in Freemasonry, joining the Johore Royal Lodge No. 3946, but had retired from it by April 1931. Gardner also returned to his old interests in the anthropology of Malaya, witnessing the magical practices performed by the locals, and he readily accepted a belief in magic. During his time in Malaya, Gardner became increasingly interested in local customs, particularly those involved in folk magic and weapons.

Gardner was not only interested in the anthropology of Malaya, but also in its archaeology. He began excavations at the city of Johore Lama, alone and in secret, as the local Sultan considered archaeologists little better than grave-robbers. Prior to Gardner's investigations, no serious archaeological excavation had occurred at the city, though he himself soon unearthed four miles of earthworks, and uncovered finds that included tombs, pottery, and porcelain dating from Ming China.

He went on to begin further excavations at the royal cemetery of Kota Tinggi, and the jungle city of Syong Penang. His finds were displayed as an exhibit on the "Early History of Johore" at the National Museum of Singapore, and several beads that he had discovered suggested that trade went on between the Roman Empire and the Malays, presumably, Gardner thought, via India. He also found gold coins originating from Johore and he published academic papers on both the beads and the coins.

By the early 1930s Gardner's activities had moved from those exclusively of a civil servant, and he began to think of himself more as a folklorist, archaeologist and anthropologist. He was encouraged in this by the director of the Raffles Museum (now the National Museum of Singapore) and by his election to Fellowship of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1936.

En route back to London in 1932 Gardner stopped off in Egypt and, armed with a letter of introduction, joined Sir Flinders Petrie who was excavating the site of Tall al-Ajjul in Palestine. Arriving in London in August 1932 he attended a conference on prehistory and protohistory at King's College London, attending at least two lectures which described the cult of the Mother Goddess. He also befriended the archaeologist and practising Pagan Alexander Keiller, known for his excavations at Avebury, who would encourage Gardner to join in with the excavations at Hembury Hill in Devon, also attended by Aileen Fox and Mary Leakey.

Returning to East Asia, he took a ship from Singapore to Saigon in French Indo-China, from where he travelled to Phnom Penh, visiting the Silver Pagoda. He then took a train to Hangzhou in China, before continuing onto Shanghai; because of the ongoing Chinese Civil War, the train did not stop throughout the entire journey, something that annoyed the passengers. In 1935, Gardner attended the Second Congress for Prehistoric Research in the Far East in Manila, Philippines, acquainting himself with several experts in the field.

His main research interest lay in the Malay kris blade, which he unusually chose to spell "keris"; he eventually collected 400 examples and talked to natives about their magico-religious uses. Deciding to author a book on the subject, he wrote Keris and Other Malay Weapons, being encouraged to do so by anthropologist friends; it would subsequently be edited into a readable form by Betty Lumsden Milne and published by the Singapore-based Progressive Publishing Company in 1936. It was well received by literary and academic circles in Malaya.

In 1935, Gardner heard that his father had died, leaving him a bequest of £3,000. This assurance of financial independence may have led him to consider retirement, and as he was due for a long leave in 1936 the Johore Civil Service allowed him to retire slightly early, in January 1936. Gardner wanted to stay in Malaya, but he conceded to his wife Donna, who insisted that they return to England.

Return to Europe: 1936–1938
In 1936, Gardner and Donna left Malaya and headed for Europe. She proceeded straight to London, renting them a flat at 26 Charing Cross Road. Gardner visited Palestine, becoming involved in the archaeological excavations run by J.L. Starkey at Lachish. Here he grew particularly interested in a temple containing statues to both the male deity of Judeo-Christian theology and the pagan goddess Ashtoreth.

From Palestine, Gardner went to Turkey, Greece, Hungary, and Germany. He eventually reached England, but soon went on a visit to Denmark to attend a conference on weaponry at the Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen, during which he gave a talk on the kris.

Returning to Britain, he found that the climate made him sick, leading him to register with a doctor, Edward A. Gregg, who recommended that he try nudism. Hesitant at first, Gardner first attended an indoor nudist club, the Lotus League in Finchley, North London, where he made several new friends and felt that the nudity cured his ailment. When summer came, he decided to visit an outdoor nudist club, that of Fouracres near the town of Bricket Wood in Hertfordshire, which he soon began to frequent.

Through nudism, Gardner made a number of notable friends, including James Laver (1899–1975), who became the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Cottie Arthur Burland (1905–1983), who was the Curator of the Department of Ethnography at the British Museum. Biographer Philip Heselton suggested that through the nudist scene Gardner may have also met Dion Byngham (1896–1990), a senior member of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry who propounded a Contemporary Pagan religion known as Dionysianism. By the end of 1936, Gardner was finding his Charing Cross Road flat to be cramped and moved into the block of flats at 32a Buckingham Palace Mansions.

Fearing the cold of the English winter, Gardner decided to sail to Cyprus in late 1936, remaining there into the following year. Visiting the Museum in Nicosia, he studied the Bronze Age swords of the island, successfully hafting one of them, on the basis of which he wrote a paper entitled "The Problem of the Cypriot Bronze Dagger Hilt", which would subsequently be translated into both French and Danish, being published in the journals of the Société Préhistorique Française and the Vaabenhistorisk Selskab respectively.

Back in London, in September 1937, Gardner applied for and received a Doctorate of Philosophy from the Meta Collegiate Extension of the National Electronic Institute, an organisation based in Nevada that was widely recognised by academic institutions as offering invalid academic degrees via post for a fee. He would subsequently style himself as "Dr. Gardner", despite the fact that academic institutions would not recognise his qualifications.

Planning to return to the Palestinian excavations the following winter, he was prevented from doing so when Starkey was murdered. Instead, he decided to return to Cyprus. A believer in reincarnation, Gardner came to believe that he had lived on the island once before, in a previous life, subsequently buying a plot of land in Famagusta, planning to build a house on it, although this never came about.

Influenced by his dreams, he wrote his first novel, A Goddess Arrives, over the next few years. Revolving around an Englishman living in 1930s London named Robert Denvers who has recollections of a previous life as a Bronze Age Cypriot – an allusion to Gardner himself – the primary plot of A Goddess Arrives is set in ancient Cyprus and featured a queen, Dayonis, who practices sorcery in an attempt to help her people defend themselves from invading Egyptians. Published in late 1939, biographer Philip Heselton noted that the book was "a very competent first work of fiction", with strong allusions to the build-up which proceeded World War II.

Returning to London, he helped to dig shelter trenches in Hyde Park as a part of the build-up to the war, also volunteering for the Air Raid Wardens' Service. Fearing the bombing of the city, Gardner and his wife soon moved to Highcliffe, just south of the New Forest in Hampshire. Here, they purchased a house built in 1923 named Southridge, situated on the corner of Highland Avenue and Elphinstone Road.

The Rosicrucian Order: 1938–1939
In Highcliffe, Gardner came across a building describing itself as the "First Rosicrucian Theatre in England". Having an interest in Rosicrucianism, a prominent magico-religious tradition within Western esotericism, Gardner decided to attend one of the plays performed by the group; in August 1939, Gardner took his wife to a theatrical performance based on the life of Pythagoras. An amateur thespian, she hated the performance, thinking the quality of both actors and script terrible, and she refused to go again.

Unperturbed and hoping to learn more of Rosicrucianism, Gardner joined the group in charge of running the theatre, the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship, and began attending meetings held in their local ashram. Founded in 1920 by George Alexander Sullivan, the Fellowship had been based upon a blend of Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Freemasonry and his own personal innovation, and had moved to Christchurch in 1930.

As time went by, Gardner became critical of many of the Rosicrucian Order's practices; Sullivan's followers claimed that he was immortal, having formerly been the famous historical figures Pythagoras, Cornelius Agrippa and Francis Bacon. Gardner facetiously asked if he was also the Wandering Jew, much to the annoyance of Sullivan himself. Another belief held by the group that Gardner found amusing was that a lamp hanging from one of the ceilings was the disguised holy grail of Arthurian legend.

Gardner's dissatisfaction with the group grew, particularly when in 1939, one of the group's leaders sent a letter out to all members in which she stated that war would not come. The very next day, Britain declared war on Germany, greatly unimpressing the increasingly cynical Gardner.

Alongside Rosicrucianism, Gardner had also been pursuing other interests. In 1939, Gardner joined the Folk-Lore Society; his first contribution to its journal Folk-Lore, appeared in the June 1939 issue and described a box of witchcraft relics that he believed had belonged to the 17th century "Witch-Finder General", Matthew Hopkins. Subsequently, in 1946 he would go on to become a member of the society's governing council, although most other members of the society were wary of him and his academic credentials.

Gardner would also join the Historical Association, being elected co-president of its Bournemouth and Christchurch branch in June 1944, following which he became a vocal supporter for the construction of a local museum for the Christchurch borough. He also involved himself in preparations for the impending war, joining the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) as a warden, where he soon rose to a position of local seniority, with his own house being assigned as the ARP post. In 1940, following the outbreak of conflict, he also tried to sign up for the Local Defence Volunteers, or "Home Guard", but was turned away because he was already an ARP warden.

He managed to circumvent this restriction by joining his local Home Guard in the capacity as armourer, which was officially classified as technical staff. Gardner took a strong interest in the Home Guard, helping to arm his fellows from his own personal weaponry collection and personally manufacturing molotov cocktails.

The New Forest coven: 1939–1944
Although sceptical of the Rosicrucian Order, Gardner got on well with a group of individuals inside the group who were "rather brow-beaten by the others, kept themselves to themselves." Gardner's biographer Philip Heselton theorised that this group consisted of Edith Woodford-Grimes (1887–1975), Susie Mason, her brother Ernie Mason, and their sister Rosetta Fudge, all of whom had originally come from Southampton before moving to the area around Highcliffe, where they joined the Order.

According to Gardner, "unlike many of the others [in the Order], [they] had to earn their livings, were cheerful and optimistic and had a real interest in the occult". Gardner became "really very fond of them", remarking that he "would have gone through hell and high water even then for any of them." In particular he grew close to Woodford-Grimes, being invited over to her home to meet her daughter, and the two helped each other with their writing, Woodford-Grimes probably assisting Gardner edit A Goddess Arrives prior to publication. Gardner would subsequently give her the nickname "Dafo", for which she would become better known.

According to Gardner's later account, one night in September 1939, they took him to a large house owned by "Old Dorothy" Clutterbuck, a wealthy local woman, where he was made to strip naked and taken through an initiation ceremony. Halfway through the ceremony, he heard the word "Wicca (Male)" and "Wicce (Female)", and he recognised it as an Old English word for "witch".

He was already acquainted with Margaret Murray's theory of the Witch-cult, and that "I then knew then that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived." This group, he claimed, were the New Forest coven, and he portrayed them as one of the few surviving covens of an ancient, pre-Christian Witch-Cult religion. Murray's theory of a pagan 'witch-cult' has been discredited. Later research by the likes of Hutton and Heselton has shown that the New Forest coven was probably only formed in the mid-1930s, based upon Murray's discredited theories and works on folk magic.

Gardner only ever described one of their rituals in depth, and this was an event that he termed "Operation Cone of Power". According to his own account, it took place in 1940 in a part of the New Forest and was designed to ward off the Nazis from invading Britain by magical means. Gardner claimed that a "Great Circle" was erected at night, with a "great cone of power" – a form of magical energy – being raised and sent to Berlin with the command of "you cannot cross the sea, you cannot cross the sea, you cannot come, you cannot come".

Bricket Wood and the Origins of Gardnerianism: 1945–1950
Throughout his time in the New Forest, Gardner had regularly travelled to London, keeping his flat at Buckingham Palace Mansions until mid-1939 and regularly visiting the Spielplatz nudist club there. At Spielplatz he befriended Ross Nichols, whom he would later introduce to the Pagan religion of Druidry; Nichols would become enamoured with this faith, eventually founding the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. However, following the war, Gardner decided to return to London, moving into 47 Ridgemount Gardens, Bloomsbury in late 1944 or early 1945.

Continuing his interest in nudism, in 1945 he purchased a plot of land in Fouracres, a nudist colony near to the village of Bricket Wood in Hertfordshire that would soon be renamed Five Acres. As a result, he would become one of the major shareholders at the club, exercising a significant level of power over any administrative decisions and was involved in a recruitment drive to obtain more members.

Between 1936 and 1939, Gardner befriended the Christian mystic J.S.M. Ward, proprietor of the Abbey Folk Park, Britain's oldest open-air museum. One of the exhibits was a 16th-century cottage that Ward had found near to Ledbury, Herefordshire and had transported to his park, where he exhibited it as a "witch's cottage". Gardner made a deal with Ward exchanging the cottage for Gardner's piece of land near to Famagusta in Cyprus.

The cottage was dismantled, and the parts transported to Bricket Wood, where they were reassembled on Gardner's land at Five Acres. In Midsummer 1947 he held a ceremony in the cottage as a form of housewarming, which Heselton speculated was probably based upon the ceremonial magic rites featured in The Key of Solomon grimoire.

Furthering his interest in esoteric Christianity, in August 1946 Gardner was ordained as a priest in the Ancient British Church, a fellowship open to anyone who considered themselves a monotheist. Gardner also took an interest in Druidry, joining the Ancient Druid Order (ADO) and attending its annual Midsummer rituals at Stonehenge.

He also joined the Folk-Lore Society, being elected to their council in 1946, and that same year giving a talk on "Art Magic and Talismans". Nevertheless, many fellows – including Katherine Briggs – were dismissive of Gardner's ideas and his fraudulent academic credentials. In 1946 he also joined the Society for Psychical Research.

On May Day 1947, Gardner's friend Arnold Crowther introduced him to Aleister Crowley, the ceremonial magician who had founded the religion of Thelema in 1904. Shortly before his death, Crowley elevated Gardner to the IV° of Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) and issued a charter decreeing that Gardner could admit people into its Minerval degree. The charter itself was written in Gardner's handwriting and only signed by Crowley.

From November 1947 to March 1948, Gardner and his wife toured the United States visiting relatives in Memphis, also visiting New Orleans, where Gardner hoped to learn about Voodoo. During his voyage, Crowley had died, and as a result Gardner considered himself the head of the O.T.O. in Europe, (a position accepted by Lady Frieda Harris). He met Crowley's successor, Karl Germer, in New York though Gardner would soon lose interest in leading the O.T.O., and in 1951 he was replaced by Frederic Mellinger as the O.T.O.'s European representative.

Gardner hoped to spread Wicca and described some of its practices in a fictional form as High Magic's Aid. Set in the twelfth-century, Gardner included scenes of ceremonial magic based on The Key of Solomon. Published by the Atlantis Bookshop in July 1949, Gardner's manuscript had been edited into a publishable form by astrologer Madeline Montalban.

Privately, he had also begun work on a scrapbook known as "Ye Bok of Ye Art Magical", in which he wrote down a number of Wiccan rituals and spells. This would prove to be the prototype for what he later termed a Book of Shadows. He also gained some of his first initiates, Barbara and Gilbert Vickers, who were initiated at some point between autumn 1949 and autumn 1950.

Doreen Valiente and the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft: 1950–1957
Gardner also came into contact with Cecil Williamson, who was intent on opening his own museum devoted to witchcraft; the result would be the Folk-lore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft, opened in Castletown on the Isle of Man in 1951. Gardner and his wife moved to the island, where he took up the position of "resident witch". On 29 July, the Sunday Pictorial published an article about the museum in which Gardner declared "Of course I'm a witch. And I get great fun out of it."

The museum was not a financial success, and the relationship between Gardner and Williamson deteriorated. In 1954, Gardner bought the museum from Williamson, who returned to England to form the rival Museum of Witchcraft, eventually settling it in Boscastle, Cornwall. Gardner renamed his exhibition the Museum of Magic and Witchcraft and continued running it up until his death.

He also acquired a flat at 145 Holland Road, near Shepherd's Bush in West London, but nevertheless fled to warmer climates during the winter, where his asthma would not be so badly affected, for instance spending time in France, Italy, and the Gold Coast. From his base in London, he would frequent Atlantis bookshop, thereby encountering a number of other occultists, including Austin Osman Spare and Kenneth Grant, and he also continued his communication with Karl Germer until 1956.

In 1952, Gardner had begun to correspond with a young woman named Doreen Valiente. She eventually requested initiation into the Craft, and though Gardner was hesitant at first, he agreed that they could meet during the winter at the home of Edith Woodford-Grimes. Valiente got on well with both Gardner and Woodford-Grimes and having no objections to either ritual nudity or scourging (which she had read about in a copy of Gardner's novel High Magic's Aid that he had given to her), she was initiated by Gardner into Wicca on Midsummer 1953.

Valiente went on to join the Bricket Wood Coven. She soon rose to become the High Priestess of the coven and helped Gardner to revise his Book of Shadows, and attempting to cut out most of Crowley's influence.

In 1954, Gardner published a non-fiction book, Witchcraft Today, containing a preface by Margaret Murray, who had published her discredited theory of 'witchcraft' being a surviving pagan religion in her 1921 book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. In his book, Gardner not only espoused Murray's theory, but also his theory that a belief in faeries in Europe was due to a secretive pygmy race that lived alongside other communities, and that the Knights Templar had been initiates of the Craft.

Alongside this book, Gardner began to increasingly court publicity, going so far as to invite the press to write articles about the religion. Many of these turned out very negatively for the cult; one declared "Witches Devil-Worship in London!", and another accused him of whitewashing witchcraft in his luring of people into covens. Gardner continued courting publicity, despite the negative articles that many tabloids were producing, and believed that only through publicity could more people become interested in witchcraft, so preventing the "Old Religion", as he called it, from dying out.

Later life and death
In 1960, Gardner's official biography, entitled Gerald Gardner: Witch, was published. It was written by a friend of his, the Sufi mystic Idries Shah, but used the name of one of Gardner's High Priests, Jack L. Bracelin, because Shah was wary about being associated with Witchcraft. In May of that year, Gardner travelled to Buckingham Palace, where he enjoyed a garden party in recognition of his years of service to the Empire in the Far East. Soon after his trip, Gardner's wife Donna died, and Gardner himself once again began to suffer badly from asthma.

The following year he, along with Shah and Lois Bourne, travelled to the island of Majorca to holiday with the poet Robert Graves, whose The White Goddess would play a significant part in the burgeoning Wiccan religion. In 1963, Gardner decided to go to Lebanon over the winter. Whilst returning home on the ship, The Scottish Prince on 12 February 1964, he suffered a fatal heart attack at the breakfast table. He was buried in Tunisia, the ship's next port of call, and his funeral was attended only by the ship's captain. He was 79 years old.

Though having bequeathed the museum, all his artifacts, and the copyright to his books in his will to one of his High Priestesses, Monique Wilson, she and her husband sold off the artefact collection to the American Ripley's Believe It or Not! organisation several years later. Ripley's took the collection to America, where it was displayed in two museums before being sold off during the 1980s. Gardner had also left parts of his inheritance to Patricia Crowther, Doreen Valiente, Lois Bourne and Jack Bracelin, the latter inheriting the Fiveacres Nudist Club and taking over as full-time High Priest of the Bricket Wood coven.

Several years after Gardner's death, the Wiccan High Priestess Eleanor Bone visited North Africa and went looking for Gardner's grave. She discovered that the cemetery he was interred in was to be redeveloped, and so she raised enough money for his body to be moved to another cemetery in Tunis, where it currently remains. In 2007, a new plaque was attached to his grave, describing him as being "Father of Modern Wicca. Beloved of the Great Goddess".

Personal life
Gardner only married once, to Donna, and several who knew him made the claim that he was devoted to her. Indeed, after her death in 1960, he began to again suffer serious asthma attacks. Despite this, as many coven members slept over at his cottage due to living too far away to travel home safely, he was known to cuddle up to his young High Priestess, Dayonis, after rituals. The author Philip Heselton, who largely researched Wicca's origins, came to the conclusion that Gardner had held a long-term affair with Dafo, a theory expanded upon by Adrian Bott.

Those who knew him within the Wiccan movement recalled how he was a firm believer in the therapeutic benefits of sunbathing. He also had several tattoos on his body, depicting magical symbols such as a snake, dragon, anchor and dagger. In his later life he wore a "heavy bronze bracelet... denoting the three degrees... of witchcraft" as well as a "large silver ring with... signs on it, which... represented his witch-name 'Scire', in the letters of the magical Theban alphabet."

According to Bricket Wood coven member Frederic Lamond, Gardner also used to comb his beard into a narrow barbiche and his hair into two horn like peaks, giving him "a somewhat demonic appearance". Lamond thought that Gardner was "surprisingly lacking in charisma" for someone at the forefront of a religious movement.

Gardner was a supporter of the centre-right Conservative Party, and for several years had been a member of the Highcliffe Conservative Association, as well as being an avid reader of the pro-Conservative newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.

Virulent homophobia
Lois Bourne, one of the High Priestesses of the Bricket Wood Coven, accused Gardner of homophobia:"'Gerald was homophobic. He had a deep hatred and detestation of homosexuality, which he regarded as a disgusting perversion and a flagrant transgression of natural law ... 'There are no homosexual witches, and it is not possible to be a homosexual and a witch' Gerald almost shouted. No one argued with him.'"

False educational claims
In a 1951 interview with a journalist from the Sunday Pictorial newspaper, Gardner said he was a Doctor of Philosophy from Singapore and also had a doctorate in literature from Toulouse. Later investigation by Doreen Valiente suggested that these claims were false. The University of Singapore did not exist at that time and the University of Toulouse had no record of his receiving a doctorate. Valiente suggests that these claims may have been a form of compensation for his lack of formal education.

Media engagement
Valiente further criticises Gardner for his publicity-seeking – or at least his indiscretion. After a series of tabloid exposés, some members of his coven proposed some rules limiting what members of the Craft should say to non-members. Valiente reports that Gardner responded with a set of Wiccan laws of his own, which he claimed were original, but others suspected he had made up on the spot. This led to a split in the coven, with Valiente and others leaving.

Legacy
Commenting on Gardner, Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White commented that "There are few figures in esoteric history who can rival him for his dominating place in the pantheon of Pagan pioneers."

In 2012, Philip Heselton published a two-volume biography of Gardner, titled Witchfather. The biography was reviewed by Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White in The Pomegranate journal, where he commented that it was "more exhaustive with greater detail" than Heselton's prior tomes and was "excellent in most respects".

title: Gerald Gardner


text:
Gavin MacLeod

Gavin MacLeod (born Allan George See; February 28, 1931 – May 29, 2021) was an American actor best known for his roles as news writer Murray Slaughter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and ship's captain Merrill Stubing on ABC's The Love Boat. After growing up Catholic, MacLeod became an evangelical Christian in 1984. His career, which spanned six decades, included work as a Christian television host, author, and guest on several talk, variety, and religious programs.

MacLeod's career began in films in 1957. In 1965, he starred in The Sword of Ali Baba. He went on to appear in A Man Called Gannon (1968), in The Thousand Plane Raid (1969), and in Kelly's Heroes (1970).

MacLeod also achieved continuing television success co-starring alongside Ernest Borgnine on McHale's Navy (1962–1964) as Joseph "Happy" Haines.

Early life
Allan George See was born in Mount Kisco, New York. His mother, Margaret (née Shea) See (1906–2004), a middle school dropout, worked for Reader's Digest. His father, George See (1906–1945), an electrician, was part Chippewa (Ojibwe). His brother Ronald was three years his junior. He grew up in Pleasantville, New York, and studied acting at Ithaca College, from which he graduated in 1952 with a bachelor's degree in fine arts.

After serving in the United States Air Force, he moved to New York City and worked at Radio City Music Hall while looking for acting work. At about this time he changed his name, drawing "Gavin" from a physically disabled victim in a television drama, and "MacLeod" from his Ithaca drama coach, Beatrice MacLeod. MacLeod said in a 2013 interview with Parade about his stage name, he "felt as if my name was getting in the way of my success." Allan, he wrote, "just wasn't strong enough," and See was "too confusing."

Career
MacLeod made his television debut in 1957 on The Walter Winchell File at the age of 26. His first movie appearance was a small, uncredited role in The True Story of Lynn Stuart in 1958. Soon thereafter, he landed a credited role in I Want to Live!, a 1958 prison drama starring Susan Hayward. He was soon noticed by Blake Edwards, who in 1958 cast him in the pilot episode of his NBC series Peter Gunn, two guest roles on the Edwards CBS series Mr. Lucky in 1959, and as a nervous harried navy yeoman in Operation Petticoat, with Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. Operation Petticoat proved to be a breakout role for MacLeod, and he was soon cast in two other Edwards comedies, High Time with Bing Crosby and The Party with Peter Sellers.

In December 1961, he landed a guest role on The Dick Van Dyke Show, which was his first time working with Mary Tyler Moore. MacLeod also had guest appearances on Perry Mason, The Andy Griffith Show, Ben Casey, The Big Valley, Hogan's Heroes, Ironside, and My Favorite Martian. He played the role of a drug pusher, "Big Chicken", in two episodes of the first season of Hawaii Five-O.

His first regular television role began in 1962 as Joseph "Happy" Haines on McHale's Navy, but—unlike his character—he was unhappy with the role's limitations. He later describe Haines as "not much of a character" who had "two lines a week", and was sometimes simply used a prop: "Sometimes they'd have me stand there. They'd shoot on a back lot, and they'd use me to cover something they didn't want anybody to see on the back lot." McLeod left the show after two seasons to appear as Signalman 2nd Class Crosley in the film The Sand Pebbles with Steve McQueen.

MacLeod's second breakout role as Murray Slaughter on CBS's The Mary Tyler Moore Show won him lasting fame and two Golden Globe Award nominations. His starring role as Captain Stubing on The Love Boat, his next television series, was broadcast in 90 countries worldwide, between 1977 and 1986, spanning nine seasons. His work on that show earned him three Golden Globe nominations. Co-starring with him was a familiar actor and best friend Bernie Kopell as Dr. Adam Bricker and Ted Lange as bartender Isaac Washington. Lange said in a 2017 interview with The Wiseguyz Show of MacLeod that "Oh yeah, sure, Gavin was wonderful. Gavin lives down here in Palm Springs and we're still tight, all of us, Gavin and Bernie and Jill; we still see each other. Fred (Grandy) lives in a different state, we're still close, we're still good friends."

MacLeod became the global ambassador for Princess Cruises in 1986. He played a role in ceremonies launching many of the line's new ships. In 1997, MacLeod joined the Love Boat cast on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

After The Love Boat, MacLeod toured with Michael Learned (of The Waltons) in Love Letters. He made several appearances in musicals such as Gigi and Copacabana between 1997 and 2003. In December 2008, he appeared with the Colorado Symphony in Denver.

MacLeod and his wife were hosts on the Trinity Broadcasting Network for 17 years, primarily hosting a show about marriage called Back on Course. MacLeod appeared in Rich Christiano's Time Changer, a movie about time travel and how the morals of society have moved away from the Bible. He also plays the lead role in Christiano's 2009 film The Secrets of Jonathan Sperry.

Later activity
In April 2010, the entire cast of The Love Boat attended the TV Land Awards with the exception of MacLeod, due to a back operation to repair a couple of injured discs. Former co-star and long-term friend Ted Lange contacted him and received word that MacLeod was doing well. In December, MacLeod appeared as a guest narrator with the Florida Orchestra and Master Chorale of Tampa Bay.

MacLeod served as the honorary Mayor of Pacific Palisades for five years, until Sugar Ray Leonard succeeded him in 2011. On February 28, 2011, MacLeod celebrated his 80th birthday aboard the Golden Princess on Princess Cruises in Los Angeles, California. His friends and family wished him a happy birthday and presented him with a 5 ft 3-D cake replica of the Pacific Princess, the original "Love Boat".

MacLeod appeared on the special for Betty White's 90th birthday on January 17, 2012. He reunited with White to film "Safety Old School Style", an in-flight safety video for Air New Zealand in 2013. By January 2013, the video had been viewed two million times on YouTube. In October 2013, MacLeod appeared on Today to begin the promotional tour for his new book This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith & Life. This appearance included a special set change to honor MacLeod's appearance on the show. In addition to television appearances, he continued his national book tour.

On November 5, 2013, MacLeod joined his Love Boat cast mates live on the CBS daytime show The Talk. A full one-hour episode was dedicated to the cast reunion. The Talk co-hosts dressed in costumes to commemorate their special guests' arrivals. Spanish-American actress Charo also appeared on the reunion show. Charo guest-starred in eight episodes of The Love Boat. Jack Jones performed the Love Boat theme song, which he introduced in 1977.

In December 2013, MacLeod appeared on The 700 Club to discuss his life and career. The following year, on February 1, MacLeod was honored with a star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars in downtown Palm Springs, California. In January 2015, MacLeod appeared in the Rose Parade along with several other members of the original cast of The Love Boat. Later that same year MacLeod starred in the play Happy Hour at the Coachella Valley Repertory Theatre (CVRep) in Rancho Mirage, California, a role which earned him critical praise.

Writing
In 1987, following MacLeod's conversion to evangelical Christianity and remarriage, he and his wife, Patti, wrote about his struggles with alcoholism and their divorce in Back On Course: The Remarkable Story of a Divorce That Ended in Remarriage.

In the 1980’s Gavin and his wife Patti started a seminar called Born Again Marriages. The main purpose was to share their journey with others that were going through separation or divorce. They really wanted to see marriages salvaged much like theirs.

In 2013, MacLeod released a memoir, This Is Your Captain Speaking: My Fantastic Voyage Through Hollywood, Faith & Life. He said, "...all my living has been based on what other people have written... I hope it can help others, how I overcame and never gave up. There are so many lessons in life." In the book, MacLeod recounted his stories as a young actor trying to make a name for himself in Hollywood, the lifelong friends he made, struggles with alcoholism, divorce, and faith.

Personal life
While working as an usher and elevator operator at Radio City Music Hall, MacLeod met dancer Joan F. Rootvik, who was a Rockette. They married in 1955 and had two sons and two daughters before divorcing in 1972.

In 1974, he married Patti Kendig. The couple divorced in 1982 and remarried in 1985. During the mid-1980s, they became evangelical Christians and credited their faith for bringing them back together.

On September 20, 2009, MacLeod discussed his conversion to evangelicalism at The Rock Church in Anaheim, California, and was a guest speaker there in 2012.

Death
MacLeod died at his home in Palm Desert, California, on May 29, 2021, aged 90. He is interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Cathedral City.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Gavin MacLeod


text:
Talk:Game of life

Should the parent article be moved to Conways Life to disambiguate it from a popular board game produced by Hasbro that has absolutely nothing to do with cellular automata?

I think Conway's game of life is the more likely target of a search than Hasbro's game of life, so why don't we keep this article for Conway and make a new one about Hasbro's game of life? --AxelBoldt

title: Talk:Game of life


text:
Gopher (protocol)

The Gopher protocol is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.

Usage
The Gopher protocol was invented by a team led by Mark P. McCahill at the University of Minnesota. It offers some features not natively supported by the Web and imposes a much stronger hierarchy on the documents it stores. Its text menu interface is well-suited to computing environments that rely heavily on remote text-oriented computer terminals, which were still common at the time of its creation in 1991, and the simplicity of its protocol facilitated a wide variety of client implementations. More recent Gopher revisions and graphical clients added support for multimedia.

Gopher's hierarchical structure provided a platform for the first large-scale electronic library connections. The Gopher protocol is still in use by enthusiasts, and although it has been almost entirely supplanted by the Web, a small population of actively-maintained servers remains.

Origins
The Gopher system was released in mid-1991 by Mark P. McCahill, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Daniel Torrey, and Bob Alberti of the University of Minnesota in the United States. Its central goals were, as stated in :

 * A file-like hierarchical arrangement that would be familiar to users.
 * A simple syntax.
 * A system that can be created quickly and inexpensively.
 * Extensibility of the file system metaphor; allowing addition of searches for example.

Gopher combines document hierarchies with collections of services, including WAIS, the Archie and Veronica search engines, and gateways to other information systems such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Usenet.

The general interest in campus-wide information systems (CWISs) in higher education at the time, and the ease of setup of Gopher servers to create an instant CWIS with links to other sites' online directories and resources, were the factors contributing to Gopher's rapid adoption.

The name was coined by Anklesaria as a play on several meanings of the word "gopher". The University of Minnesota mascot is the gopher, a gofer is an assistant who "goes for" things, and a gopher burrows through the ground to reach a desired location.

Decline
The World Wide Web was in its infancy in 1991, and Gopher services quickly became established. By the late 1990s, Gopher had ceased expanding. Several factors contributed to Gopher's stagnation:

 * In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server. Users became concerned that fees might also be charged for independent implementations. Gopher expansion stagnated, to the advantage of the World Wide Web, to which CERN disclaimed ownership. In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU General Public License.
 * Gopher client functionality was quickly duplicated by the early Mosaic web browser, which subsumed its protocol.
 * Gopher has a more rigid structure than the free-form HyperText Markup Language (HTML) of the Web. Every Gopher document has a defined format and type, and the typical user navigates through a single server-defined menu system to get to a particular document. This can be quite different from the way a user finds documents on the Web.
 * Failure to follow the open systems model, bad publicity

Gopher remains in active use by its enthusiasts, and there have been attempts to revive Gopher on modern platforms and mobile devices. One attempt is The Overbite Project, which hosts various browser extensions and modern clients.

Server census

 * , there remained about 160 gopher servers indexed by Veronica-2, reflecting a slow growth from 2007 when there were fewer than 100. They are typically infrequently updated. On these servers Veronica indexed approximately 2.5 million unique selectors. A handful of new servers were being set up every year by hobbyists with over 50 having been set up and added to Floodgap's list since 1999. A snapshot of Gopherspace in 2007 circulated on BitTorrent and was still available in 2010. Due to the simplicity of the Gopher protocol, setting up new servers or adding Gopher support to browsers is often done in a tongue-in-cheek manner, principally on April Fools' Day.
 * In November 2014 Veronica indexed 144 gopher servers, reflecting a small drop from 2012, but within these servers Veronica indexed approximately 3 million unique selectors.
 * In March 2016 Veronica indexed 135 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 4 million unique selectors.
 * In March 2017 Veronica indexed 133 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 4.9 million unique selectors.
 * In May 2018 Veronica indexed 260 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 3.7 million unique selectors.
 * In May 2019 Veronica indexed 320 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 4.2 million unique selectors.
 * In January 2020 Veronica indexed 395 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 4.5 million unique selectors.
 * In February 2021 Veronica indexed 361 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 6 million unique selectors.
 * In February 2022 Veronica indexed 325 gopher servers, within which it indexed approximately 5 million unique selectors.

Technical details
The conceptualization of knowledge in "Gopher space" or a "cloud" as specific information in a particular file, and the prominence of the FTP, influenced the technology and the resulting functionality of Gopher.

Gopher characteristics
Gopher is designed to function and to appear much like a mountable read-only global network file system (and software, such as gopherfs, is available that can actually mount a Gopher server as a FUSE resource). At a minimum, whatever can be done with data files on a CD-ROM, can be done on Gopher.

A Gopher system consists of a series of hierarchical hyperlinkable menus. The choice of menu items and titles is controlled by the administrator of the server.

Similar to a file on a Web server, a file on a Gopher server can be linked to as a menu item from any other Gopher server. Many servers take advantage of this inter-server linking to provide a directory of other servers that the user can access.

Protocol
The Gopher protocol was first described in. Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has assigned Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port 70 to the Gopher protocol. The protocol is simple to negotiate, making it possible to browse without using a client.

User request
First, the client establishes a TCP connection with the server on port 70, the standard gopher port. The client then sends a string followed by a carriage return followed by a line feed (a "CR + LF" sequence). This is the selector, which identifies the document to be retrieved. If the item selector were an empty line, the default directory would be selected.

Server response
The server then replies with the requested item and closes the connection. According to the protocol, before the connection closes, the server should send a full-stop (i.e., a period character) on a line by itself. However, not all servers conform to this part of the protocol and the server may close a connection without returning a final full-stop. The main type of reply from the server is a text or binary resource. Alternatively, the resource can be a menu: a form of structured text resource providing references to other resources.

Because of the simplicity of the Gopher protocol, tools such as netcat make it possible to download Gopher content easily from a command line: The protocol is also supported by cURL as of 7.21.2-DEV.

Search request
The selector string in the request can optionally be followed by a tab character and a search string. This is used by item type 7.

Source code of a menu
Gopher menu items are defined by lines of tab-separated values in a text file. This file is sometimes called a gophermap. As the source code to a gopher menu, a gophermap is roughly analogous to an HTML file for a web page. Each tab-separated line (called a selector line) gives the client software a description of the menu item: what it is, what it is called, and where it leads to. The client displays the menu items in the order that they appear in the gophermap.

The first character in a selector line indicates the item type, which tells the client what kind of file or protocol the menu item points to. This helps the client decide what to do with it. Gopher's item types are a more basic precursor to the media type system used by the Web and email attachments.

The item type is followed by the user display string (a description or label that represents the item in the menu); the selector (a path or other string for the resource on the server); the hostname (the domain name or IP address of the server), and the network port.

All lines in a gopher menu are terminated by "CR + LF".

Example of a selector line in a menu source: The following selector line generates a link to the "/home" directory at the subdomain gopher.floodgap.com, on port 70. The item type of 1 indicates that the linked resource is a Gopher menu itself. The string "Floodgap Home" is what the client will show to the user when visiting the example menu.

1Floodgap Home	/home	gopher.floodgap.com	70

Item types
In a Gopher menu's source code, a one-character code indicates what kind of content the client should expect. This code may either be a digit or a letter of the alphabet; letters are case-sensitive.

The technical specification for Gopher,, defines 14 item types. The later gopher+ specification defined an additional 3 types. A one-character code indicates what kind of content the client should expect. Item type 3 is an error code for exception handling. Gopher client authors improvised item types h (HTML), i (informational message), and s (sound file) after the publication of RFC 1436. Browsers like Netscape Navigator and early versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer would prepend the item type code to the selector as described in, so that the type of the gopher item could be determined by the url itself. Most gopher browsers still available, use these prefixes in their urls.

Here is an example gopher session where the user requires a gopher menu (/Reference on the first line):

/Reference 1CIA World Factbook    /Archives/mirrors/textfiles.com/politics/CIA    gopher.quux.org 70 0Jargon 4.2.0  /Reference/Jargon 4.2.0 gopher.quux.org 70      + 1Online Libraries      /Reference/Online Libraries     gopher.quux.org 70     + 1RFCs: Internet Standards      /Computers/Standards and Specs/RFC      gopher.quux.org 70 1U.S. Gazetteer /Reference/U.S. Gazetteer      gopher.quux.org 70      + iThis file contains information on United States       fake    (NULL)  0 icities, counties, and geographical areas. It has     fake    (NULL)  0 ilatitude/longitude, population, land and water area,  fake    (NULL)  0 iand ZIP codes. fake   (NULL)  0 i      fake    (NULL)  0 iTo search for a city, enter the city's name. To search       fake    (NULL) 0 ifor a county, use the name plus County -- for instance,       fake    (NULL) 0 iDallas County. fake   (NULL)  0

The gopher menu sent back from the server, is a sequence of lines each of which describes an item that can be retrieved. Most clients will display these as hypertext links, and so allow the user to navigate through gopherspace by following the links. This menu includes a text resource (itemtype 0 on the third line), multiple links to submenus (itemtype 1, on the second line as well as lines 4-6) and a non-standard information message (from line 7 on), broken down to multiple lines by providing dummy values for selector, host and port.

Gopher+
Gopher+ is a forward compatible enhancement to the Gopher protocol. Gopher+ works by sending metadata between the client and the server. The enhancement was never widely adopted by Gopher servers. The client sends a tab followed by a +. A Gopher+ server will respond with a status line followed by the content the client requested. An item is marked as supporting Gopher+ in the Gopher directory listing by a tab + after the port (this is the case of some of the items in the example above).

Other features of Gopher+ include:

 * Item attributes, which can include the items
 * Administrator
 * Last date of modification
 * Different views of the file, like PostScript or plain text, or different languages
 * Abstract, or description of the item
 * Interactive queries

Gopher clients
These are clients, libraries, and utilities primarily designed to access gopher resources.

Other clients
Clients like web browsers, libraries, and utilities primarily designed to access world wide web resources, but which maintain(ed) gopher support.

 * Browse, a browser for RISC OS
 * Camino, versions 1.0 to 2.1.2, always uses port 70.
 * Classilla, versions 9.0 to 9.3.4b1 as of March 2021, hardcoded to port 70 from 9.0 to 9.2; whitelisted ports from 9.2.1
 * Dillo+
 * Dooble
 * ELinks, versions 0.10.0 to 0.12pre6 as of October 2012, unmaintained browser with gopher build option. Fork felinks offers support as a build option
 * Edbrowse, a line-oriented editor and browser with an interface like that of ed (text editor)
 * Falkon, with plug-in only, requires Falkon ≥ 3.1.0 with both the KDE Frameworks Integration extension (shipped with Falkon ≥ 3.1.0) enabled and the (separate) kio_gopher plug-in ≥ 0.1.99 (first release for KDE Frameworks 5) installed
 * Mozilla Firefox versions 0.1 to 3.6, built-in support dropped from Firefox 4.0 onwards; can be added back by installing one of the extensions by the Overbite Project
 * Galeon version 2.0.7
 * Google Chrome, with extension only, Burrow extension
 * Internet Explorer for Mac version 5.2.3, PowerPC-only
 * Internet Explorer, dropped with version 6: Support removed by MS02-047 from IE 6 SP1 can be re-enabled in the Windows Registry. Always uses port 70. Gopher support was disabled in Internet Explorer versions 5.x and 6 for Windows in August 2002 by a patch meant to fix a security vulnerability in the browser's Gopher protocol handler to reduce the attack surface which was included in IE6 SP1; however, it can be re-enabled by editing the Windows registry. In Internet Explorer 7, Gopher support was removed on the WinINET level.
 * K-Meleon, dropped support
 * Konqueror, with plug-in only, requires kio_gopher plug-in
 * Line Mode Browser, since version 1.1, January 1992
 * Lynx
 * Mosaic, version 3.0
 * NetSurf, under development, based on the cURL fetcher
 * Netscape Navigator, version 9.0.0.6
 * OmniWeb, since version 5.9.2 (April 2009), first WebKit Browser to support Gopher
 * Opera, Opera 9.0 included a proxy capability
 * Pavuk, a web mirror (recursive download) software program
 * SeaMonkey, version 1.0 to 2.0.14, built-in support dropped from version 2.1 onward; could be added back to some versions via Overbite project, but no longer supported.
 * Epiphany, until version 2.26.3, disabled with switch to WebKit
 * WebPositive, a WebKit-based browser used in the Haiku operating system
 * libwww, versions 1.0c (December 1992) to 5.4.1 December 2006, libwww is a discontinued API for internet applications. A modern fork is maintained in Lynx

Browsers with no Gopher native support can still access servers using one of the available Gopher to HTTP gateways or proxy server that converts Gopher menus into HTML; known proxies are the Floodgap Public Gopher proxy and Gopher Proxy. Similarly, certain server packages such as GN and PyGopherd have built-in Gopher to HTTP interfaces. Squid Proxy software gateways any  URL to HTTP content, enabling any browser or web agent to access gopher content easily.

For Mozilla Firefox and SeaMonkey, Overbite extensions extend Gopher browsing and support the current versions of the browsers (Firefox Quantum v ≥57 and equivalent versions of SeaMonkey): OverbiteWX includes support for accessing Gopher servers not on port 70 using a whitelist and for CSO/ph queries. OverbiteFF always uses port 70. For Chromium and Google Chrome, Burrow is available. It redirects  URLs to a proxy. In the past an Overbite proxy-based extension for these browsers was available but is no longer maintained and does not work with the current (>23) releases. For Konqueror, Kio gopher is available.
 * OverbiteWX redirects  URLs to a proxy;
 * OverbiteNX adds native-like support;
 * for Firefox up to 56.*, and equivalent versions of SeaMonkey, OverbiteFF adds native-like support, but it is no longer maintained

As the bandwidth-sparing simple interface of Gopher can be a good match for mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs), the early 2010s saw a renewed interest in native Gopher clients for popular smartphones.

Gopher popularity was at its height at a time when there were still many equally competing computer architectures and operating systems. As a result, there are several Gopher clients available for Acorn RISC OS, AmigaOS, Atari MiNT, Conversational Monitor System (CMS), DOS, classic Mac OS, MVS, NeXT, OS/2 Warp, most Unix-like operating systems, VMS, Windows 3.x, and Windows 9x. GopherVR was a client designed for 3D visualization, and there is even a Gopher client in MOO. Most such clients are hard-coded to work on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port 70.

Server software
Because the protocol is trivial to implement in a basic fashion, there are many server packages still available, and some are still maintained.

title: Gopher (protocol)


text:
General election

A general election is an electoral process to choose most or all members of an elected body, typically a legislature. They are distinct from by-elections, which fill a seat that has become vacant between general elections. In most systems, a general election is a regularly scheduled election, typically including members of a legislature, and sometimes other officers such as a directly elected president. General elections may also take place at the same time as local, state/autonomous region, European Parliament, and other elections, where applicable. For example, on 25 May 2014, Belgian voters elected their national parliament, 21 members of the European Parliament, and regional parliaments.

In the United States, "general election" has a slightly different, but related meaning: the ordinary electoral competition following the selection of candidates in the primary election.

United Kingdom
The term general election in the United Kingdom often refers to the elections held on the same day in all constituencies of their members of Parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons.

Historically, English and later British general elections took place over a period of several weeks, with individual constituencies holding polling on different days. The Parliament Act 1911 introduced the requirement that elections in all parliamentary constituencies be held on the same day. There has been a convention since the 1930s that general elections in Britain should take place on a Thursday; the last general election to take place on any other weekday was that of 1931.

Under the terms of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, in force until March 2022, the period between one general election and the next was fixed at five years, unless the House of Commons passed one of the following:
 * A motion of no confidence in the Government sooner than that, and did not pass a motion of confidence in a new Government within fourteen days
 * A motion, approved by two-thirds of its members, resolving that a general election should take place sooner
 * A proposal from the prime minister to reschedule an election mandated by the Act to no later than two months after the original date

Although not provided for in the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, an early election could also be brought about by an act of parliament specifically calling for a general election, which (unlike the second option above) only required a simple majority. This was the mechanism used to precipitate the December 2019 election, when the Early Parliamentary General Election Act 2019 was enacted.

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act was repealed by the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022.

The term general election is also used in the United Kingdom to refer to elections to any democratically elected body in which all members are up for election. Section 2 of the Scotland Act 1998, for example, specifically refers to ordinary elections to the Scottish Parliament as general elections.

United States
In U.S. politics, general elections are elections held at any level (e.g. city, county, congressional district, state) that typically involve competition between at least two parties. General elections occur every two to six years (depending on the positions being filled, with most positions good for four years) and include the presidential election. "General election" does not refer to special elections, which fill out positions prematurely vacated by the previous office holder.

Major general elections are as follows:

 * 1) The President and Vice President are elected once every four years (2016, 2020, 2024, 2028, etc.)
 * 2) Representatives in the House of Representatives serve two-year terms, and so there are elections for representatives every two years (midterm elections, and during the same year as the Presidency: 2020, 2022, 2024, 2026, etc.)
 * 3) Senators serve six-year terms, but their terms are staggered. Throughout the US, a third of the senate will be up for election every midterm and during the Presidential election year.

The term general election is distinguished from primaries or caucuses, which are intra-party elections meant to select a party's official candidate for a particular race. Thus, if a primary is meant to elect a party's candidate for the position-in-question, a general election is meant to elect who occupies the position itself. Presidential primaries happen several months before the general election, though not all states hold primaries.

In the Louisiana the expression general election means the runoff election which occurs between the two highest candidates as determined by the jungle primary.

title: General election


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Genotype

The genotype of an organism is its complete set of genetic material. Genotype can also be used to refer to the alleles or variants an individual carries in a particular gene or genetic location. The number of alleles an individual can have in a specific gene depends on the number of copies of each chromosome found in that species, also referred to as ploidy. In diploid species like humans, two full sets of chromosomes are present, meaning each individual has two alleles for any given gene. If both alleles are the same, the genotype is referred to as homozygous. If the alleles are different, the genotype is referred to as heterozygous.

Genotype contributes to phenotype, the observable traits and characteristics in an individual or organism. The degree to which genotype affects phenotype depends on the trait. For example, the petal color in a pea plant is exclusively determined by genotype. The petals can be purple or white depending on the alleles present in the pea plant. However, other traits are only partially influenced by genotype. These traits are often called complex traits because they are influenced by additional factors, such as environmental and epigenetic factors. Not all individuals with the same genotype look or act the same way because appearance and behavior are modified by environmental and growing conditions. Likewise, not all organisms that look alike necessarily have the same genotype.

The term genotype was coined by the Danish botanist Wilhelm Johannsen in 1903.

Phenotype
Any given gene will usually cause an observable change in an organism, known as the phenotype. The terms genotype and phenotype are distinct for at least two reasons:
 * To distinguish the source of an observer's knowledge (one can know about genotype by observing DNA; one can know about phenotype by observing outward appearance of an organism).
 * Genotype and phenotype are not always directly correlated. Some genes only express a given phenotype in certain environmental conditions.  Conversely, some phenotypes could be the result of multiple genotypes. The genotype is commonly mixed up with the phenotype which describes the end result of both the genetic and the environmental factors giving the observed expression (e.g. blue eyes, hair color, or various hereditary diseases).

A simple example to illustrate genotype as distinct from phenotype is the flower colour in pea plants (see Gregor Mendel). There are three available genotypes, PP (homozygous dominant), Pp (heterozygous), and pp (homozygous recessive). All three have different genotypes but the first two have the same phenotype (purple) as distinct from the third (white).

A more technical example to illustrate genotype is the single-nucleotide polymorphism or SNP. A SNP occurs when corresponding sequences of DNA from different individuals differ at one DNA base, for example where the sequence AAGCCTA changes to AAGCTTA. This contains two alleles : C and T. SNPs typically have three genotypes, denoted generically AA Aa and aa. In the example above, the three genotypes would be CC, CT and TT. Other types of genetic marker, such as microsatellites, can have more than two alleles, and thus many different genotypes.

Penetrance is the proportion of individuals showing a specified genotype in their phenotype under a given set of environmental conditions.

Mendelian inheritance
Traits that are determined exclusively by genotype are typically inherited in a Mendelian pattern. These laws of inheritance were described extensively by Gregor Mendel, who performed experiments with pea plants to determine how traits were passed on from generation to generation. He studied phenotypes that were easily observed, such as plant height, petal color, or seed shape. He was able to observe that if he crossed two true-breeding plants with distinct phenotypes, all the offspring would have the same phenotype. For example, when he crossed a tall plant with a short plant, all the resulting plants would be tall. However, when he self-fertilized the plants that resulted, about 1/4 of the second generation would be short. He concluded that some traits were dominant, such as tall height, and others were recessive, like short height. Though Mendel was not aware at the time, each phenotype he studied was controlled by a single gene with two alleles. In the case of plant height, one allele caused the plants to be tall, and the other caused plants to be short. When the tall allele was present, the plant would be tall, even if the plant was heterozygous. In order for the plant to be short, it had to be homozygous for the recessive allele.

One way this can be illustrated is using a Punnett square. In a Punnett square, the genotypes of the parents are placed on the outside. An uppercase letter is typically used to represent the dominant allele, and a lowercase letter is used to represent the recessive allele. The possible genotypes of the offspring can then be determined by combining the parent genotypes. In the example on the right, both parents are heterozygous, with a genotype of Bb. The offspring can inherit a dominant allele from each parent, making them homozygous with a genotype of BB. The offspring can inherit a dominant allele from one parent and a recessive allele from the other parent, making them heterozygous with a genotype of Bb. Finally, the offspring could inherit a recessive allele from each parent, making them homozygous with a genotype of bb. Plants with the BB and Bb genotypes will look the same, since the B allele is dominant. The plant with the bb genotype will have the recessive trait.

These inheritance patterns can also be applied to hereditary diseases or conditions in humans or animals. Some conditions are inherited in an autosomal dominant pattern, meaning individuals with the condition typically have an affected parent as well. A classic pedigree for an autosomal dominant condition shows affected individuals in every generation. Other conditions are inherited in an autosomal recessive pattern, where affected individuals do not typically have an affected parent. Since each parent must have a copy of the recessive allele in order to have an affected offspring, the parents are referred to as carriers of the condition.

In autosomal conditions, the sex of the offspring does not play a role in their risk of being affected. In sex-linked conditions, the sex of the offspring affects their chances of having the condition. In humans, females inherit two X chromosomes, one from each parent, while males inherit an X chromosome from their mother and a Y chromosome from their father. X-linked dominant conditions can be distinguished from autosomal dominant conditions in pedigrees by the lack of transmission from fathers to sons, since affected fathers only pass their X chromosome to their daughters. In X-linked recessive conditions, males are typically affected more commonly because they are hemizygous, with only one X chromosome. In females, the presence of a second X chromosome will prevent the condition from appearing. Females are therefore carriers of the condition and can pass the trait on to their sons.

Mendelian patterns of inheritance can be complicated by additional factors. Some diseases show incomplete penetrance, meaning not all individuals with the disease-causing allele develop signs or symptoms of the disease. Penetrance can also be age-dependent, meaning signs or symptoms of disease are not visible until later in life. For example, Huntington disease is an autosomal dominant condition, but up to 25% of individuals with the affected genotype will not develop symptoms until after age 50. Another factor that can complicate Mendelian inheritance patterns is variable expressivity, in which individuals with the same genotype show different signs or symptoms of disease. For example, individuals with polydactyly can have a variable number of extra digits.

Non-Mendelian inheritance
Many traits are not inherited in a Mendelian fashion, but have more complex patterns of inheritance.

Incomplete dominance
For some traits, neither allele is completely dominant. Heterozygotes often have an appearance somewhere in between those of homozygotes. For example, a cross between true-breeding red and white Mirabilis jalapa results in pink flowers.

Codominance
Codominance refers to traits in which both alleles are expressed in the offspring in approximately equal amounts. A classic example is the ABO blood group system in humans, where both the A and B alleles are expressed when they are present. Individuals with the AB genotype have both A and B proteins expressed on their red blood cells.

Epistasis
Epistasis is when the phenotype of one gene is affected by one or more other genes. This is often through some sort of masking effect of one gene on the other. For example, the "A" gene codes for hair color, a dominant "A" allele codes for brown hair, and a recessive "a" allele codes for blonde hair, but a separate "B" gene controls hair growth, and a recessive "b" allele causes baldness. If the individual has the BB or Bb genotype, then they produce hair and the hair color phenotype can be observed, but if the individual has a bb genotype, then the person is bald which masks the A gene entirely.

Polygenic traits
A polygenic trait is one whose phenotype is dependent on the additive effects of multiple genes. The contributions of each of these genes are typically small and add up to a final phenotype with a large amount of variation. A well studied example of this is the number of sensory bristles on a fly. These types of additive effects is also the explanation for the amount of variation in human eye color.

Genotyping
Genotyping refers to the method used to determine an individual's genotype. There are a variety of techniques that can be used to assess genotype. The genotyping method typically depends on what information is being sought. Many techniques initially require amplification of the DNA sample, which is commonly done using PCR.

Some techniques are designed to investigate specific SNPs or alleles in a particular gene or set of genes, such as whether an individual is a carrier for a particular condition. This can be done via a variety of techniques, including allele specific oligonucleotide (ASO) probes or DNA sequencing. Tools such as multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification can also be used to look for duplications or deletions of genes or gene sections. Other techniques are meant to assess a large number of SNPs across the genome, such as SNP arrays. This type of technology is commonly used for genome-wide association studies.

Large-scale techniques to assess the entire genome are also available. This includes karyotyping to determine the number of chromosomes an individual has and chromosomal microarrays to assess for large duplications or deletions in the chromosome. More detailed information can be determined using exome sequencing, which provides the specific sequence of all DNA in the coding region of the genome, or whole genome sequencing, which sequences the entire genome including non-coding regions.

Genotype encoding
In linear models, the genotypes can be encoded in different manners. Let us consider a biallelic locus with two possible alleles, encoded by $A$ and $$a$$. We consider $$a$$ to correspond to the dominant allele to the reference allele $A$. The following table details the different encoding.

title: Genotype


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Gerard Hengeveld

Gerard Hengeveld (December 7, 1910, in Kampen – October 28, 2001, in Bergen, North Holland) was a Dutch classical pianist, music composer and educationalist. He is especially known for his compositions of study material for piano. Other compositions include two piano concertos, a violin sonata, and a sonata for cello. Hengeveld was an able interpreter and performer of the music of Bach for piano and harpsichord. He gave regular concerts in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Some of his concerts were captured on record. Hengeveld was a professor at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Amongst his students was Dutch pianist and musicologist Frans Bouwman.

Hengeveld died in 2001 at the age of 90, in Bergen. His closest living relative is Nicholas Hengeveld of Allentown, Pennsylvania.

title: Gerard Hengeveld


text:
George William, Elector of Brandenburg

George William (Georg Wilhelm; 13 November 1595 – 1 December 1640), of the Hohenzollern dynasty, was Margrave and Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia from 1619 until his death. His reign was marked by ineffective governance during the Thirty Years' War. He was the father of Frederick William, the "Great Elector".

Biography
Born in Cölln on the Spree (today part of Berlin), George William was the son of John Sigismund, Elector of Brandenburg and Anna of Prussia. His maternal grandfather was Albert Frederick, Duke of Prussia. In 1616, he married Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate. Their only son Frederick William would later be known as the "Great Elector". Of his two daughters, the eldest, Louise Charlotte, married Jacob Kettler, Duke of Courland, and the younger, Hedwig Sophie, married William VI, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel.

In 1619, George William inherited the Margravate of Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia, then a vassal of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, although his ownership was not confirmed by Sigismund III Vasa until September 1621. He proved a weak and ineffective ruler in a very difficult period of history; possession of Prussia involved him in the 1621 to 1625 Polish–Swedish War, since Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was married to his sister Maria Eleonora.

During the Thirty Years' War, the Calvinist George William tried to remain neutral in the contest between the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II, and his mostly Lutheran opponents. When the war shifted to northern Germany in 1625, this did not protect his lands from being looted by Imperial troops, and he was forced to take sides when Gustavus intervened in the Empire in 1630. However, this simply replaced one set of plunderers with another; Gustavus could not support so large an army, and his unpaid and unfed troops became increasingly mutinous and ill-disciplined.

After Gustavus was killed at Lützen in November 1632, George William joined the Swedish-backed Heilbronn League, until defeat at Nördlingen on 6 September 1634. Following the 1635 Peace of Prague, the League was dissolved, although by now Brandenburg's population had been decimated by the war.

Leaving his Catholic and pro-Imperial chief minister Schwarzenberg to run the government, George William withdrew in 1637 to the relatively untouched region of Prussia, where he lived in retirement until his death at Königsberg in 1640. He was succeeded by his far more accomplished son Frederick William.

title: George William, Elector of Brandenburg