In late October 1966, a reporter from The Times of London called Patricia Crowther to inquire about her plans for Halloween.
Ms. Crowther, a self-proclaimed witch, told the reporter that she intended to stay in and host a small gathering in the magic room of her home. “We dance in the nude as a symbol of purity,” she said. “We have oil furnaces, fires on the altar and at the four compass points. Electric heat inhibits magic forces, so I turn it off.”
Ms. Crowther was an obvious witch to interview.
As a high priestess of the goddess in Wicca, a branch of modern paganism founded in England, she was among the most prominent of the country’s witches, defending them against accusations that they turned men into toads and flew around on broomsticks frightening trick-or-treating children.
“Witchcraft simply means the craft of the wise people,” she often said. “Nothing sensational or horrific in that.”
Ms. Crowther died on Sept. 24 at her home in Sheffield, England, her partner, Ian Lilleyman, said. She was 97.
A former child dancing star who entertained Allied troops during World War II, she was initiated into the Craft of the Wise in 1960 by Gerald Gardner, a British civil servant and amateur anthropologist who founded Wicca in the 1930s.
The ceremony took place in Mr. Gardner’s barn on the Isle of Man. It was a windy night. He waved a sword. She was naked.
“My mind was suddenly confronted with something out of the ordinary — something which seemed to be very ancient yet very real and almost totally of the spirit,” Ms. Crowther wrote in her 1998 memoir, “One Witch’s World.” “Beyond these impressions was a sense of the entire proceedings echoing the natural processes of human life.”
Three years later, Mr. Gardner elevated her to high priestess. She was the last in a series of prominent witches he had promoted, including Doreen Valiente, who died in 1999.
“Patricia basically carried on Gerald’s work,” Ashley Mortimer, a Wiccan high priest who lectures on witchcraft, said in an interview. “And she stood up and said, ‘I’m not scared to say this is who I am, and this what I do, and it’s perfectly normal and natural and all right.’ She was a real pioneer.”
Glamorous and mysterious, Ms. Crowther was also eloquent and occasionally combative, especially with those who accused Wiccans of Satanism and other evils. She promoted an image of witches as benevolent and spiritual, trailblazers in the feminism movement.
“I wanted the Goddess to be recognized again because we had this patriarchal religion for such a long time,” Ms. Crowther told The Guardian in 1999. “From this came women’s liberation, equality for women and feminism, all that sort of thing. But the Goddess had to be recognized first.”
She sought to set the record straight about witchcraft on television news programs, in more than a dozen books and, most memorably, in “A Spell of Witchcraft,” a six-part series on the craft that she wrote and produced for BBC Radio in 1971.
“It’s got nothing to do with Satanism and black magic,” Ms. Crowther said on the first episode of the series. “We don’t go about opening graves and holding black masses. And you can forget about witches with crooked noses and hunchbacks riding through the night on broomsticks.”
But could she, as some contended, inflict suffering by sticking needles into a wax figure?
“Oh, this is sheer nonsense,” she replied. “No amount of pins stuck to a wax figure could harm anyone at a distance.”
Witches, Ms. Crowther insisted, are healers.
“One of the oldest beliefs is in the medicinal value of fasting spittle,” she said on the fourth episode of “A Spell of Witchcraft.” “That is to say, human saliva, bursting in the morning before you’ve had anything to eat or drink. If this is applied to the wart every day, it will eventually cure it. Apply it with the ring finger of the left hand, the psychic finger.”
Patricia Claire Dawson was born on Oct. 14, 1927, in Sheffield, England. Her parents, Alfred and Clare Dawson, owned tobacco and candy stores.
When Patricia was 4, her parents enrolled her at a dance school, and as a teenager she won one competition after another. In the early days of World War II, she sang and danced for Allied forces at military bases. Back home, she performed in musicals in London and on the BBC radio show “Have a Go,” starring Wilfred Pickles and Violet Carson, in 1950.
In the mid-1950s, she underwent hypnotic regression therapy. During sessions with a therapist, she said, she channeled a witch named Polly.
That was how Patricia learned that she had been a witch in a past life: Polly not only told her that, she said, but also taught her spells, including one that would make a man return to his wife.
Polly wasn’t available to appear on the BBC Radio show, so someone else portrayed her. The stand-in intoned:
Moon blood of a virgin, mixed with the hair of a man she desires to come back.
Do it over a hot fire.
Mix well and think of what you desire.
At the same time, chanting, “Get thee a man, get thee a maid.”
Mix it up well, be not afraid.
This you will get, this you will eat,
Mix it with bread and mix it with meat.
In 1956, Patricia met Arnold Crowther, a ventriloquist and a friend of her mentor, Mr. Gardner. The three became close, and in 1960, after Mr. Gardner initiated Patricia, she initiated Mr. Crowther.
Not long after, the two married during a sacred ceremony in which they were both naked. (They repeated their vows in a civil ceremony. She wore a black velvet suit.)
Mr. Crowther died in 1974 after suffering an illness in his chest, where he believed he had been injured in a previous life as a Tibetan monk.
Four years later, Ms. Crowther met Mr. Lilleyman at a Vegetarian Society meeting. He is her only immediate survivor.
Just before Halloween in 1975, Alan Hamilton, a correspondent for The Times of London, had a glass of sherry with Ms. Crowther while attending what he described as “a ghost weekend” in York.
“Witchcraft, she said, had nothing to do with orgies or blood sacrifices,” Mr. Hamilton wrote. “And she condemned Sunday newspaper journalists who confused it with voodoo and black magic.”
She recited a few incantations for him, including “Tonight is the promise renewed, and our spirits drink the life force of our beloved dead.”
Mr. Hamilton was charmed.
“I am pleased to say,” he wrote, “that I did not turn into a toad.”
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