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Not Wicca, and Not Tidy

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Not Wicca, and Not Tidy

The Feri Tradition is filed here among the Wiccan traditions, and its practitioners would mostly dispute the filing. It is initiatory witchcraft, it is contemporary with Wicca, and it shares some vocabulary with it. It is not descended from Gardner, and it does not have the structure of a Wiccan tradition.

Victor Anderson, who was blind from early childhood, and Cora Anderson met in Oregon in 1944 and married three days later. What they taught over the following half-century drew on Hawaiian Huna, on folk magic of the American south, on Vodou, on the poetry Victor wrote, and on material of unclear provenance that they attributed to earlier teachers. Where Gardner assembled a liturgy, the Andersons transmitted a sensibility.

Its cosmology is distinctive. The Star Goddess is the undifferentiated origin of everything, who fell in love with her own reflection and produced the rest from it. The person is composed of three souls (roughly, an animal self, a talking self and a divine self), and practice works to bring them into alignment. The Iron and Pearl Pentacles are sets of virtues mapped onto the points of the pentagram and used as a discipline of self-examination.

The tradition is known for intensity, for a refusal of moralising, and for an antinomian streak that its own teachers describe as dangerous. It has never had a governing body, a standard text, or an agreed spelling of its own name.

Cora Anderson's own account of the tradition, published late in her life, is the nearest thing it possesses to an authorised statement, and it is a memoir rather than a doctrine.

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