BELIEF GROUPS & CULTS

Buddhism

The Buddhist Society

The Buddhist Society was founded in 1924 by the lawyer Christmas Humphreys (d.1983), who, in his professional life, was to become a Q.C. and then a judge. Irmgard Schloegl (1921-2007) (alias Myokyo-ni), an Austrian mineralogist, succeeded him as the dominant force within the organisation.

Location: 58 Eccleston Square, SW1V 1PH (orange, brown)

Website: www.thebuddhistsociety.org

Mehehyana Buddhism

The Mehehyana strand of Buddhism was prevalent in Japan. It appears to have a strand of paradox that borders on irrationality. In the wake of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Japanese Army started utilising Buddhist terminology to help to institutionalise recruits. In the build-up to the Second World War Buddhist ideas were used to encourage people to act selflessly for the state. Following the re-establishment of peace some Japanese Buddhists concluded that this had happened because the belief system had become too identified with the country. Therefore, they launched missionary work in non-Buddhist countries. They adapted approaches that they had seen Christian missionaries using.

The Triratna Buddhist Community

Dennis Lingwood (1925-2018) was born into a working-class Baptist family that lived in Tooting. He lost his Christian faith after reading Helena Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and developed an interest in Buddhism through reading the Diamond Sutra, a 5^thC text. In 1943 he joined the Buddhist Society and came to know its founder Christmas Humphreys. Four years later, while serving in India, he deserted from the Royal Corps of Signals and went to seek enlightenment. He was ordained into the Theravada tradition assumed the name Sangharakshita.

Following the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950 he came to know a number of Tibetan Buddhists and found their egalitarianism better-suited his temperament than the caste and race concerns of their Indian counterparts. Two years later he came to know the prominent Indian lawyer and Cabinet minister Bhimrao Ambedkar, who was a Dalit who had converted to Buddhism in order to remove himself from the caste system. As a result, he started to make tours of India to encourage other untouchables to do likewise.

In 1967 he returned he returned to Britain. Humpreys and others invited him to run the Hampstead Buddhist Vihara, which had been set up in 1956. However, over the previous two decades Sangharakshita had become his own man and the two men repeatedly clashed. He left and founded the Friends of The Western Buddhist Order. He reverted to wearing Western clothes and no longer shaved his head. He drew from outside the Buddhist canon by drawing upon Western writers and thinkers such as William Blake, Friedrich Nietzche, and Sigmund Freud. The following year he ordained his first monks. He shocked some traditional Buddhists by ordaining women.

A gay man he took to questioning the Theravada Buddhist teachings that forbade homosexuality. He took to encouraging his younger male followers to have sex with him. His teachings contained elements that were hostile towards heterosexuality and families. In the 1980s he began to step down from the management of the organisation, completing the process in 2000, when he retired. In 1997 The Guardian newspaper published a damaging expos about the organisation. In 2010 the Order was renamed the Triratna Buddhist Community to reflect the fact most of its members lived in South Asia. In 2016 Sangharakshita issued an apology for the harm, hurt, and upset that he caused.

Location: London Buddhist Centre, 51 Roman Road, London E2 0HU

Website: https://thebuddhistcentre.com

Catalyst

Catalyst is a charity that counsels people who have left cults. It was set up in 1995.

Website: www.catalystcounselling.org.uk

Children of God

In the mid-1970s the Children of God operated The Poorboy Club.

Since 2004 the organisation has been called Family International.

The Church of Latter-Day Saints

Location: Hyde Park Chapel, 64-68 Exhibition Road, SW7 2PA

Website: https://uk.churchofjesuschrist.org

Wyoming Wilding

Joyce McKinney was a former Miss Wyoming.

The Daily Express journalist Peter Tory (1939-2012) established a rapport with McKinney. As a result, after she fled to the United States, she offered the newspaper an exclusive account of her story. Tory travelled to America, where he conducted a series of interviews. Privately, he concluded that the reality of what had happened had been prosaic and that she was essentially a sweet country girl .

The McKinney story was retold in the documentary Tabloid (2010).

Conway Hall

Conway Hall (1929) is the headquarters of the South Place Society. The organisation was founded in 1793. It became the South Place Ethical Society in 1839. Three decades later it became an agnostic body.

The Society commissioned the construction of Conway Hall. The building was named after Moncure Conway, a 19^thC officiate of the Society.

In 1980 the Society ceased to be a religious charity and became an educational body.

Location: 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL (blue, turquoise)

Website: https://conwayhall.org.uk

Aleister Crowley

The diabolist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was born into a Plymouth Brethren family that owned a brewery in Alton, Hampshire. In 1902 he participated in the first ascent of K2. During the First World War Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) wrote pro-German propaganda.

Crowley was probably at his most infamous during the 1920s.

At the Abbey of Thelema in Sicily one of his acolytes drank animal infected animal blood during a sacrificial ritual and subsequently died of cholera.

Crowley was partial to self-publicity. The fashionability of gin-based cocktails prompted to claim that he had devised the Kubla Khan No. 2. This was supposed to be gin with a dash of laudanum.

In 1934 a libel case bankrupted Crowley.

Crowley spent his last days living in a residential hotel Hastings, consuming heroin and neat gin. In his final eighteen months he came to know John Symonds (1914-2006), whom he appointed as his literary executor. Symonds was a very different man from Crowley, who in his own later life a teetotal jogger. Crowley may have been drawn to an unconventional strand in Symonds's character although he may have been the only reliable person that the Beast came into contact with.

Crowley appeared reworked form in numerous novels, some were drawn from personal acquaintance. He featured in Arnold Bennett's Paris Nights (1911), Dennis Wheatley's The Devil Rides Out (1934), Ian Fleming's Casino (1953) (as Le Chiffre), Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (1964), Christopher Isherwood's A Visit To Anselm Oakes (1969), and Jake Arnott's The Devil's Paintbrush (2009). Anthony Powell used him twice in the A Dance To The Music of Time (1951-75) series, first as Dr Trelawney and then as Scorpio Murtlock.

Crowley s image was included in the Sergeant Pepper's (1967) album cover. The Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page bought Crowley's Loch Ness home.

Location: 93 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6JE. Crowley's home in the early 1940s. (red, purple)

The Cult Information Service

The Cult Information Service furnishes information to the public about cults and their activities. The organisation was founded in 1987. Five years later it became the first such body to be granted charitable status.

Location: WC1N 3XX.

Website: https://cultinformation.org.uk

Druids

There is no evidence of there having been a druidic tradition in Germany. However, the image of the druids as bearded sages seems to have been created there in the 16^thC. The motif migrated through France to Scotland and then on to England.

The Gorsedd (Community) of Bards was founded in 1792 by Edward Williams, a laudanum addict who used the assumed name Iolo Morganwg. He marked the autumn equinox with a ceremony that he conducted within an improvised stone circle that he had erected upon Primrose Hill.

In 1905 Druid orders started conduct ceremonies at Stonehenge.

In the early 20^thC some strands Druidism were openly associated with the progressive elements of the Labour movement. During the 1920s the movement shrank from public scrutiny. However, it continued to be active, with meetings at places such as Clapham Common.

Druids regularly provide a subject for news photographers at the spring and autumn equinoxes. These make the national newspapers if there are not enough hard news stories circulating at the time.

In 1994 King Arthur, a Druid, waged a legal battle to try to not to have to pay poll tax (a local tax). He sought to withhold payment on the grounds that, as a Druid, he was a member of a religious order and therefore was not legally obligated to pay. He lost the case.

There are at least ten different Orders of Druids in Britain.

Location: The King s Arms (pub) 23 Poland Street, W1F 8QL. There is a plaque that states that the Ancient Order of Druids was revived at a meeting that was held in the pub in 1781.

Website: https://druidnetwork.org https://druidry.org www.druidry.co.uk

The Council of British Druid Orders

The Council of British Druid Orders was founded in 1989 by four existing druidical organisations. Its purpose was to help the movement to deal with the four-mile exclusion zone that the Wiltshire Constabulary had had placed around Stonehenge at Midsummer.

Website: www.cobdo.org.uk

Cremation

Dr William Price believed himself to be an archdruid. In 1884 the physician cremated the corpse of his illegitimate baby son on a Glamorgan hillside. He was prosecuted at Cardiff Assizes for this action. He was acquitted because there was no law that specifically made cremation illegal. Within three months of the verdict, the U.K.'s first public crematorium had been constructed. As a nonagenarian, the physician fathered two further children. Following his own death, his corpse was cremated upon the same hillside. Its disposal was assisted ... by two tons of coal.

Stonehenge

Julius Caesar (d.44 B.C.) wrote of the druids building wicker effigies in which they placed live men. The structures were then set on fire.¹ In the 1660s the antiquary John Aubrey became the first writer to associate Stonehenge with the druids. He identified the ring of depressions around the stones that became known as the Aubrey Holes. William Stukeley (d. 1765) chose to regard the druids as having been ascetic sages. The Romantics favoured Caesar's melodramatic view of them.

Location: Piccadilly Circus, W1J 7BX (purple, brown)

¹. This Classical reference was the inspiration of Robin Hardy's horror movie The Wicker Man (1973).

The Family Survival Trust

The Family Survival Trust is a charity.

Website: www.thefamilysurvivaltrust.org

The Fraternity of The Inner Light

Violet Mary Firth trained as a Jungian analyst, however, the outbreak of the First World War led her to run a soya milk business in Letchworth. With time, she became interested in the occult. She adopted the name Dion Fortune. Aleister Crowley regarded magic as being the means of changing something according to a person's will. She adapted this view to being able to make a change in consciousness occur in accordance with the will. She developed ideas of psychic attack. During the Second World she led the Fraternity of The Inner Light, which sought to use occult means to counter the Axis.

Location: 3 Queensborough Terrace, W2 3TA (orange, pink)

Hare Krishna

In 1968 Gurudas (n Roger Siegel), an American, set up the Hare Krishna's U.K. operation. He was introduced to the Beatles by members of The Grateful Dead. George Harrison proved to be open to the movement and in 1973 gave it Bhattivedanta Manor near Watford.

Location: Radha-Krishna Temple, 10 Soho Street, W1D 3DL (red, orange)

Website: www.iskcon-london.org

The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn

Members of the Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn included Aleister Crowley, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. Nesbit, and Bram Stoker.

Location: 36 Blythe Road, W14 0HA. The Order s meeting room was on the first floor.

W.B. Yeats

When the poet W.B. Yeats introduced Maud Gonne to his occult associates, she recoiled at the way in which their everyday clothing was visible beneath their robes.

Location: 5 Woburn Walk, WC1H 0JJ. Yeats's home from 1895 to 1919. (orange, yellow)

Humanists U.K

The Ethical movement in Britain was founded by Stanton Coit, an American. He established the West London Ethical Society and was minister of the Ethical Church in Bayswater In 1896 Stanton Coit founded the Ethical Union as a national umbrella organisation for local ethical societies. In 1935 Harold Blackham (1903-2009) succeeded Coit in the Bayswater church. In 1963 he set up the British Humanist Association as an umbrella organisation for Britain's diverse rationalist and ethical organisations. He was its first director.

Website: https://humanists.uk

Jesus Army

Accusations were made of bullying. A number of convictions ensued.

In 2019 the leadership of Jesus Fellowship Church announced that the organisation was disbanding.

Website: https://jesus.org.uk

The Moonies

The Labour M.P. Paul Rose (1935-2015) campaigned against the Moonies. The organisation sued him. He made an out-of-court settlement.

Location: 43 Lancaster Gate, W2 3NA (orange, yellow)

Website: https://um-uk.org https://familyfedcommunity.co.uk

The National Secular Society

Annie Besant married a clergyman. She became a member of the National Secular Society.

She and Charles Bradlaugh were associates.

Location: 25 Red Lion Square, WC1R 4RL (blue, turquoise)

Website: www.secularism.org.uk

New Age

John Michell was a Notting Hill resident who played a large role in transposing ancient science into New Age beliefs. He took an early interest in crop circles. His books included The View Over Atlantis (1969), Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions (1984), and Confessions of A Radical Traditionalist (2005). The first, which helped revive Alfred Watkins's ideas about ley lines, played a large role in turning the Somerset town of Glastonbury into Britain s Hippy Central. Mr Michell's devotion to ley lines was such that he even believed that they existed upon the Moon.

The Paranormal

Gerald Balfour

Gerald Balfour was the brother of Arthur Balfour. He gave up a career as a Conservative politician to involve himself in the investigation of the paranormal.

A view emerged that dead scientists were engaging in an eugenics experiment to create a spirit child to transform the world. Balfour was probably the biological father. The mother was the married, suffragette Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874-1956).¹

Augustus Henry Combe Tennant (1913-1989) the spirit child became an intelligence officer and then a monk at Downside.

Location: 18 Cottesmore Gardens, W8 5PR. Mrs Tennant's home. (red, blue)

¹. One of Mrs Tennant's friends, Frederick Myers (1843-1901), devised the word paranormal.

Rosicurianism

Yves Klein

The French artist Yves Klein was born the son of two artists. He was wary of becoming one himself. He developed an interest in Rosicurianism and judo. In 1949 he spent several months living in London working for a picture frame maker in South Kensington.

Location: Savage Gallery, 65 Old Brompton Road, SW7 3JS (red, purple)

The School of Philosophy & Economic Science

The School for Economic Science was founded in the 1930s by Andrew McLaren. He had been a student at the Glasgow School of Art and from 1922 to 1945 sat intermittently as a Labour M.P. for Stoke-on-Trent. He was interested in promoting the philosophy of Henry George, a late 19thC American economist who believed that land reform would bring about an equitable society.

After the Second World War the leadership of the S.E.S. was assumed by McLaren's son Leonardo Da Vinci McLaren. McLaren fils switched the organisation's focus from political and economic concerns towards philosophy and spirituality . He was interested in various Hindu traditions and mystical writers such as the Russian Georgi Gurdjieff. From an eclectic range of sources he concocted his own particular brew.

The younger MacLaren appointed Donald Lambie as his successor.

Location: 11-13 Mandeville Place, W1U 3AJ (blue, orange)

Website: www.schoolofphilosophy.org www.economicscourse.com

Henry George

Henry George was concerned with the situation of the middle classes. He believed that would be treated more equitably if only land was taxed.

See Also: TOYS & GAMES Monopoly

The School of Universal Philosophy & Healing

The School of Universal Philosophy & Healing was founded by the trance medium Zamiar (n e Gladys Spearman-Cook (n e Gardner)) (1900-1982). She was a passionate advocate of vegetarianism.

Location: 6 Phillimore Place, W8 7QD (orange, blue)

Scientology

(Lafayette) L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986) dropped out of college, was ejected from the United States Navy, and finally established himself as a pulp fiction writer. In the early 1950s he established the Church of Scientology after appreciating that the organisation would furnish him with financial opportunities through its having tax-exempted status.

In 1984 Mr Justice Latey termed the organisation a cult corrupt, sinister and dangerous out to capture people and brainwash them .

Prior to 2006 the Scientologists test changed from being a personality test into being a stress test .

In 2013 the Supreme Court ruled that Scientology was a religion.

In 2023 the the Charity Commission launched a regulatory compliance investigation into Narconon UK, an addition charity that was run by Scitologists.

Location: 146 Queen Victoria Street, EC4V 4BY (purple, pink)

68 Tottenham Court Road, W1T 2EZ (red, turquoise)

Website: www.scientology-london.org.uk (Queen Victoria Street) www.scientology-london.org.uk/inside-our-church/life-improvement-centrel (Tottenham Court Road)

The Society for Psychical Research

The Society for Psychical Research was founded in Cambridge in 1882 by a group of scientists. The organisation's early members included substantial contemporary figures such as William Crookes, Frederick Myers, Oliver Lodge, and Henry Sidgwick. The Society swiftly developed a catalogue of techniques that were used by charlatans. It coined the term telepathy . William James pointed out that an expertise had been developed in disproving but not one in confirming. By 1910 most of the Society initial intellectual heavyweight members were dead.

The psychologist William James tried to apply an empirical scientific methodology to spiritualism. He had become interested in the subject following the death of his infant son Herman. He served as the President of the Society for Psychical Research.

The British chemist Sir William Crookes (1832-1919) coined the term psychic to describe the medium Florence King.

The psychiatrist and criminologist Donald West (1924-2020) was a longtime member of the Society for Psychical Research. In 1947 he was appointed the organisation's research officer. However, he was required to resign after other members objected to his insistence on applying scientific rigour.

Location: 1 Vernon Mews, W14 0RL

Website: www.spr.ac.uk

The Screamers

Jenny James founded The Screamers in London. The group relocated to Burtonport, County Donegal. Many of if its members moved to Colombia.

Location: 12 Villa Road, Brixton, SW9 7ND

Spiritualism

In 1853 the first spiritualist church was established in Keighley, Yorkshire.

Like Charles Dickens, the chemist John Pepper disliked the fraudulent claims that spiritualists were making. He was aware that they were creating ghostly figures by means of strategically placed angled pieces of glass. Pepper utilised the technique for a stage production of the writer's novella The Haunted Man. The technique became known as Pepper's Ghost.

During the First World War soldiers corpses were not repatriated to Britain. This meant that their relatives did not experience what was to be termed closure. It probably proved to be a major fillip to spiritualism.

In 1918 Conan Doyle's son Kingsley died in the Spanish flu epidemic. The writer became a major financial supporter of spiritualism, he subsided various periodicals and established Psychic Book & Museum in Victoria Street.

Coverage of spiritualism in the 1920s and 1930s developed an element of class snobbery. The people who attended large gatherings at venues such as the Royal Albert Hall were dismissed as being middle-aged who dressed in a way that indicated that they were working-class or petit-bourgeois. The mediums tended to be working-class. Their investigators tended to be from higher up the social scale.

What technology rose, technology undermined. The application of infrared photography led to the exposure of many fraudulent mediums. Mediumship shifted from the physical to the mental. Psychical research moved its focus away from the s ance rooms. The laboratory became the venue for investigation.

Daniel Dunglas Home

The spiritualist Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886) acquired an extensive reputation in Europe and North America. In Britain he was denounced by the likes of Robert Browning and Charles Dickens.

Houdini

Conan Doyle and the escapologist Harry Houdini (n Ehrich Weisz) developed a friendship through their shared interest in spiritualism - Doyle wishing to prove and Houdini to expose it.

In 1926 Houdini died after having been punched in the stomach by Jocelyn Whitehead, a student. Subsequently, Whitehead restricted his socialising to Spiritualist circles.

Long-Distance Communication

Cromwell Varley (1828-1883) was a spiritualist engineer who was involved in the laying of the transatlantic cable. It enabled communication at thousands of miles distance.

Marconi thought that it might be possible to hear the dead via radiowaves.

Oliver Lodge had been one of the physicists who had pioneered the understanding of radiowaves. He invented the spark plug. His son Raymond had been killed during the First World War.

Alfred Wallace

Alfred Wallace was interested in mesmerism before be went to the Amazon.

Upon his return from Asia, Wallace became involved in Spiritualism.

The Swedenborg Society

Emanuel Swedenborg (n Swedberg) (1688-1772). He was a former Moravian.

The Swedenborg Society was founded in 1810.

In 1925 moved to Bloomsbury Way. The hall was added.

Location: 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, WC1A 2TA (purple, blue)

Website: www.swedenborg.org.uk

Ernest Trobridge

The architect Ernest Trobridge (1884-1942) was a Swedenborgian. He designed the Highfort Court flats (1936) in order to provide symbolic illustration for his beliefs. The building's entrance is a drawbridge and its chimneys are turrets.

Location: Buck Lane, Kingsbury, NW9 0QG

19 Heather Walk, Edgware, HA8 9TS. The architect's home.

See Also: FLATS Highfort Court

The Theosophical Society

Theosophical Society founded in New York in 1875.

Annie Besant set up a women's form of freemasonry. She was drawn to the theosophy.

Within The Theosophical Society, Rudolf Steiner became a rival to Besant.

The seventeen-stone Blavatsky is reputed to have levitated herself up to a chandelier in order to light a cigarette.

c. 1912 Steiner left The Theosophical Society.

Location: 50 Gloucester Place, W1U 8HG (red, yellow)

Website: https://theosophicalsociety.org.uk

On High

Theosophy exerted an attraction for a number of senior R.A.F. officers during the course of their lives, e.g. Hugh Dowding (1882-1970) and Arthur Tedder (1890-1967).

After the war Dowding received numerous letters from the families of young pilots who had died during it. Over the course of a year he read deeply about Spiritualism and convinced himself of its merits. He then began to meet mediums. Through one he was a dead young pilot communicated to him that he should meet his widow because they would get on. The retired officer invited her to his club. They soon developed a good rapport and went on to marry. They had a happy married life. He wrote Many Mansions (1943) and two others books on the afterlife.

Location: 3 St Mary's Road, SW19 7DF.

Unitarians

The term Unitarian was first used in 1673.

During the 18thC there was a fashion for English Presbyterians to embrace Unitarianism.¹ The movement proved to be welcoming to Enlightenment figures such as the Rev Joseph Priestley.

In 1813 William Smith M.P. piloted the Trinity Act through Parliament. This removed all penalties from people who refused to subscribe to the doctrine of the Trinity. As a result, Unitarians began to describe themselves as such, having previously used less controversial terms such as rational dissenter . Following the passage of the Dissenters Chapels Act of 1844 Unitarian groups were legally entitled to own their own places of assembly.

In 2004 it was reported that there were less than 6000 Unitarians in the UK and that half of them were aged over 65.

Location: Essex Hall, 1-6 Essex Street, WC2R 3HY. The headquarters of the Unitarian movement. (red, purple)

Essex Unitarian Church, 12 Palace Gardens Terrace, W8 4RT (blue, white)

Website: www.unitarian.org.uk www.kensington-unitarians.org.uk

¹. In the United States the early Unitarians tended to come from a Congregationalist background.

Rev Richard Price

The Rev Richard Price was a prominent Unitarian minister. He first attracted public attention through his support for the American Revolution. In 1789, at the Fetter Lane Independent Chapel, he delivered a sermon that was entitled The Love of Our Country.¹ Its subject was the French Revolution, which had started during the previous July. His intention appears to have been to try to spur on political radicals to start a second English Revolution.

The sermon, and similar pronouncements by other dissenting divines, prompted the Whig M.P. Edmund Burke to pen Reflections On The Revolution In France (1790) as a riposte. Its publication triggered numerous responses, including Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man (1791 and 1792). Fox regarded Paine s argument as being based on a false premiss and thus not worth countering. Both Reflections and Rights are still read and studied as substantial works of political philosophy. Price's sermon did not establish itself in the same canon.

Location: Stoke Newington Unitarian Church, Newington Green, N16 9PR

¹. During the 17^thC and 18^thC Fetter Lane was associated with independently inclined views with regard to religion, philosophy, and politics. Its residents included: the polemicist Thomas Paine; the leather merchant and Commonwealth M.P. Praise-God Barebones, the poet John Dryden, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who the tract Leviathan (1651). (Hobbes's great intellect concluded that a beard did not make a philosopher and so confined his facial hair to a small tuft under his lower lip.) Jonathan Swift, who was a kinsman of Dryden, gave a Fetter Lane address to Lemuel Gulliver, the protagonist in his prose satire Gulliver's Travels: Travels Into Several Remote Nations of The World (1726). At the junction of Fetter Lane and New Fetter Lane there is a squinting statue of the 18thC political agitator John Wilkes.

Witchcraft

Gardnerianism

The Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 replaced the Witchcraft Act of 1735. Gerald Gardner, a civil servant, appreciated that the change furnished an opportunity to establish a neo-pagan belief system that he claimed was based upon the Wiccan tradition. He created a set of rituals that came to be formalised in The Book of Shadows and the eightfold calendar of the wheel of the year. His outlook was structured (as was the Alexandrian ritual). His iteration included elements that were taken from ceremonial magic, freemasonry, and the ideas of Aleister Crowley. Soon a variety of variants of the Gardnerianism emerged. The one in the United States was founded by his acolyte Raymond Buckland (1934-2017). There the movement became more eclectic, developing into the Seax-Wicca strain. In the early 1970s the two men broke with one another.

The Labour M.P. Gwilym Roberts (1928-2018) had worked as a lecturer on scientific management techniques. He spent his Parliamentary career campaigning for issues that he believed were in need of reform. In 1970 he sought to have witches outlawed. He was widely mocked as a result.

The Consumer Protection Regulations of 2008 superseded the Fraudulent Mediums Act.

Location: 47 Ridgemount Gardens, WC1E 7AT (red, blue)

King James I

James I's interest in witchcraft was fostered by a storming crossing he had when bring his newly married wife back across the North Sea from her native Denmark. He attributed this to witches. He went on to write two books about witches and to participate in a number of trials. To these he applied a dispassionate, intellectual approach. If he did not believe the evidence was strong enough to prove witchery he would call for the charges to be dropped.

Margaret Murray

Margaret Murray (1863-1963) was an academic Egyptologist. Her book The Witch-Cult In Western Europe (1921) sought to argue that there was an ancient female and Nature centred religion whose practitioners had been persecuted as witches. She used the technique of folklore collection. Her work informed the development of Wicca.

Location: University College, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT (purple, red)

Governor Phips

Sir William Phips was the Governor of Massachusetts during the witch-hunt mania. He was summoned to London to account for his conduct on other matters. He died before he had had an opportunity to go before the Privy Council.

Location: St Mary Woolnoth, 1 King William Street, EC4N 7BJ (orange, purple)

David Backhouse 2024