I look at all of human spirituality as a great river, one that is the birthright of all humans. It contains countless forms of life. Not everyone chooses to partake of it.

For most of my adult life I was Wiccan. I first encountered it in the 1970s, when formal initiation was a thing. Our sources were more limited then, and Graves was one such. He had his detractors, such as Issac Bonewits, who lambasted him as a "sloppy scholar," ignoring Graves' clear statement that his book is a work of poetic inspiration. In fact, the whole book is summed up in the poem by the same name that appears on the frontispiece, the end of which reads,
"We* are gifted with so huge a sense
Of her nakedly worn magnificence
We forget cruely and past betrayal
Headless of where the next bright bolt may fall."
He is telling us that if we don't see how fundamentally cruel the Goddess is, we are not engaging seriously. It is as if he were Camus and the goddess was The Absurd.

Everyone seems to be trying to wring the Eurocentricism out of something that is, at bottom, European and Eurocentric. It is worth pointing out that in prison, "pagan" is pretty much synonymous with "Nazi." (Yeah, yeah, I know. Your bud has a pagan prison ministry, and they are not a bunch of Nazis. I'm talking about the forest, not the trees.)

In time, I heard fewer and fewer references to Graves, to the point where when I attend a Wicca gathering nowadays, if I mention Graves, I will be met with blank looks, as if I mentioned an obscure tune by the O'Jays.
So that is what I meant by "Formerly beloved by Wiccans."

In these latter days I have returned to the Christianity of my childhood, inevitably informed by my pagan background. You might be surprised how many Christians understand the deep pagan roots of the faith. Unfortunately, we aren't the ones who get all up in the news.

* that is, those of us who are true poets, among whom I am not conceited enough to number myself. He was not referring to Wiccans. Graves explicitly pointed out that he was not a subscriber to any particular religious formulation.