Anderson Feri tradition/s
Feri/Faery/Faerie. I kind of want to stop right here. What’s the point? This Tradition has been written about to death… and therein lies much complexity and conflict in our Tradition/s. And yet Anderson Feri retains its mysterious and integrous core of powerful initiatory magic linking us to the stars and the darkness that births them, and us.
I can say that Feri is a contemporary tradition of witchcraft, in the sense that much of it was formalised and woven together in the 60s in California by masterful and bardic hands, hearts, and minds. It is also an older tradition and lineage with roots to a Depression-era coven comprised of Dust Bowl refugees who settled in Oregon. One of these was Victor Anderson, then a young boy. Our stories tell us that in 1932 Victor Anderson (who was born in New Mexico in 1917) was one of the youngest witches to be initiated into this Oregon coven. Initiates know the names of some of the people said to have been in that coven, some details about their lives, and what kind of magic they did with each other. Some initiates are also in contact with grandchildren of those people today. Victor Anderson also spoke often about his first and pivotal initiation at the hands of an African and/or Faerie woman (there are various versions) in 1928… one telling of this story is famously published in the late Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, first published in 1979.
So, just as with Gerald Gardner (founder/propounder of what would later be called Gardnerian Witchcraft) and the New Forest Coven, there is Victor Anderson and the coven in Oregon.
In 1944 Victor and Cora Cremeans (who had grown up in Alabama) met and were married three days later. They married quickly because, as they both would agree, they had experienced meeting on the Astral many times before and realised this upon meeting. Cora was raised in an Appalachian family, grew up in poverty, and was connected to older cultural customs and folk-magic. They are both Grandmasters of the Tradition and their ancestral and ethnic magics provided wellsprings for the West Coast Tradition that was to come.
Victor Anderson (who died in 2001) maintained always that Feri was the science and religion that the small, dark-skinned people that came out of Africa spread throughout the world. He himself claimed Irish, Scottish, Native American, Spanish, and Hawaiian ancestry at various times of his life. Victor also experienced profound past life recollection and was observed by various initiates to be able to speak the languages of the cultures he claimed to have been a part of before. Sometimes Victor Anderson used these stories and experiences to justify naming himself a Kahuna, a Kabbalist, a Houngan, a Bokor… for decades this has made more than a few Feri initiates cringe and some, even then, countered these claims. It is widely agreed however that Victor was a powerful sorcerer, a witch through and through, and a holy man… a dear friend of mine, Cholla, said to me recently, “He was always looking for what he was… but there were no words for what he was… he was selling himself short by claiming many of these titles… he was a holy man.”
I never met Victor Anderson, nor Cora. There are many initiates today who either came to Feri after their deaths or were never able to meet them, but they remain our Mighty Dead and in our hearts.
There is another of our Mighty Dead too who is responsible for channelling and penning some of our most powerful poetry, enchantments, prayers, spells, and rites. Gwydion Pendderwen.
Gwydion Pendderwen lived a tragically short life. He was born on the same date as Victor Anderson, one of many synchronicities, May 21st, which depending on the year and the time of birth can make one a natal Sun Gemini or Taurus… so fitting for these bullish tricksters in love with the Goddess who is Love and the Twins. He died in an automobile accident in 1982, 36 years old, at Samhain-tide. Gwydion had long felt the heaviness of a crown he may have fatefully accepted, the role of Sacred and Sacrificial King. Gwydion was an adolescent, a friend to the Andersons’ one son – Elon (named for the Oak in Hebrew) – when he became an apprentice to Victor. Over several years Victor trained Gwydion, helped raise him like a second father, chastised him, and perhaps awoke in him a poetic fire that never stilled. This was at some point in the 50s after the Anderson family had move to the Bay Area of California in 1948. At least one named person known to the Tradition/s was initiated before Gwydion Pendderwen, and there may have been others, but it was Gwydion who brought a kind of zeal and fervour for the Craft that helped accelerate the course of what then came to be called Faerie, which would be eventually spelled as Feri. Before this it was called the Craft, Vicia, or even Pictish Witchcraft.
Feri is a multifarious and at times confusing tradition/s. You may have noticed I have used “Tradition/s” multiple times in referring to Feri and this is because over the decades this strain of initiatory witchcraft has experienced multiple splits. In 2011 there was an official split and several initiates decisively left and carved out their own space, returning to an older spelling of the Tradition (though other initiates may use that spelling too), declaring that they were Old Faery. Some of these folks still maintain their separate and distinct tradition, others who were part of that original split have found that contact with initiates across various divides is maintained and may even blur the boundaries (how Faerie). I include this here because I do not like to ignore history as it happens, and it is part of the quagmire of what I have inherited as in my 7-year long apprentice-journey I experienced mentorship and teaching from three distinct teachers. Each of these initiates hold very different and in some cases wildly divergent perspectives; one belongs to the group that split in 2011 and maintains that distinction, another is very public and writes books about the Tradition. The witch who ultimately initiated me into Anderson Feri comes from a lineage that has at times produced initiates who also wrote books and taught aspects of Feri publicly, and paradoxically is one of the quietest and more discreet magical lineages descending from the Andersons. I also write books, but the only Tradition I belong to that I have written explicitly about is Reclaiming, a public and open-source tradition of witchcraft which some view as an off-shoot of Anderson Feri.
Feri is often said to be an ecstatic tradition. It certainly is. The Tradition possesses certain tools and teachings – like the Triple Soul, Iron and Pearl Pentacles, being Kala, a certain readiness to access trance and enchanted states – and this catalyses intimately ecstatic experiences which bring us closer to our own natures, the spirits, the land, the cosmos, to God Herself and Her Consort whom she brings forth by Holy Lust. Some lineages/branches of Anderson Feri concentrate on a particular grouping of Gods, some work with the tools intensively and might know about those Gods but not emphasise them in any big way. Certainly there is a line and strain of Feri that does not work with the Pearl, only the Iron Pentacle, and works with different Guardians at the directions than much of the rest of Feri. What connects us at all is that we experience the same essential Mystery within the core of our rite of initiation in which the Current of Feri is passed to us via an Initiate. This Mystery can not be spoken or written about, and that remains true in multiple ways. This is what makes us kin or cousins and this is how we descend from the Andersons, and through them to other witches, other covens, and to the numinous and mysterious powers who wish our Tradition well and want it to continue.
Feri is a tradition of witchcraft that is,
Initiatory,
Ecstatic,
Mystical,
Devotional,
Sorcerous,
Fae,
Seraphic,
Necromantic,
Animalistic.
I came to this Craft an initiate and initiator within another tradition, a teacher of witchcraft both public and private, and a seeker of what calls. I was called by God Herself, the Peacock Angel, the Guardians, the Mighty Dead, the Iron, the Hidden… and in the Circle of Art, in holy land, with two of my Siblings in the Craft I was made a Feri Witch and I was changed.
Our lore teaches us that no magic must come forth from our beings unless we are aligned within – all three souls straight within me – and in an unbound, freed up, and clean state we call Kala… from this place may we be on our Points – Sex, Self, Passion, Pride, Power – and with our Spirits and God Souls bring forth wonders.
And so it is. x
