A Thought Experiment
Two of the modern Craft's Grand Old Men, Gerald Gardner and Victor Anderson, claimed initiation into preexisting covens: Gerald into the New Forest coven in southern England, Victor into the Harpy coven in the northwestern US. Were their claims true?
Well, there's true and there's true. After decades of historical research, mostly by true-believers, the evidence—to my mind, at least—remains tenuous, at best. But, speaking as a storyteller who has told a few in his time, let me tell you that it's nearly always more convincing to embroider what actually was, than to make up something out of whole cloth.
So let me tell you what I suspect.
Did the New Forest and Harpy covens actually exist? Personally, I suspect that there were indeed two small groups of like-minded people—would-be occultists, maybe—who together studied their way into magic, and maybe even eventually into the Craft. My guess would be that we see here, in both instances, small groups of people who got together to experiment with magical practice, that eventually came to think of themselves (or, at least, to be thought of—by VA and GBG, if by no one else) as covens, but only retrospectively.
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Both groups would probably have access to Leland's "Aradia: Gospel of the Witches" from 1899 and Malcom C. Duncan's "Duncan's Maso