Wicca

What it is

A modern pagan religion, publicised by Gerald Gardner from 1954, centred on the worship of a Goddess and a God, organised in initiatory covens, and observing the eight-fold Wheel of the Year.

Its best-known ethical formulation is the Wiccan Rede: an it harm none, do what ye will. Its best-known cosmological one is the Threefold Law, that what is sent out returns three times over.

Where it came from

Gardner's claim was that he had been initiated in 1939 into a surviving coven in the New Forest — the remnant of a pre-Christian witch religion that had persisted in secret through the Christian centuries.

That claim was built on the work of the Egyptologist Margaret Murray, whose The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) argued that the people executed in the European witch trials had been practitioners of an organised surviving pagan fertility religion.

Murray's thesis is comprehensively rejected by historians and has been for decades. There is no evidence the accused were pagans; they were overwhelmingly Christians accused by other Christians, and the confessions Murray relied on were obtained under torture and follow the demonological templates of the interrogators.

Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon (1999) established the actual sources of Wiccan ritual, and they are recent and traceable:

• Golden Dawn and Thelemic ritual. Gardner knew Aleister Crowley, received an OTO charter from him in 1947, and substantial portions of early Wiccan liturgy are Crowley's text, sometimes verbatim.
• Freemasonry, for the degree structure, the initiatory format and much of the ceremonial vocabulary.
• Charles Godfrey Leland's Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), a disputed account of Italian witch lore.
• Folk magic, ceremonial magic, and the ritual imagination of the period.

And then Doreen Valiente. Gardner's High Priestess from the early 1950s, Valiente read the Book of Shadows, recognised how much of it was Crowley, and told him it would not do — the material was inappropriate and the association damaging. He invited her to rewrite it.

She did. The Charge of the Goddess in the form nearly every Wiccan now uses is substantially hers, and it is a considerably better piece of writing than what it replaced. She wrote much of the liturgy that gives Wicca its distinctive voice, and she later publicly investigated and cast doubt on the New Forest coven story herself.

She is the second woman in this site's territory — after Pamela Colman Smith — whose work defines a tradition that carries a man's name.

How it is practised

In covens, traditionally of up to thirteen, led by a High Priestess and High Priest, with three degrees of initiation. Ritual takes place in a cast circle, at the eight seasonal sabbats and at esbats near the full moon.

Gardnerian and Alexandrian lines work initiatory and often skyclad — naked. Eclectic and solitary practice, made mainstream by Scott Cunningham's Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (1988), is now far more common than the initiatory lineages, and requires no coven at all.

Dianic Wicca, founded by Z. Budapest, is female-only and has been the subject of sustained controversy over the exclusion of trans women.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the historical claim was false and that this is settled. Wicca is not the survival of an ancient religion; it is a religion founded in the mid-twentieth century.

We can say most Wiccans now accept this, which is a genuine credit to the tradition. The community absorbed Hutton's scholarship rather than rejecting it, and contemporary Wiccan writing generally presents the religion as modern, drawing on older material, without claiming unbroken descent. Comparatively few traditions on this site have handled a demolition of their origin story that well.

We can say the Rede and the Threefold Law are also modern — the Rede's earliest recorded appearance is 1964 — and are not survivals of ancient ethics.

We can say it is a real religion with real adherents. Census figures in Britain, Australia, the United States and elsewhere record tens to hundreds of thousands identifying as Wiccan or pagan, it has legal recognition in several jurisdictions, and it has produced two or three generations of practitioners.

We cannot say whether Gardner believed the New Forest story. Hutton's assessment is that he probably did, at least partly — that he took fragments of folk practice and a great deal of ceremonial magic and genuinely thought he was recovering something. Which would make him less a fraud than a man who founded a religion by accident.

Further reading

• Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (1999) — the definitive history, written with sympathy.
• Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Witchcraft (1989) — her own account, including her doubts.
• Philip Heselton's biographies of Gardner, for the most detailed reconstruction of the origins.