Grey Cat, High Priestess and Founder of NorthWind Tradition of American Wicca, passed to the Summerlands on Friday, March 30, 2012.
The Wild Hunt has honored Grey Cat with an excellent article and links to many of the books and tributes to her on the web.
I mirrored this memorial page from the NorthWind site because Cat was made such an impact on my growth both as a person and as a priestess. Without her guidance, I never would have found my path. She was an amazing lady and I miss her.
In her own words, from her Ethics site.
So Who Is Grey Cat?
Well, that’s almost 60 years to catch up on. You probably don’t want to know that much.
Literally “born on a mountaintop in Tennessee” my first 17 years were spent just a few hundred yards from where I live now. In between I’ve lived in Nashville, Knoxville, Washington, DC, Atlanta, Tampa, and San Juan, PR. I should add that I’ve been married more than once, have a grown daughter and a grandson 12 at this writing. I live back of beyond with a pit bull cross and nine (don’t say nothin!) cats. I live in a house that I designed and built mostly with the help of friends.
During much of my working life I was a secretary, administrative secretary and legal secretary. When I needed to go back to work 5 years ago, though, I ran into the old buddy syndrome and ended up a Wal-Mart Associate. Contrary to everybody’s expectations, I rather like the job. Outside of the pay, it’s more interesting and challenging than most. I worked in the Electronics Department and was expected by the customers, to know everything.
I got into computers the ComDex that the first PC’s under $3,000.00 came out. $2500 for an 8088AT. But it had a full 640K ram and the largest hard drive conceivable at the time–20 Mg! I proceeded to obsess and taught myself how to use the sucker. No, I didn’t take computer classes in college. My last quarter at UT the computer class met at 11PM in the Business Adm. building because that was the only time they could get time on THE computer. Needless to say, only male mathematics majors were allowed to sign up for the class.
I had been backup operator on a Wang Word Processor and had also run a robo-typer. Wangs ran on audio tape cassettes and used a program that eventually mutated to become Multimate. What, you ask, is a robo-typer. It’s a mechanical typewriter mounted on a player piano mechanism. You typed in the name and address by hand, pressed the button, the punched roll unwound and the keys happily typed the letter. I did get pretty good and actually got paid to test early desktop publishing software for review.
You probably want to get right on into the Witch stuff. Somehow I’d missed all notice of the existence of modern Witchcraft all through the late 60s and the 70s, but somewhere around 1980 (you don’t really want me to go upstairs and look up the date do you?) {You’d better not, because I’m not going to, so there.} I got hold of a book called Drawing Down the Moon, by Margot Adler. Opened MY eyes! I fairly quickly got in touch with some Wiccans in the area and with the ones who became my teachers. I studied with Michael Ragan of the Temple of Danann for my first with a lot of help from Amber K. Seems like it was no time at all before I found myself with students of my own. My first class of five all made it to initiation and formed the nucleus of NorthWind. We have, it goes without saying, grown bigger, split, grown smaller, hived, added new students, lost them or sent them on to form their own branch of the Wiccan tree. I always try not to take it personally since one of the most consistent facts about my line is that we split off from our original teachers.
That’s really about all there is to the Wicca stuff. I’ve gone to quite a few festivals, been dumb enough to let myself be elected to office of some organizations, and retired to lick my wounds and get over it all. I’m still moderately active in NorthWind although I don’t have any students myself right now. I occasionally host small gatherings at my home and attend a few when I get the chance. The photo is Grey Cat and Medicine Hawk in their working clothes.
I’ve done a good bit of writing, some of the more recent of which you’ll find on this site under NEW and the three books I’ve been part of appear on the My Books page. [All thoughtfully arranged with convenient links to Amazon.com so I can get a much bigger cut of the profits than I usually do!!] Right now I’m working on revising (and re-writing) the NorthWind first degree classes. Maybe when I’m through they’ll get published by someone.
