Too often I see seekers and outsiders of the witchcraft Tradition to which I belong, in which I'm initiated--the Anderson Faery (aka 'Feri') Tradition--talk about my Tradition like it's a certificate or diploma for some self-focused course. And that's really fucking sad.
I see people talk about "the Current," how they feel toward it, how they feel numinously Called or motivated to touch its stream of Power, to be enraptured by our strange, Fae gods. But here's the thing. Feri *has* a Virtue, a "Current" or stream of power, that runs through its Initiates--and the very nature of the Faery Power is not mysterious: it is the life-blood of the witches who are the workers, shapers, and producers of the Tradition.
Feri is people. The Witchblood is our collective life-force spun and woven into the Tradition. It is not distinct from the persons who produced it in certain times and places, in particular, lived contexts. That's why we call it 'The Red Power.'
All our lore, narrative context, and the spirit relationships you inherit as an Initiate are part of the Communal Pact of the Tradition, which is built into the architecture of the Initiation Rite, and is continuously curated by living witches who we know, some of whom are alive. We are married to the spirits. When you Initiate into Feri, you are becoming a part of the corpus, the body, of the Tradition--the continued Enfleshing of its Egregore.
There's this trick most folks who teach the Tradition for money use. I watched my own Magister employ it, as anyone who teaches Feri for money, turning its life-ways into digestible lessons employed as classes, is following in Gabriel Carrillo's footsteps, is carrying on that legacy in particular. Despite what Gabe tried to do, Feri can't be flattened down into a set of sequential instructions, and the attempt to do so weakens the very Virtue so prized and sought-after by seekers. It completely deletes the counter-cultural aspect, which to me is the true prize, the key that unlocks the true vigor of our Virtue.
The trick is rather simple: it's this dangling promise that you can become an inheritor of this Current, but it obfuscates that it is the very lineage of human sorcerers (some dead, some alive, all of us interpenetrated with Otherness), their work, and their spirit relationships. It obfuscates that you are joining a family of spirit-beings (some mortal, all immortal) to whom you are asked to be loyal and share everything of yourself with. The spirits are at the wheel, leading us, and it is with them that adoption is accepted or denied. But that isn't very salable. So the very life-blood of the Tradition must be occluded.
You can see it in the way these folks, when criticized, have acolytes, not loyal friends and kin. People who will defend them not because they are close to that teacher in any meaningful way, but because that teacher represents an open access-point to a commodity that is desired. It's horrifying to me. It's exactly the manner in which consumers defend their favorite brands. This is another form of the theft of labor, like any nasty Capitalist would be up to, especially with all the *branding* of one's lineage. Let's remember that traditionally a lineage is simply the name of a coven. I believe that a coven is the primary unit of witchcraft; an individual is an entirely powerless unit, at least to achieve goals outside of oneself, and our initiatory Tradition has quite the aims.
We are a highly 'bardic' tradition--all our liturgical poetry, archives of spells, spirit lists, exegeses on lore and cosmological frameworks, methods and tools, etc., these are all the production of minds and hands that lived and breathed this witchery. To collapse and flatten that all into "the lore says" without attachment to the actual people and contexts in which they were created is lazy, sloppy, and manipulative, and will only lead to the dilution of our Craft.
The Harpies who seeded the Feri Tradition were primarily star worshippers, and Victor was a dyed-in-the-hide Neo-pagan. The Feri Tradition is very much concerned with the union of Heaven and Earth, much like the Orphics of antiquity. The stars are within the earth, after all.
The provenance of our Tradition is spirit-contact from Otherworldly agents; the gods to whom we are devoted in mutual love and respect are not really the deities of humankind, but 'Great Old Ones,' cosmic entities from beyond Beyond who seek entrance into waking reality through us. We aim to reshape the world.
Here is an excerpt from a comment I made to someone recently, because I think it illustrates what it is Feri is versus what folks may encounter via books and online classes:
"If you want Faery Trad with your whole heart, what are you willing to give or do to get what you want? If you're Called, the answer is action, not desire.
"What level of priority does it hold? For me, I was Driven, deeply desirous and devoted. I took action and left everything and all my known connections behind to move to California and move in with my dying Faery teacher. I was only 22 and I spent a year of my life caring for him as a live-in aid, not making or living a life for myself. I moved down to the Bay Area after a year and had to make a life from scratch. It was the beginning of the Financial Crisis and the Great Recession. There were hardly any jobs open, companies were laying off in huge sweeps, and it was hella expensive. I only survived with the monetary help of Feri witches who looked out for me. I was hungry A LOT.
"Likewise, my own apprentice (who I told 'no' to three times before accepting them) took a leap and moved to WV with their teacher, we live together, and they gave up A LOT to live here very rurally (and it turned out to be a scam by my ex, so wheeee!).
"But if you don't even want it with your whole heart, then it's not where or to whom you belong.
"Initiating into a red-thread is taking on a whole host of spiritual Ancestors and living siblings of the Other, people whose heart work and labor is what we have as the Tradition. It's a counter-culture of hundreds of living witches and hundreds of dead witches and to be adopted into it you need to be re-acculturated to it, really, to be successful at practicing this Craft and Art over a lifetime. You must be able to bring forth and wear your own unique Otherness, take your place in the Otherworldly ecology of which we are a part, as we are a whole host of the Uncanny wearing human skin.
"This is my personal opinion--I don't think a lot of the folks who have undergone training through paid programs in the last twenty years are well-trained. It's been so sloppy! There is *so much* they don't know or understand and it is maddening. I trained for 7 years before I was offered the Initiation. I am very well-trained by a Master of my Craft and I have been practicing and honing my Craft without cessation for the 19 years since. I think of Initiatory Craft traditions, at least Feri, as a sort of hybrid spiritual family with trade guild, and they are for 'professionals'--I don't mean folks who bring their Craft to the Marketplace; I'm referring here to the spiritual vocation of being a witch, a sorcerously-marked person (who has 'certain forms of perception and abilities already in place which can be expanded further') in service to (or more like, entwined with) Otherworldly powers and beings. We are Cleft from the Herd.
"I don't think Feri Trad is a degree or certification or knowledge-base. It draws from the same folkloric Well of Witchery and hermetic magic as many of the major houses of traditional witchcraft do. And from Spiritualism and Southern Conjure. Getting to know many Initiates would be the first step toward really Knowing if Feri is even right for you, I think. The Tradition is the hard work, the 'heart-work,' and labor of its witches, its spirit-workers.
"This Tradition and its spirits ask a LOT of us who are actively practicing it, those of us who are Lifers. There are health problems associated with the intensity of the Tradition's Virtue ('the Current'), mainly that the Faery Power stresses the pancreas and can cause issues like hypoglycemia, diabetes type II, and pancreatic insufficiency syndrome.
“I first encountered Feri thru Storm Faerywolf’s art and website when I was 17, and he recommended and put me in touch with my teacher Gabriel. I misappropriated my student loans in college to fly to California from Ohio multiple times a year for four years to spend time with my teacher in person and to meet other Initiates and students. I asked to visit Cora and ended up doing caring for her too; she was bedridden post-stroke at that point and having mild dementia. It’s the culture part.
“And after I was an Initiate I stood up for my tradition in three separate courts of law (family court, civil court, and eventually criminal court) on three occasions against a narcissistic paedo who had tried to associate himself with it as excuse for his actions. I started PEARL (Pagan Eldercare, Advocacy, & Resource League) which gave care hours to elders in need in the Bay Area, and also started an oral history archive for the Feri Tradition and was able to get the testimony of the Anderson’s first initiate before she died. I organized PanFeri Samhain, which ran for five years, bringing together multiple lineages and ways of approach within the Tradition. The Mighty Dead Spirit of Victor came to enlist me as a psychopomp in Palestine when they were first getting annihilated, and all my dreamscape became that battleground. None of this was paid work, it was for the Tradition. It wasn’t for my personal enrichment, but for the collective enrichment of Feri.
"It also makes you less and less able to be 'normal' or blend in aurically, the longer you actively practice it. It can bring madness and even death. The Witchfire, the Blue Fire, (which is present in every witch of every stripe) gradually consumes the 'daylight self' and alchemizes it into our Immortal Form, the Daimon-self through the agency of the Witchblood. 'The Blood carries the Breath to the Bone.' It is a flowering forth of Fetches.”
