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Transmission, Argument, and the Spelling

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Transmission, Argument, and the Spelling

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

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

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

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

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