The pair divorced in 2000, and much water should have passed under the bridge between them, but there is still a scrap over who created what in the magical system they had worked on during that period.
A few years ago, Stewart moaned that some of McCarthy's websites were breaching his copyright because she had stolen his ideas. McCarthy, not wishing to have an expensive court battle, pulled the sites but told him to sling his hook.
All seemed quiet for several years until McCarthy published a series of popular occult books which included elements of her earlier work.
In May 2013, Stewart wrote: "Josephine Dunne (now Josephine McCarthy) joined me in teaching workshops in the late 1990s, as we were married then. She came as a beginner into an existing network with the difficult prospect of working with many established group members who had years of experience of Inner Temple Traditions methods before her joining."
McCarthy said that she did come into an existing network of Stewart's teaching in 1992, 90 per cent of which at that time was Faery and Underworld, Merlin, etc focussed work.
Stewart had just begun, as of 1992, the work he called Priests and Priestesses first UK workshop was held in Feb 1993. They got together shortly afterwards, and for the next two years, McCarthy said she took the work he was presenting and began to learn on her own, experiment, pushing boundaries and adding her findings and developments to the base of work that Stewart was teaching.
"I also joined in the workshops, offered my aspects of the work for him to teach along with his own work and was a co-developer of the work in every sense. This was the core development of the Priests and Priestesses work. By 1995, we were teaching it together and as individual teachers," she said.
Stewart appears to have told his students that McCarthy's work was all stolen from him. He did not bring about any legal action; he just gathered the support of some of the great names of the 1990s, such as Gareth Knight and Caitlin and John Matthews.
McCarthy re-installed her old sites and started to hit back with some comments of her own. She had a lot of paperwork that suggested she had the full rights to the work, and besides, some of it was hers.
"I have no wish or intention to interfere with the courses, books and work of RJ Stewart. I ask that Mr Stewart refrain from interfering with my work," McCarthy wrote.
McCarthy points out that all the comments against her are based on people believing that her ex-husband had worked on Merlin, Underworld, faery, and Living Magical Arts stuff for over 25 years before he met her.
She says that she never claimed that she invented all of Stewart's material, but she added that Stewart could not really claim to have done so either.
"I have stolen nothing, have plagiarized nothing, and have never claimed to be the sole originator of the disputed work. All work in my books and on my websites is work I developed. Most of it is (95 per cent) work I developed alone since my divorce. The five per cent of work that I have used from the time 1993-2000 is work I developed with my then partner [stewart]," she wrote.
McCarthy makes a good point that when magical couples work together, both side's work is enhanced. After the marriage, the ghostly children do not just go to one partner or the other.
Indeed, anyone reading her current works would have difficulty finding much for Stewart to be upset about, as there is no confusion between the two approaches. But that does not seem to have stopped Stewart from being insistent that his wife was his "student" and she learned everything from him, so any magical work she did in the future would be stolen from him.
He also has lots of sworn statements from people who claimed to be there at the time agreeing with him. McCarthy has done quite a good job finding holes in some of these friends' "memories."
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