Lady Gwen Thompson (September 16, 1928 – May 22, 1986) was the pseudonym of Phyllis Thompson, author and teacher of traditionalist initiatory witchcraft through her own organisation, the New England Covens of Traditionalist Witches. Lady Gwen claimed to be a hereditary witch, with connections to the Salem witch trials of 1692, though she could not provide original sources to support these assertions. When she published a supposedly ancient poem called The Rede of the Wiccae, it was believed by some to be partly her own work. Family Phyllis Thompson (née Healy) claimed to be a hereditary witch from New England. She was best known by the pseudonym (or public Craft name) of Lady Gwen Thompson, though she changed the forename to Gwynne in the 1980s. Thompson was her final married surname. According to Thompson, her grandmother Adriana Porter's family were the carriers of a secret tradition of folk witchcraft that had come down through Sarah Arnot Cook and Wealthy Trask (Trash) from the latter's seventeenth-century ancestors. Porter had initiated her and her mother into the family's tradition and given them their "Craft Names".1 At first Thompson intended to keep the tradition within her family, subsequently initiating her children and grandchildren into them. However, her son and his family left the family tradition, joining the Christian religion and raising their children within it, and her daughter had no children. Fearing that her traditions would be completely lost, she began "fostering" outsiders into it as family members; she began initiating them in the late 1960s. By 1970 she had informally created the organization now known as the New England Covens of Traditionalist Witches (N.E.C.T.W.) (currently listed in the State of Rhode Island as a subsidiary of Society of the Evening Star.)2 Around 1974 Thompson retired from leading the N.E.C.T.W. and turned it over to two of its early members;3 the leadership has undergone several changes in the intervening years. Thompson's claims to be an hereditary witch have little independent support, since she states that she destroyed the original version of her grandmother's lore-book after copying its contents, and recopied her own book several times throughout her lifetime. While a recent book by Robert Mathiesen and Theitic documents a long history of occultism within Thompson's ancestry, including the seventeenth-century alchemist, Jonathan Brewster, as well as several of the families on both sides of the Salem witch trials of 1692, there is no direct