Vivianne Crowley

Who is Vivianne Crowley?

Vivianne Crowley is an author, university lecturer, psychologist, and a High Priestess and teacher of the Wiccan religion. She was initiated into the London coven of Alex Sanders at the age of eighteen, but later joined a Gardnerian coven in the famous Whitecroft line derived from Eleanor Bone, and so she was one of few people in the seventies to be part of both Traditions.

She founded the Wicca Study Group in London in 1988, and became secretary of the Pagan Federation the same year. Vivianne Crowley was described as "very influential in recent developments in Wicca... She has more of 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". Professor Ronald Hutton also has described Vivianne as "the closest thing that Britain possessed to an informal successor to Alex Sanders.

As an interfaith coordinator for the Federation, she served as the U.K. coordinator of the Pagan Chaplainry Services for H.M. Prisons. In 1989, she released her first book Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Age, which is one of the most valued and widespread books on Wicca. It was revised and updated in 1996 as Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium.