Gareth Knight | |
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| Born | Basil Leslie Wilby 3 April 1930 Colchester, Essex, United Kingdom |
| Died | 1 March 2022 (aged 91) Braintree, Essex, United Kingdom |
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| Spouse | Roma Wilby (1959–2019) |
| Children | 2 |
Basil Leslie Wilby (3 April 1930 – 1 March 2022), known as Gareth Knight, was a British occultist, ritual magician, author, and publisher. Born in Colchester, Essex, Knight developed an interest in magic in early life. He read the works of the occultist Dion Fortune when he was 23, leading him to seek initiation into her Society of the Inner Light, and was admitted as an initiate in 1954. Knight was an active participant in the Society for the next decade, serving as its librarian and the editor of its periodical New Dimensions. In the early 1960s, he and his wife Roma co-founded the Helios Book Service with fellow Society members John and Mary Hall, aiming to publish occult-related books and distribute them by mail order.
Knight left the Society in 1965, feeling alienated by its increasingly religious direction. He published his first four books in the second half of the decade. Knight befriended the esoteric Anglican priest Anthony Duncan and developed an interest in Christian occultism; his works from the 1970s onwards interpreted magic and spiritual practice through an explicitly Christian lens. In 1973, he founded his own esoteric order known as the Gareth Knight Group. The group was known for its annual conventions at Greystone, a manor house in Wiltshire, where Knight hosted lectures and rituals for an occultist audience; it was a focus of Persuasions of the Witch's Craft, an anthropological study of contemporary magical practice by Tanya Luhrmann.
Throughout his life, Knight published on a variety of occult subjects. His areas of interest included Christian esotericism, tarot reading, Arthurian legends, Celtic mythology, and occult influence on J. R. R. Tolkien's works. Knight rejoined the Society of the Inner Light in 1998 and became Fortune's biographer, as well as compiling collections of many of her previously unpublished works. He died on 1 March 2022 at the age of 91.