Clive Cedric Bayleaf (1900–1970)   Sometimes called “Weland” ; an English warlock and anthropologist and archaeologist. Founder of the Wǣrlogia movement and also of the Order of the Silver Grail.

Carried out extensive research on the spiritual background of the South Downs.

                        Index entry from The Moon’s Silver Shadow – A history of Wǣrlogia.  Houseman, Roland.  Hexwood Press, 1991, Oxford.

Constance Firbank-Walsh, in 1975, wrote:

So who was Clive Cedric Bayleaf? 

Born into an upper-middle class family in Winchester in the October of 1900, Bayleaf attended Winchester College and Oxford -where he read history and classics.  He was called up in 1917, and joined the Royal Flying Corps as an observer, and spent some time over the western front photographing enemy positions.  During this time, he conceived a fascinations with maps.  He also was shot down and had to get back to British lines alone, badly injured in the leg.  He subsequently had a permanent limp. 

He went back to flying but was suffering from a mild form of shell-shock, and was put onto clerical work.  While on leave in early 1918, and walking the South Downs he visited a small chapel dedicated to St. Hubert, and experienced a religious conversion.  After the war he obtained a job with the Ordnance Survey and spent a lot of time flying, as a mapper/photographer.  He had fallen in love with the South Downs and walked and mapped there obsessively on his own account.  He was also becoming fascinated with the pagan underlay of Sussex, Hants and Wiltshire history.

Restless, and feeling there was a whole world of culture he was missing, he left the OS in 1930 and got a contract mapping job in the Caribbean on the British territory of Holbourne Island, at the behest of the Hawkins family who owned the island at that time.  It was there that he first learned about voodoo and its blended African and Christian roots.  He attended many ceremonies, took drugs, and was initiated into the voodoo cult.  Renouncing his Christianity and declaring himself a witch, he ‘went native’ for two years, living among the locals, “honing his craft” as he later put it. 

In 1934 he returned to England, settling down on the outskirts of Winchester where he joined a local pagan group which met on the crown of St. Cath’s Hill.  He spent five years intensively studying the history of witchcraft while working as a schoolmaster in a private school nearby.  Some of the boys in the school were inculcated into the occult group, and Bayleaf was sacked as a result.  He then worked then as a house painter while writing books on the pagan religions.  He became a proselytiser for witchcraft at a time when it was fairly unfashionable, and began to mutate what he had found with his own philosopy -a mix of paganism, voodoo and Diana worship.  Sub groups of the original St. Cath’s Hill coven were set up across the South of England.

In WW2 he rejoined the RAF in a ground occupation, again related to mapping.  He made the rank of flight Lieutenant.  While he was still serving he was also attending witchcraft groups in the area surrounding the air base he was billetted at.  He struck up a relationship with two young WAAFs: Candice Collingwood and Jocelyn Maunder.  All three attended cult events and, by their own admission within the circles they moved in, were in an active sexual relationship with each other. 

After the war Bayleaf and his two ‘priestesses’ evolved the Order of the Silver Grail,  which practised a newly-created form of withcraft which Bayleaf called Wǣrlogia.  Named after the Anglo-Saxon term for the male witch, its practises distilled all that he had learned and developed since his time in the Caribbean.   The rituals structures of  Wǣrlogia were set down in a secret, handwritten text called The Rede of the Shadow, the only edition of which is now in the hands of Bayleaf’s family.   An ever-widening spread of covens followed his practises -across Britain and spreading to America and Australia.  He earned money through several books on the subject of Wǣrlogia.

Oddly, he also continued as a housepainter which he said he found to be ‘therapeutic, and an occasion for deep thought’.

 He withdrew from active membership of the Silver Grail in 1965 after disagreements with others in the central committee.  By then he was 65 and felt in old, and unwell.  He had contracted mild malaria in the Caribbean, and his leg had never recovered from his WW1 adventure.  He was in and out of hospital through 1969 early 1970, and when pain-free was constantly writing or walking.  His then wife, Candice Collingwood, one of the original priestesses- described him as being in a state of spiritual fixation.  There were fears for his sanity; he seemed to be wracked with doubts and demons.   

Then, on the day before midsummer 1970, he disappeared, forever.  It was a brief cause celebre in the press with many old followers suggesting he had been transported to the spirit world.  Other, less charitable, suggested Hades.  No trace of him was found, and it was suspected by the police that he died wandering deep in the beech woods of the South Downs, thus returning to his beloved chalk soil.

Excerpts from. Bayleaf: Father of English Waerlogia by Constance Firbank-Walsh, Constance Haddo & Oliver, 1975, Boscastle.

Bibliography:

1947            Towards a new English paganism

1952            English witchcraft and the post-war settlements

1954            Wǣrlogia  articles of a new faith (manifesto)

1954            The Rede of the Shadow  (book of ritualistic instructions for Wǣrlogian covens)

1957-68       (Articles and ed.)