Lady Passion, High Priestess
&
*Diuvei, High Priest

A formidable pair: In our thirties and committed to the Craft, we were both still looking for that strong, Witchy, someone special when we attended the Covenant of the Goddess's MerryMeet '93 gathering at Lake Lure in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Lady Passion had brought her daughter along in an effort to branch out and meet other Witches from all over the country. *Diuvei flew in with fellow Covenmates from California, expressly because he'd heard tales of the prowess of Witches from the Southern mountain area. *Diuvei fell in love with Lady Passion when he saw how compassionately she helped someone's feral child. But it was our shared devotion to the Goddess Hecate that sealed our bond. We began a bi-coastal romance. A year later, after *Diuvei traded Berkeley for Asheville, we were handfasted in a sacred woodhenge in the rainforest of Tennessee.

We founded Coven Oldenwilde, a Traditional English Gardnerian/Italian Strega blend, on Samhain, 1994. We are both legally empowered to "marry and bury", and perform all Wiccan Rites of Passage ceremonies.

We are open, public Witches highly utilized by area folk and in high demand by film crews. As of 2004, we've held 10 annual free public Samhain Sabbats attended by untold numbers of people. We write about Witchcraft (buy our book The Goodly Spellbook: Olde Spells for Modern Problems), lecture at area colleges and for groups including everyone from police to Mensa members, and have been Wiccan clergy for Buncombe Correctional Center for 10 years as of 2005. We advocate for peace and justice, counsel and aid the needy, maintain this web site, run our 501(c)(3) religious non-profit, and help nurture the Asheville area's rapidly growing Craft community. It is hard, but goodly work.

We require no fees from our students or clients for our Craft work, but happily accept donations to our non-profit Coven, which enable us to aid others. We actively oppose religious persecution (as in our successful struggle to get our state's 50-year-old anti-divination law expunged). We often find the mundane world's ways of greed, force, and hypocrisy difficult to deal with, and frequently dangerous to accept. So we continue to be what we are: Witches -- spelling for a better time to come.