The Hermetic Hour

The Hermetic Hour for Thursday May 10th, 2012 will feature a discussion, moderated by host Poke Runyon, on the origins and the establishment of the "1734" Witchcraft tradition in the United States. This was an American version of Roy Bowers' (Robert Cochrane's) "Clan of Tubal Cain" that surfaced in England in the 1960s as a rival to the Gardnerian Craft. Bowers' claimed to belong to a hereditary tradition more indigenous and authentic than Gardner's popular version of "The Craft." While Gardner drew from Margeret Murray's "Witch Cult in Western Europe", Bowers drew from Robert Graves "The White Goddess." Bowers' American correspondent Joseph Wilson received numerous letters from Roy, forming an enigmatic, mystical corpus of material from which the talented Joe Wilson fashioned the American version called "1734" from a cypher included in the manuscripts. Like Johnny Appleseed, Joe Wilson seeded 1734 covens across the nation. Some of these groups still don't know where their Book of Shadows came from. As featur