The Wiccan/Pagan community can be a trusting lot. This isn't bad, because it's nice to partake in a community where, for all of our doctrinal differances, people feel a sense of unity and fellowship. And yet, it is tragic when this trust is violated by fraudulent scams masquerading as spirituality.

The chief scam, and one that seeminly refused to die, is the story of the fam-trad. Sort for "family tradition", the fallicy of the fam-trad used to be prevelent throughout the Wiccan world, only to (seeminly) die out during the 80's. The fact that it has found new life on the internet is why I call fam-trads the "herpes of the Pagan community...just when you think it's gone, it pops right back up again".

The scam is as such: someone claims to be from a "family tradition" that goes back an unbelievable number of generations (usually at least in the teens). They claim that their tradition is therefore more valid than more modern varieties (because it's "older" and hasn't been contaminated by modern "fluffiness"). They claim to have been initiated into the fam-trad by a relative who is usually dead, making it difficult to verify their claims.

Before I go further, let me clarify one point: Those who say that they have a heritage of folk magick and/or herbal healing knowledge that they learned from their family are NOT part of what I'm talking about here. If they want to incorporate their family knowledge into their personal traditions and pass that along to others, that's not only fine, it's encouraged. It enriches the collective knowledge of modern Wicca. But an initiatory, ritualized system from um-teen generations back? Not likely.

(Note: the ironic thing is that, in the present day, we are seeing genuine family traditions being born. People who got invlved back in the 60's and 70's, had children and then raised them in a Wiccan way, are now seeing grandchildren born into their Pagan families. Thus, theree are now kids with genuine Wiccan grandmothers, but it's a recent phenomenon, and much more verifiable.)

What is the harm, you might ask, in indulging in a (seeminly) innocuous fantasy story? After all, isn't the occult world replete with difficult to verify claims? Even with that being the case, fam-trad fantasies tend to cause more trouble and heartache than any other Neo-Pagan mythology, and more than one community has been negatively affected by these tales. It's not just the fantasy that's the cause of the trouble, it's the results that inevitably follow.

Before we get into details, let's look at how this particular fallicy came to be. In the 1960's, when coven lineage was considered all-important, a man came along named Alex Sanders. He couldn't point to an established Gardnerian coven as his source (Gardnerian was the only game in town then), but he said his brand of Witchcraft was valid anyway, because he was initiated by his grandmother into his family tradition when he was 12 years old. He claimed that his was one of the families that guarded the secrets of Wicca through the burning times, and that he wanted to bring his family's form of the Craft into the public eye.

In reality, Alex was an intiate of Pat Kopanski, who had hived from Patricia Crowther's coven (Patricia having been initiated by Gerald Gardner). He hadn't gone through the requisite three degrees before hiving off...actually he copied as much as he could from the Gardnerian Book of Shadows and then disappeared for a time. When he resurfaced, he claimed to be the head of 107 covens in England, and to have been awarded the title "King of the Witches" by them. His BoS was 90% Gardnerian, butthe Gardnerians couldn't come out and call him on it. The secrecy oaths they had taken precluded them fom calling him out on this, because acknowledging his (semi-published) rituals as Gardnerian would have, by association, been revealing Gardnerian secrets. With no-one to challenge him, he quickly gained noterity.

Not everything about Sanders was bad...he was great with the media, and got Wicca the kind of good press relations that Gardner could never manage. He also brought some great people into the Craft, like Janet & Stewart Farrar, who have contributed much. Unfortunately, his biggest legacy is the fam-trad fantasy, which refuses to die.
It gained more adherants in the 70's, when self-styled Wicca was considered invalid. "Only a Witch can make a Witch", they used to say, so those who cobbled together their own methods used the fam-trad story to give themslves cover in the community. It got a little out of hand...with so many Wiccan grandmothers running around, our country would have been a vastly different place. Once Sanders' story was exposed in the 80's (along with the legitamacy of self-made Wicca), the fam-trad fantasy seemed to die out.

With the advent of the internet, with it's anonymity and it's "easy-to-make-but-unverifiable-claims" tendency, the fam-trad has made a comeback. Some self-styled "grand pooh-bahs of the cyberverse" have found this a great way to pump up their egos, and to build up their magickal resumes beyond their experience. And with the vast ignorance of Wiccan history that's all too common these days, their claims have gone largely unchallenged.

If this was confined to the internet world, then it would not be such a problem. However, it continues to spill out into real life, and this brings things into the local community.

Now that the history lesson is done, here are some of the tendencies of these fam-trad people/groups, and how they negatively impact the local community in which they reside.

One: They claim to be older, and therefore better, than any other method or tradition. Sanders started this when he disparaged Gardnerians. He said that his family still considered them Witches, but only of the first degree. Thus, the most experienced Gardnerian Priestess was only a beginner in his eyes.

Two: They claim great antiquity, but their rituals are mostly Gardnerian/generic Wicca, much of which wasn't written prior to the 1950's. This isn't a big problem, except for it's dishonesty.

Three: Because their tradition is "ancient" and "heretofore unknown", they can mix in whatever strikes their fancy. This also isn't a problem in theory (many of us do this all of the time), but because their "tradition" predates any Wiccan Rede, their practices can often get bizarre and/or downright unethical.

Four: Because their system is so "old", and therefore "better", they expect everyone else in the community to give them defference and respect that they haven't earned. This is an outgrowth of symptom # 1, but it has dire consequences for the local community. In their quest for influence, they often engage in bitchcraft and witch wars to defeat their competitors. And woe be to thee who call them on their game...they're regarded as the devil incarnate.

Five: They often discourage independent study. They claim that, because their tradition isn't taught in books, there's no need to read them (Sanders never did this...it's a more recent phenomenon).

Here's an example, and one that hits close to home. Just such a fraud was perpetuated on the Akron community a few years ago. It wound up sabotaging a promising Pagan church, and has left a trail of emotionally scarred people in it's wake.

The Church of Spiral Oak (in Akron) started as a Pagan activist organization, and later became a church. I was involved in the early stages, before it even had a name, but moved away for a time before it really got going. After I left, a couple came to town and worked their way into the organization.

The story was just as I discribed above. They claimed to be part of a family tradition, going back at least 16 generations, and even said that they could produce a list of names going back that far (of course, I can give you a list of my family members going back several generations...but a list doesn't prove that they were Witches!). They were quite charasmatic, and ingratiated themselves to the local people quickly. They claimed to be a combination of Celtic and Strega fam-trads (two trendy styles at the time), and, with so few in the area being hip to their game, quickly gained influence.

They just as quickly opened their "family" to others, and their coven ("White Willow") rapidly grew. After a while, they hived so many times they called the collective "The Clan of the White Arrow". With shrewd political maneuvers, they eventually siezed control of the church, and forced out any not part of their fam-trad.

They exhibited all of the classic symptoms of a dysfunctional fam-trad. First, they had an extremely condecending attitude to any who did not practice their system. They claimed to be "non-Wiccan Witches", and said that all Wiccans were "fluffybunnies", and therefore hopeless amateurs. Other covens and experienced people were degraded (not always openly, but in whispers behind the scenes), and their system heralded as genuine over all others.

Two: Having witnessed several of their private circles, as well as discussing their system with several of their initiates, I found it was nothing more than re-warmed post-Gardnerian Wicca...with a few startling differances that I'll get to below.
Three: They said that they were Witches, not Wiccans, and thus had no need for any rede. Their ethics were deplorable, and they had a "curse first and ask questions later" policy, and reveled in their "dangerous" reputation. They also eventually incorporated practices such as blood-drinking into their system, and other unsavoury practices.

Four: In their quest for influence, they quickly moved to force out (or make extremely uncomfortable so that they would leave) anyone not affiliated with their party line. This drained the Church of vital knowledge and experience, and left it in the hands of those who pretended to great wisdom without actually having it. They eventually allowed a few "outsiders" into the church's clergy program, but did their level best to freeze out anyone with experience (or who didn't but their line). Those who they did let in they eventually tried to pressure them to join their "family", to the point of being obnoxious.

Five: They actively discouraged independent study, because they knew that reading would turn up "secrets" of theirs that no one "outside of the family" should know. Those that did just that made them dance very fast, and they eventually came up with the story that their fam-trad had other, "lost" branches...and that perhaps the books people found were written by members of those other branches.

Beside these five attributes, the group as a whole was unhealthy. They say power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely...well, this coven had gained absolute power in the largest public Pagan church in Akron pretty much absolutely, and their corruption followed suit. Of course, when one's history is based on lies and deceptions, then the entire ediface is shaky because the foundation is rotten. This has proven true again and again for these "fam-trad" types, and the White Wollow people were no exception. After a while, they started engaging in downright cult-like activity (besides the blood-drinking) like mucking about in their members' love lives. A person joining that sham who's partner (spouse, lover, etc) chose not to join would, after a time, be pressured to end that relationship so that they could be paired off with someone else in the fam-trad. Sometimes it would be obvious, other times it would be a whisper and innuendo campaign to build distrust to wreck the relationship from within. Not even couples who both joined were spared the partner shuffle game, and after a while the only people who escaped with their relationships intact were the ones who ran screaming.

Eventually, the whole house of cards came down. Crow and Raja, the people at the centre of the charade, split up and the whole thing collapsed (this is typical...once Alex and Maxine Sanders divorced, neither really had the same noteriaty again). Unfortunately, the Church of Spiral Oak, once a promising ecumenical organization, has been torn down with them. In their zeal for "trad" purity, they manipulated the church's structure, it's ritual form, and it's leadership until they were pleased...but nobody else really was. The resulting fallout and bitchcraft associated with the fam-trad's implosion has reduced attendance at it's Beltane rite from 40-50 (in it's heyday) to less than a dozen (according to reports I got from people who were there last year...I stopped going years ago). Their iron-grip on the ritual form stifled creativity, and made most feel like spectators. Paganism is supposed to be a participatory religion...the Church of Spiral Oak definately wasn't.

So, as we can see from the above example, fam-trad frauds aren't just harmless fantasies. They can be, and have often been, highly destructive shell-games that leave communities in ruins and lives shattered. I only went into such detail because I wanted to show just how malignant these stories really can be on a large community. On the individual scale, they're just sad...people trying so hard to convince others of their wisdom and superiority that they rarely get around to real spiritual growth.

We must arm ourselves with knowledge, to recognize these frauds the second they surface. We must also gird ourselves with the will to do something about it before another person is suckered by a fast line and seductive fantasies. As Issac Bonewitz said: "If someone comes up to you and says that they're part of a multi-generational fam-trad that goes back um-teen generations, then there's a complex anthropological term for what they're doing...it's called LYING to you!"

Blessed Be,
Taliesin