Stewart Farrar

Frank Stewart Farrar (28 June 1916 – 7 February 2000) was an English screenwriter, novelist and prominent figure in the Neopagan religion of Wicca, which he devoted much of his later life to propagating with the aid of his seventh wife, Janet Farrar, and then his friend Gavin Bone as well. A devout communist in early life, he worked as a reporter for such newspapers as the Soviet Weekly and the Daily Worker, and also served in the British army during the Second World War. He was responsible for writing episodes for such television series as Dr. Finlay's Casebook, Armchair Theatre and Crossroads, and for his work in writing radio scripts won a Writer's Guild Award. He also published a string of novels, written in such disparate genres as crime, romance and fantasy.

After being initiated into Alexandrian Wicca by Maxine Sanders in 1970,^[1] he subsequently published one of the earliest books to describe this newly burgeoning religion, What Witches Do (1971). Within only a few months of being initiated, he had risen to the position of High Priest and founded his own coven in south London, with Janet Farrar, whom he would later handfast and then legally marry, as his High Priestess. In 1976 the couple moved to Ireland, where they went about founding new covens and initiating new people into Wicca - according to George Knowles, "some seventy five per cent of Wiccans both in the Republic and North of Ireland can trace their roots back to the Farrar's [sic]".^[2] With Janet, he also set about writing books about the subject, most notably Eight Sabbats for Witches (1981) and The Witches' Way (1984).

Because of his work in propagating the Craft, the historian Ronald Hutton compared him to Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders as "the third and last of the great male figures who have formed Wicca".^[3]