Early life: 1951–1991 Clifton was born in 1951, and raised in the
Anglican denomination of
Christianity. The following year he joined a Witches' coven with "loose ties" to the
1734 Tradition alongside his partner Mary, and several years later they underwent a Pagan marriage ceremony. With Jones, he co-wrote a book titled
Sacred Mask, Sacred Dance (1997), after which they had planned a sequel,
The Castle and the Cave: Further Steps in Traditional Witchcraft, In 2004, he published
Her Hidden Children, making use of the mass of materials he had assembled over the years. It appeared as the first in the "Pagan Studies Series" published by
AltaMira Press; first devised by an editor in the late 1990s, the series came to fruition under the co-editorship of Clifton and Wendy Griffin. Clifton took an early retirement when his departmental head left, believing that the future would not be conducive to his research. == Bibliography ==