Patricia Kennealy-Morrison - FAQ 34

 ''What kind of witch are you? What tradition?''   My first coven, or 'gwerin' as we called it, was a sort of generic pan-Celtic group; the High Priestess and High Priest were Scottish -- in fact, he was a Presbyterian minister -- and most of the rest of the group were Irish and Welsh. I was the youngest by about fifteen years. I met a contact to the group while I was doing research in a private Irish library in New York, the summer I was 20. They thought I was promising recruit material, and started to train me, and I was formally initiated the next year, and became the Maiden of the coven. That group, Caer Artos, was the group I was with when I met Jim; I became High Priestess shortly thereafter -- the founding priestess, the woman I call 'Maura', in Days, wanted to take it a little easier, so I ran things for a while. She and 'Brân', her husband, the Presbie dominie, were the ones who married Jim and me. After Jim died, I couldn't go on with the group, and it broke up; most of the members were much older than I, my parents' age, and they may even be dead by now, at least some of them -- I know Brân is. I stayed away from organized groups for a while, then started attending Margot Adler's Pagan Way circles in the mid-70's, and joined a small Welsh Traditionalist coven -- which also ended in tears, a casualty of the Manhattan witch wars. I never joined another group, nor do I have any desire to; I practice on my own, or get together with friends for the holidays -- when I'm in California I often attend circles held by friends, and I have the occasional (corporeal!) guest for Samhain in New York.