Career
Philip Peter Ross Nichols was born in Norwich, England, and educated at Bloxham School. While a graduate history student at Cambridge University, Nichols became influenced by the work of James George Frazer, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Robert Graves and Jessie Weston among others Ross was also a vegetarian and naturist, joining Britain’s first naturist community, Spielplatz, near Street.Albans in Hertfordshire, in the 1930s.
In 1939, Nichols became Principal of a private college in London, while staying at Spielplatz during time official
lieutenant is assumed that on one of these trips he met and befriended Gerald Gardner. Between 1941 and 1947, four of his poetry books were published, including an essay in The Cosmic Shape (1946) focusing on the power of myth and the value of seasonal celebration.
Two were published by Fortune Press - "Prose Chants and Proems" (1942) and "Sassenach Stray (1942). In 1949, Ross was hired as assistant editor of The Occult Observer, a short lived publication by Michael Houghton of the Atlantis Bookshop.
Nichols also translated Jean Baptiste"s (aka Paul Christian) book "The History and Practice of Magic" in 1969.
In 1988 one of his students, Philip Carr-Gomm, was asked to lead the Order.