Gerald Gardner
His claimed 1939 initiation has no independent corroboration of any kind. Later textual scholarship has traced the actual rituals he taught to identifiable printed sources including Crowley's writings, a nineteenth-century folklore collection, and Freemasonry — nothing in the tradition he presented is attested before that undocumented 1939 initiation.
Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today (1954); Aidan Kelly (1991) and Ronald Hutton (1999), tracing the ritual sources
English civil servant who publicly launched modern Wicca in the 1950s, claiming initiation into a surviving pre-Christian witchcraft coven.