Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition

Cora Anderson did not set out to write the Feri Tradition's reference text. In 1994 she wrote Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition as a private gift for her husband Victor, marking fifty years of marriage and of the shared teaching work that had, decades earlier, become the tradition the two of them are credited with founding on the American West Coast. Victor Anderson, blind since childhood, worked as a poet and teacher rather than as a writer of doctrinal prose, and the couple's tradition had spread for years mainly through direct oral instruction, teacher to student, rather than through any settled written statement either of them had put their name to.

That transmission method had a cost the book was written partly to answer. Students who had received only a portion of the teaching, or who had learned it secondhand from someone else's partial account, carried away versions of Feri belief and practice that did not always agree with each other or with what the Andersons themselves taught. Cora's book, brief and written in a personal, conversational voice rather than as a formal treatise, gave the tradition something it had not had before: a short statement in a founder's own words that a reader anywhere could check an account against. When Acorn Guild Press brought out a wider trade edition in 2005, that private anniversary gift became, in practice, the closest thing to a founding reference text the Feri Tradition has ever had in print.

Cora Anderson outlived Victor by more than a decade, and the years after his death in 2001 are part of why her book carries more weight today than an anniversary keepsake normally would. She continued teaching directly, and among the students who passed through her instruction were two figures who went on to become influential teachers of Pagan witchcraft well beyond the Feri Tradition itself, Starhawk and Gwydion Pendderwen. Their own later work carried pieces of what they had learned from her out into the wider modern Pagan movement, which means Cora Anderson's influence on how present day Pagan witchcraft is taught runs well past the readers of her own book.

That makes the book worth reading against the oral transmission surrounding it rather than as a replacement for it. Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition was never meant to be a self-sufficient course of instruction; it is a short, personal statement correcting the gaps and distortions Cora saw building up in secondhand accounts, written by someone who was, by the time student after student passed through her teaching, in as strong a position as anyone alive to say what the tradition she and Victor had founded actually held. Read that way, the book functions less as a manual and more as a check, a founder's own account a later reader can measure any other description of Feri belief and practice against.