Order of Woodcraft Chivalry

The Order of Woodcraft Chivalry is a Scouting-like movement operating in the United Kingdom, which was founded in 1916 by Ernest Westlake. Like Scouting, it was inspired by Ernest Thompson Seton's Woodcraft Indians, and Seton was its honorary Grand Chieftain. Whilst largely being contemporary to Baden-Powell's Scouting movement, it differed from it in that it does not have the perceived military overtones of Scouting, instead focusing on the virtues of kindness, fellowship and woodcraft. The Order was small compared to Scouts, having only 1,200 members by 1926. By the 1950s it had ceased to have a major public presence. It still exists (2016) as a semi-formal network of personal friends with historic family links to the original formal organisation, with little interest in publicity and few surviving overt connections with the Woodcraft Folk or the Forest School Camps.

The Order accepted many premises of Neopaganism. It has been suggested by writer Steve Wilson that it provided the basis for the New Forest coven, and through that the Neopagan religion of Wicca.

Westlake was a naturalist, anthropologist and traveller of Quaker upbringing, however in 1909 he began to fault Quakerism and extol the "old gods" of paganism. He was inspired by authors such as Edward Carpenter, Nietzsche, Havelock Ellis, Jane Ellen Harrison, Tylor and Frazer, and saw the Order as saving people from "the cul de sac of intellectualized religion" and reviving the "greater Hellas" of modern civilisation. He saw women as incarnations of God, to be "worshipped in spirit and in truth"; he revered the Jack-in-the-Green, which he considered to be the English equivalent of Dionysus, and held that the "Trinity of Woodcraft" consisted of Pan, Artemis and Dionysus.

...
Wikipedia