It was my friends grandmother, Owlswing.
Sorry for the misquote!
Her Dad couldn't have been against the use of conventional medicine because he was a matron at a local old peoples home and would have had to dispense them.
Perhaps the Grandmother had leanings to one of the groups you are referring to.
One of the things I do remember was that the Wicca was considered as being historically in the family sort of handed down. ( I was told about the burning times etc)It was hoped my friend would take it up, but she wasn't really into it at that time.
I would have thought the grandmother and earlier would have predated gardnerian wicca although they were very secretive about members in a coven.
Gardner's Wicca began in about 1952 with the repeal of the Witchcraft Acts and their replacement by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, so by the 60s it was reasonably well-established.
There were many Wiccans who claimed historical connections to the Craft and Wicca as one of the things that Gardner claimed for Wicca, something that he picked up from Margaret A Murray, whom he met as they were both members of the Folklore Society of which Murray was President, was her theory that witchcraft had been a religious cult that had existed before the coming of Christianity and had continued to exist, uninterrupted, underground since the coming of Christianity.
The name the Burning Times was/is used to refer to the time between about 1430 and up to about 1750, the time of the witch-craze that was fuelled by the Inquisition. It was so-called because, thanks to Kramer and Spengler and the Malleus Maleficarum, witchcraft had been deemed heresy by dint of the 'fact' that witches made a pact with the Devil t the Sabbat in order to receive their magic powers, and burning at the stake was the punishment under Catholic law for heresy.
I had always assumed all covens had 13 members, so maybe they were. It was also considered bad form to reveal other members of the coven ( I Sussed a couple out, only because my friend Sussed them out, most seemed to have influential middle class jobs)
It's almost like the masons 
The Coven of 13 was another of Murray's ideas about witches that Gradner picked up. In fact, there was only one mention of a Coven having 13 members in the, one of very few, voluntary confessions to be a witch by Isobel Gowdie, a Scotswoman in 1662, but Murray, who had a habit of twisting history to fit her theory that was to lead to the rejection of the Murrayite witch-cult theory during the 1970s, decided that ALL Covens of Medieval witched had 13 members.
Members of a Coven are Oathbound to keep the identities of ALL witches, not just those of their Coven, secret unless the witch makes her being a witch public herself.
Her Dad also spoke about an odd belief ( to me) that he held that we lived in a dream and we visited the real world when we went to sleep and visited the astral plane and our dreams were distorted memories of that real world.
Not sure how that fits into Wicca, but that was his belief.
This, to my knowledge and belief, has nothing to do with Wicca, so it probably was just a personal belief.
They definitely saw themselves as wiccans as they told me it meant "craft of the wise'
Wicca and Wicce are Old English and thought variously to mean 'wise man' and 'wise woman' respectively or 'male witch' and 'female witch' respectively, and thus 'Witchcraft' is taken to mean 'the craft of the wise'.
Incidentally, today both female and male witches call themselves witch - you are only a wizard if you are Merlin or a denizen of the J K Rowling novels.
