Vivianne Crowley is an English writer, university lecturer, psychologist, and a High Priestess and teacher of the Wiccan religion.
Life
Crowley was initiated into the London coven of Alex Sanders (founder of the Alexandrian tradition of Wicca) at the age of eighteen, but later joined a Gardnerian coven in the famous Whitecroft line derived from Eleanor Bone, and was one of few people in the seventies to be part of both traditions.[citation needed]
Crowley founded the Wicca Study Group in London in 1988,[1] and became secretary of the Pagan Federation the same year.[2] Crowley was described as "very influential in recent developments in Wicca... She has more or less captained the bringing together of the Gardnerian and Alexandrian Traditions through the process of cross-initiation, where a person is initiated into both Traditions".[1] Professor Ronald Hutton also described Crowley as "the closest thing that Britain possessed to an informal successor to Alex Sanders.[2]
As an interfaith coordinator for the Federation, Crowley served as the U.K. coordinator of the Pagan Chaplaincy Services for H.M. Prisons. In 1989, she released her first book Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Age, which became one of the most widely known books on Wicca.[3] It was revised and updated in 1996 as Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium.
Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Age. Element Books Ltd. 1989. ISBN978-0-7225-3271-3. Revised and updated in 1996 as Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium.
Phoenix from the Flame: Pagan Spirituality in the Western World. Thorsons Publishers. 1994. ISBN978-1-85538-161-2.
Crowley, V. (1998). "Wicca as Nature Religion". In Pearson, J.; Roberts, R.; Samuel, G. (eds.). Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World. pp. 170–179. ISBN978-0-7486-1057-0.
Crowley, V. (12 January 2002). Carl Jung and the Development of Contemporary Paganism. The Development of Paganism: History, Influences and Contexts, 1880-2002. The Open University Religious Studies Research Group Belief Beyond Boundaries.
^ abHowe, Tamsin; Adams, Luthaneal (2011). "Prominent Wiccans". Wicca Explained. Archived from the original on 18 September 2012. Retrieved 13 July 2015. ...A Wiccan of great repute, Vivianne Crowley has released many books, all of which have received a position of renown. She is perhaps best known for starting a London based witchcraft course in the late eighties, which explained the basics of Wicca. This course is still running today and has taken on a great many teachers and students along the way, usually being so popular that student numbers have had to be limited and places reserved for each run of the course.
^ abHutton, Ronald (1999). Triumph of the Moon. London: Oxford University Press. pp. 373. ISBN0-19-285449-6. ... the Pagan Federation was refounded with a larger and more formal structure; five executive officers, a treasury and an extended framework for dealing with correspondence and for production of The Wiccan. The president was Leonora James, the secretary another high priestess, Vivianne Crowley, who had been trained in Alexandrian and Gardnerian Wicca in the 1970s and come to prominence in the 1980s.
^Hjelm, Titus, ed. (2005). Mitä wicca on? (in Finnish) (1st ed.). Helsinki: Like. p. 28. ISBN952-471-502-3. Her book Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Age (1989) is a typical example of a strongly psychologized interpretation of Wicca. The book in question is one of the most valued and widespread books on Wicca.
^Guiley, Rosemary Ellen (2008). The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft and Wicca. Infobase Publishing. p. 82.