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Denominations

Feri Tradition

Also Known As Feri
Wicca

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Origin 1940 to 1960

An ecstatic, initiatory tradition of witchcraft emphasizing direct experience, personal power, poetry, and a distinctive cosmology of the Three Souls and the Star Goddess. It is known for its intensity, its non-dogmatic and often antinomian spirit, and its blend of many folk and magical currents.

Facts
Practice
Liturgical Language
The vernacular 1
Status
Status Today
Living tradition, practised today 1
Open Questions
Membership Over Time
no count isolating this tradition exists
Feri is transmitted through small initiatory covens and houses under individual teachers with no central registry, and the wider surveys of American Paganism count Wiccans and Pagans as one combined category rather than separating out this comparatively small and deliberately non-dogmatic tradition.
Belief
Defining Doctrinal Position
No fixed pantheon or liturgy; each practitioner composes their own 1Tradition: Wicca
Its own record describes "its blend of many folk and magical currents", matching Reclaiming and Eclectic Solitary Wicca, already carried as eclectic-syncretic from the same source.
Organisation
Governance
Autonomous covens, authority conferred by initiation 1
Ordination
Open to women and men 1
Ordination
Authority conferred by initiation rather than by ordination 1
Origins
Origin Period
1940 to 1960 1
Place of Origin
The San Francisco Bay Area, California 1
Founder
Victor Anderson (1917-2001) and Cora Anderson (1915-2008). 1
History
Separation or Divergence
An independent American tradition older than the arrival of Gardnerian Wicca in the United States, which later exchanged material with it 1
Separation or Divergence
No separation 1
Learn More
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.

Transmission, Argument, and the Spelling

Feri is transmitted person to person, and the transmission has never been systematic. There was no curriculum, no set of classes and no ladder of degrees; there were conversations, occasional rituals, and, by the accounts of those who received it, a meal afterwards. The Andersons personally initiated something like twenty-five to thirty people across forty years. The lines descending from those initiates have diverged substantially, and there is no authority competent to say which of them is correct.

The name is itself contested. Early initiates wrote Fairy, Faery and Faerie interchangeably; Victor Anderson adopted Feri in the 1990s to distinguish the tradition from other faery-witchcraft currents, and both spellings remain in use by different lines.

The tradition's largest and most awkward fact is Starhawk. She trained in the Anderson line, and then, in The Spiral Dance of 1979, published a book that carried Feri concepts, the three souls, the pentacles, to a mass readership and became one of the founding documents of modern paganism. She went on to co-found Reclaiming, which teaches Feri-derived technique in an open, non-initiatory setting.

Feri initiates disagree about this, sharply. Some regard the publication of transmitted material as a straightforward breach of what initiation obliges. Others regard the objection as a claim of ownership over ideas that were never any one person's to own. The argument is about whether an initiatory tradition can survive being explained, and it is the same argument that runs through modern paganism generally, in an unusually concentrated form.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition (Cora Anderson), Sources

This source names Feri directly: "Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition is Cora Anderson's own short book on the Feri, or Faery, Tradition of modern witchcraft she co-founded with her husband, Victor H."

Source Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition (Cora Anderson)Cora Anderson

Belongs to Tradition

Wicca, Religions

Branch Of

Wicca, Religions

Holds Element

Witchcraft, Disciplines

The Feri tradition is initiatory and oath-bound, with a body of practice distinct from the Gardnerian line rather than derived from it.

Source Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in AmericaChas S. Clifton

Objects and Practices of This Tradition

Beltane, Holidays & Festivals

Feri keeps Beltane with a strong emphasis on ecstasy, desire and embodiment, worked through poetry, trance and improvisation rather than to a fixed seasonal script.

Source The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in BritainRonald Hutton
Casting the Circle, Rituals

Feri works the circle loosely and ecstatically rather than to a fixed script, treating the boundary as a container for intense personal energy work, and what is invoked is shaped by its own Three Souls and Star Goddess cosmology.

Source The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan WitchcraftRonald Hutton
Divination, Practices

Feri leans to trance and direct vision rather than to a fixed divinatory system, treating the practitioner's own ecstatic perception, and contact with the Star Goddess and the Three Souls, as the source consulted.

Source The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)Anonymous (multiple authors)
Drawing Down the Moon, Rituals

Feri emphasises direct ecstatic possession over formal invocation, a priestess or priest aspecting a deity through trance and breath rather than through a fixed script, and the deities called are Feri's own.

Source The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan WitchcraftRonald Hutton
Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition, Literary Works

Co-founder Cora Anderson's own account of the tradition's theology, symbolism and social structure, written for her husband Victor's fiftieth anniversary and later published as the lineage's own reference text.

Source Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition (Cora Anderson)Cora Anderson
Harm none (the Wiccan Rede), Beliefs & Restrictions

Feri practitioners know the Rede but the tradition is less bound by it than most Wiccan lines, teaching instead an ethic of personal responsibility and the cultivation of power.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
New Moon observance, Practices
Source The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)Anonymous (multiple authors)
Samhain, Holidays & Festivals

Feri keeps Samhain with direct and often intense contact with the dead and the ancestors, worked ecstatically through trance and poetry rather than to a set liturgy.

Source The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in BritainRonald Hutton
Spellcraft, Practices

Feri works magic through the body and the breath, its Iron and Pearl Pentacle exercises and its Three Souls model supplying the mechanism, and it is deliberately non-dogmatic about ethical limits where most Wiccan traditions cite the Rede.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
The God and the Goddess (divine duality), Beliefs & Restrictions

Feri works with a Star Goddess from whom all things emanate and with divine twins rather than a simple pairing, so its account of divine duality is more elaborate than the usual Wiccan model.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
The Maiden, Mother and Crone, Doctrines

Feri tradition honors a Triple Goddess figure within its own distinct pantheon, alongside a wider array of deities not confined to a single duotheistic pairing.

Source Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in AmericaChas S. Clifton
The Sabbat Rites, Rituals

Feri keeps the eight festivals but treats them as occasions for ecstatic and poetic working rather than fixed liturgy, with content improvised by the group and shaped by the tradition's own mythology.

Source The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in BritainRonald Hutton
The Three Souls and ecstatic personal power, Beliefs & Restrictions

Feri teaches that the person has three souls to be brought into alignment, and its practice aims at ecstatic contact and personal power rather than at seasonal observance alone.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
The Threefold Law, Beliefs & Restrictions

Feri knows the threefold return but does not make it a governing rule, since the tradition holds that ethics follow from the alignment of the self rather than from a formula of consequence.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
The Threefold Law, Doctrines

The Threefold Law circulates within Feri practice as a general ethical principle, though Feri's own teachings place greater weight on other concepts.

Source Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in AmericaChas S. Clifton
The Wiccan Rede, Doctrines

The Wiccan Rede is held within Feri practice as a general ethical orientation, alongside the tradition's own distinct ecstatic and mystical emphases.

Source Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in AmericaChas S. Clifton
Sources
1. Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America
Chas S. Clifton, AltaMira Press, 2006View the Source
Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition (Cora Anderson)
Cora Anderson, Acorn Guild Press, 2005
The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft
Ronald Hutton, Oxford University Press, 1999On the American witchcraft traditions
Quote, On the American witchcraft traditions
Feri is contemporary with Wicca and is not descended from Gardner.
View the Source
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005Entry on contemporary Paganism
Quote, Entry on contemporary Paganism
Transmission was informal and the descending lines have diverged, with no authority competent to adjudicate between them.
View the Source
Open Questions (1 open question)
How Many Practitioners Does the Feri Tradition Have?

Feri passes from teacher to student through small covens and houses with no central registry, and general surveys of American Paganism count Wiccans and Pagans as one combined category without separating this smaller initiatory current from the larger traditions around it.

What would resolve this A survey that asked self-identified witches or Pagans specifically which initiatory lineage, if any, they belong to would let a Feri-specific figure be drawn where only a combined estimate exists today.
Chas S. Clifton, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America
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