american pagan studies scholar aidan a. kelly similarly rejected liddell's claims. kelly highlighted that whereas liddell had claimed that gardnerian wicca had adopted the concept of a female coven leader from french and scandinavian witch covens, the historical evidence clearly showed that gardner developed the concept of a coven being led by a high priestess during the late 1950s, thus disproving liddell's assertions. he noted that liddell's claim that crowley wrote gardner's book of shadows "cannot possibly be true" because crowley died before the book was written. kelly believed that either liddell or his elders had purposely created a "phony history" in order to hide the fact that gardner had invented wicca in its entirety in the early 1950s. similarly, in a 2014 article about pickingill in "the cauldron", richard ward argued that liddell's claims did not stand up under scrutiny, and that they had simply been made in an attempt to promote claims regarding the existence of a "pre-gardnerian tradition" of witchcraft. liddell has specifically denied any charges that he was deliberately falsifying claims to make gardnerian wicca appear to have an older pedigree than it really has.