According to his description, the group was devoted to a god and goddess, Setan and Lilith, and were influenced by both American folk magic and Huna.

In 1944, he married Cora Cremeans in Bend, Oregon, and, inspired by the writings of English Wiccan Gerald Gardner, they founded the Mahaelani Coven, gaining followers of what became known as the Feri tradition.

[3] He also claimed that his maternal great-grandmother had been one of the Blue Fugates, a community living in Appalachia whose skin had a blueish coloration due to methemoglobinemia.

[5] By 1920, the family were living in Burkburnett, Wichita County, Texas, where a sister, Elsie Glenan Anderson, was born in February.

[6] From there they moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they were recorded as living in the 1923–24 directory, and where Anderson later claimed that he had made many friends among Mexican migrant children.

[6] After several months in Oklahoma they proceeded to the area around Ashland, Oregon, where Anderson claimed to have befriended Hawaiian and Haitian migrant families who were working as fruit pickers.

[2] The family moved around the state in the coming years; in August 1928 they were living in Pinehurst, where Hilbert was recorded as working as an engineer at a lumber mill in the 1930 census.

[6] Anderson informed the journalist Margot Adler that when he was nine years old he encountered a small old woman sitting in the centre of a circle containing brass bowls of herbs.

[12] After the vision, he claimed that they sat in the circle and she instructed him in the magical use of the various herbs, after which he was washed in butter, oil, and salt, before putting his clothes on and returning home.

[13] The Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White described this as being "difficult to accept as a literal account", but suggested that Anderson may have undergone a significant spiritual experience with an older woman in 1926, which was subsequently "embellished into the later tale" that he told Adler.

[6] Researcher William Wallworth provided potential supporting evidence for this claim when he noted that a number of the circuses that performed in Oregon during the 1920s and 1930s had Africans in their travelling retinues.

[15] "According to the picture ascertained by Voigt and supplemented by an open letter issued by Victor in 1991, the [Harpy] coven eclectically mixed American folk magic with Huna – a New Thought philosophy partly based in traditional Hawaiian religion – and venerated a god known as Setan as well as a goddess known as Lilith in both indoor and outdoor rituals organized according to the phases of the moon."

[20] According to Voigt's account, Anderson also claimed that on occasion, the coven used a naked woman as their altar,[20] and that the group disbanded after World War II broke out.

[20] Anderson met Cora Ann Cremeans in Bend, Oregon, in 1944; they married three days later, on May 3, claiming that they had encountered each other before in the astral realm.

[25] Born in Nyota, Alabama, in January 1915, Cora had been exposed to folk magical practices from childhood;[26] reputedly, her Irish grandfather was a "root doctor" who was known among locals as the "druid".

"[36] She added that "the name Fairy became accidentally attached to our tradition because Victor so often mentioned that word in speaking of nature spirits and Celtic magic".

[40] In their writing, the Andersons mixed terminology adopted from Huna, Gardnerian Wicca, and Voodoo, believing that all reflected the same underlying magico-religious tradition.

[10] Another prominent initiate was Gabriel Carillo (Caradoc ap Cador), who in the late 1970s developed a written body of Feri teachings, and began offering paid classes in the tradition in the 1980s, generating the Bloodrose lineage; doing so generated controversy among Feri initiates, with critics believing that it was morally wrong to charge for teaching.

[10] Money to publish the book had come from Cora's savings, with sales barely covering the costs of publication, so a second printing was not possible at that time.

[49] In 1975, this book received the Clover International Poetry Competition Award,[30] and in 1980 it was republished by Pendderwen, who also put some of Anderson's poems to music for his own 1975 album, Songs for the Old Religion.

[10] To honor her fiftieth wedding anniversary, in 1994 Cora authored a book titled Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition, deeming it a tribute to her husband.

[61] Systems of morality in Feri revolved largely around the idea of kala; Cora stated that this term was borrowed from the Hawaiian language and that it meant "keep[ing] oneself clean and bright and free from complexes within and without".

[62] Cora stated that the Feri tradition had "a code of honor and sexual morality which is as tough and demanding as the Bushido of Japan and of Shinto".

[63] She added that while Christian missionaries would understand Feri as a "sex cult", "we do not behave like a bunch of slavering mad dogs in heat".

[72] She believed that the third part of the soul was "the Godself" and lived in the top of the aura, appearing as a blue, white or gold ball of light.

[74] They taught that between incarnations, a soul could travel to one of nine etheric globes surrounding the Earth,[75] in which existed "well-defined classes of nature spirits" which included gnomes, sylphs, undines, and salamanders.

[76] Cora described Feri as the "direct survival of old Stone Age religion",[77] reflecting a trend within the Wiccan community for retaining faith in the witch-cult hypothesis long after it was academically discredited by historians.

[83] Cora stated that in their rituals "power is raised and used in magic operations for the good of our human race, our ecology, or for necessary martial purposes".