Coven Coven A coven usually refers to a group or gathering of witches. The word "coven" remained largely unused in English until 1921 when Margaret Murray promoted the idea, now discredited, that all witches across Europe met in groups of thirteen which they called "covens". In Wicca and other similar forms of modern neopagan witchcraft, such as Stregheria and Feri, a coven is a gathering or community of witches, much like a in Christian parlance. It is composed of a group of believers who gather together for ceremonies of worship such as Drawing Down the Moon, or celebrating the Sabbats. The
A Community of Witches South Carolina Press in their series on 'Studies in Comparative Religion', and in his preface to the book, the series editor Frederick M. Denny referred to it as the "sequel" to Berger's earlier work. In their preface, Berger, Leach and Shaffer discussed the Pagan Census and how it had been used in producing "A Community of Witches"; they noted that at the time Berger had originally written the book, "the rest of the data had not been completely processed, cleaned, and analyzed. Unlike that book, which relied primarily on her ethnographic research in the northeastern United States and an analysis