Charles “Chas” Stanhope Clifton was born June 13, 1951, in Del Norte, Colorado. He received a BA in English from Reed College, Portland, Oregon in 1973. After moving to Colorado Springs, he worked as an advertising copywriter and journalist, including stints with the Mountain States Collector monthly (publisher and editor), the Colorado Association of Motorsports’ RPM Magazine (managing editor), and the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper (feature writer, business editor), as well as with the Office of College Relations at Colorado College (staff writer). His first short book, Ghost Tales of Cripple Creek, was published in 1983 by Little London Press, Colorado Springs. During his undergraduate years, while working near Taos, New Mexico, he read Robert Graves’ influential book The White Goddess, which led him to Paganism. Using a ritual in Hans Holzer’s book The New Pagans, he self-initiated himself into the Craft. In Colorado, he would become involved with a coven, and in 1977 he and his partner, Mary Currier, were joined in a Wiccan handfasting. In 1984 he entered the University of Colorado’s religious studies program, earning an MA in 1988. In that time he was employed as a CU graduate teaching assistant, a publicist for Johnson Books in Boulder, as managing editor of Colorado Outdoor Journal, and as a reporter/photographer for the Cañon City Daily Record in Cañon City, Colorado. In 1988 he began teaching writing part-time at Pueblo Community College, then joined the English program at Colorado State University-Pueblo, where he taught until 2008. Since then he has been primarily a freelance writer and editor. Between 1984–1988, he published a small magazine called Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion [See: http://hdl.handle.net/10428/2744]. From 1985­-1999, he was a contributing editor for Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, published by the Lumen Foundation in San Francisco. He later assumed the editorship of The Pomegranate: A New Journal of Neopagan Thought, published in Vancouver, BC, and developed it into a peer-reviewed Pagan-studies journal, The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, published by Equinox Publishing, UK, which he continues to serve as editor. As a member of the American Academy of Religion, Clifton worked with a group of colleagues to develop the Nature Religion Scholars Network (1997–2004), which evolved into a permanent AAR program unit, the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group, for which he served as a steering-committee member and co-chair, stepping down in 2016. In 1992, he published The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics (ABC-Clio). During the 1990s, he edited the four-volume Witchcraft Today series for Llewellyn Publications: I. The Modern Craft Movement; 2. Modern Rites of Passage; 3. Witchcraft and Shamanism; 4. Living Between Two Worlds, and co-wrote with Evan John Jones Sacred Mask, Sacred Dance (Llewellyn, 1997). In 2004 he co-edited with Graham Harvey The Paganism Reader (Routledge), and in 2006 he published Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (AltaMira Press). His articles have also appeared in various edited collections and journals as well as in such reference books as Religions of the World: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Beliefs and Practices (ABC-Clio), The Encylopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology (Gale Research, 2001), The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Continuum, 2005).The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (2016), and The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism (2016). He also serves as co-editor of Equinox Publishing’s book series on contemporary and historic Paganism and on the editorial staff of The Bulletin for the Study of Religion.

Note written by Clifton, Chas