[3 posts concatenated from Google (URLs at bottom)]

To: alt.pagan
From: khepera (an11884@anon.penet.fi)
Subject: History of the Roebuck, parts I/II/III
Date: 1993-02-22 02:05:06 PST/ 02:07:01 PST / 15:49:31 PST 

The History of the Roebuck: From Its Inception to Present
by Ann Finnin, HPs
Imbolc, 1991

I can't remember when I became interested in the Craft. It seems as
though I had always been familiar with it. My mother had studied
with the Theosophists for many years before my birth -- Alice
Bailey, Rudolph Steiner, and so on -- and I grew up with the
concepts of Karma and Reincarnation. At 19 when I was researching
my first novel and all I had to go on was historical sources, I
don't ever remember feeling anything but acceptance. I remember
strolling through the bookstore at UC Riverside in 1972 or 1973,
picking up a book which I think was =What Witches Do= by Stuart
Farrar. I leafed through it and put it back, thinking only that I
didn't buy their explanation about the need for nudity. If you were
going to raise enough power to heal someone, why would a few
millimeters of cloth impede it? I can remember nothing else that I
found any problem with. 

January, 1974. One of those pivotal points in one's life where
decisions that are made affect the entire course of one's future.
I met David Finnin at an SCA 12th night held in Costa Mesa. The
revel and feast was held after an afternoon wedding and I was there
at the invitation of an old and dear friend, Chris Pickavet, who
had herself just joined the organization. After the revel, Chris
had suggested that, instead of trying to drive back to Riverside,
that I stay overnight at her friends' house in Redondo beach. I
agreed, realizing that I needed to find a phone in order to call my
roommate about my change of plans. The neighborhood was unfamiliar
and a little on the scuzzy side, and it was decided that I was not
to venture forth alone and unprotected. The Baroness of Dreibergen,
a hefty woman named Alison, took it upon herself to find me a
suitable escort. A blond man named David, dressed in a red
velveteen tunic, was presented to me as my Knight Errant and we
climbed into his 1956 Volkswagen bug to go search for a phone. As
fate would have it, it was a long search. Pay phones were few and
far between and those we found were mostly out of order. However,
we found one, I made my call and we returned to the revel.

Nothing much actually happened after that with David, at least 
the rest of that evening. We flirted and bantered a bit, but to my
astonishment, I had discovered that I had become an open flower in
a swarm of bees. Baroness Alison had on her hands a whole passel of
ex-GI's who had just gotten out of the service at nearby March Air
Force Base. There were at least five of them, as near as I can
remember and they continued to swarm around me until I left with
Chris some hours later. The following Tuesday, Alison, David and
one or two other fellows appeared on my doorstep ready to take me
away to a baronial council meeting. I soon found myself sandwiched
on a couch between two attentive fellows and heard about an
upcoming event in February called a "love feast." A few days later,
David showed up on my doorstep with the largest, most elaborate
valentine card I have ever seen and proceeded to persuade me to go
to this love feast with him.

It was held at Ed Sitch's house in Redlands. The place was full of
interesting people in even more interesting costumes. I remember
several things about that evening. I sat on the couch and David
brought a steady stream of people over to meet me, and they asked
me pointed questions about my interest in the occult. Something was
clearly up, but somehow I didn't seem to mind. Looking back, I met
not only Ed at that event, but Joe Wilson, Mara Schaeffer, Bill and
Helen Mohs, Little Bill (he worked with Bill and Helen and his last
name escapes me at the moment), as well as David's old buddy Paul
Antuano and his then-wife Chris. I can't remember ever being asked
to join Ed's ongoing Craft training group. I just began to go. It
turned out that Alison and her husband, Forrest, David, his
roommate Renfield (Ed Rush) and Chris Antuano were all in this
group. Ed, who called himself Thomas Doubleaxe, served as kind of
pied piper to a budding SCA cum-Craft community in Riverside and
this little training group turned out several people who are now
well-known Craft leaders.

We learned a variety of very nifty things such as how to perform
ritual, how to adlib quarter invocations (yes, that came from Ed),
and how to do spells (Ed had a recipe for "poof powder." You
wrapped this stuff up in a piece of paper upon which you had
written your spell or whatever and put it in the brazier. In the
time it took to chant "so mote it be," the powder ignited and went
poof. Neat stuff.) We also learned about psychic protection. I
can't remember when we first discovered the Thing. Something had
fastened itself onto Dave and gave him terrible headaches that only
responded to Darvon. He had never had them before, and has never
had them since. Ed called it a psychic slug, an astral parasite
that fastens itself onto people in a weakened condition and sucks
energy from them. We could find no source for it (Ed had wisely
counseled us against considering it a psychic attack unless we had
some kind of proof), but it was becoming extremely painful for Dave
and scary for me. I had spent several distraught nights, using
nothing but a fish knife and a votive candle, casting circles
around our bed trying to chase it away. We resolved one night to
get rid of it.

Ed took charge. Taking everyone (there were about 7 of us, as I
recall) into his bedroom, he directed Dave and me to lie down side
by side on the bed. Ed put a sword in my hand, telling me that it
was to be my magical weapon against the Thing and placed us both in
a trance. I was instructed to do battle with the Thing on the
astral, put it to flight and see in what direction it fled. My
memories of what happened next are dim. What I remember is seeing
a black amorphous something, thicker than a cloud, but with no
discernable shape, pressing down on Dave's aura, especially its
head. Unafraid, I raised the sword and attempted to wedge it
between Dave and the Thing. It was difficult to pry loose, but I
finally did and watched it retreat off in a roughly southwesterly
direction. Tremendously pleased with myself, I opened my eyes and
found to my astonishment that the rest of the group plastered
themselves against the walls and or dove behind dressers and
chairs. Apparently, I had sat up on the bed, my eyes still closed,
and begun swinging the sword wildly. I had swatted Dave in the
foot, nicked the edge of the wooden bedstead and scared the bejesus
out of everybody, including Ed, who resolved next time to tell his
students to use the sword as an astral weapon, not a physical one.

To digress a moment, Ed's training circles had the following
history. Ed, who had taken his Gardnarian 3rd Degree from Theos in
Long Island, had been transferred out to Norton Airforce Base near
San Bernardino from the Midwest somewhere. He had no 3rd Degree
priestess and, therefore, under Gardnarian rules and regulations,
could not have his own Gardnarian coven. But that didn't stop Ed.
He formed what he called the "Outer Court," a series of rituals and
exercises contained in an Outer Court Book of Shadows and the Outer
Court Grimoire. Since these things were considered Outer Court and
didn't come under the Gardnarian shroud of secrecy, they were
blithely handed out to anyone who wanted them. Many groups sprang
up during the late Sixties and early Seventies using only those two
references. One, called the Pagan Way in Chicago under a man named
Herman Enderle, still functions (for anyone who is interested,
Krista Heyden-Landon originally came from that group). This is the
so-called =Book of Pagan Rituals= that Herman Slater of the Magical
Childe published without Ed's byline. Now that Slater is dying of
AIDS, he has admitted to this. I've heard that Llewellyn is
thinking of reprinting the Pagan Way with Ed's byline.

There were even initiation rituals, a 1st and a 2nd. We took 1st,
I think, in June sometime. Then, we were shuffled over to Bill and
Helen Mohs for initiation in to the Inner Court. Bill and Helen
lived in LaVerne and they worked something called the American
Trad. This was a strange amalgam of Gardnarian stuff, stuff from
England (Bowers and Wynn-Owen come to mind, but I'm sure there were
others), Cabala and a smattering of other things. It was put
together primarily by Ed Sitch, Joe Wilson and John Hansen. Bill
and Helen (who originally got into the craft, I'm told, by
contacting an entity calling itself Pan on a Ouija Board) were
former students of Joe Wilson when he lived in Kansas City and the
English stuff came directly from Joe. Bill Mohs was a gaunt man in
his mid to late forties. He had a cataract over one eye which he
refused to have removed because it made him look sinister. Helen
was a zoftig blond who imagined herself a siren. Their main
deities were Pan and Aphrodite. 'Nuff said.

Anyway, we were hauled before the Inquisition in Bill and Helen's
living room with Ed, Fred and Martha Adler and Little Bill and his
then wife, Elizabeth. After a few pointed questions, our 1st Degree
into the American Trad was scheduled. Even though the American Trad
was not Gardnarian, it was still considered Inner Court. Ed was
present, so was Little Bill and Elizabeth (I believe) and Chris
Antuano, who also took 1st that night. It was around Lammas, 1974,
and Dave and I became Priest and Priestess of the Craft.

WITCH WARS

The reactions weren't long in coming. It appears that Alison and
Forrest had taken a 2nd Degree, Outer Court, because Ed had not
judged them ready for Inner Court. But they thought that being 2nd
Degree Outer Court entitled them to tell the rest of us what to do.
Chris broke it to them that she, Dave and I had been taken into the
Inner Court and, as such, were out of their jurisdiction. Alison
and Forrest left in a huff, Renfield dropped out for reasons of his
own, and there we were. Janine had showed up by this time and had
moved in with Ed that fall along with a bevy of teenagers that had
been attracted to Ed from the SCA. Ed and Janine were married in
early October by Phil Wayne, another SCA-Craft friend from San
Diego. Dave and I were the only ones present who were over 18 and
could witness the marriage. By this time, Dave and I were planning
our own wedding. We had written the ritual for the legal wedding,
to be held after the SCA Tourney of Union on October 27. Our
handfast was to be held on the 31st, which was in the middle of the
week.

Never get married on a Sabbat. That week between the wedding and
the handfast was insane. On October 30, Ed, Poke Runyon and Issac
Bonewitz were scheduled to appear on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show. It
was to be a show on Witchcraft. There was to be some film footage
showing a "real" coven in action that was supposed to be shot at
the home of Dale and Diane Brooks, former students of Bill and
Helen, who lived in Pomona somewhere. On the appointed night, we
all gathered at Dale and Diane's and waited for the microwave link-
up. Then, we heard that the microwave uplink had been taken away to
cover Nixon's phlebitis attack. So, we all piled into Puff (Dale
and Diane's purple van) with all our regalia and drove to the
Burbank studio. We unloaded Puff, trooped into the studio, robes
and all, and walked onto the set during the commercial break just
before we were slated to go on. When the commercial was over, there
we were. Magic.

Anyway, the show went on and it was really quite positive,
considering. Diane Brooks presided, a thin woman with long red hair
in her early thirties. Dale Brooks wore an antlered headdress. As
I remember, there were, besides Dale and Diane, Bill and Helen,
Dave and me, Tom and Debbie Morgan (more SCAers who had joined Ed's
training group) and Little Bill. We were billed as a "coven" which
wasn't strictly true, although we had all shared a common tradition
at that point. Dale and Diane had their own coven and Tom and
Debbie were still part of Ed's group, but no matter. We performed
the Gardnarian nine knot spell for "healing" and recited a chant
that began "Winds of Heaven, blow through us..." (more on that,
later). Then, it was all over. We piled back into Puff and went
back to Pomona.

October 31st was our handfast. Ed presided. Present were Janine,
Alison, Forrest, Tom, Debbie, Chris and Paul. It was, I think, a
Thursday night. That weekend, we set off for San Francisco to
attend a Samhain ritual hosted by Gwyddion Penderwyn (Tom deLong)
and meet some of the people in the Bay area. We flew up and took a
taxi into Berkeley. Gwyddion picked us up and took us to a motel
where, being an IRS agent, he got us a room at a cheap government
rate. The next day, we went to his house for the ritual. He was
clean shaven then, in his thirties, good looking in a kind of
nondescript way. Whatever else one might say about him, he was kind
to us nervous newcomers that weekend and I will always be grateful
to him for that. (Note: Gwyddion died in a car accident about ten
years later.)

Earlier that fall, Dave and I had been involved in a curious
incident. Dave used to work for W.T. Grants in Riverside before
they went under. During his lunch break at the snack bar, he would
do Tarot readings. One day, he read for a young woman whose
boyfriend disappeared along with his car in the hills behind the
University. Although the police suspected foul play, no body was
ever found so there was little they could do. The girlfriend,
however, wanted to know for sure so she asked Dave for a reading.
The reading indicated that he had, indeed, been murdered and the
body dumped in the hills. But the body still had to be located. So,
that evening being Samhain, we had asked Gwyddion to do
something about this situation. The group seized upon this and came
up with several ideas. One woman, who we later learned was Sharon
Devlin, went into a trance and brought through the spirit of the
young man, who described where his body was located on the other
side of the canyon from where the police were looking. We duly took
notes. Then, she led us in a keening that was supposed to put the
young man's spirit to rest. I suppose it did, because the ritual
ended without further incident and we spent the rest of the night
drinking Gwyddion's methegelin and talking. We duly reported the
results to the fiance when we returned, but nothing came of it,
except the police wanted to know who we were and how we knew all of
this stuff. We found it prudent to drop the entire thing. 

That was our introduction into the Real World of Witchcraft. In
November, Ed and Janine moved from Redlands to Huntington Beach and
we were left with Tom, Debbie and the remainder of his training
group. Bravely, we ran weekly rituals and a Yule festival until we
ourselves made plans to move out of Riverside. Tom and Debbie also
moved. Shelly and the teenagers had to stay. By January, 1975, we
had nearly moved completely out. We came back to an empty apartment
for twelfth night, then made the break to Pasadena. In Pasadena, we
entered into the stream of LA Craft. We met Poke Runyon of the OTA
and entered the lodge in January of 1975. We almost rented the
house of a man who had formerly been associated with Poke, a man
named Nelson White who owned the Magic Circle on North Lake Street.
Fortunately, we didn't. The place turned out to be a firetrap.
Besides, this man was to cause us trouble later. But, we didn't
know that then. We started into a mad schedule of attending every
ritual held by any group that would have us. Ed had started up
circles again in Huntington Beach and we attended those. Bill and
Helen were still working in LaVerne, and we went there frequently.
Joe and Mara had moved to Tujunga and we attended a few rituals
there. Eventually, we were going to at least three rituals a week,
all on different nights. 

Then, Bill and Helen's group disintegrated. Little Bill, it seems,
was having a mad, passionate affair with Helen and expected the
other Bill to take on his wife, Elizabeth. Well, Elizabeth was a
tall, skinny, severe-looking woman, and Bill just wasn't
interested. Finally, Helen and Little Bill moved out and Helen
filed for divorce. Elizabeth left under her own steam, and that
left Bill with a coven full of people. Bill, convinced that Helen
and Little Bill were doing "booga" against him, had us all doing
protection rituals. This got old real fast. Finally, Bill Mohs ran
off with Mary Mesa, an old flame of his, and the group fell apart.
We began working with Dale and Diane at this point along with a few
people who later achieved a small bit of notoriety. A couple named
Leslie and Donny Regis had joined the group and had been suckered
into a kind of group marriage affair which we had refused to do
earlier. Dale and Diane were not pleased with our refusal,
considering our decision to remain faithful to each other a very
non-pagan thing to do. We eased out of the group, leaving it to
Leslie and Donny. Eventually, Dale and Diane, under pressure from
harassment from their neighbors, moved up to the Bay area where, I
assume, they still are. Leslie Regis later became Lady Dana of
Crystal Well fame.

By this time, we had taken on a few students and, under the
watchful eye of people like Fred and Martha, we had formed
something we called the Pasadena Training Coven, modeled after the
training groups that Ed was holding in Huntington Beach. It was not
"official," we were not 2nd Degree yet. But we still got involved
in the movement that eventually resulted in the Covenant of the
Goddess. We signed the original COG charter as the Pasadena
Training Coven. Since only official covens were supposed to sign
this thing, it was determined that we should get our 2nd Degree
without further ado. Somebody must have muscled Bill into doing it,
because he gave us that Degree before he vanished.

Then, Ed dissolved his training group under pressure from a
fledgling Gardnarian High Priestess that had just assumed control
of the Los Angeles area. Hailing out of an affluent section of
Diamond Bar, Ann and Van Tipton had originally been students of
Ed's in the same training group that we had joined and had actually
been initiated by Bill and Helen a few short months before we had.
However, Ann Tipton had all the makings of a good Gardnarian High
Priestess. A well-educated, professional woman (she has, I'm told,
a PhD in Chemistry) with strong feminist leanings, she attracted
the attention of Lady Theos in New York as a candidate to spread
the Gardnarian movement into Los Angeles. After a weekend at Theos'
Long Island home, Ann Tipton, now calling herself Lady Athena,
returned to Diamond Bar and set up shop.

Now, Ed had a real Gardnarian coven to send his students to. But
the problem was that there were very few people that came out of
Ed's group that Ann Tipton would take. For example, she didn't like
us. Dave was too blunt and tactless and, since neither one of us
was impressed with her week-end 3rd Degree, we were not properly
respectful. Therefore, we were not welcomed. We were not the only
ones. A woman named Nan Poss, who had originally studied with Mary
Mesa (Bill Mohs' old flame) had also been working with Ed. She and
another woman named DeeDee Dluhosh had been attending Ed's
regularly since they, too, lived in Orange county and he had the
only game in town at that point. Nan had a 3rd Degree American Trad
and wasn't impressed with Lady Athena either. So, when Athena shut
down Ed's training group, Nan decided to form her own group with
DeeDee called the Sea Coven. We attended their rituals as regularly
as we could.

THE SAGA OF 1734

By this time, it's the fall of 1975. After a six month wait, we
were told that Joe and Mara were starting up their group again, and
did we wish to join. We did, and started going up to their new
house in Sunland. The first ritual we attended at Hallows, 1975
consisted in part of a conjuration of the spirit of Roy Bowers (aka
Robert Cochrane) and ushered us into the 1734 stuff. Soon, we were
reading the letters and furiously devouring the White Goddess
trying to solve he now-famous riddle so that we could be initiated.

By way of background, in 1966, Joe had advertised in a British
publication called Pentagram for someone to correspond with
regarding traditional (that is, non-Gardnarian) Craft. The ad was
answered by someone calling himself Robert Cochrane (actually Roy
Bowers), a man who had written several articles in the magazine and
had some very unusual ideas about what the Craft really should be.
Both Bowers' articles and the letters he subsequently wrote to Joe
outlines a secret tradition he called "1734" which was a cipher for
a secret name of the Goddess of Wisdom. The Bowers material
stressed the visionary, almost shamanic, nature of the Craft and
contained some very sharp criticism of the Gardnarians. There were
two keys, or so said the letters, that one needed to find in order
to practice the tradition. One had to figure out the Goddess's
secret name, hidden in the numbers "1734" and one had to figure out
how to approach the altar, a ritual that was described very
obliquely with lots of metaphor and little else. Sadly, Roy
committed suicide in June of 1966, right in the middle of that
correspondence. This cut off any further information on 1734, save
for the book by Justine Glass who interviewed Roy (not mentioning
him by name, of course) and also reported the existence of the
secret tradition. 

Then, in 1972, Joe went to England with the Air Force. While he was
there, he met a man called Norman, who claimed to have worked with
Roy and produced some other letters Roy had written to him along
with some descriptions of quarter guardians and other bits and
pieces. Norman presented himself as the last surviving member of
Roy's old group, telling lurid tales about how Roy, disappointed
over a failed love affair and crushed by being abandoned by his
wife, called all his people together in the circle and proceeded to
drink a potion of belladonna, forbidding his people to do anything
about it until it was too late. They carried out his wishes, taking
his body out to a remote location, dumping it, then calling the
police. Unbeknownst to anyone, however, Roy had in has pocket a
little book with everyone's names, addresses and telephone numbers
and, since he died a drug-related death, the police investigated.
Everyone went scurrying off into the woodwork and refused to talk
to anyone about Roy. Norman then empowered Joe to carry on the
tradition in America and presented Roy with a piece of what he
claimed was the Oracle stone in the Rollrights, a stone upon which
the priestess would sit in order to give oracles. Unfortunately,
Joe attracted a lot of negative attention while he was in England.

This was during the tail end of the Vietnam war, a war as unpopular
overseas as it was here. One of the sergeants of his unit was
involved in some protest activities and the Army suspected
sabotage. Joe, who had some knowledge of these events, was called
upon to testify at the man's trial. When he was sworn it, he
refused to swear on the Bible, stating that he was a Witch. The
British gutter press got a hold of this and made it appear that an
American Witch was undercutting the peace movement. Some of the
London Gardnarians (including Doreen Valiente), who didn't like him
anyway, declared him anathema, claiming that he compromised the
Craft with all the publicity. But his didn't stop Joe. When he
returned to the States, he put together the beginnings of a book
about the craft including not only the material from Norman, but
also bits from the other traditional Craft groups who would talk to
him. He distributed this material among all his students and
correspondents, giving no notation of who wrote the stuff and when.

We continued to work with Joe and Mara all through November and
December. But, unknown to us at the time, Joe was seeing another
woman and Mara was soon to find out about it. She did, at another
Twelfth Night, 1976. This ill-fated party, held at Joe and Mara's
Sunland home, carried with it some bright spots. A young black man
named Byron Baker, who had met Joe when he lived in Kansas City and
had been corresponding with him ever since, had flown out for his
1734 initiation. We met him for the first time at that party. Also
present were Ed and Janine (they ended up being chosen for the Lord
and lady of misrule), Fred and Martha, Poke and Jeanette (his then-
wife) Nan Poss, DeeDee and one or two other folk. Joe, who was
drunk out of his mind that night, was trying his best to be rude to
Ed and Janine. We found out later that Joe had been the one
originally asked to perform Ed and Janine's handfast and had been
passed over for Phil Wayne at the last moment, mostly for political
reasons. Joe was understandably irked.

But there were other problems to come. Mara found out about Joanna
Watkyns (everyone called her Joey) and left Joe then and there.
Most of the group, us included, tried to be friendly to both Joe
and Mara. Finally, Joe vanished for a time with Joey and we had to
take Mara into our house when the place she was living (with
another member of the group) asked her to move out. While Mara was
with us, we really began delving into the entire 1734 phenomenon
and we managed to work out the riddle, finding the secret goddess
name. But before we were initiated, Mara went to England herself to
try to find Norman and make contact with the original members of
the group, of whom she had little or no knowledge.

Well, she found Norman, all right. He was living in a little
cottage with his mother. He didn't seem to have a whole lot to tell
her and tried to involve her in a little scam he had going where he
announced to some attractive woman that he was taking pictures of
fairies. He did this by persuading the woman to wear shorts and
tromp through the grass in his back garden. The fairies, he
claimed, would be attracted to the woman and, by taking pictures of
her legs, he could possibly catch a photo of one of the fairies.

Mara didn't think very much of this, and moved on to a variety of
other people including Ruth Wynn-Owen. Ruth didn't have much to
tell her either -- only that she had written some of the rituals
that Joe had stolen and that she was annoyed, not so much that they
were filched, but that she was not given credit for writing them
and they were changed without her knowledge. Remember the "Winds of
Heaven" chant that we solemnly chanted on the Tom Snyder show?
Well, Ruth wrote that some years before. Joe had taken it, as he
had taken a good deal of other material, and had given it to his
students without any notation of who had written it. Bill and Helen
had inherited this chant from Joe and, not knowing where it had
come from, proceeded to rewrite it, shortening it and making it
more like a jingle. Apparently, they saw the Tom Snyder show in
England and Ruth, listening to her butchered ritual, was fit to be
tied.

Finally, Mara visited yet another well-known Craft figure, a man
who had written the Wiccan, a Gardnarian newsletter, under the
byline of M. This was John Score, a man who had taken his 3rd
Degree from Eleanor "Ray" Bone, a woman who was yet another protege
of Gerald Gardner. Score, a well known womanizer, offered Mara a
chance to perform the Great Rite (for real, folks -- no cup and
knife stuff here) and give her an English Gardnarian 3rd Degree
that would make her the equal of Ann Tipton, Theos and all the
rest. Mara agreed and returned to the U.S. with an English 3rd
Degree and a conviction that all the 1734 stuff was nothing but a
bunch of garbage.

Well, she gave us our 1734 initiation anyway with a young man who
had worked with her and Joe in the past that I had never seen
before and have not seen since. With an earnest desire to make the
experience as memorable as possible, she decided to concoct a
potion that she had learned about in England wherein one takes
Broom flowers and concocts a tea with it. She gave us this stuff to
drink, which we obediently did, and proceeded with the ritual.
However, she had used local Broom, not English Broom, which is a
completely different species that contains an alkali poison. Dave
and I were throwing up all through the ritual and spent three days
in bed with plastic buckets by our beds, since neither one of us
had the strength to make it to the bathroom. Still, we had the
initiation and a collection of Joe's material that Mara had allowed
us to copy from her files while she was overseas. Inevitably, Mara
become the darling of the Diamond Bar Gardnarians who actively
courted her to join their coven, playing on her bad experiences
with Joe to persuade her to join their feminist cause. Mara began
attending their rituals while still making a halfhearted attempt to
work with us.

THE QUINTELLA

In the meantime, we had also been working with Phil and Joanne
Wayne in a group that was called the Quintella. This was
"Witchcraft By Committee" where the five of us, Phil, Jo, Dave,
Mara and myself ran seasonal festivals for whoever wanted to show
up. And sometimes over 50 people did. We met in a variety of
places, everywhere from Angeles National Forest to Fred and
Martha's backyard. It was mostly Phil Wayne's show and he wrote the
majority of the rituals. He had moved up to Los Angeles from San
Diego soon after performing Ed and Janine's wedding and was anxious
to put together some kind of group of his own. 

Phil was a strange fellow, brilliant but lived in a fantasy world.
He wrote poetry, songs, novels and was a language freak. He had
told us a yarn about how he had originally learned the craft from
his grandmother and eventually ended up in a supersecret group in
Sacramento who practiced a tradition from Brittany. His rituals
were written in a strange language called Brittic. (Upon
examination years later, this "language" of his bears no
resemblance to any kind of gaelic dialect, but looks and reads for
all the world like glossolalia, the gibberish that Pentacostal
Christians use when they speak in Tongues.)

Anyway, Phil was a talented ritualist and we produced some very
successful open circles, attracting a number of people, some of
which later founded their own groups, and some of which stayed to
work with us. Several people floated in and out of the Quintella in
the year or so that it flourished. Dan and Laura Campbell, Jill
Johns (later to be known as Jill Dugan), Sandy Pinney, Bonnie and
Jim Crowley, Fred and Martha Adler, and on and on. Finally, the
Quintella became too much of a problem to keep up. Mara wanted to
go off with the Gardnarians and Dave and I wanted to explore the
1734 stuff further. The Quintella more or less officially
dissolved, although Phil and Jo tried to keep it going for a time
with the help of Jim and Bonnie and Jill until their marriage broke
up and Phil moved to Oakland.

However, this was about the time that a man named Bill Holmes
thrust himself into the community and remained a thorn in its side
for many years thereafter.

BILL HOLMES

He first showed up while Ed was still running his training group --
a well educated, good looking man in his early thirties who worked
as an estimator for a construction company. He lived in Anaheim at
the time with his wife and two little girls. His wife, a stay-at-
home housewife that he had married right out of high school, had no
interest in any of this and so he came to circles alone. He was
like a kid in a toy store -- enthusiastic, devoted, dedicated, all
of the earmarks of a "born-again" pagan. He worked with us (Dave,
myself, Nan and DeeDee) a couple of months until Ed dissolved the
training group. Then, he started going to Diamond Bar to prepare
for Gardnarian initiation.

That is, until he fell in love with Ed's sister. Charlotte Sitch
had just come out from Virginia and was staying with Ed and Janine
while she was finishing school. She was tall, lithe, with long
straight dark hair and a kind of fantasy otherworldly look to her.
She was also intelligent, articulate and interested in the Craft.
Bill, bored with his wife and annoyed that she did not share his
new found passion, found his anima priestess in Charlotte. He
promptly abandoned the wife and kids, and took an apartment with
Charlotte.

The Gardnarians were outraged, fueled in part by Janine's jealous
dislike of Charlotte and Mara's recent experience with Joe doing
the same thing. So they proceeded to pronounce Bill anathema and
forbad him to be initiated. Nan Poss, who by this time had started
up the Sea Coven, decided to take up the cudgel, not so much
because she liked Bill all that much (it was actually DeeDee that
was enamored of Bill), but she felt that Athena had no right to
place Bill under any kind of ban for something that sounded too
much like Christian Sin. So she proceeded to initiate Bill herself.
Worse yet, she employed the priestly services of Joe Wilson, who
initiated Charlotte.

Joe and Joey had become regulars down at the Sea Coven. They had
been living in La Canada with Joey's family all this time. Joey had
decided that she was interested in all of this after all, and the
Sea Coven was a place where she was certain that she wouldn't run
into Mara. Eventually, Joe and Joey moved back into the Sunland
house and Bill and Joe became fast friends. Bill, by this time, had
discovered 1734 and dove into it with all the enthusiasm of a new
convert. But Joe didn't have the entire system. It seems that he
had burned all of his material when Mara left and now had to get it
back somehow. We gave him copies of the stuff he had written, but
not the stuff that Mara had brought back, including the exercises
that we had come up with when we were working with her. But Joe was
satisfied with what he had and Bill took the letters and annotated
them extensively to the point where the resultant document was
nearly twice the size of the original packet of letters.

After Samhain, 1976, Mara announced that she no longer wanted to
work with us. She didn't feel comfortable knowing that we were
circling with Joe at the Sea Coven and besides, she wanted to
belong to the Gardnarian coven and they wanted nothing to do with
us, not only because they didn't like us in the first place, but
also we had been involved with Bill's initiation. So, Mara went her
way, and that was the end of that.

Then, after a Full Moon at Phil Wayne's house in which we were
expected to charge a sweepstakes ticket, Dave and I and Sandy
Pinney came up with the idea of starting our own real coven, a
coven that would not follow any one tradition but that would
experiment with a variety of different things and would do its best
to avoid the shenanigans that was going on in the community. We set
up a Yule ritual at our house, invited some interested people left
over from the Quintella days, and launched the Roebuck on the night
of the dark of the moon, December 21, 1976.

THE ROEBUCK

Attending the first ritual were: Jill Johns, Sandy Pinney, Tom and
Debbie Morgan (who had moved back into the area from Northern
California), Johann Keysper (a leftover from Bill and Helen), Dave
and myself. The ritual involved the death and resurrection of the
year king (Dave) after which he was blessed by the Maiden (Debbie),
the Mother (me) and the Crone (Sandy). It was short, sweet and to
the point and afterwards we had a really dandy feast. (Just for the
record, we had also invited a young woman who had formerly been one
of Phil Wayne's Students. She had shown up for the rehearsal, but
for some reason, could not attend the ritual. She later became Liz
Rodrick.) We began meeting regularly at the full and dark moons and
the festivals.

We attracted a lot of old Quintella people and some folks that had
come out of the woodwork after Ed's group fell apart. Joe and Joey
became regulars. Jill was a regular, as well as Sandy and Tom and
Debbie. Johann, a corpulent Dutchman who had served time in a
Japanese prison camp, could not attend regularly due to failing
eyesight which made it difficult for him to drive at night. He had
come to us after Bill and Helen split up, and wanted nothing more
than to sit in circle, worship the Lady, and enjoy the company of
kindred spirits. Finally, when we moved to Tujunga, he could no
longer join us.

Jill Johns originally came to us from Patterson's group in
Bakersfield. She brought tales with her about Pat's 12-year-old
High Priestesses (and, one presumes, sex partners) and Pat's
insistence that what later turned out to be Ed's Outer Court Book
of Shadows was something he inherited from his Grandmother. She had
also developed connections with a New York Gardnarian named Judith
and a Florida group run by a Lady Gwynn. She moved to Highland Park
with her then boyfriend and was very instrumental in helping us
decipher the letters, research Celtic mythology and put together
what is now the Roebuck pantheon.

Jill not only worked with us during those early years, but also
tried to keep Phil's open rituals going for a time. We never
initiated Jill. She already had a third degree from her Gardnarian
friend in New York, and we felt that there was no point in re-
initiating her (this was years before our adoption policy). Later,
she left her boyfriend and married a fellow who lived down in Palos
Verdes. Although she made it up fairly regularly for Roebuck
rituals, she decided to start her own group. Phil and Jim and
Bonnie (and later, Joe and Joey) were regular attendees. 

Sandy Pinney was a refugee from Z. Budapest's group. She had
originally been a buddy of Jim Crowley, they worked at the same
place for awhile, and had come to one of Phil's Quintella rituals.
Although she claimed to be a lesbian, she felt that her early
training had been unbalanced and wanted to try to explore the God
as well as the Goddess. We offered her initiation and she accepted.
Sandy was a dedicated Roebuck member for several years. She was a
graphics artist and designed our Roebuck logo from a picture in the
Bain book on Celtic knotwork. But as the years went by, she felt
increasingly uncomfortable with the trance and vision work that we
were doing. After a short-lived affair with another member of the
group, she left to start her own printing business.

Tom and Debbie Morgan were old friends from our Riverside days.
They had worked with Ed for a while until he moved away, then Tom
decided to move up north to try to study with an Indian shaman. He
was turned down. After an unsuccessful stint in the Forest Service
(he discovered he had terrible asthma and allergies), they returned
to Van Nuys. Tom had a lot of energy and talent, but he never quite
fit in to the Roebuck mindset. For one thing, he insisting on
invoking Norse gods, particularly Thor in the north. Worse still,
he insisted on coming to circle stoned after we forbad him to smoke
grass in our home. However, we offered them initiation anyway,
since they had worked so hard for so long, and they accepted. We
took the three of them, Sandy, Tom, and Debbie, to a place up by
Brown Mountain that we had worked at with Mara and gave them,
essentially, the same initiation that Mara had given us. She and
Joe had originally put it together when they were trying to revive
"1734" and she had made some special changes for us. It remains
nearly unchanged to this day. This was sometime in the spring of
1977. However, we didn't require people to be initiates to work
with us. We were also going down to the Sea Coven, which was
thriving at this point, as well as the OTA. Joe and Mara had been
members of the OTA, and Poke didn't want to alienate either of
them. Finally, Mara stopped coming and Poke made an unsuccessful
attempt to bring Joey into the lodge.

We moved into the Tujunga house in October, 1977. We bought it
primarily through the urging of Joe and Joey, who offered us the
services of their Realtor. They helped us move and we set up shop
in our present location, with them running a kind of scion group in
Sunland. Joey was more interested in Ceremonial Magic than Craft
ala "1734" (possibly because of Mara's connection with it) and they
laid plans to found the Temple of the Elder Gods, a kind of generic
pagan group much like the old Pagan Way. Joe, however, continued
his own interest in 1734, although by this time he was so
disconnected from it that his input was of little use. His drinking
had increased and produced some bizarre behavior. One night, he got
drunk and "officially" turned over the entire 1734 tradition to us,
complete with the sacred stone from the Rollrights that Norman had
given him. But that didn't stop him from becoming 1734 guru to
whoever approached him. Since he was the one who had originally had
the correspondence with Roy, he was the one that everybody wanted
to talk to. And Joe could never resist chela.

We moved into the Tujunga house in October, 1977. We bought it
primarily through the urging of Joe and Joey, who offered us the
services of their Realtor. They helped us move and we set up shop
in our present location, with them running a kind of scion group in
Sunland. Joey was more interested in Ceremonial Magic than Craft
ala "1734" (possibly because of Mara's connection with it) and they
laid plans to found the Temple of the Elder Gods, a kind of generic
pagan group much like the old Pagan Way. Joe, however, continued
his own interest in 1734, although by this time he was so
disconnected from it that his input was of little use. His drinking
had increased and produced some bizarre behavior. One night, he got
drunk and "officially" turned over the entire 1734 tradition to us,
complete with the sacred stone from the Rollrights that Norman had
given him. But that didn't stop him from becoming 1734 guru to
whoever approached him. Since he was the one who had originally had
the correspondence with Roy, he was the one that everybody wanted
to talk to. And Joe could never resist chela.

There were a couple of people who came to sit at the master's feet.
One was Bill Holmes. Others included a threesome from Chicago,
David Piper, his sidekick/lover Brian and Jomil Vrabel. Jomil had
originally worked with Phil Wayne and had moved to Chicago where
she met up with David Piper, a refugee from Herman Enderle who had
managed to pick up an Alexandrian initiation along the way. They
had a small group going in Chicago before they moved out here. They
were bad news from the first. They first ended up with Phil, who
threw them out and they landed on our doorstep in the middle of the
night just before we were scheduled to move to the Tujunga house.
We told them they could stay if they helped us move, which they
reluctantly did. We finally threw them out when we discovered that
they were taking the money that they were supposed to be saving for
apartment deposit and buying books. They eventually got their own
place, and haunted Joe and Joey for awhile. Finally, Jomil left
David and Brian in Hollywood and moved to San Diego where she
started her own group, called the Pleaides.

Enter the Troll. Frank had found his way to one of the classes that
Poke held to prepare people for the lodge. We all hit it off and he
began to attend our circles, driving all the way up from Pendleton
(he was a Marine at that time). He bounced back and forth from our
house to Joe and Joey's. One night, he and Joe got drunk and wrote
up a military parody of Poke's Goetia invocation, thinking it was
a great joke. Poke, for some reason, chose to be offended by it and
threw Frank out of the lodge class. So, Frank ended up with us.
Then, he had a falling out with Joe and Joey. It appears that he
never really took Joey seriously as High Priestess and perversely
looked for ways to deflate what he saw as her pretensions. One
night, he was asked to make a libation during a ritual. When, he
attempted to go outside, he was told not to leave the circle. So he
proceeded to libate Joey's white rug. That did it. There was a
great row and Frank was thrown out of Joe and Joey's. We offered
him initiation and he accepted.

Ed and Denise Bethune were also part of the OTA and were trying to
work both with him and with us at the same time. Joe was setting up
the Temple of the Elder Gods and we were treading on thin ice with
Poke regarding people who wanted to be members of both. Ed and
Denise were two of the people who were trying to do this. They
didn't succeed for very long. Poke launched a lawsuit against
Nelson White who he accused of libeling him in his newsletter. It
appears that a couple of OTA members that Poke had a dispute with
had been going to Nelson and telling tales, half truths and
innuendos and Nelson was gleefully printing them. Poke wanted
everyone in the lodge to sign a statement declaring themselves to
be official lodge members. We deferred, not wanting to be involved
in any kind of countersuit and Poke hysterically accused us of
betrayal during a lodge meeting. After this Ed and Denise decided
that they wanted nothing more to do with Poke and resigned from the
lodge. We did not resign. We felt that we had not betrayed Poke (we
eventually signed the paper after consulting with an attorney). But
Poke seemed eager to get rid of all of us, so we went inactive for
many years. 

In March of 1978, we initiated Frank, Ed, and Denise at the Brown
Mountain site. Things were already beginning to cool between us and
Joe and Joey. We had dropped out of the Temple of the Elder Gods,
preferring to stay with the 1734 stuff rather than exploring the
ceremonial magic that Joey preferred. This was touchy, since Dave
and Joe both worked for Savin Business Machines at that point.

Finally, Joe quit Savin and Dave was given Joe's final check to
deliver. It was raining hard and the dirt road to Joe and Joey's
house was virtually impassable. So, I put the check in the mail and
it took several days to get delivered. They were furious, claiming
that we should have made more of an effort to get the check to them
sooner. I apologized profusely and offered to try to make it up to
them, but Joe wasn't having any. One night, he got drunk and left
a threatening message on our answering machine. We felt that he was
looking for an excuse to break off their relationship with us, so
we left them alone after that.

This left us with Sandy, Frank, Ed, and Denise. Tom objected to
Frank being initiated, accusing him of being a narc, so he and
Debbie decided to leave us and go work with Joe and Joey. This
ended up being the best thing for all concerned. So the five of us
began working in earnest developing magical techniques, getting to
know the gods and goddesses, etc. With few other commitments at
that time, we concentrated on refining our own system. The material
for the quarter pathworkings resulted from several group contact
rituals that we did using the black mirror into which we invoked
all of our quarter deities in turn. This technique was adapted from
the classic Almadel working that we learned from Poke in which an
angel or other spirit is invoked into a central point (a crystal or
incense) and all the people in the circle seek contact with it,
gathering visions, impressions and other information. With this
input, plus continued research, we fleshed out the present quarter
deities.

During this time, both Denise and I were studying hypnotherapy and
I was in graduate school so we adapted several psychological
techniques (such as the Gestalt "empty chair") to be used in magic.
Actually, we had inherited a strong tradition of using hypnosis in
the circle both from Poke and from Joe, who got his training from
Dr. Theo Mordley, a local psychiatrist with an interest in magic.
It wasn't difficult to adapt these techniques and we found that
they worked very well -- almost too well. We began to work on a
very intense level and neither Dave nor I were experienced enough
to deal adequately with the things we uncovered.

Two other people were initiated into the group during this period
of 1978 to 1981. Barb Miller was yet another OTA refugee. She and
her husband had joined the lodge soon after we did. Her husband and
another woman had gone off to do Egyptian magic together and Poke
had accused them of having an affair. Whether it was true or not
didn't matter. The husband and the other woman went running off to
Nelson White to spread tales, which led to the eventual lawsuit.

Barb found her way to us and, since Poke would not allow her to
attend both groups, decided to resign from the lodge and take
initiation with us. Also at this time, Pat Howell began attending
circles with Sandy. They started out as lovers, but the affair soon
ended with bitter feelings. Pat proved to be better at vision work
than Sandy, so Sandy left to start her business, leaving Pat in the
circle. Pat was initiated at Hallows, 1979. She as to be the last
initiate for more than three years with one notable exception.

Living in Bakersfield at this time was a woman named Patsy, another
refugee from Patterson's group, who used to attend Quintella
rituals. Patsy had a large house outside Bakersfield and loved to
host festivals up there. You could drive up, attend the ritual,
spend the night, and come back the next day. We had gone up there
for one such ritual and found a small group of people who, oddly
enough, claimed to be the "only 1734 coven in America." It turned
out that this tiny group was being run by Bill Holmes, who had
concocted this story. DeeDee Dluhosh, who used to work with Nan in
the Sea Coven, had joined this group, but didn't want to cross Bill
because she was afraid that he would not initiate her. Bill, it
seemed, did not see fit to attend this particular gathering. So, in
a rare fit of pique, Dave, Frank and I took DeeDee into a back room
and initiated her. Then, we called all Bill's people into the room,
introduced DeeDee as their new High Priestess and informed them
that they had been fed a pack of lies. At first, Bill was furious
at us, but later he confronted Joe about it. Joe, it seemed, had
gotten drunk and told Bill that he and he alone had the authority
to carry on "1734," not mentioning of course, the fact that he had
given us that same authority some two or three years previous.
Totally shattered, Bill had nothing further to do with Joe. 

We still attended the Sea Coven and maintained close contact with
Jill's group. Jill's husband, although interested in magic, did not
want to be High Priest of the group, so Frank volunteered for the
job. He had married by this time and was living in Long Beach, so
it was more convenient for him to go to Jill's. Jill, by this time,
was developing her own material and some of it we found a little
suspicious. One bit in particular caused some problems. This was a
notion that she had picked up from Lady Gwynn based, I'm told, on
an ancient Greek manuscript that described "good gods" that came
from Sirius and "bad gods" from Alpha Draconis. Somewhere along the
line, Jill decided that she and all the other Craft people on Earth
were descended from the Sirius people and that a few actually were
aware of their otherworldly origins. She decided to form a kind of
clan in which one sought to remember the homeworld and write an
essay about one's memories and one's longing to return.

This is not an original notion, by the way. Many "new agers" and
science fiction writers have fastened onto the idea that people who
are interested in psychic things are somehow different than the
rest of humanity and are really descended from gods from outer
space. The problems that this caused centered around the Draconian
"bad gods" who, apparently, had also come down to Earth in some way
to chase down and exterminate the Sirius survivors. This sounded
uncomfortably like the sort of novel that Phil Wayne would write,
and indeed, much of this material Jill had originally gotten from
him. After awhile, everything unpleasant that occurred in Jill's
life was blamed on the Draconians, not her own actions or poor
judgement, and she was constantly doing protection rituals and the
like to alleviate some increasingly nasty problems. Finally, her
marriage broke up. Greg Dugan, a Vietnam Vet with a Section 8 from
the Army, left her and moved to Texas, forcing her to give up the
Palos Verdes house. The group collapsed, leaving several survivors.

Before it did, though, it fostered a couple of very interesting
relationships. Bonnie and Jim continued to attend some of Jill's
rituals, as did Joe and Joey. The rumors began to fly regarding an
affair between Bonnie and Joe. Nan Poss, who still maintained
contact with all parties concerned, thought this was ridiculous.
But after Jill left town, Bonnie and Jim became extremely chummy
with Joe and Joey, going in on some agricultural projects with them
among other things. Bonnie continued to maintain that she was
having an affair with Joe and that Joe had initiated her into
"1734." Actually, Bonnie and Jim had begun an interest in 1734
while they were working with Jill and had obtained a copy of the
original letters, whether from Jill or directly from Joe, I don't
know. There were things in Bonnie and Jim's material that we know
didn't come from Joe -- material that Jill had written up to be
used with her own "clan," stuff like who could and could not be a
priest or priestess, who could sleep with whom, etc. This was
clearly Jill's invention and was not part of the original Bowers
material at all.

In the meantime, we continued with our experimentation. Ed and
Denise eventually drifted off, as did Pat Howell, about the time we
began working with the Black Goddess. Then, Barb moved to Texas and
this left only Frank as an active Roebuck initiate. DeeDee never
actually came up and worked in the circle. In fact, she became the
only initiate that we were forced to banish because of her illegal
drug use. However, we always had a full house. Fred and Martha
attended regularly, as did Jill (until she married someone else and
moved away completely) and a former student of Jill's named Joanne
Fox. Another student, a young man we picked up at some open
festival or other, was Michael Dern (known as Michael Three), a
bright and overly ambitious computer programmer who had been
involved with a group from the Sorcerer's Shop. They were enamored
of Babetta until we showed them an old copy of Penthouse that
revealed Babetta in all her glory doing a photo spread in their
temple. Anyway, Michael had gotten a snoot full of real magic and
decided he wanted to study.

About this time, it was becoming increasingly clear that we had
just about reached the end of our resources. We were stuck. No book
could guide us any farther, our intuition was circling in a dead
end. We had just spent several months working out a ritual that is
discussed in the Bowers letters called "Approaching the Altar" in
which one is supposed to spiral around, gazing at the central altar
with "psi" power, and things were supposed to appear. Frank had
constructed an elaborate spiral dance affair in which one was
supposed to spin around while circumambulating an illuminated
central point. One Full Moon, we got everyone together and tried
this ritual. It was far more difficult to do than we had thought.
People were getting dizzy and dropping out. Our living room wasn't
quite large enough and people were bumping into things. And all we
got was a message strong enough to be picked up by everyone. We
were close, but we still hadn't hit upon the secret. (Close, as
someone said, but no cigar). We were crushed.

At first, the idea of going to England was dismissed. Both Joe and
Mara had gone to England to try to find the missing parts of the
ritual. They both failed. The only connection to the old group that
we knew of was Norman, and he had proved to be singularly unhelpful
in both cases. We knew of no other contact and we were reluctant to
be led down the garden path again. That's when we decided to ask
the Old Ones to help us. That turned out to be easier said than
done. The only contact point we had was the stone that Norman had
given Joe, the stone that was supposed to come from the Rollrights.
And we weren't even sure if that was true or if it was another one
of Norman's con jobs. But we decided to give it a try anyway. Using
the stone in the center of the circle, we invoked the Old Ones of
the sacred places and stated our honest intentions to try to learn
enough to revive the Old Ways. We asked them to guide us to the
people who could (and would) help us, it didn't matter who or where
they were. Then, we passed around a basket and everyone put in a
coin to be tossed into the Chalice Well at Glastonbury to show our
good faith. These were to be tied up in a silk pouch and carried
with us on the plane.

Other contacts began to present themselves. Nan Poss had among her
wide circle of friends an Englishman named Fred Lamond, a
Gardnarian who had been in Gerald's original coven in London. We
wrote to him and found him extremely friendly and helpful. He
invited us to give him a call when we arrived in London and visit
him. Another encouraging contact came in the person of William G.
Gray, or Bill Gray, the author of many works on Ceremonial Magic
and the Cabala. Poke had corresponded with him on several occasions
and his address was listed in several of his books as an invitation
for correspondence. We hadn't originally thought of writing to Bill
Gray. Despite our previous training in the OTA, we were not all
that interested in Cabala. However, Bill had written one book,
called The Rollright Ritual (now reprinted by Llewellyn as =By
Elder Tree and Standing Stone=) which outlined some experimental
work that he and several unnamed associates had done at the
Rollrights. The ceremony described in The Rollright Ritual seemed
to be more Craft-like than Ceremonial Magic, and it intrigued us.
So, we wrote to Bill. His reply was very prompt and encouraging
and, after several letters, he invited us to visit him at his home
in Cheltenham. With these invitations in hand, we took off for
London.

ENGLAND

To describe all the things that occured during that first trip to
England would take many pages, so I'll stick to the incidents that
directly relate to the history thus far. Suffice to say, our
invocations to the Old Ones were heard and we were led to people
(some very unlikely and totally unexpected) that were able to set
us on the right path. Some of these contacts blossomed into
friendships that have lasted to this day.

We met Prudence Jones first at the Ley Hunter's moot, a kind of ley
hunters convention that was held outside of Cambridge in July,
1982. Pru was there selling literature from Fenris Wolf
publications. We told her that we were Craft people from the States
and, after a pleasant chat, she took us to her house for supper.
During the course of things, we discovered that she was a
Gardnarian who had taken over from John Score who had passed on a
year or two previous to that and now edits the Wiccan. We showed
her our Book of Shadows and some of the exercises that we were
doing and, to our utter astonishment, dropped her Book of Shadows
into our laps. It appears that the shroud of secrecy that covers
the Gardnarian Book of Shadows does not extend to the other side of
the pond. From Pru, we copied the outline of what later became our
Hunter's Moon ritual (written, I'm told, by Score's wife) and we
passed on to her our Queen of the North ritual.

From there, we landed in the lap of Michael Howard who shared a
cottage in an unpronounceable part of Wales with a lady named
Rosina Bishop. Rosina had been one of Norman's students many a year
ago and gave us some valuable insights into that situation. Norman,
it turned out, was never a member of Roy's group. He was a self-
styled gypsy cunning man who had attended a few rituals and had
carried on a very brief correspondence with Roy. When Rosina heard
our tale about Joe, she didn't seem surprised. It seems that he was
extremely fond of leading people on, and a gullible Yank was too
good to pass up. The stone, however, turned out to be genuine,
although it wasn't from the Rollrights proper, but from a nearby
cromlech called the Whispering Knights. The stone that Norman gave
Joe was a piece of the capstone from the Whispering Knights which
fell down at one point and shattered into fragments. Rosina was
with Norman when he scaled the fence and took a large chunk of the
capstone. From Michael, we learned that after Roy's death, some of
the members of his group formed a kind of public group called the
Regency, based on the idea that they were keeping the tradition
warm until the rightful heir would come along. This rightful heir
was supposed to have been Roy's son Adrian (who now owns a pub
somewhere and has no interest in the Craft at all).

At any rate, one of the members of The Regency was Ruth Wynn-Owen,
a rather well-known stage actress in her day who began her own
"family" tradition called the Plant Bran. Some of the members of
this family are noteworthy. Two of them were Fred and Martha Adler,
who met Ruth on one of their trips to England and were adopted into
her family. Another member was a woman who wrote under the name of
Marian Green, a nom de plume that was originally used by three
women who all wrote articles on magic and the occult. The present
Marian Green is really Anne Sloegrove, a former associate of Roy
(although she was never formally in his group). This particular
lady left Roy's group after a falling out with Bill Gray (she had,
we were told, sneaked down into his temple in the middle of the
night and photographed his magical book without his permission) and
ended up in the Plant Bran. For all of her "family" tradition,
Ruth's husband was not a part of it, and Ruth would hold her
gatherings at her London flat. Eventually, she contracted throat
cancer and left her London flat, moving up to the seaside and the
group pretty much folded. We never met Ruth. She was too ill to
travel to London to meet us and her husband didn't allow any
gatherings at their cottage. But we still have much of her
material. 

We met several other noteworthy people during the first several
weeks of that five-week trip. Fred Lamond introduced us to Zachary
Cox and Jean Morton-Williams, the people who took over Gerald
Gardner's London coven after his death and run it to this day.
Zachary, a tall man in his fifties with an unruly shock of salt and
pepper hair, edits =The Aquarian Arrow= and Jean, a pretty blond
lady, ran a kind of outer court group called Pagan Pathfinders.
Zachary filled in a lot of details about how the Gardnarians really
worked (things that Doreen Valiente would later write about in one
of her books), including the tidbit that Old Gerald made up the
practice of scourging because he liked being whipped. They, it
seemed, had also known Roy and indicated that the British Craft in
the Sixties intermingled just as much as they do today.

But it was when we visited Bill Gray that we finally made our
connection. We had no idea that Bill had anything to do with Roy.
All of his previous books had been extremely critical of
"Witchcraft," especially Gardnarian. But we inquired about the
background behind The Rollright Ritual anyway, saying that it was
very close to what Roy wrote about in his letters. The Old Ones
stepped in at this point. Bill, when we brought up the subject of
Roy, he opened up to us and told us that he had worked with Roy for
some years, attending rituals and carrying on an extensive
correspondence of which he gave us copies (this correspondence
appears in the chapter entitled "Paganistic Principles" in his book
=Western Inner Workings=, the first volume of his Sangreal series).
He gave us Roy's cord and, perhaps the most valuable of all, wrote
us a letter of introduction to John Jones (the John Armstrong of
the letters), the man who had been Roy's Man in Black for the old
group. John now lived quietly in Brighton with his wife and three
children and didn't have much to do with the Craft anymore. But
Bill sent the letter off anyway. We phoned John a couple of days
later and he agreed to see us. 

That was the first of several visits to Brighton that we were to
make over the course of many years. John, a short, sturdily built
man with red hair and an acid wit, took us up to the old meeting
site that Roy had used. On the old oak that stood at the Northern
Quarter, he found a sprig of Mistletoe growing -- rare on oak
trees, I understand. He took that as an omen and agreed to teach
us, among other things, the proper way to do the "Approach to the
Altar." He called it Grinding the Mill and it was the basic ritual
used in Roy's tradition. In our attempt at reconstruction, we had
made the ritual entirely too complicated. In actuality, it is
simplicity itself. One simply paces slowly around a small fire or
lighted candle, eyes fixated on the light, and chants a version of
the vowel chant that is, curiously enough, given in full in one of
Roy's articles. The one thing we didn't think of, due in part to
our quasi-Gardnarian training, is that one grinds the mill
Widdershins -- counterclockwise, not clockwise. The
counterclockwise motion (also called "Moonwise") churns the energy
against the Earth's axis, producing friction and, therefore, energy
for manifestations, or whatever. Deosil was used for worship
rituals or for festivals. If one wanted to raise power, one went
Widdershins. With this bit of information in hand, we were
instructed to return to the States and try it out, reporting to
John what we got.

THE CLAN OF TUBAL CAIN

The Clan of Tubal Cain is mentioned very briefly in the letters to
Joe and it, not "the order of 1734," was the actual name of Roy's
old group. We were not actually adopted into the Clan during our
first trip. John performed a ritual with us that consisted of
sending me on a kind of "vision quest" in which I was supposed to
bring back a series of "key" visions which would determine whether
or not I had been accepted by the Ancient Ones. As it happened, I
did receive those keys and John proceeded to give us as much
background material on the Clan and the way Roy used to work as we
could absorb. However, he knew that we had our own group so the
subject of bringing us formally into the Clan was never really
brought up. John just assumed that we would use the material with
the Roebuck and, for a time, that is what we did.

However, in one of my letters to him, I had expressed a concern
about whether or not the material we had (and, incidentally, the
truth about Roy's death) would be accepted as valid in the States.
We had, after all, been duped before. In his return letter, John
suggested that we actually join the Clan of Tubal Cain. By this
time, it was already May of 1983. Of course, we accepted and he
sent us a copy of the adoption ritual, empowering Dave to act in
his stead to adopt the entire Roebuck into the Clan provisionally
while we served a year-long apprenticeship. He suggested that Dave
and I give each other the oath first, then, a few weeks later, give
it to the entire Roebuck. We did this in June of 1983, during a
ritual in which we were raided by the police for working in an area
of Tujunga that was part of the county flood control district.
While the visitors of the group held the police at bay, Dave and I
adopted four people provisionally into the Clan: Frank, Byron
Baker, Michael Dern and Joanne Fox (a former student of Jill's who
had recently been initiated into the Roebuck). These four, plus
Dave and myself, made up both the Roebuck and the Clan of Tubal
Cain for several years after that.

Many practices that are now an integral part of the Roebuck were
developed during this time. The Clan rituals did not replace the
Roebuck rituals, only enhanced them. The Clan did not work with
quarter deities per se and we had to make a decision to continue to
work with them anyway. However, our circle casting ritual, cakes
and ale consecration, group structure and so on were gradually
brought into line with what we were learning from John. Our
apprenticeship was an intense one, even given the distance. In
frequent letters, John would suggest a ritual, we would perform it
and report back to him in detail what happened and who got what.
Then, he would write a critique and suggest something else. There
were also phone calls in which we discussed a variety of issues.

John was insistent from the very first that we were to be an
independent group and not slavishly copy the practices of the
original clan. He was especially adamant that we not repeat any of
Roy's mistakes. Roy apparently was a very charismatic leader, and
people would flock to the group because of him and not necessarily
because of what the group was doing. We obviously could not
duplicate that. Not only were we Americans and a different
generation, we had advantages that Roy's old group didn't have --
an equal compliment of women, for one thing. But we did decide to
keep the core practices and philosophy of the Clan as much as we
were able to, even when they violated American principles.

This is precisely the reason for much of the accusations of elitism
and snobbery that have been leveled at us by more egalitarian
American Craft groups. We hold to the ancient Divine Right of Kings
(the King being the Magister) who holds his office by virtue of
being chosen by the gods and not through his own efforts or
personal virtue. Indeed, all of us hold our priesthood the same
way. We do not choose this path -- we are chosen for it. We can
accept or reject it for a time, but when it comes down to it, we
are not here through our own efforts or desires. One is of the Clan
or one is not, and wannabes just don't make it. This is the source
of our arrogance. Roebuck initiates are an elite few that the gods
have chosen for a very difficult task. Many are those who have
tried to enter the door and are turned aside. Some of these are
people who have achieved rank in other traditions. But when it
comes down to it, it doesn't matter how many degrees one has. You
either draw the water in the circle or you don't. Finally, after a
year of magical and personal upheavals, Dave and I affirmed our
adoption and John made Dave Magister in fact rather than in name.
We were now the Clan of Tubal Cain.

Dottie first began working with us about this time. A 3rd Degree
Gardnarian, she had come out to California from the East Coast and
turned up at Moontalks, an open gathering held by Ellen Cannon
Reed, in February of 1983. Dottie had run afoul of the same Theos
in New York that had originally initiated Ed Sitch and Ann Tipton.
Consequently, her reception by the Diamond Bar Gardnarians was
decidedly chilly. Although our tradition was vastly different from
hers by this time, she decided to give ours a try, eventually
coming up with her own approach to it. Through her unique
perspective, she was very instrumental in helping us to clarify and
solidify some very ambiguous facets of the Clan tradition. But it
would be nearly seven years before she would officially become part
of the Clan.

Eventually, the pre-England Roebuck experiments and techniques were
distilled down into what is now known as the Roebuck training
manual. What a student learns during the year of formal
apprenticeship is a compilation of nearly seven years of Roebuck
experimentation with god forms and techniques, codified, refined
and presented in a coherent fashion. By mastering these techniques
and becoming familiar with the guardians, the student essentially
reaches the level that we did in 1982 when we first came into
contact with the Clan and has the necessary background to do the
advanced experimental work that the Roebuck still does. We felt
that now we could initiate someone into the Roebuck and watch them
for a year. They would either plug into the root tradition, in
which case they would be considered for Clan, or they would take
their training and go off to do their own thing as Roebuck members
had done in the past. The year between Roebuck initiation and Clan
adoption would function as the same kind of apprenticeship that we
had served under John. The decision was then made to split the Clan
off from the Roebuck and have separate Clan workings that Roebuck
initiates were unable to attend. The main reason for this decision
was caution. We were beginning to raise a great deal of power in
Clan circles as our own contacts began to be established, and we
felt that, for the time being, it would be best to keep the Roebuck
as a separate group so that people would not feel pressured into
committing to what we were beginning to discover was a powerful and
potentially dangerous system.

Jim and Susan Fox-Davis were the first people to come under this
new arrangement. They had originally been students of Michael Three
who had been working with his own group as well as working with us.
During the first year, the Clan had only met every six weeks, on
the Full Moon closest to the quarter and cross quarter days. With
the training cycle finally put together, however, it was now
possible to hold formal training circles. So Jim and Susan
performed the training exercises every other Friday night and
worked with the Clan on the festivals. They were initiated in
February of 1984. Michael Three dropped out of the group soon after
that. He had taken an initiation by Jomil into Pleaides and had
chosen not to tell us about it. Jim, who had originally been a
member of Pleaides himself, was the one to confront Michael. It
became obvious that Michael had no intention of committing himself
permanently to any one system and simply wanted to collect as much
information as he could from any group that would let him and form
his own tradition. This would have been perfectly acceptable if he
had been honest with us from the beginning. But the fact that he
withheld his intentions and his "secret" initiation so that he
could obtain Clan adoption and, presumably, Clan secrets not only
for his own use but to pass on to Jomil without our consent led us
to the sad decision to banish him from the Clan. He is the only
Clan member to have suffered banishment.

Joanne Fox left the group also on an extended leave of absence. She
had a new husband with whom she was going into business, and she
decided that, with the distance she had to drive and the increasing
frequency of our meetings, it would be better to take a leave of
absence than to attend sporadically. Joanne is still a member of
the Roebuck and of the Clan and will return to us one day when her
situation changes. All previous Roebuck members, with the exception
of Michael Three, are always welcome to return to circle at any
time they wish, and some have. One does not have to be active to be
part of the family, and there are those members like Byron, who
circles with us once every two or three years, who are just as
close as those who attend every week. A young Englishman (and 3rd
Degree Gardnarian from Zachary and Jean's coven) named Peter
Larkworthy, who had obtained our name and address from Prudence,
wrote to us in 1984 regarding Roy and the Clan. He had originally
been one of Marian Green's students and learned about Roy from her.
He ended up coming to the States twice. The first time, we adopted
him into the Roebuck and wrote a recommendation letter to John on
his behalf. The second time he came, we adopted him into the Clan.
Since then, he has been actively working with John and helping to
rebuild the original group. The Clan at this point was beginning to
encompass more than just the active core of the Roebuck.

STUART

There are members, such as Stuart, who form the so-called Hidden
Company -- a group of disincarnate souls who began to attach
themselves to us in a kind of advisory capacity. Some of us have a
past-life link with these souls and so perceive them more strongly
than others. The most visible member of the Hidden Company is
Stuart, an entity who came to us during a ritual that we were
instructed to do that involved the consecration of a skull. The
skull itself came from Jim Hrisoulas (Atar the Blacksmith). He told
us that a friend of his liberated it from the county morgue. After
a two-fold ritual (which is described in John's book, by the way),
we cleansed the skull of the vibrations of its previous owner (a
troubled young man addicted to drugs), and invoked whoever was out
there of the Hidden Company who wanted to manifest within it.

The name that came through was Stuart, and we perceived a man who
had been in the Craft sometime during the Jacobite rebellion.
Although this is difficult to explain to those who have yet to meet
him, Stuart is, for us, just as much a member of the Roebuck and
the Clan as any physical member is. He especially comes through
strongly to women, nearly always with a joke, and he demands his
share of the cup. He also seems to enjoy poking fun at people.

There was a woman named Jo Staples who had the skull put in her
hands. She started and nearly dropped the skull onto the floor.
Later, she reported that a man had suddenly appeared to her with a
leer and an off-color remark. But Stuart has his serious side, too.
And we have consulted him and the rest of the Hidden Company
several times for advice on the direction the group should go. 

FURTHER ROEBUCK MEMBERS

Several other members passed through the group during the period of
1984 to 1986. The first pair were Jam (Atar) and Debbie Hrisoulas.
Dave and I had been involved in Atar's knifemaking business even
before the first trip to England and when we returned, they began
making tentative gestures towards finding out more about what we
were doing. They entered the apprenticeship program and eventually
took initiation. Atar was an extremely talented and very
temperamental man with a paranoid streak that was difficult to
break through. As expected, he plugged into Tubal Cain but had
little or no interest in the other guardians and, as it turned out,
the rest of the circle. Debbie was more in tune with us than he
was, but was unable to attend circles without him. Finally, we left
the business and Atar broke away from us completely, refusing to
speak to us ever since. Debbie tragically killed herself a couple
of years after that for reasons that are still not clear. Although
Atar's stay in the Roebuck was short and turbulent, he left his
mark indelibly on the group in the form of exquisite athames and
swords, the skull which was later to become Stuart, and an
understanding of the art of the blacksmith that we didn't know
before.

Sven Lugar also came to us during that period from another one of
Ed Sitch's training groups that had started up in Anaheim. He was
hardly a stranger. We had known him for years in the SCA and he had
been a former roommate of Jim's. But he had recently moved back
into the Los Angeles area and wanted to study. Beginning the
apprentice class with him was Kari Sprowl, another member of the
OTA as well as Jay and Sue (later known as Red Sue) Mayer, Randy
and Linda Likins and Robin and Jerry Montonya, refugees from the
local Rosicrucian lodge that was beginning to fall apart. It was
the largest apprenticeship class that we had ever had and, along
with Jim and Susan, provided the beginning of the Roebuck as we
know it today. Eventually Robin and Jerry dropped out of the
training entirely and Randy and Linda took a year's leave of
absence. So, in April of 1986, Sven and Kari were initiated with
Jay and Sue waiting until the following June.

ENGLAND AGAIN

In May, 1986, we took a second trip to England. This trip was much
shorter, but several significant things occured. We stayed with
Peter in his home outside of London and reestablished contact with
Bill Gray, Prudence, and, of course, John. But we were no longer
wide-eyed with wonder, and we found some profound differences
between how we, as Americans, did things and how the British do
them -- especially the British Gardnerians. A lot of the openness
that we had found during our first trip was no longer there. This,
we were assured, was due to some upheavals in the Craft community
and had nothing to do with us, but it was extremely difficult to
avoid being paranoid.

A Beltaine ritual with Peter at Glastonbury Tor, however, helped a
great deal to reestablish our otherworld contacts and the three of
us headed down to Brighton. There, on Beltaine old calendar, John
formally adopted me into the Clan in person and I, in turn, adopted
Dave and Peter. The ritual, held on the hill above Brighton, was
simple and impromptu, but would prove to have a profound effect on
the future of the Roebuck. For some inexplicable reason, it was
vital to have that in-person, hands-on confirmation of what we had
done through the mail three years previously. Something clicked
into place that night on both the material and non-material planes,
something that would give us the power to solve the problems that
we would face in the years ahead.

There are many Craft people that scoff at the tradition of the
laying on of hands, a ritual from the Catholic church by which the
Bishop confers power onto a new priest. And, indeed, this is one of
the sources of the accusations of elitism and snobbery that have
been leveled at us since then. But all the members of the Roebuck
knew what had happened when we returned, and that the initiations
and Clan adoptions that we performed after that trip had a
different quality than the ones we had performed before. There was
a power there that was not there previously. So strongly was this
felt by all the members that Sven requested to retake his
initiation and Frank and Byron retook their Clan adoption. This is
not to say that previous initiations or adoptions were invalid. But
the members working with us at this time have had an added
consecration that previous members do not have. 

The subsequent years were very emotionally turbulent. Kari Sprowl,
[had] an unsuccessful affair with Frank. ... Sven by this time had 
married Cathy Coman, an occupational therapist with extensive 
experience with mental disorders .... Sadly, [Kari] chose to leave 
us.... Eventually, she joined another group called Moondance,
headed by a woman named Lani Rosenberger who was another refugee
from Pleaides. Happily, Kari ... is now teaching Moondance our 
Roebuck techniques. Cathy was initiated in 1987, along with Arnett 
Taylor, a refugee from the Catholic Church. Then, Cathy became 
pregnant and both Sven and Cathy took a leave of absence after 
their daughter's birth. Tom and Heather had originally shown up 
before the second England trip. We had found them, like we had so 
many others, at the OTA. They were still smarting after a couple 
of years with an abusive ceremonial group and were very suspicious 
of us. They had originally wanted to be Gardnerians, so we had sent 
them to Dottie. But she wasn't set up to teach, so they came back 
to us. It took them nearly three years to get over their suspicions 
and take initiation but eventually they did.

[The above paragraph was changed on 2006-06-18 at the request 
  of Kari Sprowl.]

Jane Jacobs came to us after an unpleasant experience with Bonnie
and Jim Crowley, who had set up their own coven called "Covenant of
the Doves" and were running an open group called Seekers' Circle.
Seekers' Circle became a forum for a variety of different groups.

Joe and Joey Wilson had re-incorporated the Temple of the Elder
Gods into a quasi-Native American group and by this time had a
large number of people. Randy and Linda had become involved with a
group headed by an ex-Jesuit who wrote under the name of David
Farren and his "High Priestess" a punk rocker named Desiree. After
that group crumbled, Randy and Linda rejoined our training class.

Moontalks had gone by the board so Ellen Cannon Reed and her
husband Chris also frequented Seekers' Circle, as did Mary
Forrester and the Pallas Society. A couple calling themselves
Morvyn and Scarecrow also showed up at one point. Morvyn was also
a third degree Gardnerian on the outs with Theos. Scarecrow had
also studied with Lady Gwynn in Florida, and would eventually write
a letter to Bill Gray requesting information on the 'Clan of Cain.'
Bill gave the letter to John who wrote a rude letter in reply.
Scarecrow would not be the first to receive such a letter.

Unfortunately, Bonnie and Jim were involved in a number of
practices that many people in the community did not approve of --
including ritual spanking. It was during one of these rituals that
things got out of hand and Jane, who was one of their students, was
battered. She went to Joe as Bonnie and Jim's initiator and
complained. Immediately, there was an outcry. Bonnie and Jim were
not very popular anyway, and many groups seized upon this as an
excellent excuse to drum them out of the community. There was an
inquiry meeting at Joe's Sunland home in which several people
testified to Bonnie and Jim's practices. Bonnie and Jim refused to
attend the inquiry, sending a representative to state that they did
not feel that the community had any right to dictate to them what
they could or could not do in the privacy of their own circle, and
if Jane didn't like it, she was free to leave. This position might
have been defensible except for the fact that Bonnie and Jim have
always had their underage sons in these circles and, technically,
abuse of an adult while a child is present also constitutes child
abuse. Adding to the problem was the fact that Bonnie and Jim
claimed that that particular ritual was 'part of 1734,' a tradition
that they shared with us. We protested vigorously that this was not
the case.

Still, in many ways, we felt that the situation, considering Joe
Wilson's past history, was a case of a pot calling a couple of
kettles black. Although we went on record as not condoning Jim and
Bonnie's actions and protested the inclusion of the offending
ritual in the '1734' tradition, we did not jump on the anathema
bandwagon along with everyone else. Eventually, Joe pulled his
previous stunt again, having an affair with a young woman who was
in the group while still married to Joey (they had two daughters by
this time). Joey threw him out of the Sunland house and the Temple
of the Elder Gods folded. From the wreckage of that group, we got
Osa Danam, an old friend of Jay and Sue. Osa was in the process of
trying to choose between her Norse heritage and her Southwest
Indian background. She circled with us for a year before beginning
to study.

In the early part of 1988, we initiated the largest group that had
ever gone through the training at one time. Randy, Linda, Tom,
Heather and Jane were all initiated in the space of a month and
immediately hit the ground running, training the next crop. Jane
married Arnett soon after her initiation and took on the
responsibility of doing the Thicket, a monthly newsletter giving
the calendar of events. The Roebuck was growing exponentially. The
next group consisted of Greg Welz, a friend of Jim's who worked at
JPL, Osa Danam, and Melinda Mullin, whom we called Lindy. Lindy came
from the SCA and had been part of Clan Colin. This was the first
class that Sue and Jay would teach. Greg took initiation Lammas
1989. Osa was next in September of 1989. Although we didn't know it
at the time, Lindy was dying of cancer. Her training would take
over a year and a half, since we had to work around her
chemotherapy schedule. Finally, she took initiation Imbolc, 1990.
Six months later, she died. Her ashes still reside in the temple
and she has joined the Hidden Company, making her presence known
from time to time.

Finally, in September of 1990, we made the decision to incorporate
as a legal church. It was a step that we had been putting off for
some years after having seen organizations either fold like the
Temple of the Elder Gods or engage in questionable financial
practices like the Covenant of the Goddess. We had originally had
ministers credentials from Ed's church, the Church of Natural
Religion. But that church had been defunct for many years. We
thought of reviving it, then thought better of it, since we weren't
sure to whom Ed had also given credentials over the years. We
decided that it would be best to incorporate fresh. On October 31,
1990, I submitted the papers to the state. We were approved and on
December 29, 1990, the Ancient Keltic Church came into being. We
filed our Internal Revenue Exemption in March and it, too, was
approved in June, 1990. We were off and running. 


Ann Finnin
Imbolc, 1991

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