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On 05/07/2010 11:33, Melissa Harrington wrote:
Dear Francis
 
These points are well spotted and I agree with your querying them. What is the full title of the Gaskill book?
The ISBN is 9 780199 236954 ; the title is Witchcraft ; it's one of the OUP's Very Short Introduction series.
 
I certainly agree with you to disagree re Gardner, he always maintained he was initiated into the New Forest coven, (you can quote from  Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft) and was publicising the Old Religion to save it from dying out, directly contradicts this rather ridiculous assertion.Nor was the word Pagan current then, Gardner and co were all Witches.

I spent the 1970s in Australia. When I came back to England, 1 January 1980, I found there was a huge hole in my 'recent English history' i.e. I knew nothing about the 1970s in the UK.

I discovered Mogg Morgan's Golden Dawn Discussion Group in the early 1980s and was with Jonathan Jayne when we set up an Oxford branch of the Green Circle and a year later turned this into the Oxford Pagan Fellowship which met every Sunday evening and was always well attended. I was not aware of any more general use of the word Pagan until rather later. When we had a coven, for the first year or two we practised witchcraft strongly influenced by Valiente and by Starhawk. Only later, when we were joined by young people who had read widely in the Farrars, was there local talk of Wicca. We still thought of ourselves as witches.
 
The three books you mention are all wide ranging studies of the magical/occult/pagan milieu, not monographs on Wicca so I'd go with that, esp for Luhrmann who based a lot of her stuff + quotes from  a western mysteries group 'the glittering sword' rather than her coven.
She was with Fred Lamond during her stay. He once told me she would have made a splendid High Priestess but she had to give her Cambridge PhD preference. After all, that was why she had come to England.
 
Would be interested to read what you are writing when done, hope this helps,
It has helped a lot. Thank you, Melissa.

Francis