Gavin Frost

The Frosts had adopted the term "Wicca" in the late 1960s, when it was gaining increasing usage within the pagan witchcraft community, as a name for their religion.

The Church and School of Wicca was founded by Gavin Frost and Yvonne Frost in 1968.

It was the first federally recognized Church of the religion known as Wicca in the United States.

It is known for its correspondence courses on the Frosts' unique interpretation of Wicca.

The Church and School are located in Beckley, West Virginia.

The Church of Wicca was founded in 1968.

Gavin Frost was a British-born aerospace engineer.

While working for an aerospace company in southern England's Salisbury Plain– an area replete with prehistoric monuments, he became interested in the druids.

His wife Yvonne was an American with a background in Spiritualism.

He then claimed to have been initiated into a Wiccan group in St. Louis, Missouri.

When living in St. Louis, they developed a correspondence course through which to teach people about Wicca, advertizing these courses as the "School of Wicca".

They argued that by spreading their religious teaching in the form of a correspondence course, they were reaching a wider range of people than initiatory-based forms of Wicca, and that this would be necessary in order for the religion to become a "strong religious force".

They believed strongly that Wicca should be presented publicly, believing that the secrecy that is observed by some Wiccan groups brought mistrust and persecution from wider society.

The pair resisted using the term "pagan" until the late 1970s.

In conjunction with his lawyers, Gavin secured religious recognition for his church from the Internal Revenue Service in 1972; this resulted in his church becoming the first recognized church of Wicca in the United States.

Later that year, they began working on their Church and School full time.

Gavin appointed himself as its archbishop, and Yvonne as a bishop, and they awarded themselves doctorates of divinity through their church.

In 1975, Yvonne stated that "I do not consider myself a pagan. I do not worship any nature deity. I reach upward to the unnameable which has no gender".

In 1985, the Church of Wicca was involved in the Dettmer v. Landon case, during which the District Court of Virginia ruled that Wicca constitutes a legitimate religion under U.S. law.

The Virginia prison authorities appealed the case, and in 1986, Judge J. Butzner of the Federal Appeals Court upheld the original decision.

This made the Church of Wicca the only federally recognized Wiccan church to have its status as a religion upheld in a federal appeals court.

Within the American Wiccan and wider modern pagan community, the Frosts have been at the center of various disputes, particularly surrounding issues such as homosexuality and theology.

The Wiccan Margot Adler suggested that much of this controversy stemmed from Gavin's "wry and rather bizarre sense of humor, and his tendency to say anything to get a rise out of someone", something which she thought had resulted in the Frosts often being "misunderstood".

In person, she thought, the Frosts "have always been delightful", with Gavin being "kind and humorous" and Yvonne being "forthright and even a bit prim".

They published a book titled The Witch's Bible, which generated outrage within the Wiccan community.

Many critics referred to it as a "witchcrap book".

Many of the central teachings featured in the book, such as its emphasis upon the existence of an asexual monotheistic deity, were completely contradictory to mainstream Wiccan belief.

Many Wiccans were angered at the word The as it appeared in the title, presupposing that it carried some form of authority within the Wiccan community.

Its comments on race and sex also caused controversy.

The Church of Wicca defines Wicca as a monotheistic religion.

Gavin asserted that there is one god, which is abstract, unknowable, and beyond the need for any worship.

This is one of the teachings which distinguishes it from other Wiccan groups.

Unlike many other Wiccan groups, there was no particular emphasis upon female divinity or the feminine, with Gavin calling beliefs about ancient matriarchies "a Marxist heresy".

He also expressed belief in "stone gods"– idols which are created by humans as a storage for energy, which can then be utilized for magical purposes.

The Church taught that the astral realm, which they called the "Sidhe", is structured into ten levels.

They taught that each human has a soul which undergoes a progressive system of reincarnation, through which it can learn.

The Frosts believed that overpopulation had resulted in "inferior souls" incarnating upon the earth.

The Church taught kundalini sex practices.

These included "introitus", in which sex without orgasm was held as a form of surrender to the monotheistic god.

The couple moved first to Salem, Missouri, where they ran a pig farm), and then to New Bern, North Carolina, in 1974. There they tried to establish a survival community, but it failed to materialize. In the late 1970s, they began holding an annual "Samhain Seminar", in which workshops, rituals, and lectures took place, primarily for students of their correspondence course. In 1996, they relocated to Hinton, West Virginia. They subsequently moved to West Virginia in 1993, where Gavin died on 11 September 2016 at the age of 86.